Is President Donald Trump a sports jinx or just a corrupt fool? Trump is once again an international laughingstock after the U.S. Men’s National Team crashed out of the World Cup despite the president’s meddling. Trump had urged FIFA president Gianni Infantino over the weekend to overturn a red card that would’ve kept the U.S. team’s top scorer from playing against Belgium Monday night. For the first time in half a century, FIFA overturned the decision, but even that couldn’t save the U.S. Men’s Soccer team from being handily defeated 4-1. (And the player in question, Folarin Balogun, didn’t even score America’s lone goal of the night.)“Overturn this,” the Belgian Red Devils, Belgium’s national team, wrote in a post on X after the game. As if losing wasn’t humiliating enough, a handful of players on the Belgian team were spotted doing Trump’s iconic dance to celebrate one of their goals.Belgium’s team celebrated their victory over the US by mocking Trump’s signature double jerk off dance move. pic.twitter.com/emvy5tK6Xr— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) July 7, 2026 Online, people speculated that Trump might even be a sports curse. Last month, Trump made an appearance at Madison Square Garden for the NBA Finals. The president was loudly booed, fell asleep—and the Knicks broke their winning steak. In 2025, Trump attended the Super Bowl, fled the stadium during a very political halftime performance by Kendrick Lamar, and backed the Kansas City Chiefs—who lost. Trump skipped this year’s Super Bowl after being warned that he’d be drowned in a sea of 69,000 boos, and the New England Patriots, his friend Robert Kraft’s team, still lost. Trump also attended the 2025 Ryder Cup, where team Europe beat the United States. Read more about the World Cup:MAGA world is not satisfied with the excuses from Senator Mitch McConnell’s office over his sudden disappearance, and are now demanding proof that the former Senate majority leader is still alive.McConnell was admitted to the hospital last month, sparking grave concerns about the Kentucky Republican’s health. The worries were only stoked by vague and repetitive statements from McConnell’s aides that failed to elaborate on the senator’s condition or why he was receiving care.But rumors about McConnell’s health spiked late Monday, when far-right influencer Laura Loomer claimed on X that an unnamed “high level source close to the White House” told her that “Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead.” In a separate post, Loomer elaborated that “McConnell is in organ failure,” and that the White House had been told “McConnell isn’t ever coming back.”Shortly afterward, the reporter that first broke the story about McConnell’s cardiac arrest—Desirée Townsend—said that her sources had shared the same information.By Tuesday morning, a slew of MAGA-aligned figures were demanding answers from McConnell’s office.“McConnell’s staff should produce proof of the senator’s condition one way or another right now,” posted Matthew Boyle, the Washington bureau chief for the far-right commentary website Breitbart.MAGA influencer Catturd posed the obvious question to his 4 million followers on X: “It’s really easy for Mitch McConnell’s team to prove he’s still alive and well. Just do a video from the hospital. Why won’t they do it?”Steve Bannon has also speculated about McConnell’s condition, promoting claims online that the senator’s office is trying to “avoid triggering a special election that could allow Thomas Massie to run as an independent.”The 84-year-old Republican has represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate since 1985. He also served as the majority leader of the upper chamber from 2015 to 2021.These are supposed to be McConnell’s final months in office—he is currently set to retire in January, at the end of his seventh term.But his determination to remain in play on Capitol Hill has also forced him into the limelight due to several critical health scares since 2023. In March of that year, McConnell fell at a dinner event at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, fracturing his rib and suffering a concussion in the process. He fell again that July. He also froze mid-sentence twice that year, dissociating for 20 to 30 seconds each time, sparking concerns that the aging lawmaker had suffered a stroke. In December 2024, McConnell fell for a third time in a public setting, and again in October 2025 while on his way to vote in the Capitol. He has since been transported via wheelchair by his aides as a health precaution.In February, McConnell’s staffers shared that the lawmaker had spent roughly eight days in the hospital for “flu-like symptoms.”Read more about McConnell:A federal judge in Ohio ruled against the Trump administration Monday, citing bigoted comments President Trump and Vice President JD Vance made about immigrants. U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley ordered the White House to unfreeze immigrants’ benefit applications, citing Trump and Vance’s “outright hostility towards immigrants, both before and after the 2024 presidential election.” These applications include filings for work authorization and green cards from people in the U.S. from countries including Burma, Canada, Iran, Nigeria, Syria, Tanzania, and Venezuela.“Their ire appears focused on immigrants from countries in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Asia,” Marbley, nominated to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton in 1997, wrote. The judge quoted many of Trump’s comments against immigrants of color, including the time he railed against people coming to the U.S. from “shithole countries” or when he claimed Haitians are “poisoning the blood” of our country. In his second term as president, Trump attacked Somali Americans and accused them of adding “nothing” to the country, and oversaw violent immigration crackdowns across the country, particularly in Minnesota.Marbley also highlighted Trump and Vance’s made-up accusation that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pet cats and dogs. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance said in 2024, which Marbley quoted directly.“This general hostility to immigration contrasts with an apparent interest in and preference for the migration of white people,” Marbley added.Now, the Trump administration’s racism has come back to bite Trump and Vance, and at least some immigrants can have a chance to establish some stability in the U.S. The administration’s attempt to shut them out and penalize them for where they come from, for reasons born of prejudice, was temporarily blocked Monday. Editor’s Pick:Maine Democratic Senate hopeful Graham Platner has responded to more allegations of sexual misconduct against women. Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine resident who dated Platner on and off for two years, says that he sexually assaulted her in 2021—drunkenly entering her home uninvited and forcing himself on her even as she told him to stop multiple times. “I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me,” Racicot told Politico in an article published on Monday. “I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’”Racicot was one of the women who detailed Platner’s past “unsettling” behavior to The New York Times last month, but did not make her full allegation until recently due to the reaction to the story being dominated by one of the women’s political connections to the GOP. She also mentioned the internal ideological conflict in her decision. “One of the reasons I didn’t come forward sooner was, the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person,” she said. “I just want the truth out there. I just want people to have a whole scope of who he is as a person.”Platner has denied the allegations. “Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false,” Platner said in a video posted on X. “Over the last 10 months, I have been deeply humbled by the faith Mainers have put in me. You have welcomed me into your homes, into your places of work, into your restaurants.… Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.”pic.twitter.com/9itIt4Mw25— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 6, 2026 While the announcement is unclear, Platner’s political future is in more jeopardy than it already was, as calls for him to drop out begin to foment. This story has been updated.Editor’s Pick:The president can bellyache all he wants about advancing the SAVE America Act, but it once again appears to be completely and utterly dead in the water.House Republican leadership has claimed that the controversial voter ID bill—which has so far held up confirmation hearings and bipartisan bill signings at Donald Trump’s behest—could still be passed through reconciliation. But at least one GOP lawmaker whose vote is very much needed to advance the effort to the president’s desk is not so confident. “It can’t” pass through reconciliation, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis told MS NOW. “If it could, we’d already be talking about it. Let’s just stop playing games. Let’s stop being dishonest.”When a reporter suggested that the House might strong-arm the Senate into passing the act by blocking other legislation, Tillis responded bluntly: “That’s super cute.”Tillis has been one of the more vocal conservative critics of Trump’s signature bill, openly questioning how the SAVE America Act could be implemented without the use of federal funds.“Let’s assume you only allow early voting in the month of October,” Tillis told the Raleigh News & Observer last week. “Then do you honestly believe that we can have this thing up in 50 states? There’s no funding. There’s no specific implementation instructions.”“Unless they do the work to get to the 60 votes, they know it’s dead, and so all this is theater,” Tillis continued. “And honestly, here in North Carolina, or in virtually any state, the ability, if we go back to when we implemented voter ID in North Carolina, it took a year to get everything in place with adequate funding.”The SAVE America Act sparked nationwide controversy earlier this year, particularly over a detail in the first version of the bill that would have made it more difficult for married women to vote. The backlash on Capitol Hill was so grave that it gummed up efforts to fund the Department of Homeland Security for several months, forcing Republicans to bail on the package in order to end the congressional gridlock.The original SAVE America Act suggested numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, including line items that would abolish mail-in voting, require voters to bring proof of citizenship and proof of residency to register to vote, require voter ID, and mandate voter roll purges every 30 days, an enormous bureaucratic task that would place undue burdens on local election officials. The measure also would have added to federal law to prevent men from competing in women’s sports, and a ban on “transgender mutilation surgery.”But the bill has been radically pared down since then, in large part due to the improbability of passing it in whole. House Speaker Mike Johnson has claimed that the current iteration of the act proposed by the lower chamber preserves the “backbone” of what Trump is pushing to pass in the Senate. That includes requirements to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, and a mandate to present photo identification when casting a ballot.“That eliminates the problem, all the fraud and everything that everybody’s concerned about in our elections, particularly, frankly, in these blue states,” Johnson told Fox News Sunday, describing the SAVE Act as a shared top priority between the lower chamber and the White House.The House is currently in a two-week recess, and only a handful of legislative weeks remain before midterm elections. Beyond that, lawmakers aren’t convinced the president will be satisfied with whatever solution could even get through Congress.“He wants to go it alone, his way to the highway, and it don’t work,” Nebraska Representative Don Bacon told MS NOW. “He’s trying to pound the square peg through the circle, and it doesn’t work.”Despite Trump’s aggressive efforts to turn the tide, Republican holdouts on the bill haven’t budged—and those that remain wish that the current administration would let this strenuous chapter come to a close.“Republicans—those of us who can do math—would like the president and other members to recognize that there isn’t a path forward,” an unidentified lawmaker told the network.Read more about the SAVE Act: