Raw Story

New York City Mayor Eric Adams called former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) "a snake and a liar," firing back at rumors that he's leaving the mayoral race.

“I want to be clear with you. Andrew Cuomo is a snake and a liar. I am in this race and I’m the only one that can beat Mamdani,” Adams announced Friday in New York City.

After reports surfaced that President Donald Trump wanted to offer him an administration role to pull him out of the race and give Cuomo a path to victory, and defeat Zohran Mamdani. Adams was clear that he had no plans to step away.

Trump advisors had planned to offer Adams a position, considering nominating Adams as ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the New York Times reported.

Polls showed Adams trailing in fourth place, and the possible move could aim to potentially damage Mamdani's chances in the general election and give Cuomo a path to victory, The New York Times reported. Insiders also shared that the administration is looking for a role for Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa.

The Times called it a "potentially audacious intervention."

Former Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera told CNN's Kate Bolduan on Friday he doesn't think President Donald Trump's push to bury the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking files controversy, most recently calling it a "hoax" manufactured by Democrats, is going to move the needle much.

"It's a valid question to be asked as to why the Democrats didn't push more for any of this during President Biden's term or after, after Epstein's death," said Bolduan. "That being said, the president continues to try to tamp this down. Do you think that this sort of thing, calling it a hoax by the Democrats, is enough to tamp down the calls for transparency from within his own party on this issue?"

"Well, there is no doubt that Trump is done with Epstein; the question is whether Epstein is done with Trump," said Rivera. The issue for Trump, he continued, is "there is an intransigence among certain members of Congress, particularly Republican women, where they say, 'Hey, listen, we need to have justice for these victims, we need to find out all that happened.'"

"President Trump is right when he when, he says — I love the quote, 'Democrats did nothing while he was alive except befriend him' — that is, Epstein — 'socialized with him, traveled to his island and take his money,'" said Rivera. "So I think they have, you know, the Democrats are relishing this moment. It's setting the president off his agenda. You know, it's — it's hard to get rid of. It's kind of a sticky thing you can't get off your fingers."

"It's ... one of those impasses where I think the conspiracy theory industry will keep this alive," Rivera continued, likening it to the theories around the Kennedy assassination. "It's one of those things that will be enduring. It will stay forever. It will, the conspiracy theorists will bring it up a century from now, it seems to me. Epstein's island, who took his money, what did they do, who were the victims, what did, you know, people in power do to these poor young girls? You know, it's one of those things where as long as there is a driver in the House of Representatives, like Nancy Mace, for instance, of South Carolina, you're going to have this issue around."

"I think it's going to haunt Republicans," he added. "It's something that the president will be increasingly frustrated by, not that he can get much more frustrated than he is already. But it's, it's an issue that, you know — he calls it a hoax, the women in Congress say, 'Hey, yeah, let's — let's see who's involved, if anyone.'"

Watch the video below or at the link here.

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Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) slammed President Donald Trump's move to "rebrand" the Department of Defense to the Department of War, taking a shot at Trump's "peace through strength" slogan.

"If we call it the Dept. of War, we'd better equip the military to actually prevent and win wars. Can't preserve American primacy if we're unwilling to spend substantially more on our military than Carter or Biden. 'Peace through strength' requires investment, not just rebranding," McConnell posted on X.

The 83-year-old senator and longest-serving Senate party leader has criticized Trump and the growing MAGA wing of the Republican Party.

He warned earlier this week that America was slipping into a time reminiscent of the 1930s, with a similar slogan, "America First," that poised the United States to enter an isolationist period. He has previously warned that it could put the U.S. in a "dangerous" global situation.

The phrase "America First" originated in the 1850s nativist American Party. It was used by President Woodrow Wilson during World War I. And in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan adopted the slogan.

The president intends to sign an executive order changing the agency's name to the Department of War, which it had been called from 1789 until its 1947 reorganization.

Other critics have called the president's rebrand "a sign of weakness."

"The name 'Department of War' conveys a stronger message of readiness and resolve compared to 'Department of Defense,' which emphasizes only defensive capabilities," the executive order says.

“It’s a much more appropriate name, especially in light of where the world is right now,” Trump said. He called the previous name "woke," according to The Associated Press, adding that it "just sounded better."

The conservative group behind the Project 2025 is about to propose a sweeping change to domestic economic policy to explicitly encourage married heterosexual couples to have more children.

The right-wing Heritage Foundation will ask lawmakers to steer money away from Head Start and other child care programs to fund government-seeded savings accounts specifically meant to encourage parents to stay home and raise children, reported the Washington Post.

“For family policy to succeed, old orthodoxies must be re-examined and innovative approaches embraced, but more than that, we need to mobilize a nation to meet this moment,” states a draft of the paper, which was sent to Heritage police experts by the think tank's domestic policy vice president, Roger Severino.

A five-page summary of the forthcoming position paper titled “We Must Save the American Family" calls for “Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family,” which represents a major break away from its longstanding ideals of limited government and free-market conservatism and toward the "pronatalist" movement supported by Vice President JD Vance and Heritage President Kevin Roberts.

"I want more babies in the United States of America," Vance said in his first public speech in office.

“It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family," Roberts wrote in the introduction to Project 2025, which has served as a blueprint for President Donald Trump's second term.

The apparent shift in priorities has caught some at the institute off guard, with one person comparing the policies to "eugenics" and another calling the policies "'social engineering' that would reverse a half century of progress toward gender equality."

“That paper is not a compromise between the limited government folks and the big government folks,” said that person. “It is an outright steamrolling of the limited government folks.”

“Going back 50 years?” the person added. “I wouldn’t want to go back 50 years.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) accused President Donald Trump of having dementia because he keeps repeating the same lie over and over again.

The conspiracy theory is that Newsom somehow wasn't releasing a flood of water that could be used to extinguish the wildfires in Southern California. Somehow he was sitting on tons of water that could be used to fight the fires that comes from snow runoff.

According to Trump, the entire wildfire in Southern California would never have happened to begin with due to sprinklers.

"You wouldn't have had the fire because all the sprinklers would've worked in the houses," said Trump.

Homes don't have fire suppression sprinkler systems. Large structures do.

"Forty-six states have completely removed the sprinkler requirements for one- and two-family homes," said the National Association of Home Builders.

As one fact-check, from CNN, explained, "This is false. Newsom has never refused to sign a 'water restoration declaration.' In fact, there is no such document, as Newsom’s office said on social media on Wednesday and experts on California water policy confirmed."

Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow in the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California think tank, told CNN in January, “At no time was water scarcity in general an issue. Rather, there were local shortages of water during the firefight, principally due to infrastructure constraints. But Southern California has plenty of water in storage right now, so this was not a limiting factor."

Newsom even published comments on the governor's website from water agencies, water contractors, and a metro water district dispelling Trump's myth.

Newsom replied to Trump's post with a screen capture in which he asks the AI site Perplexity whether it's a sign of dementia to repeat the same "crazy conspiracies" over and over again.

People with dementia often repeat the same statements, questions, and sometimes false or mistaken beliefs, primarily because of memory loss and impaired reasoning. This repetitive behavior can include everyday concerns, but may also involve delusions of persistent falsehoods, such as believing people are stealing from them or thinking they are in danger—sometimes leading to repeated expression of these ideas," Perplexity wrote, according to Newsom's screen capture.

See the clip of Trump below or at the link here.

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President Donald Trump suggested that a press conference being held by survivors of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was a "Democrat hoax."

As the survivors were speaking outside the Capitol on Wednesday, a reporter asked Trump if his Justice Department was "protecting any friends or donors."

"So this is a Democrat hoax that never ends," the president complained. "You know, it reminds me a little of the Kennedy situation. We gave him everything over and over again, more and more and more, and nobody's ever satisfied."

"But it's really a Democrat hoax because they're trying to get people to talk about something that's totally irrelevant to the success that we've had as a nation since I've been president," he continued. "So what they're trying to do with the Epstein hoax is, get people to talk about that instead of speaking about the tremendous success, like ending seven wars."

"I ended seven wars. Nobody's going to talk about because they're going to talk about the Epstein, whatever."

Trump argued that his government had "given thousands of pages of files" about Epstein to Congress.

"And I think it's, I think, really, I think it's enough because I think we should talk about the greatness of our country and the success that we're having," he insisted. "And that's what I want to talk about. That's what we should be talking about. Not the Epstein hoax."

Watch the video below from Fox News or click the link.