Dr. Oz: I think President Trump is healthy as a bull…
He defends his decisions about food and fast food by saying that when he’s on the road, he doesn’t want to get sick.
So he eats at large brands because he knows they’re not going to skimp on the quality of the food” pic.twitter.com/rx3T5Ds1kJ
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) April 22, 2026
I think he’s probably more or less physically healthy for someone his age. Some people are just able to eat garbage and it doesn’t hurt them. His excuse for eating it (they use good ingredients!!??) is fatuous as always but then what isn’t?
He also has never indulged in alcohol and drugs (as far as we know) and he never smoked. So that probably makes a difference. Still, Joe Biden thought he was healthy as well and ended up being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Sure, that could happen to anyone but the odds get much higher that something’s lurking inside you when you get to be 80, which is where Trump is.
And none of that addresses the real elephant in the room which is his mental state. Oz describes his obsessions and pro-occupations as “passion” for the issues. Nonsense. His mind is coming unglued and he’s unable to focus on anything but his ballroom, tariffs and vengeance. Not even the war is able to hold his attention. Plus, he’s falling asleep on camera, speaking in gibberish much more than he used to and is making impulsive, dangerous decisions. Maybe Oz is too dazzled by his “extraordinary brilliance” that he can’t see it.
On the other hand, he is a proven hack and a quack and has no business being anywhere near our government health systems.
Ye, yep, yep. Of course it was rigged. And our self-described “extraordinarily brilliant” president couldn’t understand the referendum so it must mean that anyone who voted for it didn’t understand it. either.
One of the main questions I have about the MAGA voters is how they can stand the fact that their great guru, Dear Leader is such a winny little bitch.
Our new poll shows that 55% of U.S. adults support the House voting to impeach Trump, while 37% oppose and 8% are unsure.
As for the president’s overall approval rating, there is a strong intensity gap in responses to our poll. Overall, 45% of all adults say they strongly support impeachment, while only 30% say they strongly oppose it. That is a 15-point intensity gap in favor of impeachment — the people who want Trump out are both more numerous and more committed than the people who want him to stay.
Support for impeachment extends well beyond the Democratic base. The chart below shows support and opposition to impeaching the president for major demographic groups in our new survey:
Look at those demographics. Yikes. The only group that isn’t in favor are the over 65s and that’s a bare majority. I’m frankly a little bit shocked by this. He’s even lost 21% of Republicans.
People seem to mean it: The 55% figure is unusual by modern impeachment-polling standards.
After January 6, 2021, ABC News/Washington Post found 56% wanted Trump impeached and removed from office. Other polls showed similar numbers: The Pew Research Center had it at 54%, and Gallup at 52%.
For comparison’s sake, during the Ukraine impeachment in fall 2019, Fox News had impeachment and removal at 51% and Gallup at 52%. Bill Clinton’s peak removal number in January 1999 (which failed) was just 33%.
And support for impeaching Trump today is only a few percentage points lower than it was for Richard Nixon in 1974: And at the height of Watergate, days before Nixon resigned, Gallup found 58% wanted him removed. Trump is in “Nixon resignation” territory with these impeachment numbers (and his approval rating overall).
But note our poll is not completely apples to apples: we asked about the House voting to impeach, a lower bar than the “impeach and remove” language most national pollsters have used historically. But even accounting for that, the April 2026 number sits at or near the high-water mark of modern impeachment polling, and well above the Ukraine and Clinton readings.
I think the Democrats should do it if the win the House, and they should do it on the basis of his rampant corruption. Even if the Republicans in the Senate refuse to convict, which is almost certain, get those politicians on the record defending this outrageous grift. It’s the issue that brings the whole thing together — the assault on democracy, the economy, national security and the completely disrespect of the American voters.
No wonder he’s losing his grip. He doesn’t know how to end the war he’s started, the economy is getting worse by the day and his immigration program has turned out to be massively unpopular. And the country has turned on him because of it.
This guy would vote for it:
Trump in 2008: Anyone who invades the Middle East under false pretenses should be impeached.
RFK Jr: "President Trump has a different way of calculating percentages. If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that's a 600% reduction." pic.twitter.com/MjDNADqc8p
Trump: "They want it to be over immediately and I just looked at a little chart: WWI four years, three months. WWII six years. Korean War three years. Vietnam 19 years. Iraq eight years. I'm five months. Five months. I would have won Vietnam very quickly." pic.twitter.com/Z2FW2hFCTw
“They want it to be over immediately, and I just looked at a little chart: WWI, four years, three months. WWII, six years. Korean War, three years. Vietnam, nineteen years. Iraq, eight years. I’m five months. Five months. I would have won Vietnam very quickly.”
Says the man who ran against the forever wars. And who won the presidency twice.
I’ll just leave that there for you to think about while you reach for the tequila bottle.
Redistricting not only happens in legislatures and ballot measures
From her campaign website, “Justice Anita Earls is a civil rights attorney and experienced jurist who is running for reelection to the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2026.”
Democrats’ narrow victory in Tuesday’s redistricting referendum in Virginia was the latest battle in the two major parties’ gerrymandering war. Democrats, for once, did not roll over when Republicans launched the war in Texas at Donald Trump’s command. They fought back:
“We cannot bring a stick to a knife fight,” said Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, which spent more than $12 million backing the redistricting referendum.
With Republicans “assaulting the integrity of representation in the U.S. Congress, we need to be able to respond with every tool that we have,” she said.
The new map could turn the state’s 5D-5R congressional delegation (with one seat open) into a 10D-1R affair.
But the redistricting war of control of Congress is not only fought in legislatures, ballot measures, and congressional races. They also happen in lower-profile spots on your ballot.
Judicial elections are on the ballot this fall. And they matter. A lot. Bolts offers a state-by-state guide:
Nineteen states are holding regular elections for their supreme courts this year, meaning races where candidates can challenge incumbent judges or run for an open seat. How those work is straightforward; think of what you’re used to seeing for Congress or governor.
But 13 states are holding retention elections, which are simple up-or-down votes, with no challengers, where voters decide if a judge who is already on the court should stay in office. (Explore these rules in our state-by-state guide to each state’s high court.)
Plus, some states allow candidates to affiliate with a party. Others hold nonpartisan elections, though in many such states parties and advocacy organizations still get involved.
This year, liberals or Democrats are aiming to retain their large advantage in Michigan and gain a foothold in Georgia and Texas. A wave of retirements could affect the Washington court’s recent history as one of the more left-leaning in the country, though conservatives are unlikely to gain major ground.
Lest anyone forget, NC Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs and the state’s Democratic Party had to fight in court for six months and two days to secure her 734-vote win in 2024. Republicans play to win even when they lose. January 6 ring a bell? How about this?
Democrats losing control of the state Supreme Court majority in the 2022 midterms meant the new Republican court revisited a recently settled gerrymandering case that gave North Carolina a 7R-7D congressional delegation.
Democracy Docket noted at the time that “the court’s unprecedented decision to rehear this case was not due to any changes in the underlying facts of the lawsuit; instead, it ensued after North Carolina Republican legislators asked for the case to be reheard following the state Supreme Court’s shift from a Democratic to a Republican majority after the 2022 midterm elections.” The new 5R-2D court overturned the old court. The resulting congressional split is now 10R-4D in a state Trump won by 3.2 points in 2024.
Conservatives or Republicans, meanwhile, have an opportunity to erase the liberal lean of Montana’s supreme court, and extend their dominance in North Carolina and Ohio.
In the red states of Kansas, Missouri, and Wyoming, justices who have sided with more liberal outcomes in major recent cases are all up for retention. Conservatives managed to oust a Democratic-appointed justice in Oklahoma two years ago for the first time in the state’s history, though it appears unlikely that the state will see similar agitation this year.
Progressive efforts to oust justices who upheld abortion bans faltered in Arizona and Florida two years ago; this year, more justices who held that position are up for retention in those states. And in Minnesota, a trio of justices with experience as public defenders—a very unusual concentration by national standards—is up for reelection, though the field is not yet set.
These races are not sexy or high-profile. In the past, it’s been unseemly for judges to spend a lot of time raising campaign funds. All bets are off now that Trump sees his power ebbing away and is clutching at any lever for hanging on and staying out of jail. Democrats have to take seriously these state court races. We train our poll greeeters to advise voters to vote all the way down the ballot, of course. But we ask that they pay particularly close attention to the state judicial races. They matter. We’ve lived with the consequences.
Go and do likewise where you live.
North Carolina Democrats hope to secure reelection for Justice Anita Earls this fall and then flip enough Republican seats in 2028 and 2030 to regain the majority on our Supreme Court in time to defend fair redistricting after the 2030 census. (Three Republicans are up for reelection in 2028 and two in 2030.)
Donald Trump on Saturday signed an executive order allowing expedited research into psychedelics as potential treatments for mental disorders. (Like his?) “It is the policy of my Administration to accelerate innovative research models and appropriate drug approvals to increase access to psychedelic drugs that could save lives and reverse the crisis of serious mental illness in America,” the statement reads.
“Can I have some, please?” Trump joked to assembled guests in the Oval Office.
Would we notice any difference?
Seth Meyers reminds us how batshit crazy the last 3 weeks have been: Trump fired AG Pam Bondi. He posted a meme of himself as Jesus then said he thought it was a meme of himself as a doctor. He said the Pope is weak on crime. A MAGA podcaster said Trump is under demonic… pic.twitter.com/CRhoPotsVA
In no way should you believe that Trump signed this order out of concern for anyone’s mental health. It’s simply another business area that someone close to him feels is insufficiently commodified and exploited financially. And that someone whispered in Trump’s ear. Likely after making a large donation to Trump, an investment in his businesses, or a purchase of his crypto. Is Don Jr. invested yet?
Big pharma is all over it. A site called Biopharmdive reports:
At least half a dozen biotechnology companies working on psychedelics saw their stocks rise following an executive order from the White House meant to encourage the development of these drugs for mental health.
The order, issued Saturday, directs the head of the Food and Drug Administration to provide a new — and controversial — kind of voucher to “appropriate” psychedelic medicines that the FDA has classified as potential breakthroughs for serious conditions. That classification, as well as the “national priority vouchers,” are designed to significantly speed up the development and regulatory review of certain therapies.
This is more about profits than patients.
Not that there isn’t public and medical interest, Scientific Americanreports:
An estimated 15.4 million adults in the U.S. live with severe mental illness, according to the National Institutes of Health. Veterans are at particular risk: Research shows that suicide rates are nearly twice as high among veterans as they are in the general population. And existing drugs, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), that are designed to treat depression and other mental health conditions aren’t always effective or accessible for everyone. An increasingly vocal cadre of researchers believe psychedelic substances could offer more effective treatments. And in some clinical trials, psilocybin, MDMA and LSD have been found to have promising results in treating mental health conditions.
“We need better treatments,” says Alan Davis, director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education at the Ohio State University. “We need to be able to help people, and I think psychedelic therapies will offer a new way in which to do that.”
But research into these drugs is slow and hard to do, not least because the U.S. government categorizes many psychedelics as Schedule I drugs, which means they are considered to be dangerous and to have a high potential for abuse and “no currently accepted medical use,” according to the definition in the Code of Federal Regulations. In most cases, the possession of such drugs is federally criminalized, and that adds significant hurdles for researchers who are trying to study their effects.
That’s part of the reason why very few therapies that use psychedelic drugs have been approved for use in the U.S. One of the most well studied psychedelics, MDMA, was set back in 2024 when, citing insufficient and flawed research, the Food and Drug Administration rejected a proposal to approve it as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Maybe it’s a good thing. Half of this country appears deranged. We’ll all have PTSD before Trump and Trumpism are gone.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a video address released Sunday that Canada’s strong economic ties to the United States were once a strength but are now a weakness that must be corrected.
In the 10-minute address, Carney spoke about his government’s efforts to strengthen the Canadian economy by attracting new investments and signing trade deals with other countries. The world is more dangerous and divided,” Carney said. “The U.S. has fundamentally changed its approach to trade, raising its tariffs to levels last seen during the Great Depression.
“Many of our former strengths, based on our close ties to America, have become weaknesses. Weaknesses that we must correct.”
Carney said tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump have affected workers in the auto and steel industries. He added that businesses are holding back investments “restrained by the pall of uncertainty that’s hanging over all of us.” Many Canadians have also been angered by Trumps comments suggesting Canada become the 51st state.
Carney said he plans to give Canadians regular updates on his government’s efforts to diversify away from the U.S.
“Security can’t be achieved by ignoring the obvious or downplaying the very real threats that we Canadians face,” he said. “I promise you I will never sugarcoat our challenges.”
He’s right to do it. The US has chosen (barely) to become a rogue nation. Other countries, even — especially — our allies have to protect themselves.
Carney is what a smart, mature, strong person( as opposed to a stupid, infantile bully) sounds like. I’m worried that too many of us have lost the ability to tell the difference.
Consumer sentiment, which fell off a cliff in 2022, has declined further under Trump II. Indeed, according to the venerable Michigan Survey, it is at the lowest level ever recorded. Other measures, like the index of consumer confidence produced by the Conference Board, are somewhat less dismal but also show that Americans feelworse now than they did during the Biden years. And as the chart above shows, Americans — a crucial segment of whom voted for Trump because they believed his fabulist promises to bring prices down “on Day One” — are now saying that the Biden economy was better than the Trump II economy.
[…]
Let me address three issues in particular: Purchasing power, inequality, and the labor market.
Purchasing power: Biden had the misfortune of being president when there was a large jump in prices, a jump that was out of his control and happened around the world. This came as a shock to Americans after decades of low, stable inflation This price jump clearly depressed consumer sentiment. However, it’s often asserted that the jump in prices from 2021 through 2022 left most Americans substantially poorer. And that just isn’t true…Using the eve of the pandemic as a baseline, we see that large increases in consumer prices were more than matched by large increases in wages:
Aaaaand he says that thing that nobody wants to hear when they are pointing out that people were hurting nonetheless:
[T}hroughout the past 5 years many millions of Americans have had a hard time making ends meet. But this is always true, in good times and bad. It was actually less true than usual during the Biden years, a period in which wages at the bottom rose more rapidly than wages at the top.
That was a stunning reversal of everything that was happening before or since.
People were traumatized by the pandemic and prices were higher and everything was upsetting. It’s the main reason every country in the world was tossing out their incumbents. We just had the misfortune of having the worst president in history still owning one of the parties and determined to take another bite of the apple.
On inequality:
The economist Peter Atwater coined the term “K-shaped economy” in 2020, to describe an economy in which those at the top get ahead while those at the bottom fall behind. The phrase has stuck, as has the narrative.
But what actually happened during the Biden years, at least in terms of wages, was the opposite. In 2023 and in subsequent work, David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew documented that there had in fact been an “unexpected compression” in which the wage gap between the highly paid and the less well paid suddenly narrowed.
;…]
[D]uring the Biden years, real wages for the bottom 80 percent of workers grew substantially faster than they had over the previous 40 years. Moreover, growth was especially high at the very bottom of the wage distribution. This was the “unexpected compression”: because low-earning workers experienced faster wage growth than those with higher pay, the wage gap between low income workers and high income workers was squeezed during the Biden years.
Then he talks bout the labor market:
Dube’s thesis is that a tight labor market – one in which workers find it easy to get jobs and employers find it hard to get workers — is essential to wage growth, especially among the low paid.
And for much of the Biden era the U.S. job market was very tight. For evidence, look at the Conference Board’s “labor market differential” — the difference between the percentage of people saying that jobs are plentiful and those saying that jobs are hard to get. That number is usually positive — we are an optimistic nation — but it was exceptionally positive during the Biden years:
He concludes:
So, why is it important to set the record straight about the Biden economy? We can’t rerun the 2024 election (although if we could, Kamala Harris would win.) But misperceptions about that economy may prevent us from appreciating policies — especially the strong response to the pandemic — that were actually very good, and which we should be prepared to emulate in future crises.
Isn’t it pretty to think so? But Biden was old and eggs were expensive so… never again?
I urge you to read the whole thing because he goes into much greater detail than I’ve excerpted here and makes a much more in-depth argument. But the upshot is that Biden’s policies were actually very good for the average American and it’s just a terrible shame that he and Harris were run out of office before they could take the next steps to make them stick. Trump’s only real political strategy is to be a bully and do the opposite of whatever his predecessors did and that’s exactly what he’s done.
• Ties lowest of his second term • Only 16% back US exit from NATO —— Favorability 🟢 Pope Leo: 60% favorable 🔴 Pres. Trump: 36% favorable —— 4/15-20 | 4,557 US Adults pic.twitter.com/35klQC0W9A
