Tiger King, Trump and Marianne Williamson: The incompetent crop of 2024 U.S. presidential candidates
While Joe Exotic’s run for president isn’t exactly newsworthy, he isn’t the only candidate in the race mired in legal peril — just ask Donald Trump.
Three years ago, the world had seemingly grinded to a halt.
The COVID-19 pandemic could no longer be ignored, and governments were forced to implement lockdown measures to prevent the spread of the mysterious virus.
In those early days, millions of Americans sat at home and tuned into the latest Netflix documentary series, Tiger King.
Based around the world of big cat conservationists, the series zeroed in on Joe Exotic and his years-long feud with Carole Baskin.
Exotic was convicted in 2019 on 17 federal charges of animal abuse and two counts of attempted murder-for-hire in a plot to kill Baskin. He's facing 21 years in prison.
He may be behind bars, but Exotic has launched a bid to run for president in 2024 under the Libertarian Party.
"Put aside that I am gay, that I am in prison for now, that I used drugs in the past, that I had more than one boyfriend at once, and that Carole [Baskin] hates my guts," Exotic wrote in a statement published on his campaign’s website. "That all has not a thing to do with me being able to be your voice."
While Exotic’s run for president isn’t exactly newsworthy, he isn’t the only candidate in the race mired in legal peril — just ask Donald Trump.
As of press time, an indictment against the former president hasn’t been filed.
Trump’s lawyer of the week, Joe Tacopina, has been appearing on CNN, MSNBC, and other networks, touting his client’s innocence.
But for Tacopina, his defence of Trump represents an about-face from just a few years ago.
In 2018, the lawyer called the hush money payment to author and adult film star Stormy Daniels "illegal" and said Trump could face a possible "campaign finance issue" for silencing his mistress.
Trump could certainly pull the "Melania defence" and argue he paid off Daniels so the affair wouldn’t destroy his marriage. But that defence would only explain the hush money — not the decision to misclassify the payment as a legal expense.
For the first time since he launched his third consecutive presidential run in November, the Republican Party is firmly standing behind Trump, with calls to defund the FBI and investigate Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg coming from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Trump’s troubles aren’t limited to New York, either. The former reality television star is also facing a potential indictment in Georgia in a probe investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election in the state after a definitive loss.
CNN reported this week that prosecutors are considering racketeering and conspiracy charges against Trump for trying to "find 11,000 votes" in the 2020 contest.
Next month, Trump will stand trial for defamation after claiming writer E. Jean Carroll lied when she spoke out about being raped by the former president in a 2019 memoir.
It was revealed Thursday that the proceedings will feature an anonymous jury, a decision made by the presiding judge due to Trump’s attacks on the legal system and allegations of witness tampering.
Meanwhile, his former Vice President Mike Pence has stayed mum about running for president, but has indicated he’ll make his intention clear, according to POLITICO, "before summertime."
But the Republican race has added another candidate to the mix since last month, with businessman Perry Johnson making his bid official in early March.
If Johnson sounds familiar, it’s not because of any political experience. He ran in the 2022 Michigan gubernatorial election, but didn’t make it to the ballot after he was found to have filed "thousands of fraudulent nomination signatures."
Elsewhere, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has announced he will not be seeking the Republican nomination.
Marianne Williamson: Electric Boogaloo
President Joe Biden hasn’t made a formal decision on whether he’ll run for a second term. Biden, already the oldest president to serve in U.S. history,
But that hasn’t stopped a former 2020 Democratic candidate from mounting another campaign.
Marianne Williamson, known for being Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual guru back in the day, has launched another campaign for president.
"I have run for president before. I am not naïve about these forces which have no intention of allowing anyone into this conversation who does not align with their predetermined agenda," she told the roughly 600 attendees at her campaign kickoff. "I understand that, in their mind, only people who previously have been entrenched in the car that brought us into this ditch can possibly be considered qualified to bring us out of it."
Williamson, 70, has no political experience, but as the author of 14 books, she claims to have the spiritual prowess needed to harness the nation for the future.
She may have founded a volunteer food delivery program for people living with HIV/AIDS, but Williamson’s past comments about gay men using their faith to combat the debilitating disease in the absence of medical treatment are troubling.
Just look at her 1992 book A Return to Love, where she encouraged people with AIDS, as Slate reported in 2019, to "write letters to the virus inside them and imagine how the virus would respond."
It’s not just disease that Williamson believes can be wished away. She once asserted that the power of meditation could alter the course of hurricanes.
While she made headlines in the 2020 nomination campaign after calling for reparations for slavery, she dropped out of the race before the Iowa caucuses.
Her 2020 run also made news last week when POLITICO’s Lauren Egan published a report detailing her "abusive" treatment towards campaign staff. Egan interviewed 12 people who worked on the campaign and spoke out about the "unpredictable, explosive episodes of anger" they were subjected to during her bid for the White House.
Allegations against Williamson include throwing her phone at staffers, having outbursts so loud that hotel staff conducted a safety check, and pounding a car door until her hand started to swell, which resulted in her needing medical assistance. She’s also accused of ridiculing staffers for "being overweight."
"All 12 former staffers interviewed recalled instances where Williamson would scream at people until they started to cry," Egan wrote.
If her campaign leadership is any indication, it’s clear Williamson isn’t prepared to take the reins from Biden. The real question is whether Biden will hand them over to anyone in 2024.