Donald Trump has told reporters at the White House he believes China should investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter for corruption, speaking in blithe defiance of the impeachment inquiry already underway after he asked Ukraine for the same thing on his now-notorious 25 July call with Volodymyr Zelensky.
The president is now jetting out to Florida after a morning on which he attacked teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, clearly still angry after exploding at the White House press corps on Wednesday evening, where he threatened “a lot of litigation against a lot of people”, call Biden Sr “stone-cold crooked” and accused House speaker Nancy Pelosi of handing out subpoenas “like cookies”.
Continuing to spend much of his time raging on Twitter against the “do nothing Democrats”, apparently without stopping to consider the irony, Mr Trump also posted a bizarre video hitting out at the Bidens featuring the Canadian soft rock band Nickelback, which was swiftly taken down by the social media giant for copyright infringement.
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We get so caught up on Rudy's TV appearances that we forget he also tweets sometimes:
For your consideration.
Trump is en route to Florida...
...but has still found time to post another laughably bogus Breitpart poll, this time on Shifty Schiff.
Nickelback have yet to tweet anything about the Trump copyright infringement but it looks like they seldom use their account and are currently in Brazil on tour anyway.
When they do tweet, it's often downright weird...
The incensed reaction to Trump's latest comments are beginning to roll in.
The Abbott and Costello of alt-right bedroom activism have absolutely outdone themselves this time, spoiling us with an utterly ludicrous bid to smear Elizabeth Warren.
George Conway, husband of senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, is at it again. This time he's penned a 11,400-word piece for The Atlantic arguing that his wife's boss is unfit for office.
Trump is speaking to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before he jets out for Florida and is telling them that both Ukraine and China should investigate the Bidens, despite facing an impeachment inquiryafter being accused of doing precisely this.
Writing from Kiev, Oliver Carroll explains how Trump finally came to be caught out by a conspiracy theory too far.
The Daily Beast reports today that Peter Schweizer's book Secret Empires, which fuelled the MAGA crowd's obsession with the false allegations against the Bidens that started this whole mess, appears to have lifted passages of text from Wikipedia.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke to George Stephanopoulos on ABC's Good Morning America today to warn that a second Trump term could do "irreparable damage" to the country.
“The re-election of Donald Trump would do irreparable damage to the United States. We have some serious repair and healing to do in our country for what he's done so far. I'm not sure that two terms - it might be irreparable," she said.
Don Jr and Trump's social media butler Dan Scavino have reposted the Biden/Nickelback video, despite Twitter taking it down after the band complained about it violating their copyright.
Diamond Joe's communications director has meanwhile hit back to debunk the nonsense.
The big man is meanwhile arguing the media is "deranged".
Eric Trump was on Laura Ingraham's Fox News show last night and demonstrated the same staggering lack of self-awareness as his old man.
Marianne Eloise has more.
Among the usual slew of partisan retweets this morning, Trump has twice picked up his antagonism towards Democratic House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, the man spearheading the impeachment inquiry whom he angrily labelled "Shifty Schiff" yesterday.
At a press conference of his own with Speaker Pelosi on Wednesday, Schiff accused Trump of "an incitement to violence" with his attacks on the unnamed whistleblower at the heart of the Ukraine scandal, who is provided anonymity and other protections under federal law. Schiff said the investigation is proceeding "deliberately" but also with a sense of "urgency."
Unlike Trump, Schiff never raised his voice once, but did say firmly: "We're not fooling around here."
On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah has compared the president to a "spray-tanned Samuel L Jackson", likening his ranting last night to the actor's unhinged Pulp Fiction hitman Jules Winfield ranting about "the path of the righteous man".
Also for Voices, Alec Sears argues 2020 candidate Kamala Harris made a mistake in calling for Trump to be suspended from Twitter.
For Indy Voices, Michael Arceneaux says Obama foresaw the mad cruelty of the Trump administration coming.
Beautiful work here from The Onion.
Aides to vice president Mike Pence are busy defending his role in the Ukraine controversy as The Washington Post reports a senior aide to the veep was listening in on the Zelensky call along with Pompeo.
Trump reportedly told Pence to cancel his plans to attend the inauguration of Ukraine's new president earlier this year after initially pushing for him to go. But aides to Pence dispute that, blaming logistics for the decision.
Pence's chief of staff, Marc Short, noted that Ukraine's parliament formally set the date of Volodymyr Zelensky's inauguration just a week before it took place.
The aides also said that Pence has never mentioned Joe Biden in the repeated conversations he has had with Zelenskiy.
The men met on 1 September in Warsaw, Poland, where The Post says Pence warned the Ukrainian president the US would be withholding the $400m (£325m) in military aid over concerns the country was not doing enough to combat corruption.
Former officials told the newspaper that Zelensky would probably have interpreted the vice president’s reference to corruption as “code” for the Biden allegations.
“The president consistently raised concerns about corruption and the lack of burden sharing by European partners, so having run on an anti-corruption campaign, Zelensky was receptive to those messages,” Short told The Post. “The vice president, as your reporting says, reported back to the president after the meeting and the aid was released.”
Pence told Fox News's Sean Hannity last week his talks with Zelensky “were all based upon proper considerations of how we support Ukraine, how we support their effort to end an era of corruption in their government and advance the interest of their sovereignty.”
“[Trump] mentioned Vice President Biden and his son [to Zelensky] in the context of us wanting to see honest government. That’s exactly what the American taxpayer would expect,” Pence told Hannity.
The man who couldn't name his favourite Bible passage is giving book recommendations again.
