The Most Infuriating Search Term Is Trending in States Trump Won

Donald Trump voters are having a shocking bout of buyer’s remorse now that their candidate is slated for a second term.

On Election Day and in the hours following, searches for “how to change my vote” spiked in states that the president-elect won, according to Google analytics. The searches first surged the morning of Election Day before declining the day afterward. Interest in the phrase was not short-lived, though, with numbers climbing again on Monday—just shy of a week out from the election—and continuing to grow throughout the week. The apparent change of heart comes after Trump allies had admitted Project 2025 was the plan all along, and after women and girls became the target of an overtly misogynistic, far-right campaign claiming ownership of their bodies.

The search became so popular that it hit 100, according to Google Trends, which registers searched phrases on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 indicating the peak popularity for a term.

Some of the states that Trump won by the biggest margins, such as Iowa, generated the highest number of state-by-state queries for the term. Those searches were concentrated around the Des Moines-Ames, Cedar Rapids-Waterlook-Iowa City, and Dubuque areas in the Hawkeye State, which already had a large portion of votes for Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Virginia news outlet WAVY. It is not clear, though, whether Trump or Harris supporters were hoping to change their vote.

It should be common knowledge that citizens cannot change their vote once they’ve dropped it into the ballot box, but the data points to an alarming number of Americans who apparently have no awareness of the legitimacy and finite nature of their vote.

Special counsel Jack Smith is throwing in the towel.

The prosecutor who oversaw President-elect Donald Trump’s January 6 case and his Mar-a-Lago classified documents case is planning to finish his work and quit the office before Inauguration Day, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Trump had promised to fire Smith “within two seconds” of being sworn in as the country’s forty-seventh president.

“We got immunity at the Supreme Court. It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds. He’ll be one of the first things addressed,” Trump told the Hugh Hewitt Show in October, adding his intentions to sue Smith.

Smith worked for two years on outstandingly complex cases against the former president, but actually translating them into trials proved even more difficult. Trump’s legal team employed practically every tactic to slow-roll the cases until a general election that made the whole effort moot (Justice Department policy prevents a sitting president from being prosecuted for crimes).

Before leaving the post, regulation requires that Smith file a report summarizing the investigation and his team’s decisions, though it’s unclear how quickly he will be able to do so. If he manages to finish it within President Joe Biden’s term, the document will likely become public, leaving a historic black mark on Trump’s legacy before his second administration begins. But if Smith fails to do so, the fate of such a document would remain unknown.

Smith has become a favorite target of the MAGA party, which frames him as the figurehead behind Democratic efforts to destroy Trump.

In October, Smith released an eye-opening report related to Trump’s January 6 case that included revelations about Trump’s behavior ahead of and on January 6. The report outlined what Smith described as Trump’s “private criminal conduct.”

“At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” prosecutors wrote in the massive motion. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”

But Smith’s efforts to make Trump face legal consequences were cut off at the legs in July, when the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to expand a president’s immunity and redefine what constitutes an “official act,” effectively deciding that Trump could not be held accountable for some of his behavior with regard to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

Donald Trump has appointed Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense—and he’s one of the worst choices yet.

“Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday night. “With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice—Our military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down.”

While Hegseth is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he is significantly less experienced than a traditional pick to head the Department of Defense. Hegseth once called the very same Iraq War that Trump and JD Vance just spent weeks pretending to critique “an example of what we got right, when we got it right.”

He will now run the Pentagon and command 1.3 million active-duty troops. Or maybe fewer: Just last week, Hegseth said, “I’m straight up just saying, we should not have women in combat roles.

“It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” he explained. “Our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where traditionally—not traditionally, over history—men in those positions are more capable.”

Hegseth doesn’t seem to want anyone but white men to be in the military. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth painted the military as anti-white and suffering from a “long-term infection of radical left wing social justice policies.”

He wrote that “affirmative action posts have skyrocketed, with ‘firsts’ being the most important factor in filling new commanders. We will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!”

Trump seemed to echo many of Hegseth’s complaints on the campaign trail, with his own ramblings about “woke” military leadership.

Hegseth has repeatedly fearmongered about the spread of Islam in the United States, both as a contributor to Fox News and in his 2020 book, American Crusade.

“Just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today,” Hegseth wrote in his book.

“Islamists—and even mainstream Muslims—use aggressive tactics to exploit American ‘tolerance’ as utter weakness in order to achieve accommodations that would never otherwise be tolerated,” he wrote. “I’m not talking about on the battlefield, I’m talking about in our classrooms, city councils, and social media.”

Hegseth has also complained about Muslim birth rates in states such as Michigan, which has the largest Arab population in the country. He pushed fears about the “integration” of Muslims into American society and has lamented France’s changing “demography” in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis, which he compared to an invasion.

“Next to the communist Chinese and their global ambitions, Islamism is the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world. It cannot be negotiated with, coexisted with, or understood; it must be exposed, marginalized, and crushed,” he wrote in American Crusade.

Unsurprisingly, Hegseth is a big supporter of “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer.

Although he graduated from Princeton University, Hegseth has criticized elite universities. “I have a new rule, the more elite the university and advanced a graduate is, the dumber they are,” Hegseth said on an episode of Fox News’s The Five. “If you went to an Ivy League, prove that you have any common sense at all.”

Hegseth has claimed that he sent his degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government back.

Maybe he’s right. In 2019 Hegseth, laughed on air about not washing his hands for 10 years, saying, “Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them, therefore, they are not real.”

This story has been updated.

Despite Republicans winning control of the presidency, the Senate, and likely the House, one losing GOP candidate is still alleging fraud in his race and refusing to concede.

Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who lost to incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin, posted a video on X Tuesday afternoon claiming inconsistencies in the vote tally, citing everything from a surge in “same-day registration on a rainy day” to a sudden spike in absentee ballots, as well as “voting irregularities” in Milwaukee.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Hovde had refused to concede but not requested funds needed for a recount, according to the Wisconsin Republican Party. He addressed that question in the video, saying “asking for recount is a serious decision that requires careful consideration.”

“Further, there are meaningful limits on a recount, because they don’t look at the integrity of a ballot,” Hovde added, before complaining about two third-party candidates on the ballot.

Hovde claimed that Democrats “organized and funded a phony America First candidate,” Thomas Leager, in addition to Libertarian candidate Phil Anderson, both of whom Hovde claimed took votes away from him.

“Is this right and fair to deceive voters? Is this the democratic process we want?” Hovde asked.

Hovde probably isn’t pushing for a recount because his complaints don’t actually address the vote count. Instead, he’s upset that his margin was low enough to have third-party candidates matter in Baldwin’s margin of victory. Wisconsin, like the other battleground states in this election, was won by Donald Trump and in fact clinched his victory. If Hovde is mad about his loss, he has only his own campaign to blame.

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s job may be in jeopardy once again.

Some conservative lawmakers are plotting to nominate an alternative candidate to Johnson during internal GOP elections this week, The Hill reported Tuesday.

One source told The Hill that “there will be a nomination” on Wednesday.

Johnson, a close ally of President-elect Donald Trump, has expressed confidence that he will be reelected. “I think you’ll have total unity in the party,” he said.

The Louisiana Republican previously faced a failed challenge to vacate the speakership from Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie. He has also been openly criticized by Representative Chip Roy, who said that there were “a lot of Republicans” who were concerned about Johnson.

Roy said Tuesday that it “seems likely” that Johnson will have a challenger in the vote but did not clarify whether he or someone else would be the one to challenge the current speaker.

Johnson said Tuesday that Republicans will be “ready to deliver” Trump’s 2025 agenda.

“We will be ready day one. We are prepared this time,” he said.

Ready for what, exactly? Johnson has previously promised to push for government spending reform that could threaten Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, and Social Security. Johnson has also said he would repeal the CHIPS Act, which is set to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and bring in billions of dollars, even though it’s not currently on the GOP agenda. He later walked back that statement by saying it wasn’t on the agenda.

Republicans have begun warning Trump’s transition team that it cannot select any more Republican representatives to the president-elect’s Cabinet, because it threatens the GOP’s narrow House majority.