Everything you need to know about Donald Trump’s bizarre golf lies, the fact that he’s having to campaign in places he shouldn’t, JD Vance doing his best to help but dropping some clangers – and we explain the whole Jack Smith basketball thing for the British reader. Buckle up.
Donald Trump revealed how far he’s willing to go to undermine next month’s Midterm elections in a deeply chilling interview this week. In the space of one hour with Time Magazine, Donald Trump failed to rule out declaring a state of emergency, claimed to have the highest IQ, insisted his dismal polls were “fake” and launched a furious and sweary rant about what he sees as unfair press coverage.
And that was just Wednesday. We’ll also cover Trump’s bizarre golf lies, the fact that he’s having to campaign in places he shouldn’t, JD Vance doing his best to help but dropping some clangers – and we explain the whole Jack Smith basketball thing for the British reader. Here’s more on that and the rest of the wild and troubling things happening in Trumpworld this week. Buckle up.
Trump is campaigning in unexpected places
Starting at the end, Donald Trump held a rally in Alabama last night – one of a series of appearances in states that should be super-safe for Republicans. Last night’s speech in Mobile, AL, saw him stump for Tommy Tuberville, who is stepping down as a senator to run for Governor. Tuberville won his senate seat by 20 points, and Trump won the state by 30 in 2024 – so he should be a slam dunk.
Then why is Trump there? Well, because a poll last month put Tuberville just 8 points ahead, with another this week putting him 13 points ahead with 8% undecided – still in the lead, but a massive collapse in support in one of America’s reddest states. And it wasn’t just Alabama. On Wednesday, Trump stumped in Oklahoma, which Trump won in 2024 by 34 points and has never voted for a Democrat in a single district for 26 years. No statewide polling there yet, but it’s a weird place for a president to spend time this close to an election. From there he went to Texas. TEXAS. Where Democrat senate candidate James Talarico is ahead of Trump-backed Republican Ken Paxton by seven points. IN TEXAS.
And that’s despite a massive ad blitz by Texas Republicans. Trump is going back to Texas next week – and he was only there a couple of weeks ago for his weird midterm party convention – which Paxton has allegedly said privately did him more harm than good. He’ll pay another visit to Alabama on Saturday to watch a football game. If I were reading the tea leaves of this from a campaign strategy point of view, I’d think it was someone who had given up on the battleground states as lost, and was trying to shore up the base to try and head off a massacre. But we’ll see.
Trump himself said during the speech in Alabama: “I don’t need the votes. I’m not running. But you’re going to think of me as on the ballot right? Promise?” Problem with that is across the country Trump’s average net approval rating is -26. At the same point in his first term, he was -10. At the same point in Biden’s first term, he was -8.
Trump’s golf boasts would make Kim Jong Un blush
Speaking of Tommy Tuberville, during his guest spot at last night’s rally, the famously a bit mad and very outspoken senator buttered his boss up by bigging up his prowess as a golfer: “Trump has won 40 club championships. I want you to think about that. 40 club championships.”
So I took his advice and thought about it. And luckily, sportswriter Rick Reilly recently did so in The Washington Post, from which I learned the following. In 2000, Trump admitted to Reilly that whenever he buys or builds a golf club, he plays the first round on his own and calls that winning a club championship.
At the time he was claiming to have won 12. By 2013, he was claiming to have won 18, all on his own courses, many of them dubious. By 2024 he claimed he’d won 26. That’s 8 in 11 years, which in itself is a feat. In April 2025 he claimed on Truth Social to have won 36. 10 in less than a year. While in office. Earlier this year he claimed to have won 43. Another 7 while in office. Kim Jong Un would blush.
JD Vance is helping
JD Vance has been doing his bit on the trail with a speech in Lakeland, Florida – which I only mention because he dropped some serious clangers. For a start, he accused Florida Democrat Governor candidate David Jolly of having “contorted himself like a pretzel to pander to the crazies” and added: “He’ll do and say whatever it takes to stay relevant. He flips any flops with the wind because he’s so desperate to be relevant. He is desperate to have a job where he gets to tell you how to live your life. He wants power.”
This from a man who said he went “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler” less than a decade before becoming the Vice President. He also took aim at Angie Nixon, a woman of colour and member of the House of Representatives. “When Angie Nixon calls herself a socialist,” he said, “I think the right response is to say, then get the hell out of here. You don’t belong in America.” The Vice President, there, calling for a US citizen, born in Jacksonville, Florida, to be kicked out of the country because of her political views.
Trump attacks ‘dirty’ Obama and won’t rule out declaring a state of emergency before the midterms
Trump gave an interview to Time Magazine this week, and I implore everyone to read the full transcript. It starts wild and only gets wilder. During the hour-long chat he suggests Supreme Court justices should be loyal to him – not to the law, not to the country…to him. He confirms he will absolutely be pardoning his entire staff before he leaves office.
He claims Barack Obama didn’t refurbish the White House because he “doesn’t know if something’s dirty or clean”. A quick side note on this – it’s not the first time, Trump has accused someone of not being able to see dirt. He said this in response to ABC News White House Correspondent Rachel Scott back in May.
I’ll let you guess what Rachel Scott and Barack Obama have in common. Anyway, he also spiralled into a sweary meltdown at the interviewer because – and I quote – “You haven’t asked me one f-ing positive question”. But to me the most alarming section was when he was asked a series of questions about what he had planned for the run-up to the midterms.
He was asked a series of questions that should be pretty easy for the leader of a functioning democracy to say “no” to. First he was asked if he planned to dispatch ICE agents to polling places in the midterms. “Haven’t thought of it,” he said. Which is in itself, patently untrue, because people have asked him and his team about it a load of times. And, well, you might think, if you’re voting, you’re a US citizen, so why would you be worried about ICE agents being at polling places? Well, ask the friends and relatives of all the US citizens who have been wrongly arrested, disappeared, shot or killed in the last 18 months whether they’d feel comfortable walking past a line of ICE agents to cast their ballot?
And then he’s asked whether he would declare a state of emergency ahead of the midterms other than in the case of widespread violence in the streets. “No, there would be no reason to do that…” …is what any sane person would say in answer to that question. What he actually said was: “I don’t rule anything out or in. We’ll see.”
Trump strong-arms Europe into releasing emergency reserves with threat of diesel export ban
Trump backed down on threats to ban the export of diesel from the US. But only after G7 leaders agreed to release 100 million barrels of diesel and crude oil from their emergency reserves to bring global oil prices down. That’s the spike in prices that he caused when he started bombing Iran, in case anyone was unsure.
BBC unimpressed by Trump team slow-walking lawsuit discovery
Trump’s team are seriously dragging their feet in the BBC lawsuit – and the beeb are not happy. Long story short, Trump is suing the BBC for $10billion (£7.5billion) over a slightly clumsily edited passage in a Panorama documentary, which Trump claims had materially damaged him ahead of of the 2024 election, an election he WON – despite having been watched, statistically speaking, by nobody who could vote in America.
Anyway, the BBC’s lawyers this week lodged a complaint, because they have on twelve occasions provided documents to Trump’s lawyers – including internal emails and amounting to more than 100,000 pages…and Trump’s team have only sent one set of files to them. They accused trump’s team of choosing to “ignore the instructions of this court and his obligations under the rules,” and called for the court to issue a firm order threatening sanctions against the president if they don’t comply in a timely manner.
Meanwhile, there’s been a slight setback on the BBC’s end. They wanted to interview Cassidy Hutchinson, who was a top aide to Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows at the time of the January 6th riots. She had previously testified to Congress in 2022 that Trump had ignored warnings that some of the crowd at the capitol were armed, and had said: “I’m the f***ing president, take me up to the capitol now” The beeb argued her testimony would be highly relevant to Trump’s state of mind – given they’re demanding Trump must prove he did not “foment or incite” the riot. The judge in the case, whose name I’m not going to say out loud because it sounds like a very rude word, disagreed, saying it was a “fishing expedition” – but said her sworn testimony to congress was available to them to refer to in court. And in any case, she’d almost certainly plead the fifth if she was subpoenaed, so it would be an unnecessary burden on her.
Trump’s £20 million propaganda blitz
Last week, we looked at the Trump ads that have started airing in the states, which despite clearly being Trump campaign ads – one of them was literally a 2024 campaign ad with the badges removed – are “paid for by the US Government”. The White House has insisted they’re not campaign ads, because there’s no call to action to vote a certain way. In fact, they insist, they’re “Public Service Announcements”. Which conveniently means they don’t have to declare how much they’ve spent on them. Even though it’s taxpayers’ cash.
The New York Times has a story out today suggesting Trump himself, personally, ordered the ads and said they should be paid for by taxpayers in a $20million (£15million) contract that used funds from the Department of Homeland Security. I imagine this will see the inside of a courtroom before too long – and that Trump’s repeated statements telling voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot” in the midterms will do nothing to help the administration defend its assertion that the ads were legal because there was no call to action.
Let me explain the Jack Smith thing
So if you’re still hanging around the dystopian hellscape that everyone still calls “Twitter” despite Elon Musk’s best efforts, you might have seen a bunch of videos of a Republican congressman trying to “gotcha” someone, but being humiliated because he got something wrong about a basketball game. Like an episode of “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue,” it was truly hilarious, but relied on quite a lot of prior knowledge. So let’s fill everyone in.
Jack Smith was the special consel nominated by the Justice Department to oversee the investigations into Trump’s role in January 6th and his stash of documents at Mar A Lago. Donald Trump, as you can imagine, hates this guy. And a lot of Republicans in the Senate really like pleasing Donald Trump. Still.
For some reason. Anyway at about the same time, in 2023/24, there was a separate, parallel case being brought by prosecutors in Georgia – aimed, among other things, at his attempts to get Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes so he could win the state and overturn the 2020 election result. It stalled after Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis admitted she’d been having an affair with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor who was leading the case against Trump in Georgia.
So on Tuesday Jack Smith came for questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Republican Senator Eric Schmitt thought he had a blockbuster gotcha. Something that he could use to paint Smith as a corrupt official colluding with others in the deep state to weaponise the justice system into vindictive prosecutions of the then-former President. Schmitt asked Smith if he’d attended an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024 – the day before Willis admitted the affair. The implication being that he – a DoJ employee – had been colluding with Georgia prosecutors to co-ordinate the prosecutions. A big no-no. Smith said no, he had not – and that he had never met with Willis or Wade. Schmitt suggested smugly that Smith had already committed perjury, and his produced a poster board that he claimed showed text messages from Smith’s team discussing his plans to go to the game – before immediately pulling it down again. Smith asked for it to be held up a little longer so he could read it, to which Schmitt refused and called him a “dirtbag.”
A little later, Smith clarified that he remembered attending a basketball game that month…but it was a women’s college game, between the University of Maryland and the University of Iowa. He remembered the game because Caitlin Clark – now a WNBA superstar – had played.
It was then that Senator Amy Klobuchar came with the missing piece of the puzzle…and noted that the University of Iowa’s basketball team is called…the Hawkeyes. The game was in College Park, Maryland – just a few minutes’ drive from Washington DC, but about 700 miles and a ten hour drive from Georgia.
“I think people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag, and not get the teams wrong,” Klobuchar said. “I would just say, for a U.S. senator to have false information and imply, based on a confusion about the name of a team, which I knew knowing my Midwestern sports, and imply that you were in another city, that you were somehow involved that day in what was happening in Georgia and then call you a dirtbag is something that deserves an apology.” So far, no apology has been forthcoming.