SPCA Pet of the Week: Petey

Former President Donald Trump spent his day off from his ongoing criminal trial by floating a conspiracy theory about pro-Palestinian protests taking place on campuses across the country.

Students have been protesting Israel's war in Gaza in demonstrations that have led to police crackdowns and mass arrests, but the former president claimed Tuesday night on Fox News that "paid agitators" were spurring the movement, and the following morning he suggested the Biden administration might be involved.

“Do you think that the Radical Left Lunatics that are causing all of the CHAOS at our Colleges and Universities are doing so in order to take the FOCUS away from our Southern Border, where millions of people, many from prisons and mental institutions, are pouring into our Country?” Trump posted Wednesday morning on Truth Social. “Just askin’…???”

The protesters have expressed their anger at President Joe Biden for siding with Israel and refusing to pressure its government into negotiating an end to the war, and the president has warned the demonstrators not to engage in antisemitic "hate speech" and to remain "peaceful and lawful."

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“Forcibly taking over buildings is not peaceful, it is wrong, and hate speech and hate symbols have no place in America," Biden said.

Trump has characterized the campus protests as worse than the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying that event that claimed the life of civil rights activist Heather Heyer was "like a peanut" compared to the recent demonstrations in support of Palestinians.

The former president will use his scheduled day off from his hush money trial in Manhattan to campaign for re-election in Michigan and Wisconsin, and he took a potshot against Biden before apparently logging off his social media website.

“Where’s SLEEPY JOE?" posted Trump, who has repeatedly dozed off during his trial. "He’s SLEEPING, that’s where!!!”

"I know the people saying this aren't, you know, white Aryan males with tiki torches, but they have the same message."

As Donald Trump's first criminal trial got underway, proceedings received extensive coverage in the media.

But over at Fox News, the story is not the center of the news world — and the network's focus was more centered around Trump's grievances over the trial, which accuses him of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment made to adult movie star Stormy Daniels.

According to The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona, "The rest of the cable news landscape has devoted round-the-clock coverage to the trial," but Fox has "mostly dipped in and out."

"Spending the bulk of its time on the pro-Palestinian protests at Ivy League schools, Fox News has centered a large portion of its Trump trial coverage on criticizing the case and the court’s treatment of the former president," Baragona wrote.

Baragona contends that Fox's approach to coverage of Trump's trial is causing its hosts and guests to take "increasingly goofy and zany positions" in order to defend Trump, and he cites a number of examples, including from The Five host Jesse Watters.

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“The guy needs exercise. He’s usually golfing. And so, you’re going to put a man who’s almost 80, sitting in a room like this on his butt for all that time? It's not healthy,” Watters said during a segment this Monday.

“You know how big of a health nut I am. He needs sunlight and he needs activity. He needs to be walking around, he needs action. It’s really cruel and unusual punishment to make a man do that. And any time he moves, they threaten to throw him in prison!”

Baragona then points to the roundtable show Outnumbered, where GOP operative and regular Fox News guest Ian Prior compared Trump being criminally tried to the fall of Rome.

“The very problem that we have here is we are weaponizing the justice system to go after former presidents. You back up 2,000 years and this is the kind of thing they would do in the Roman Republic that led to the end of the Roman Republic,” Prior said. “Caesar is out there and says if you do not come back to Rome…and face prosecution, what did he do? He crossed the Rubicon and there’s the end of the Republic.”

Then there's Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt, whose take on the matter didn't make much sense to Baragona, and he asked his readers to decide what the following commentary means.

“Does this set a precedent for other people who want to run for president?” Earhardt sighed. “What if they've done something like this in the past and they can say, 'Oh, well, they told me in the 8th grade they want to run for president, so since they paid off a girl when they were 30 years old, then that was election interference!'”

But the craziest take, according to Baragona, came from former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

“I am deeply worried that tomorrow, a totally corrupt judge and a totally corrupt district attorney are going to try to put a former president of the United States, candidate of his party, and front-runner in the polls in jail. Now, I think this is so horrendous that there has to be some way to reach out to the Supreme Court,” Gingrich said on Monday night’s Hannity.

“This is literally like some of the civil rights workers in Mississippi in the 1960s. The New York system is now so deeply corrupted and it's so bitterly, deeply anti-Trump.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.