The disgraced former mayor of New York, Rudy (I was just tucking in my shirt) Giuliani, has threatened to sue me for defamation over an interview in which I never said his name. No one even mentioned him.
I want to apologize to Rudy. Going forward I will be certain to say his name directly.
Rudy, you worked with known Russian agents and their proxies to spread lies about me and my father. Their names are Andrii Derkach, Konstantin Kulyk, Andriy Telizhenko and Oleksandr Dubinsky and more. Kulyk handed you a dossier filled with disinformation. You flew to Kyiv in December 2019 to sit down with Derkach, then went on television with him to sell his bullshit tapes.
Trump’s own national security adviser warned the White House that what you brought back was Russian disinformation. You kept going.
Then Trump’s own Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, sanctioned Derkach in September 2020 as an active Russian agent for over a decade, for spreading the same lies you are still spitting. Four months later, on his way out the door, Mnuchin sanctioned the rest of your sources. Kulyk. Telizhenko. Dubinsky. Eleven people and four media front companies in all. Not sanctioned by me. Not by my father. By Donald Trump’s Treasury Department.
And remember Vienna Rudy. In October 2019 you, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman had tickets to fly there to collect a hard drive, courtesy of Dmytro Firtash, an indicted oligarch who has spent a decade in Vienna fighting extradition to the United States. Lev and Igor were arrested at Dulles holding one-way tickets. You canceled yours the next morning. That was way before a computer repairman in Wilmington was ever a twinkle in your eye.
So please, @RudyGiuliani. Please, please sue me. Discovery will be a joy for everyone.
We all knew he was lying about the Reflecting Pool. The problem is that he lies so often that it’s almost impossible to keep up.
So I asked AI to compile claims from just the past twenty-four months and then checked them against official data, contemporaneous reporting and independent fact-checks.
Here is a partial list of 86 lies:
1. He promised to bring prices down “starting on Day One.” Grocery prices remained high and continued rising.
2. After winning, he admitted that prices are very hard to bring down once they have gone up.
3. He said egg prices had fallen 93 percent. They had not fallen remotely close to 93 percent.
4. He said he inherited the highest inflation in American history. He inherited an annual inflation rate of 2.9 percent.
5. When corrected, he changed the claim to the worst inflation in 49 years. That was also false. Annual inflation reached 23.7 percent in 1920.
6. He said there was virtually no inflation during his first term. Consumer prices rose approximately 8 percent.
7. He repeatedly claimed he had already brought inflation down, including during periods when the annual inflation rate was higher than the 2.9 percent reported shortly before he took office.
8. He told Congress inflation was “plummeting.” Prices were still rising overall, including major household expenses such as housing, electricity and medical care.
9. He claimed to have secured $18 trillion in new investment.
10. He then raised the figure to $19.2 trillion.
11. Even the White House’s own tracker listed far less, and its total included multiyear pledges, purchasing agreements, previously announced projects and commitments that might never become actual US investment.
12. He said America was building more factories than ever.
13. He said factory construction was rising.
14. He said the country had achieved its highest growth ever. Manufacturing employment declined, factory-construction claims depended on cherry-picked categories, and economic growth was nowhere near a historical record.
15. He called the country he inherited a dead country. The US economy grew 2.8 percent in 2024, faster than every other major wealthy economy except Spain.
16. He says foreign countries pay his tariffs. American importers pay them and frequently pass the cost on to American consumers.
17. He said the evidence overwhelmingly showed consumers did not pay his tariffs. Economic studies found that American consumers and businesses absorbed nearly all their cost.
18. He said tariff revenue came with “no inflation.” Prices continued rising, and economic research found that the tariffs themselves increased costs for American consumers and businesses.
19. He repeatedly said drug prices were down 70, 80 or 90 percent. No broad measure of prescription-drug prices showed anything close to those reductions.
20. He said Medicaid was “left the same.” The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the legislation would reduce federal Medicaid spending by roughly $930 billion over ten years.
21. He said Americans were “not going to feel any of it.” The Congressional Budget Office projected that the legislation would leave approximately 11.8 million more people uninsured.
22. He said the Medicaid changes touched only waste, fraud and abuse. Independent analyses found that the legislation reduced coverage and federal spending far beyond fraudulent claims.
23. He said he had eliminated taxes on Social Security. The law created a temporary deduction, unavailable to many beneficiaries, that expires after 2028. It did not abolish taxation of Social Security benefits.
24. He said taxes would rise 68 percent without his bill. No credible independent estimate came close to supporting that figure.
25. He then declared, “I’ve kept all my promises and much more.”
26. He publicly promised at least 53 times to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours, or even before taking office.
Continued in replies…
I watched Trump’s speech at the Correspondents’ Dinner last night.
It’s hard to articulate how sad it made me.
Sad and embarrassed and exhausted.
Here is the thing about a man who is a joke. He can’t tell one.
People think humor is a talent. It isn’t. It’s a capacity. To make someone laugh you have to be able to laugh at yourself, and to laugh at yourself you have to step outside of yourself and see what everyone else sees. For one second you have to be just another person in the room.
Most people can do this by the time they are nine years old.
He has never once managed it. Not in fifty years of cameras. Not for a second.
That is not a quirk. It is a symptom. The muscle that lets you tell a joke is the same one that lets you feel what another person feels. A man who cannot survive being laughed at cannot imagine being anyone but himself. He will only ever be generous when it is photographed. He will only ever be kind when it is filmed.
There is a name for it.
So he stood up there and did what he always does. He hit down. He made jokes about people’s weight. He made jokes about their intelligence. He made jokes about how women look. He read out the names of people he doesn’t like, and mocked them. Always mocking. And when no one laughed he blamed his speech writers.
The cruelty dressed as humor has worn so thin.
And for the 30% of you still in the cult who will inevitably call me a crackhead and blame it all on my Dad, all I can say is please, for the love of God, open your eyes. Wake the fuck up. Have some dignity. Have some pride.
Joe Biden wasn’t standing at that podium last night. Donald Trump was.
And at the end of it he put on a red hat that said Trump 2028 and told the room he was running again. No one laughed because everyone knows he has no intention of leaving.
Just another joke at our expense.
Salmonella in the eggs.
Flesh-eating screwworms in the meat.
Diarrhea lettuce.
Smoke in the air.
Forever chemicals in the soil.
Data center pollution in our water.
Handing Saudi Arabia nuclear technology.
A war over a strait that was already open.
$5 gas.
Expensive groceries.
Skyrocketing healthcare costs.
Crushing utility bills.
Are we great yet?
We are supposedly at war to stop Iran from enriching the uranium we “obliterated” over a year ago.
Yesterday we signed a deal to help Saudi Arabia enrich uranium.
The first time the United States has ever helped another country enrich uranium on foreign soil.
The Saudis refused the inspection protocol 140 other countries accept. Too intrusive, they said.
Trump agreed. He signed a national security waiver to get around the rule.
The Saudis paid Kushner $100 million. They put $2 billion into his firm. They put another $6 billion into LIV Golf, which pays Trump properties to host its tournaments. They signed ten billion dollars in Trump-branded real estate deals in Jeddah and Riyadh. All in just the last few years.
But sure. My paintings.
Meet the senior staff running Mitch McConnell's DC office. You pay their salaries. You're entitled to know what they're keeping from us.
Let them know how you feel.
A sitting member of Congress brutally beat his wife. He threw boiling water at her. He burned her.
In front of their young daughter.
The House of Representatives needs to immediately expel Rep @MaxMillerOH (R-OH).
No man who throws boiling water on his wife in front of their daughter is fit for office.
#ExpelMaxMiller #ExpelMiller
https://t.co/EdtSkcg3VZ
🚨BREAKING: Charlie Kirk’s cameraman is preparing to go on the record, alleging Erika Kirk doesn’t want the truth about Charlie Kirk’s assassination to come out because it’ll expose her.
He also says that Erika’s primary focus was securing control of Charlie’s multi-million dollar empire and legacy all along.
Those of us who gave Erika the benefit of the doubt are about to get a masterclass in why you must always trust your gut over any rationalization, even if it doesn’t make any sense.
The man who was supposed to be an all-powerful political force can't get through a state-level endorsement post without stopping to complain about The Lincoln Project.
We're in his head. Help us stay there: https://t.co/7rjiOaij8i
About Pete Hegseth’s talk about testosterone for service members … Rep Becca Balint (D-VT):
“There are so many people in this Administration that have some weird, intense homoerotic feelings toward men, while also being homophobic”…
BREAKING: Helen Comperatore, the widow of Corey Comperatore, who was killed during the attempted assassination of President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, now alleges the attack was an inside job.
Three years ago I sued @PatrickByrne for lying about me. He claimed that I took a bribe and committed treason. He implied I was in some part responsible for the Hamas attack of October 7th.
His lies caused real damage and endangered my family.
On Friday I was awarded $1.7M in punitive damages by a Reagan-appointed federal judge. The court determined that everything he said about me was a complete fiction.
For those of you who don’t know Patrick Byrne, he is the former Overstock CEO who lost control of his company when it became public he was sleeping with convicted Russian agent Maria Butina. He is the man who was in the Oval Office with Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell leading up to the January 6th insurrection.
He is a clownish footnote in history. But his lies travel far and wide. He is a fraud who did the bidding of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon.
This isn’t the first defamation case brought against Byrne, and it won’t be the last. Even after losing, he is still doing it.
He continues to tell his audience he has “three dynamite voicemails” and a former federal agent whose testimony confirms his story. Byrne had three years to bring that evidence to court. He never produced it. The voicemails he did produce, the court found, “do not mention a bribe, implicate contemporaneous involvement in any illegal scheme by Plaintiff, or otherwise independently corroborate Defendant’s story.” The former federal agent Byrne relied on, John Moynihan, gave sworn testimony that contradicted him. The FBI agent Byrne claimed had backed him up denied it under oath.
Those are not my findings. Those are the findings of a federal court. And nothing prevents Byrne from releasing the voicemails he keeps promising his audience. He never has, because the court has already listened to what he produced and found they prove nothing.
Patrick will try not pay this judgment. He didn’t pay the $34,969 the court ordered six months ago either. His strategy is delay. Fire the lawyer. Skip the hearing. File nonsense with courts that have already ruled. Repeat the lie on Alex Jones while the clock runs.
He is not a whistleblower or a spy. He is a man who got played by a Russian intelligence asset, lost his company over it, and has been performing a spy fantasy on the internet ever since.
He is a coward who wouldn’t even show up in court to face me. He is hiding in Dubai, where he fled during my case to avoid being deposed, and told the court a story about a Venezuelan hit squad to explain it.
He will run from this judgment the same way he ran from my trial. Fine. Every defamatory statement is a new lawsuit. I have as much time as he has words.
One phone call from President Trump to his buddy Gianni Infantino and — boom — FIFA overturns a World Cup red card suspension for the first time in tournament history so U.S. star Folarin Balogun can play Belgium tomorrow.
Belgium is already furious and “astonished.” They should be. Contest this rigged nonsense publicly all day today and all day tomorrow.
The World Cup on American soil just became a Trump family business. So much for credibility, fairness, or rules. This stinks of corruption. ⚽📞🇺🇸
JD Vance: "If you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation."
Lawrence O'Donnell: "No. They didn't.
WWII ended with ZERO negotiations."
How is Yale Law-educated JD Vance so f*cking stupid?
Oversight and Judiciary Dems visited Ghislaine Maxwell’s prison today, it is essentially a pristine park with fountains and ample green space. She’s the only convicted sex offender there. Why did @DAGToddBlanche move her here? This isn’t justice.