A House Republican, whose caucus is being besieged with questions about President Donald Trump, is leading the charge to spare lawmakers the irritation of reporters camped off the House floor, according to a new report.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who chairs the House Rules Committee, revealed that some of her colleagues want to ban the press entirely from the Speaker's Lobby, the Washington Sun reported Thursday.

Reporters have long been able to buttonhole members between votes in that room, according to the report. Foxx told 535 News the idea came up during a "member day" hearing earlier this month, where the House weighed rules changes ahead of the upcoming 120th Congress.

"One that had a lot of support was to not allow the press in the Speaker's Lobby," Foxx said. "People are very irritated about the press being right off the floor."

Foxx said she didn't personally endorse the ban, but that the idea carried "a lot of sentiment" among members.

The idea lands amid a broader pattern of shrinking press access under the Trump administration, which has barred reporters from "unescorted" access to the West Wing press office. Last year, dozens of reporters turned in their Pentagon credentials and walked out over restrictive rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Not every recent lobby debate has centered on locking press out, according to the report.

"Earlier this month, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) joked about easing restrictions on sneakers in the Speaker’s Lobby should Democrats gain the majority, adding that he’s a member of the pro-kicks camp," the report stated.

The full House is set to vote on the new rules package Jan. 3, when the next congressional session convenes, likely with a Democratic majority.

A Minnesota judge on Thursday gave a "rare" interview to the New York Times to double down on his "stark" warning about President Donald Trump.

Judge Patrick J. Schiltz spoke out against Immigration and Customs Enforcement months after it violated nearly 100 federal court orders, some mandating the release of undocumented immigrants, the Times reported.

"The Trump administration’s disregard for court orders was clogging his courthouse to a near standstill, contributing to rising tensions in the protest-filled city and, ultimately, putting the constitutional order at risk," the report stated.

"What happened in Minnesota’s federal court, he said, 'created a grave threat to the rule of law.'"

Schiltz was appointed by former President George W. Bush, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the report notes.

But decades spent working with conservatives did not prepare him for President Donald Trump's Justice department, Schiltz told the Times.

"He said he thought the violations were largely the result of incompetence and staffing shortages, but also worried that the Justice Department had not taken their corrosive effect seriously enough," the Times reported.

Justice department spokesperson Kiersten Pels scoffed at Schiltz in a comment to the Times, stating she found it “remarkable that sitting federal judges are giving on-the-record interviews."

But Schiltz said he felt compelled to speak out after, as the Times noted, two American citizens were killed by federal agents.

“The rule of law to democracy is like oxygen to a human body,” he said. “It is something that you absolutely need to survive, and yet it’s something that people just take for granted.”

Last Friday, for the first time in American history, a brand new court in America deported Nazira Haji Zada, a 47-year-old lawful permanent resident living in Fort Worth, to Afghanistan. She was never charged with a crime, and wasn’t allowed to see the evidence against her (and neither were her lawyers). Attorney General Todd Blanche called the whole thing “a win for national security and the rule of law.”

This was possible because, in a moment of national hysteria following the Tim McVeigh bombing in Oklahoma City in the 1990s, Congress authorized the creation of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, something so counter to normal American concepts of the rule of law and fair play that no president before now had been willing to use it.

Until, of course, Trump.

When I was around 12, my dad gave me his tattered copy of a paperback of Franz Kafka’s short novel The Trial and told me he wanted to discuss it after I’d read it. The book gave me nightmares for weeks, which was clearly his goal.

He was a tool-and-die maker in Lansing, a WWII vet, and a man who’d volunteered in 1945 to go fight and even die to defeat fascism and defend the rule of law. He saw The Trial as the essence of why he’d joined the Army straight out of high school.

The Trial opens with a bank clerk named Josef K. being dragged out of his bed one morning by two officers who won’t tell him what he’s being charged with. They made clear that even they didn’t know what his crime was.

Over the following year, he’s pulled deeper and deeper into a dark court that’s never held in public or official buildings, whose judges he never sees, and whose files are “secret” and thus not available to him or his lawyer. Nobody ever sees or says what Joseph K. was accused of, and his attorneys advise him it’s best to stop asking because the fact that he was arrested in the first place will be considered by the court as all the proof they’ll need of his guilt.

The story ends when two men in frock coats drag him out to a quarry at night and carry out his execution as mandated by the secret court:

“Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread all his fingers.
“But the hands of one of the men closed around K.’s throat, while the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes, K. could still see the two men close in front of his face, cheek pressed to cheek, watching the outcome. ‘Like a dog!’ he said…”

When Kafka wrote that in 1914, he was a Jew living in Prague inside a dying empire. He never lived to see Hitler or the Gestapo or Putin build the very thing he’d imagined, but my dad did, which is why he’d given me that book so I could understand what a police state would feel like from the inside. He told me repeatedly throughout my life that “only the rule of law” and the Constitution protected us from the tyranny he’d volunteered to fight as a teenager.

I got a glimpse into that world myself twenty-some years later, in the winter of 1986, when my teenage daughter and I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie and were picked up in East Berlin by a young gypsy cab driver named Torsten. Before we’d traveled even a full block, he had us rehearsing a cover story that we were his cousins from the West, in case the Volkspolizei or the Stasi pulled us over.

That’s because in East Germany — where the secret police was then largely run by a guy named Vladimir Putin — Torsten knew that anybody could be hauled into jail at any time for any reason and nobody would ever have to explain why.

What happened Friday here in America is the Trump administration’s version of the same thing:

— Under this bizarre law in these secret courts, 8 U.S.C. § 1534, the judge reviews the government’s classified evidence alone, in chambers, and neither the accused nor the public may learn what it is or where it came from beyond an unclassified summary.

— The Federal Rules of Evidence don’t apply.

— The government may use the fruits of FISA wiretaps and warrantless physical searches, and the accused is specifically denied the right to suppress evidence she claims was gathered illegally.

— You get a court-appointed “special attorney” with a security clearance who can look at the secret file on your behalf, but that lawyer is forbidden by law from telling you or other lawyers what’s in it, and if he does he faces 10 to 25 years in federal prison.

Kafka gave Josef K. a lawyer who couldn’t see the file with the charges against him. Now Trump mandates a lawyer who can see the file, but goes to prison if he talks about it to any other living being.

Zada’s public defenders put it plainly before she was chained and thrown onto the plane to Afghanistan:

“Dragging lawful permanent residents into court but refusing to show them or their attorneys the evidence that will be used against them is a plain violation of due process,” they said in a statement, adding that her consent to removal “should not be seen as an endorsement of this court’s legitimacy.”

This secret court is only the most recent brick in the fascist wall Trump, his tech bro billionaire supporters, and his fascist lickspittles are building around what used to be American law. Last year he sent 238 men to life sentences in a torture prison in El Salvador — most with no criminal record whatsoever — without even bothering with a hearing for them.

One of them — a gay makeup artist named Andry Hernández Romero who was snatched by masked, armed men at the asylum appointment the government had set up for him — was shipped off to his life sentence in a foreign hellhole on the strength of crowns tattooed above the words “mom” and “dad." He spent 125 days incommunicado before a prisoner swap got him out.

Shades of Joseph K. 109 years later.

ICE today is holding roughly 65,000 people in detention, most of them never convicted of even any minor crime (being in the country without papers is a civil infraction, not a crime) and never having seen a real judge or courtroom. Most will wait months for a hearing that may never come, a clear violation of their Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

In their frantic efforts to purge America of nonwhite people, Trump’s racist toadies have frozen our refugee program since he was sworn in, with more than 100,000 fully vetted people stranded abroad. We’ve only admitted 6,069 refugees, and all but three were lily-white South Africans.

These misogynist white supremacist fascists are also purging our government’s own institutions of women and people of color. Whiskey Pete Hegseth has fired or forced out at least 20 generals, admirals, and senior civilian leaders; when he removed the Army’s chief of staff in April, in the middle of a war, the Pentagon announced it in true Kafkaesque fashion without even bothering to give a reason.

White South African immigrant Elon Musk’s DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management drove out more than 300,000 federal workers in a single year, with Black women losing roughly a third of those jobs. (I can no longer link to this because the administration deleted their workforce demographic data in March, 2025.) Many were fired with Joseph K.-style form letters that cited nonspecific “performance” issues, often sent to people who’d gotten glowing reviews just weeks previously.

One National Institutes of Health analyst’s supervisor told her that management had been ordered to pick either misconduct or performance as the reason and so had simply randomly picked one. A federal judge correctly called the entire process a “sham,” and when ProPublica dug into what ICE has been up to, they found more than 170 US citizens who’d been dragged off and imprisoned, often for days with no access to either a phone or a lawyer, all in clear violation of the law and our Constitution.

Each of these examples of overreach and lawbreaking by Trump, ICE, and the DOJ are grounded in the same basic logic Kafka described: you are powerless before the all-knowing, all-seeing state. Instead of being judged, you’re processed through an impersonal, uncaring, brutal machine.

If you’re arrested it must be because you’re guilty, even if nobody knows for sure of what. And when you ask why this is happening to you, the answer is a variation on, “You don’t need to know and, besides, we won’t tell you in any case.”

My father’s generation understood something we’ve lost track of in the years of right-wing hysteria since McVeigh and 9/11.

Our Sixth Amendment guarantees that every accused person — citizen or not — must be told the nature and cause of the accusation they’re charged with, have a public trial, and be confronted with the witnesses against them. The Fourteenth Amendment requires and guarantees due process for everybody confronted by the government, citizen or not.

When a government stops honoring the rule of law, due process, and fundamental human rights, it ceases to be a legitimate republic and has demonstrably slid into the early stages of being reinvented as a full-blown fascist state.

Zada may well have been involved in potential terrorist activity, although none of us will ever know because of the secretive nature of this case. If she was guilty, it should have been established in public; we have plenty of ways to protect sources and methods, when necessary, that are consistent with our Constitution.

Torsten knew what a country that doesn’t respect the rule of law and civil rights felt like. So did my dad, which is why he asked me to read The Trial when I was 12. We’re not East Germany yet, but Trump’s clearly learned from his mentor/owner who used to run that country’s secret police, and this new terrorist court is now established as a legal precedent. Which means this is just beginning.

Call your senators and representative at the Capitol Switchboard, 202-224-3121, and tell them the Alien Terrorist Removal Court should be repealed and that not one more person, citizen or not, should be deported, detained, or fired by this government without being told why.

And if this piece was useful to you, please share it and support my daily work, because the only real answer to a government that won’t explain itself is a public that never stops demanding it does.

A sudden warning sign inside the Trump administration triggered days of round-the-clock alarm among senior officials, according to people familiar with internal discussions.

The trigger, officials say, was the preview and staged rollout of Anthropic's powerful Mythos model, which set off fears inside the administration that the technology could be weaponized to launch damaging cyberattacks or otherwise threaten national security, reported the Wall Street Journal.

One senior administration official described the incident as a "red flashing light," prompting officials to convene urgent calls that stretched around the clock for days.

In May, White House AI adviser David Sacks persuaded President Trump to scrap a planned executive order that would have subjected AI models to extended government review — a last-minute reversal that blindsided and angered officials including chief of staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, according to the report.

Bessent had worried that AI-enabled cyberattacks could destabilize the banking system. Wiles and Bessent later pushed Trump to sign a scaled-back version of the order instead.

Since then, Wiles, Bessent and other officials have met almost daily to weigh risks and possible safeguards, people familiar with the matter said, even as Trump publicly waves off calls for tighter regulation.

The concern deepened in July, when OpenAI's systems were involved in an incident affecting the company Hugging Face using hundreds of coordinated AI agents, reportedly intensifying fears among officials about models operating outside human control.

White House teams, including Vice President JD Vance, have examined how hostile actors or foreign governments might exploit the technology to target infrastructure such as power grids and water systems, with input at times from the National Security Agency and CIA.

Discussions have also touched on the potential for the technology to aid in the creation of biological weapons, drawing in officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Journal reported.

Despite the internal alarm, Trump has remained committed to accelerating AI development, arguing the U.S. must outpace China, according to the report.

He has reportedly dismissed suggestions of a coordinated slowdown and continues to back the industry's rapid buildout of data centers, even as polling shows most Americans oppose such projects in their own communities.

Trump's inner circle is split on the issue, with some aides are pushing for firmer guardrails, while allies including Sacks, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia's Jensen Huang continue to press the president toward a hands-off approach — one that, so far, appears to be prevailing.

President Donald Trump told Republican candidates at his midterm convention in Dallas to run their campaigns as if he were personally on the ballot — an order, just one week later, they appear to have ignored, New York Magazine reported Thursday.

"I'm asking you to pretend that I'm on the ballot," Trump told the crowd. "I'm on the ballot. I'm on the ballot."

But a Washington Post analysis of more than a million social media posts found the opposite trend playing out among candidates. Republican mentions of Trump or MAGA have fallen sharply compared with earlier in the year, with some campaigns scrubbing his name from their websites entirely, and candidates in several competitive races skipping the convention altogether.

Ironically, the politicians talking about Trump most right now are Democrats, who referenced him in about one in five of their posts the same week, according to the analysis.

Republicans are similarly cold on Trump's other convention centerpiece: a proposed one-time $5,000 "Trump dividend" for every citizen if the GOP holds Congress, with no explanation of funding or implementation. Democrats have mocked the idea as a barely disguised bribe, while most Republican candidates are either dismissing it as fiscally reckless or simply avoiding the topic. A recent poll shows voters are overwhelmingly against the proposal.

New York Magazine columnist Ed Kilgore argued Thursday that the disconnect stems from Trump's insistence that affordability concerns are a "hoax" and Congressional Republicans' desperation to address rising prices.

"Congressional Republicans, on the other hand, think public concerns about living costs need to be addressed via some party-branded proposals to show that the party understands voters’ top issue and intends to do something about it," Kilgore wrote.

"This enrages the president, who wants everyone to know that America has in fact entered a 'golden age' in which the economy is red hot and getting better every day in every way. He regards the whole affordability issue as a “hoax” (as he insisted once again in Dallas) and seems to think of voters who fret about their ability to make ends meet as ignorant ingrates who need to be told they’ve never had it so good."

President Donald Trump's administration may be walking into a fresh competence scandal as ex-staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency appear to be running the show again, according to a new analysis.

The Washington Sun revealed Thursday that officials are quietly developing an "AI-driven government website" called America.gov, meant to serve as a one-stop shop for federal services, including free passport renewals and free tax filing.

Six current and former officials told the Sun that a multi-agency launch is tentatively targeted for the end of September, though the timing could slip.

The project is being led by Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder and former DOGE official who now runs the White House's National Design Studio, according to the report. Also involved is Edward Coristine, the ex-DOGE operative better known by his online handle "Big Balls."

Officials are reportedly "weighing whether to resurrect Direct File," the free tax-filing tool that President Joe Biden's administration launched — and that Trump's own administration killed just last year. The Sun reports that decision could be reversed, in altered form, as part of the new site.

"Some Trump administration officials hope the initiative could give the Republican Party a selling point in the upcoming midterm elections," the Sun reported. "But an uneven rollout could backfire and underscore Americans’ fears about the administration’s competency."

Critics are already skeptical of the about-face on tax filing, according to the report.

"This program did exist, it was overwhelmingly popular and successful, and then it was killed by Elon Musk and Donald Trump," Liz Pancotti of the Groundwork Collaborative told the Sun. "Why all of a sudden would their tune change?"

Merici Vinton of the Center for American Progress said rebuilding public trust after killing the original program would take "careful work." The effort has not been previously reported, and the administration has not publicly confirmed America.gov's existence.

World leaders are not impressed with President Donald Trump's claim that welcoming Canada into partnership constitutes a "hostile act," the Washington Post reported Thursday.

Trump made this claim in North Carolina Wednesday in response to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's proposal to make Canada the European Union's first-ever "associate member."

"If it's a good intention, that's fine," Trump said. "If it's a bad intention, we'll put very heavy tariffs on Europe."

Now leaders from up north and across the pond are saying they don't intend to be influenced by Trump or the United States.

Benjamin Haddad, France’s European affairs minister, said on French television Thursday that the U.S. has no veto over decisions made by the 27-nation bloc, according to the Post.

“It is not up to a foreign power, not the United States or anyone else, to choose the geopolitical direction of the Europeans,” he said on Public Sénat. “Once again, we have a relationship ⁠with Canada, and we are fully entitled to seek to deepen it.”

European Union Commission spokesman Olof Gill said the E.U. leader made clear that “the proposed strengthening of our partnership with Canada is not against anyone else, but for our common strength.”

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, set to address European lawmakers on Thursday, described a partnership between his country and the European Union as "natural."

According to the Post, he said both wanted “a deeper partnership that reinforces our mutual sovereignty to create more opportunities and prosperity for our peoples.”

The U.S. military's cyber defense chief says artificial intelligence has caused a "tenfold" spike in vulnerabilities across the Pentagon's aging computer networks, exposing systems that have gone without major upgrades for nearly 30 years to a new generation of AI-powered attacks.

Lt. Gen. Paul Stanton, who leads the Army's cyber defense command, told attendees at last week's Billington CyberSecurity Summit in Washington that the Defense Department had chronically shortchanged network maintenance in favor of funding advanced weapons programs — a tradeoff he said the military can no longer afford, reported the Washington Post.

"We have postponed and deferred the sustainment and maintenance of our systems to our potential peril," Stanton said. "No more."

Washington is fixating on a broader reckoning over AI's dangers, triggered in part by the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who cautioned the technology could "kill us all" within a decade. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk have since backed calls to slow AI development, while President Donald Trump has dismissed the alarm as a "hoax."

But cybersecurity specialists say the more immediate danger is sitting inside the Pentagon's own networks. Michael Horowitz, who directs the defense and national security program at the Council on Foreign Relations, called network modernization "a pretty urgent priority," warning that adversaries could exploit the gap to steal military data and disrupt U.S. defenses.

Experts point to a shift in who can pull off a serious cyberattack. Nicholas Leiserson of the Institute for Security and Technology said AI tools now let attackers stitch together minor software flaws into major breaches — a technique once limited to elite hackers. "You don't need to be a math genius," he said.

A 2025 Government Accountability Office review found that of 24 Pentagon IT programs examined, two had no cybersecurity risk strategy at all, and four lacked plans for stronger defenses. Horowitz said the department has long treated network security as an afterthought, diverting funds to higher-profile initiatives.

The Pentagon is now seeking proposals for Project Griffin, a pilot program aimed at building AI defense agents of its own. The agency did not respond to a request for comment.

God, the list of terrible Trump Cabinet appointees (and other positions) is as endless as the number of jobs themselves — though that's to be expected when the first, maybe only, requirement is unrequited love, along with unwavering and public support of Donald Trump as president and person.

Bessent, Blanche, Patel, Noem — one could go on and on. And yet the worst still holds his job, perhaps because Trump doesn't fire white males, perhaps because Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth actually does efficiently and perfectly perform the real task before him — pandering to Trump and persecuting those he believes deserve it — while failing at all others.

Despite the perfect overlap with Trump's Secretary of Defense job description (it is not the War Department until Congress changes it), the country and Donald Trump needed Hegseth fired long ago. He endangers American lives, ruins morale among our best, blows up our relationship with former allies, miscounts or lies about tools left to blow things up, minimizes or lies about the damage to American personnel and assets, and fails to recognize that war in 2026 doesn't align with war in 2016, even.

Hegseth's list of failures rivals Trump's list of horrific appointments. And yet, he may have barely scratched the surface of the damage he can do to this country and the world.

The aim of this column is not to review all the failures; they're well known — and many of them are listed in Rep. Thomas Massie's (R-KY) articles of impeachment filed against him Tuesday. It is to argue that the worst is yet to come. But the list of evidence that begs for termination is impressive and merits a tight review.

First and foremost, Hegseth badly underestimated the damage Iranian drones could do to U.S. bases, which were surprisingly (to him) disrupted such that CENTCOM had to rely on its base in Diego Garcia, a long, long way away. Remember this failure in particular. Additionally, Hegseth then appeared to cover up the extent of the damage from Congress and the American people, with hundreds of buildings destroyed or damaged.

Were that not enough, the DoD spent $22 billion, primarily through the use of interceptor missiles that do protect U.S. personnel from attack, to the point that we are beyond any sort of fast resupply. One is left to conclude that this obvious issue, the bottleneck in replenishment, didn't cross his mind prior to the war. Yeah, remember this one, also.

It appears that not only does Hegseth not appreciate the 2026 war dynamic, but he has apparently never read Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." He has the DoD relying on $3M interceptors to protect troops from $30K-$100K drones, and that math isn't mathing in defense of troops, nor is it working; see the damage above.

As part of what might have been Hegseth's real military mission, blowing up anything he determined "smelled" like diversity, equity and inclusion, Hegseth essentially decapitated the Pentagon's most senior and effective leadership, starting with firing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. C.Q. Brown, down to blocking the promotion of two Black men and two female soldiers, on track to become one-star generals. Keep a close eye on that one.

Yes, keep that eye right here because it decimated morale in the Pentagon, which is what happens when other senior officials, presumably even the white men, understand the military needed those officers and were tired of playing political games.

That's more than enough of a list without even getting into his decision to blow operational security through Signal, or — quaintly — that we're in a stalemate with Iran with no apparent plan to "win" anytime soon. Yes, that also matters.

Let's get where we need to go. All the above leads inevitably to the reality that the world is a much more dangerous place due to Hegseth — more dangerous to American personnel, more dangerous to Americans generally, and just flat out more dangerous. "We," America and its [former] allies, are vulnerable beyond any point in recent memory.

Quite obviously, as it has in other areas, one can feel the rise of the East overtaking the American Empire, with China feeling less restrained from squeezing Taiwan. To this point, China had to really think about getting physical with Taiwan because they might lose their lives and their stuff, worried about a U.S. defensive attack. Right now, it appears we cannot competently attack Iran, never mind China.

The real-world economic impact (never mind the number of Taiwanese or Americans killed in such an attack) would be overwhelming. Taiwain supplies 90% of our most super of semi-conductors. Granted, with all the bad AI news lately, a world with fewer semi-conductors might not sound like the worst outcome, except it might shrink the global GDP by 10%.

But the military impact would go well beyond the economic impact. We look at China and see ... well, China. it looks out past its shores and feels suffocated with American military might, from South Korean partnerships, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Taiwan, down to Australia, the U.S. has controlled not only the Eastern but also the Western Pacific. Taking Taiwan would truly breakthrough a big American defensive principle.

Beyond Taiwan and China, head to Russia, Russia, Russia. While it's true that Russia cannot overtake Ukraine, that does not mean that Russia isn't probing Eastern Europe in other places, against countries much smaller and poorer than Ukraine. Russia knows that U.S. and NATO forces can't fire interceptors that don't exist.

Russia doesn't even need to fire a shot. True to the Motherland's real modus operandi, it could freely rely more on sabotage, cyberattacks, GPS jamming, airspace incursions, pressure against the Baltics, attacks on undersea infrastructure. All provocations designed to determine what NATO will tolerate and whether the U.S. will even be there, given that our president and his servant in the Pentagon love the Russian butcher currently targeting American troops over NATO democracies that had our backs in Afghanistan.

Additionally, having fumbled against Iran, the Middle East could simply blow up generally — a very bad development.

Which brings us to a more all-encompassing danger: the fact that it sure appears that Hegseth's ineptitude means the U.S. can't defend two crises at once. What if North Korea really got aggressive with its nuclear missiles, fired in any direction, or just regular artillery fired 30 miles into downtown Seoul? Russia ignores Ukraine and moves on the Baltics? What if we need to protect American soil? Guam? Alaskan Islands? Other?

Hegseth needs to go. He needs to go because of all the above but perhaps even more for the below. The countries that might otherwise help us, a Congress that might otherwise act, American military personnel that could be in a more defensive position, all suffer under his leadership.

Germany and the E.U. cannot stand him, seeing him for what he is — a clumsy drunk way out of his depth. It looks like Hegseth is almost personally ensuring that our [former] military allies have decided they can't rely on the American military even if it is properly ordered to protect overriding interests.

Congress was seemingly done with him long ago. Democrats never wanted him. Even several GOP Senators voted against his confirmation, a Secretary of Defense requiring a vice presidential tie-breaking vote for confirmation? Really? Yes, well — when the nominee is a drunk, alleged sexual attacker, inexperienced anti-DEI moron, yes. But it's so much worse now. Congress seems reluctant to invest in the Defense Department at least, in part, because it doesn't trust Hegseth to use the money properly.

All of which leaves American personnel, asked to risk their lives far from home for a cause far from clear, far more vulnerable — much of it due to Hegseth's leadership, personally.

If that isn't a deal breaker, what would it be?

Yes, yes, yes. The dealbreaker would be appearing to question Trump's greatness and leadership. But neither Noem nor Bondi ever crossed Trump and, other than being women (no small matter), they sure didn't put Americans at more risk than Pete.

Moreover, this one is a head-scratcher precisely because Hegseth succeeded so spectacularly in his one "true mission." The military was never a safe place for any American, but the Pentagon itself is now not a safe place for Black officers (or non-commissioned officers), women, LGBTQ Americans, or immigrants. And that was likely what Trump really wanted.

Not fine at all, but fine.

Given that that job is done until it's corrected by a real president, is it too much to ask that Trump fire Hegseth and appoint someone who can at least "better" manage the massive American military might while still sucking sufficiently up to Trump?

No. It is not. Trump got all the success he demanded against all common sense and sensitivity and has used up all he needed from Hegseth. Now he only needs someone just as pliant; we need one less pitiful before the pain gets even more unmanageable.

Blanche, Patel, Bennett... The list goes on and on. But one person in particular makes the globe a much more dangerous place, putting more American lives in peril. That guy, Pete Hegseth, needs to go. Before it's even more too late.

Jason Miciak is a Raw Story columnist, former associate editor at Occupy Democrats, author, consultant, attorney, and single parent girldad. Please follow on Blue Sky. He can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com.

President Donald Trump was photographed aboard Air Force One looking at a poster board that read "Kennedy Center DEM-."

On Wednesday night, Trump was heading back from a rally for GOP candidate Michael Whatley when AFP photographer Brendan Smialowski snapped a picture through one of the Air Force One windows that caught him studying a large placard.

Commentators pointed out that the top of the poster clearly read "Kennedy Center" and that the bottom seemed to be some kind of designs or blueprints, but what alarmed them was that the sign also seemed to have the letters "DEM" spelling out an unfinished word next to "Kennedy Center."

"As someone pointed out to me, it looks like the placard could read 'Kennedy Center DEMOLITION,'" journalist Aaron Rupar noted in a post on X.

"Kennedy Center Demolition?" asked foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen. "That is what he is focused on while gas prices rising, interest rate rising, he can't get a deal with Canada much less Iran."

She noted in another post, "This is the politically weak, damaged ego Xi will be meeting with a week from today," referring to the upcoming visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

"Looks like backhoes. Guessing it says 'Kennedy Center DEMOLITION,'" agreed disinformation expert and Kash Patel foe Jim Stewartson. "He is a criminal saboteur. He must be stopped."

"If the next letter on that posterboard is an 'O,' the word would likely be 'demolition,'" political journalist Jonathan Nicholson similarly pointed out. "And you put that together with Trump's 'never ask permission, maybe forgiveness' with what was seen earlier in the day and..."

Nicholson was referring to the news, which Ben Meiselas from MeidasTouch reported, that a legal observer declared in a court document, under penalty of perjury, that she witnessed a forklift repeatedly crashing into the pillars of the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, hours before Trump was seen with the ominous poster board.

Conservative CNN pundit Scott Jennings botched an attempt to defend President Donald Trump's tariffs with a hypothetical that led to everyone laughing in his face.

On Wednesday, Jennings was part of the roundtable on CNN Newsnight, and he tried to back up Trump's handling of the economy by posing a question to the other pundits, including former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro and Democratic political strategist Bakari Sellers.

"I have a sincere question for you because you all very concerned about the tariffs as taxes," Jennings said, referring to critics' argument that tariffs function as a tax on American consumers because importers pass the cost along as higher prices. "If Donald Trump tomorrow said, 'I'll trade you elimination of all tariffs for elimination of all corporate income taxes,' would you take the deal?"

The panel responded with faces of confusion. De Blasio squinted his eyes and turned his head sideways while Garcia-Navarro threw her hands up and stared blankly at Jennings. No one responded for several seconds until host Abby Phillip asked, "What is that, Scott?"

"Would you take all taxes down to zero?" Jennings asked. De Blasio, still squinting, shook his head and said, "No," while Garcia-Navarro waved the question away.

"What is the point of that hypothetical, Scott?" Phillip asked. As Jennings took himself seriously, everyone else at the table began cracking up as he tried to explain, "The point is this, because you're mad about certain taxes, but every Democrat constantly argues for tax increases on corporations against tariffs. It makes no sense."

"Scott, you're the conservative at this table. That's why this is so comedic," Phillip explained while Jennings, with an angry expression, turned to Sellers, who was laughing with the other pundits still, and yelled, "Do you not understand this? It's a very simple argument!"

"You have to bend over backwards to explain the conservative rationale for tariffs, and I don't see you doing it," Phillip said. "You keep telling me this is what Trump believes."

CBS News insiders are sounding the alarm over Bari Weiss' revamped '60 Minutes,' with one senior staffer declaring the show already "dead."

The grim verdict came from an unnamed CBS News senior staffer who spoke with media columnist Justin Baragona in a Wednesday article for his Zeteo newsletter "Ragebait."

"The show is dead. We're just looking at some Frankenstein of bits sewn together of mismatched pieces," the staffer told Baragona. "I think the season is in trouble."

The doom-saying followed the network's own upbeat press release about the premiere, which one CBS reporter mocked in an all-caps text to Baragona.

"WELCOME TO THE SPIN ZONE!!!" the reporter wrote, according to Baragona.

Staffers have reason to worry. The season debut of Weiss' overhauled '60 Minutes' pulled in the worst premiere ratings this century, according to final Nielsen figures. The newsmagazine drew about 7.9 million total viewers, down roughly 21 percent from last year's premiere, with a steeper 33 percent drop in the key 25-to-54 demographic that advertisers pay a premium to reach.

The internal gloom has been building since Weiss took over CBS News earlier this year and veteran producers and correspondents headed for the exits. One staffer previously told Baragona that anchor Norah O'Donnell was "willing to play the part of dimwit reporter used as a propaganda tool."

Weiss and her boss, Paramount CEO David Ellison, have drawn criticism for their ties to President Donald Trump and his administration, and critics blamed the ratings slide on that leadership rather than the competing NFL games that aired that same Sunday.

"Nearly 2 million people collectively just said, f— you Bari Weiss," a CBS News senior staffer told Baragona, referring to the loss of viewers between last season's '60 Minutes' premiere and this year's. "And also, f— you David Ellison."

Online, the schadenfreude was thick. "Bari is a loser," journalist and radio host Doug Henwood wrote. Author Don Winslow needled, "Is this called winning??"

Veteran GOP strategist Karl Rove went into more detail about his decision to split with his party in the upcoming elections with a blistering op-ed.

Earlier this week, the Texas Tribune reported that Rove, a former adviser to President George W. Bush and longtime Texas GOP political consultant, said he will vote for Houston Democrat Jon Rosenthal to serve on the Texas Railroad Commission.

Rove announced his split during a members-only lunch event at the Headliners Club in Austin, where he explained that he made his decision after Republican Bo French posted racist comments about South Asian students at the University of Texas. However, in a Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, Rove tore into the GOP, saying it wasn't just French that turned him off from his own party.

"The GOP has a growing number of Bo Frenches—and not only in Texas," Rove wrote. "Conservatism and the party it dominates have an increasing number of bigoted advocates of a 'heritage America' composed of white descendants of the original European settlers."

Rove never responded to the Texas Tribune's reporting, but his op-ed echoed much of what the outlet had reported. French's post came after footage showed UT students celebrating the victory of the Longhorns football team over the top-ranked Ohio State with a last-minute touchdown.

"How did Bo French—a UT grad and Republican statewide candidate for Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry—mark this special moment?" Rove asked in his WSJ post, which also described the final moments of the game at length.

Rove explained in the op-ed that French reacted to "a picture of screaming, joyous, celebrating burnt-orange-clad students" by declaring, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined."

"Mr. French's not-so-subtle claim that UT has too many Hispanics and South Asians—he later said his issue is too many 'foreigners'—is raw, uncut bigotry," Rove blasted. "These people are diminishing the Republican Party, not building it. I’ll have no part of it."

The Republican-led House of Representatives is skipping town again — shutting down all business until the midterms. And MS NOW's Jen Psaki drew attention to the likely reason they are doing it.

"There have been 185 weekdays since this year began," said Psaki. "And of those 185 weekdays, the House of Representatives has been on the job for a whopping 71 days." In other words, she said, "That is less than 40 percent of the days that you and I and everybody else have been expected to show up for work this year."

Even in spite of that, she said, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) "has decided to just send everyone home early. He canceled all the remaining votes for this week."

As for why that is happening, she said, "Republican Congressman Thomas Massie has a pretty solid theory on that." She rolled the clip of him raging on the House floor.

"So why did he just cut another day off the calendar?" said Massie. "He had some more choice words for me because I predicted this as well. On Tuesday, as a fully participating member of Congress, I introduced eight articles of impeachment against Peter Brian Hegseth."

Those articles against Trump's Secretary of Defense, said Psaki, "accus[e] him of subverting the Constitution and abusing his powers as secretary of defense. So if the Republican-led House had stuck around through the end of the week like they had planned, they would have been forced to vote on those articles of impeachment. But I guess they'd rather skip town than be on the record defending Pete Hegseth right now."

"Can't really blame them," she continued. Nonetheless, "It's kind of a shame for a number of reasons, including the fact that Congressman Massie made a very compelling case for impeachment today."

"Over there, they're leading a little fantasy," said Massie in the clip. "They call it the Department of War. You know, you can't rename things without Congress. Hell, you can't even rename a post office without us. You think you can rename the Department of Defense, the Department of War? Give me a break, but enjoy your little fantasy. If you're looking over at the administrative branch and trying to give an award for the person who's racked up the most illegal and unconstitutional acts, there's one clear winner. It's Peter Brian Hegseth."

"So Republicans in Congress would rather skip town than have to answer for Peter Brian Hegseth," Psaki concluded, adding, "I do just love how Massie used his full name there, like a parent scolding a child."

- YouTube youtu.be

President Donald Trump told North Carolinians that he'll withhold FEMA funding needed for hurricane relief unless the candidate he endorsed wins the midterms.

On Wednesday, Trump showed up in Gastonia, North Carolina, to stump for GOP Senate nominee Michael Whatley, and he told the voters at the rally that Whatley had to win if the state were to receive any additional FEMA funding as the state continues to recover from Hurricane Helene.

"We spent more than $2 billion in FEMA funding, and you know you're waiting for some additional money," Trump reminded his rally attendees. "I'm going to get that to you, Michael. Now, if Michael loses, I'm not sending it."

The audience reacted with a mixture of laughs and groans while online commentators were outraged.

"This is SICK!" wrote Gavin Newsom from his personal account. "Donald Trump is threatening to hold disaster relief hostage based on how people vote. This UN-AMERICAN PRESIDENCY ENDS on November 3rd."

"Good grief," reacted Amanda Carpenter, the writer and editor of Protect Democracy.

"What an awful thing to say," exclaimed national opinion columnist Sophia Nelson. "Good grief!"

Author Mary Pezzulo lamented, "At this point, saying 'this is illegal' about the things Trump does is kind of like saying 'this is a rather unpleasant odor' about a skunk who just got run over by a garbage truck outside the sardine cannery."

Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina in September 2024. The disaster killed at least 107 people in the state and caused an estimated $60 billion in damage, according to The Center Square and Weather.com. Communities there are still waiting on billions in promised aid, Weather.com noted.

Trump has repeatedly targeted the agency he now controls. During the first trip of his second term, a January 2025 visit to Asheville, he floated "getting rid" of FEMA, calling it "a very big disappointment" that was "very bureaucratic" and "very slow," according to PBS NewsHour. He tapped Whatley, who later said he'd personally urged the president to abolish the agency, to help lead the recovery, according to local reporting.

Dozens of residents packed the Nashville Metro Council on Tuesday to speak against plans to establish a national immigration enforcement support center in Nashville.

One after another, Nashville residents took to the podium during the meeting’s public comment period to say they opposed the coordination center.

“We are here to protect our community from a system that doesn’t reflect the morals and ethics of our city,” said Alexandra Van Zeelandt, who criticized ICE’ mass arrest and deportation policies.

“Our city protects its people, all of them, and we expect the same from anyone who chooses to operate here,” she said.

Federal documents show Alaska-based Koniag Services landed a government contract of up to $63 million to provide “services in support of enforcement and removal operations” in Nashville, effective Aug. 6.

The services include a 24/7 operation to coordinate with local police and sheriffs across the country who have entered cooperative agreements with the federal government to enforce immigration laws.

The contract, which originally listed the small Middle Tennessee town of Adams, Tenn. as its place of performance, was later edited to say the center will be located in Nashville, listing a zip code that corresponds to the Donelson neighborhood. No specific location has been publicly revealed.

The call center was not part of the meeting’s agenda and council members took no action Tuesday.

A Koniag representative has not responded to the Lookout’s questions in recent weeks, and did not respond again on Wednesday. In August, a spokesperson said the company was “not at liberty to discuss this very recently awarded contract at this time.” The company has posted more than two dozen job listings for a Nashville call center, which list government security clearances as an employment requirement.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement also declined to answer questions about the center’s physical location or plans, citing security concerns.

It is unclear how elected council members could legally intervene to prevent the ICE center’s presence in Nashville. A spokesperson for Mayor Freddie O’Connell told the Lookout in late August that he was “still in the process of getting a consistent depiction of what is planned.” The Lookout sought additional information from the mayor Wednesday.

ICE changes location of Tennessee call center site from Adams to Nashville

Nevertheless, speakers on Tuesday night urged council members to take action against the support center. Some speakers noted that an effort to establish a mass ICE detention center in Lebanon, Tenn. earlier this year was scrapped after strong community pushback.

Jennifer Berry, who identified herself as a longtime educator, told council members she was “deeply concerned about what we are teaching our children by potentially allowing a 287(g) ICE coordination center to operate in our community.”

Nashville children are already fearful of ICE’s power to separate them from their parents and families, she said.

“They do not need us to normalize surveillance, suspicion and the idea that some families are less deserving of safety and surveillance than others.”

The government’s description of the contract responsibilities, in a document published in November soliciting bids, describes an operation that would more closely integrate the work of local police and federal immigration authorities. The document says the support center’s primary function would be to operate a call center capable of handling an estimated 6,000-7,000 daily inquiries from law enforcement agencies across the nation. The document also describes providing local law enforcement with “targeting focus and material” to locate immigrant children.

“They are building infrastructure to surveil our neighbors, share information about our neighbors and ultimately remove our neighbors from families and their communities,” Luis Mata, communications and deputy director for the Tennessee Democratic Party, told councilmembers.

“Someone’s father or mother doesn’t come home. A child loses a parent. Your favorite small business closes down. That is what all this infrastructure eventually touches.”

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com.

Palestinian-American human rights lawyer and Rutgers University professor Noura Erakat was arrested and charged with trespassing Tuesday night after speaking out against Palm Beach County's billion-dollar investment in Israel Bonds during a public budget hearing.

According to The Guardian, Erakat, who teaches Africana studies at Rutgers and sits on the editorial committee of the Journal for Palestine Studies, was detained by deputies in an elevator at the county government building in West Palm Beach. She remained in custody overnight and was released the following morning after paying bond.

Dozens of other attendees who'd shown up to oppose the investment were also removed from the meeting, with some carrying signs reading messages like "Fund Housing, Not Genocide."

Palm Beach County's stake in Israel Bonds climbed to roughly $1 billion earlier this year, a jump largely attributed to a purchase exceeding $350 million approved by Mike Caruso, the county clerk who has since been suspended from office and is separately facing unrelated sexual abuse allegations. A similar fight just unfolded in Miami-Dade, where county commissioners recently loosened investment rules to allow Israel Bonds to make up as much as 5 percent of the portfolio, up from a prior 3 percent cap, though the change stops short of forcing officials to actually purchase additional bonds.

Opponents at that earlier meeting also had their microphones cut off or were escorted out.

Erakat, born in California to Palestinian immigrant parents and a Berkeley law graduate, has spent years as a prominent critic of Israel's policies toward Palestinians, including addressing the United Nations directly on the issue. Tensions ran high enough during Tuesday's Palm Beach hearing that one commissioner told a protesting retired Air Force member he was "embarrassing the uniform."

Palm Beach County deputies have not yet released an arrest report detailing the specific circumstances of Erakat's detention.

Tricia Pridemore, who until recently served as an elected utility regulator in Georgia, is now working for a corporation that builds data centers primarily in the southeast.

Pridemore, who is a Republican, will serve as the executive vice president of energy, regulatory and policy for DC BLOX, where she will represent the company in policy discussions with lawmakers, regulatory bodies and utility providers.

Pridemore resigned from the state Public Service Commission on Sept. 4, leaving her post a few months early.

Pridemore said in an interview Wednesday that she’ll be “leveraging [her] experienced understanding of the energy space, as well as Georgia policy and law, and being able to do that to support one of the largest customers in the state.”

“The world of energy and utilities is very detailed. It is likely one of the most … detailed policy and regulatory spaces that exist in states, and so I am intimately familiar with rate structures, tariffs, the Georgia Territorial Act, the entire section of the OCGA that regulates energy and energy deployment across the state,” Pridemore said.

Pridemore was appointed to the commission in 2018 by former Gov. Nathan Deal despite not having previous energy or regulatory experience. She ran for the seat that November and won with just over 50% of the vote. She has not faced an election since then because the 2024 commission elections were postponed.

While the commission does not directly control the growth of data centers in Georgia, it regulates electric utilities and contracts they sign with data centers, as well as the energy infrastructure that power these facilities. During her tenure, the commission passed a rule aimed at helping ensure data centers pay for the energy infrastructure they need, but critics raised concerns that the rule did not do enough to protect residential ratepayers from paying for some of those costs. Lawmakers attempted to pass legislation that would have codified the rule into law, as well as numerous other bills dealing with data center regulations, but all failed to become law.

Instead of running for the seat she held on the commission, she opted to run for Georgia’s 11th Congressional District seat, but she ended up coming in third in the Republican primary earlier this year.

When asked why step down from the position before her term concluded, Pridemore said that there are federal projects that are moving quickly and “DC BLOX needed [her] to be involved in those in the beginning stages of those projects.” She mentioned particularly that the U.S. Department of Energy tapped DC BLOX to help build a data center at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

“This is a project that really gained my interest because it is new not only to what the feds are doing, but it’s great to have it right here in the southeast with such close South Carolina and Georgia ties,” she said.

But her appointment has raised questions about whether it could give DC BLOX an unfair advantage in navigating the regulatory environment in Georgia. DC BLOX already has one data center in Rockdale County, and another in Douglas County, and the company has plans for another one near where Sara Kennedy, a Rockdale resident of 20 years, lives. Kennedy, who has been pushing back against the DC BLOX’s second data center in Rockdale since she found out about the plans in May, called it a “system failure” that the law allows a formerly elected official to go to work for an industry they were charged with regulating.

“When you have someone in place like this person who knows the ins and outs, the way the system is supposed to work, the way that it’s actually working, and they’re moving on to the side of corporate profit over tax-paying residents, it’s terrifying,” Kennedy said.

Brionté McCorkle, the executive director of Georgia Conservation Voters, a political advocacy organization focused on the environment, raised concerns regarding Georgia’s revolving-door policy. Georgia law prohibits public officials from registering as a lobbyist or engaging in lobbying for one year after leaving such office.

“That matters because DC BLOX is actively expanding data centers in Georgia, including a Conyers campus with 216 megawatts of power committed by Georgia Power. During Pridemore’s time on the commission, she voted on major expansions of Georgia Power’s system driven substantially by data-center demand,” McCorkle said.

But Pridemore said her duties at DC BLOX during the first year will be outside of Georgia in neighboring states and at the federal level. While she will continue to live in Georgia, she said her “roles and responsibilities for the first year will be centered around other projects.”

“You won’t see me appearing before the commission, or doing commission-type business, but the years of experience that I’ve gained – they’re all in my head, and it’s the same work that I’ve taken and represented Georgia and the great things that we’ve done in energy and utility regulation and management all across the country,” Pridemore said.

Even so, Edward Queen, the director of Emory University’s Center for Ethics, said in an interview that when a public official moves to the private sector, they run the risk of undermining people’s trust in the system. Even if the rules are followed, he said that there can still be the public perception that corporations have unfair access to insider information.

“Public policies or the acceptance of public policy fundamentally rests on people’s trust in the system, and when there are activities that at least on a kind of facial appearance would lead a reasonable person to lose that trust, there’s a fundamental problem,” Queen said.

Queen said perhaps having a longer waiting period before a public official joins the private sector could help address those concerns, but even that may not be enough to tamp down concerns.

“People that are going to kind of willfully suspect what’s going on are going to do it no matter what happens,” Queen said.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jill Nolin for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com.

House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) admitted to a reporter that he's "very concerned" about Donald Trump Jr.'s Russian oligarch scandal.

Earlier this week, a ProPublica report revealed that Umar Kremlev, an ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, secretly bankrolled Don Jr.'s lavish Bahamas wedding in May. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, followed up on the bombshell report by announcing he's investigating Kremlev's involvement in the wedding.

Defiance, the newsletter run by Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Miles Taylor, asked Comer about the investigation coming out of his committee, and Taylor stressed that Comer isn't brushing off Garcia's investigation.

Taylor told Comer, "Even MAGA supporters have been pretty stressed out about the president and his family monetizing the presidency." He asked Comer, "Is this something you're hearing from the caucus? Desires to look into the Trump children?"

"Yeah, well, I would be very concerned," Comer said. "There's a lot of things that are being looked at. I've always been an advocate for executive branch ethics as well as legislative branch ethics."

Analyzing the interview during his podcast, Taylor said, "Was it the bravest thing that James Comer has ever done? No. But look, this is how much Donald Trump is starting to lose his own people, his own people who would defend anything he did and said." Comer has been one of Trump's most reliable defenders in the House, in particular when it came to probing the Epstein files, Taylor said.

"James Comer just saying right there he is very concerned about reports, as he should be, that Don Jr., Trump's kid, is taking money from Russian oligarchs for his wedding," Taylor said. "I'd like to point him, if he does feel very concerned, to something he can do about it."

Taylor suggested that Comer can help the Democrat-led investigation into the wedding by signing "his damn name" on the letter Garcia sent to the White House requesting records from Don Jr.

Former high-ranking Justice Department official Andrew Weissmann tore into the latest reports of the shady Trump Tower deal that benefits President Donald Trump's family while enriching an oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin.

The whole situation, he said on MS NOW, shatters the entire illusion that Trump has built around his agenda.

"I think it's important to connect this to the story that you were just covering, which was sort of the incompetence of the leader of the Department of Defense when we are at war," said Weissmann to anchor Nicolle Wallace. "And here you have yet another story of ways that the administration is cozying up, not to our allies, but to our enemies and the individual oligarch ... is under sanction from the United States government, from the Biden administration, because of his anti-democratic, anti-United States activities."

Furthermore, he continued, "It does tie directly to the things that we were investigating so many years ago. So, this is one where there is just a complete through-line, and it is very hard right now to see this as anything that is in the interests of the United States."

"Just to further your point, Andrew, do you know who thinks that the Georgian government is anti-American?" noted Wallace. "Marco Rubio!"

"Exactly. The current secretary of state," agreed Weissmann, noting that Rubio unequivocally said Russia interfered in U.S. elections when he was serving in the Senate, only to now deny this while working under Trump.

The bottom line, he said, is "this is a president who ran on the slogan of America First. How is it America First to be supporting our enemy and to be doing deals with someone who is sanctioned for undertaking anti-democratic activities?"

- YouTube www.youtube.com

President Donald Trump sparked an angry backlash Wednesday after threatening to punish Europe if Canada forms a closer alliance with the European Union.

Speaking to reporters in Charlotte, North Carolina, Trump called the prospect of Canada becoming the EU’s first associate member “laughable” and described the longtime U.S. ally as "a terrible trade partner.”

“And if they do that, if I think it’s a hostile act, I will put very serious tariffs or stop trading with Europe on many things,” Trump said, adding that “very heavy tariffs” could follow the move.

“This is nuts,” wrote Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia.

Bloomberg White House correspondent Josh Wingrove questioned whether Trump understood the proposal.

“It... does not appear Trump has been particularly briefed on Canada's ‘associate member’ status with the EU,” Wingrove posted on X.

“Cutting off trade with our allies because they support our other allies?” the political commentator Angry Staffer told their half a million followers on X. “What a f----ing buffoon.”

Author and political activist Don Winslow dismissed Trump’s comments as “empty threats.”

“He has destroyed the American economy in less than 2 years,” he added in a social media post.

Meanwhile, one Canadian critic asked: “Who is he gonna trade with? North Korea? He is alienating everyone.”

“This guy is delusional,” concluded X user Lucas Sanders.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sparked more concerns about his health and state of mind as he responded to reporters with a frozen smile and peace sign.

On Wednesday, McConnell left Capitol Hill after casting a decisive vote in the Senate Agriculture Committee. McConnell snoop Desiree Townsend posted a video of him leaving, and it set off alarms as he only smiled and held up two fingers as she peppered him with questions.

In the video, Townsend walked up to the open door of McConnell's car while he was sitting in there and asked, "Good for it?" referring to an interview. However, she was met with silence as McConnell smiled and slowly rotated his head towards her.

"Any other bills you're looking forward to?" Townsend asked. "Are we voting tonight, Senator?"

Two guards then moved in front of the door and blocked her. Townsend raised her phone to keep recording McConnell, whose smile remained frozen on his face. McConnell then slowly raised two fingers in a peace sign while remaining silent.

"When can we expect you back, Senator?" Townsend yelled as McConnell's door slid shut.

"This is so infuriating," responded TV host and political commentator Sara Gonzales. "Term limits should be non-negotiable."

"He is a f— vegetable," wrote hedge fund founder and podcaster Spencer Hakimian.

"I remember going to the Brooklyn nursing home where my great grandma was and almost all of the residents looked like this," offered former Miami Herald gossip columnist Lesley Abravanel.

"Folks, this is worse than Joe Biden," warned former Fox Corporation and Newsmax journalist Breanna Morello. "Mitch McConnell appears to be nonverbal. What are we doing here?!"

Townsend also posted a video of McConnell in the Capitol before he entered his car. In that video, he's also smiling and flashing a peace sign.

"Peace, yeah," a reporter yells. "Peace, Senator."

A protester interrupted President Donald Trump during his campaign speech for GOP candidate Michael Whatley in North Carolina on Wednesday.

Cameras didn't show the protester, but Trump stopped his speech to ask the crowd, "What do you have, a bad guy or a good guy over there? Where is he? Show him to me. Let me see his face."

Trump was stunned when the protester was brought out of the crowd.

"Oh, it's a she. Hello!" Trump said. "She's going home to mama."

President Donald Trump sparked outrage on Wednesday after he publicly threatened to tear down the Kennedy Center if courts don't allow him to affix his name to the building.

Speaking to reporters before departing to North Carolina for a rally, Trump called the building a "loser" and said he was the one capable of fixing it. He also said that the Trump administration needed to be recognized for "subsidizing" the center and fundraising for it.

"Frankly, if we don't do that, it will close and get ripped down," Trump said. "It's in very bad shape, and it's dangerous."

His comments came at a time when federal judges have prevented the Trump administration from renaming the Kennedy Center after Trump. The president recently dialed-in to a Kennedy Center board meeting, where he reportedly had an outburst at Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) because of her lawsuit to prevent him from renaming the center.

Trump's comments stunned political analysts, who shared their reactions on social media.

"The worst human being to ever occupy the office. Just reprehensible scum," Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch Network, posted on X.

"Closed and ripped down? Every Trumpist threat is a confession," political commentator Keith Olbermann posted on X.

"What ugliness lurks in a man's mind that seeks to erase a man's name from a monument- a memorial-dedicated to him in death, to put his own, living one? It's almost akin to putting 'Trump' on JFK's tombstone," Annie Duforur, a Canadian journalist, posted on X.

"And, he says it out loud: Rip it down," Joyce Vance, a legal expert, posted on X.

Donald Trump Jr.’s wife tried to dismiss questions about a lavish gift from a Russian oligarch — but ended up confirming the central allegation, according to a new analysis.

The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt examined Bettina Trump’s response to reports that Umar Kremlev, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, paid for two nights of the couple’s wedding celebrations.

“Bettina Trump, Trump Jr’s new wife, attempted some PR damage control on her Instagram on Tuesday, but kind of botched it,” Gabbatt wrote. “She decried ‘fake news’ before going on to confirm that, yep, Kremlev did pay for two nights of celebrations.”

Kremlev reportedly covered the cost of a private island and an elaborate fireworks display for the newlyweds and their guests. ProPublica described the "extraordinary development" as a member of Putin’s circle financing the president’s son while gaining close access to the Trump family.

Gabbatt noted Wednesday that Don Jr. remains deeply involved in his father’s political operation, including reportedly helping select administration officials.

“That influence makes it extra concerning that Kremlev has managed to develop such a close relationship with Trump Jr.” he wrote.

Bettina Trump insisted that “sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift,” while President Donald Trump dismissed the controversy as “not a big deal.”

But Gabbard rejected that defense.

“As tempting as it might be to accept a Russian oligarch’s offer to help pay for napkins and forks and knives, people might have some questions – especially if your dad is the president of the United States,” he concluded.

Six current Pentagon insiders, each with at least six years working inside the building, have gone public with detailed accounts of dysfunction and fear pervading the Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth, speaking to the Daily Mail despite the professional risk of doing so.

The sources described a workplace shaped by firings, stalled promotions and score-settling, all playing out against an increasingly unpopular seven-month-old war with Iran that barely a third of Americans support.

"This isn't a war we have any business continuing," one insider said.

Sources allege Hegseth has kept the public in the dark about serious setbacks, including shrinking munitions supplies, damaged installations throughout the Middle East, and no real plan for how the conflict ends. He's nonetheless pushed forward with deploying tens of thousands of additional troops and a large naval buildup extending into 2027, a move that reportedly drew formal written objections from senior Navy and regional command leadership.

"The whole building is non-concur," one source said.

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has come to represent the broader crisis, according to insiders, after an extended deployment marked by reported shortages, mechanical failures and several suicide attempts among crew members before the ship finally docked in Thailand earlier this month.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell pushed back hard, calling shortage claims false and potentially damaging to national security. "America's military remains the most powerful fighting force on earth," Parnell said.

Sources also described a climate of internal surveillance, with Hegseth's team reportedly digging through staffers' social media and conducting loyalty interrogations after Trump privately confronted Hegseth in August over being kept in the dark about munitions shortfalls.

"There's a real sense of paranoia," another source said.

Several senior officials have exited under Hegseth's tenure, insiders say, including Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who left the administration after conflict with Hegseth over efforts to remove officers Hegseth branded diversity hires, and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, whose departure followed his decision to discipline aircrews who'd hovered helicopters over a private pool gathering for a Trump ally.

Overall, insiders say the officer corps has been thinned dramatically, with roughly half as many four-star generals currently serving compared with when Hegseth first took the job. "We're hemorrhaging talent," an Army insider said.

Even Hegseth's wife, Jennifer, hasn't escaped the mockery, with insiders saying she's earned the nickname "Yoko" for sitting in on sensitive military meetings and Signal chats despite holding no formal Pentagon role. Hegseth himself has picked up nicknames including "No Tab Pete," "Whiskey Pete" and, from one female insider referencing a 2017 rape allegation he denies but settled for $50,000, "Pete the Predator."

Despite the risks of speaking out, one insider explained why he felt compelled to do it anyway. "My duty is to them," he said, referring to the troops he says are bearing the consequences. "There are lives on the line."

President Donald Trump reacted to a rate hike by the Federal Reserve by framing it as a personal attack on him.

The Federal Reserve announced the rate hike on Wednesday, but Trump previously attacked former Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for not decreasing interest rates. The rate hike came under Kevin Warsh's leadership, the chairman Trump elevated to the job in May after months of attacking Powell.

Trump addressed the rate hike while speaking with reporters before a political rally in North Carolina, and it marked his first comments on the rate hike following a Truth Social meltdown. Trump told reporters that before the rate hike, the United States had the "lowest interest rate anywhere in the world because we're the best." He then began to speak in the third person to explain the Federal Reserve's decision to increase interest rates.

"They're raising the rates to make Trump do as bad as they can possibly do," Trump said. "The problem they have is that we have the greatest economy in history. We have over $21 trillion being invested in this country, which is five times more than we've ever had before."

Trump's $21 trillion investment figure has been repeatedly fact-checked as false. A CBS News review found no documentation showing total investments approaching $21 trillion, an amount roughly two-thirds of annual GDP, and independent tallies of the White House's own investment lists have come in trillions of dollars lower.

"So they're raising that only for political reasons," Trump said. "And that's a raise against Trump."

The Federal Reserve's policymakers unanimously voted to raise the benchmark rate by a quarter point, to a range of 3.75 percent to 4 percent, which is its first increase since 2023, and signaled another hike could come before year's end.

Warsh cast the move as a response to stubborn inflation, which picked up again last month as the war with Iran drove up prices. "The plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long," Warsh said, according to reporting by NBC News.

A counterterrorism official in President Donald Trump's administration stalled a House hearing with repeated silences as he struggled to say whether right-wing extremism exists in the United States.

Joel Borkert, a deputy coordinator in the State Department's Bureau of Counterterrorism, was the only witness Wednesday at a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on terrorism 25 years after the 9/11 attacks, according to the committee's website.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) questioned Borkert about a White House counterterrorism strategy released in May, which names violent left-wing extremists as one of three major terror threats facing the country.

"Yes, sir. That's correct," Borkert said when Moskowitz asked him to confirm that the strategy lists left-wing extremism among its top three threats.

"There's left-wing. There's right-wing extremism, right, as well?" Moskowitz then asked.

"There, uh, likely is," Borkert replied.

"Likely?" Moskowitz repeated.

"There... there's... there has been..." Borkert began.

"There's 'likely' right-wing extremism?" Moskowitz pressed.

"There has been right-wing extremism, but there's been left-wing extremism," Borkert answered.

"I'm not saying you're wrong. But there's also right-wing extremism. Right?" Moskowitz said after telling Borkert he agreed with what the strategy says about left-wing extremism and Antifa.

"[5-second pause] There... are... various..." Borkert said.

"Why are you struggling to answer that?" Moskowitz asked, cutting him off.

"Well... what... I'll tell you, sir, that there's forms of..." Borkert tried again.

"There's left-wing extremism, and there's right-wing extremism. We can debate whether it's 60/40, 55/45. We can debate that," Moskowitz said.

"But there is no debate amongst the American people that there are left-wing extremists and there are right-wing extremists. But you struggle to answer on the right-wing extremists," he continued.

"Melissa Hortman was killed by a right-wing extremist, not mentioned in your report," Moskowitz added. "Charlie Kirk is mentioned. I'm glad it's mentioned. He was killed by a left-wing extremist."

Hortman, a Democrat and former speaker of the Minnesota House, was killed along with her husband in June 2025, The Associated Press reported.

The White House strategy cites the assassination of Kirk, a conservative activist, as an example of violence by left-wing extremists.

"I'll give you another shot at it. Is... Are there right-wing extremists, political violence by right-wing, in this country?" Moskowitz continued.

After an eight second pause, the Borkert attempted a response.

"There..." Borkert offered before halting agian.

"I can see the wheels turning in your head trying to figure out how you don't get in trouble to try to answer that question," Moskowitz told him.

"That's... that's not true. There are... there..." Borkert responded.

"Why isn't it just a yes?" Moskowitz asked.

Before taking his current post, Borkert served in the Trump administration as chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he helped shift the agency's remaining work to the State Department, according to his official biography.

The State Department, where Borkert works, lost about 3,000 employees to firings and buyouts by July 2025, The Guardian reported.

A department policy adviser, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, told the outlet that a culture of "keeping your head down" had taken hold.

"Why isn't the answer, 'Representative Moskowitz, of course, there's right-wing and left-wing extremists. Of course, there's political violence on both sides'?" Moskowitz went on at the hearing. "We all know this. So does the audience. Why don't you?"

The Trump administration official fell silent for five more seconds before answering.

"There are all forms. There's..." Borkert said.

"Now 'all forms'! It's just... It's all people! Right? All lives matter. Is that what you're doing now?" Moskowitz shot back, likening the answer to the "All Lives Matter" response to Black Lives Matter.

"No. Sir, what I'm trying to tell you is that there, yes, you are correct. There is left-wing extremism and violence, and there is right-wing," Borkert finally said. "And this administration... left-wing extremism and terrorists has been a blind spot that we must rectify."

"Hold on. That's great. I don't disagree with anything you just said, but it seems the blind spot is that it's on the right wing for you," Moskowitz replied.

"It took you three minutes to get to a yes that there is right-wing extremism," Moskowitz said. "Okay. I'll move on. I think I've made the point. The problem with this report is that it's completely one-sided."

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) made waves when he laid out articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump's Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth.

The House adjourned before any vote could be held on it — which Massie asserts was intentional — but regardless, national security journalist Marcy "emptywheel" Wheeler wrote for her site on Wednesday that this isn't the end of the matter.

"Massie’s articles of impeachment are substantive — similar to what I had expect Democrats would file in January shortly if they win the House," wrote Wheeler.

Among the charges laid out in the articles, she said, are "Going to war in violation of the War Powers Act Section 2(c); Following illegal orders to go to war in violation of the WPA Section 5(c); Remaining at war after failing to submit necessary paperwork under WPA 5(b); Failing to minimize civilian casualties; Murderboating (sic) 221 people; Censoring Senator Mark Kelly; Kidnapping Maduro; [and] Starting a war against the Houthis."

Moreover, noted Wheeler, the last time a war powers resolution to stop the Iran war came before Congress, seven Republican lawmakers backed it — many of whom could be potential crossover votes in an impeachment vote.

The bottom line, she said, is "this is not going away." In all likelihood, "far more Republicans" will join Massie in condemning the war after it costs them big at the ballot box — and Hegseth could be on the receiving end of their desire for blood at the administration.

"Even assuming Hegseth is not convicted in the Senate — though that, too, may depend on how many Republicans are furious enough after the election to damage Trump — just the passage of the Article pertaining to Maduro may give his very good attorney, Barry Pollack, more leverage in his existing claim that he has sovereign immunity, which could create big problems for Trump’s attempt to colonize Venezuela," Wheeler wrote.

A Republican strategist burst out laughing Wednesday when CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked him to name GOP candidates who are successfully navigating a difficult midterm environment.

“What Republicans out there do you see doing it right?” Tapper asked GOP strategist Shermichael Singleton on “The Lead.”

Singleton paused, then burst out laughing.

“You’re going to put me on the spot,” Singleton replied with a laugh.

The awkward moment came after Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson warned that GOP candidates do not have “the wind at their back” and must give voters concrete reasons to keep them in office.

“For many Republicans, their big problem is going to be reminding their own voters: What is it that you sent us to Washington to do?” Anderson said.

She argued that voters were not focused on symbolic moves such as renaming the Gulf of Mexico or the Kennedy Center.

“That is not what voters are looking for,” Anderson said Wednesday. “They’re looking for things that they can feel.”

Singleton eventually pointed to Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers, citing the Republican’s efforts to reach Jewish voters, Black churchgoers, and Black men.

“This is a candidate who has endorsed the president, but he’s really been focused on statewide issues,” Singleton said. “He’s been hyper-focused on statewide issues and trying to draw a contrast between himself and El-Sayed.”