Senior GOP Senator Secretly Refusing to Bend the Knee to Trump

Senator John Thune, the chamber’s incoming majority leader, is reportedly working behind the scenes on a plan to block some of Donald Trump’s controversial Cabinet nominees.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Wednesday, MSNBC contributor Katty Kay said that after attending an event where she spoke to a swath of Republican senators, her understanding was that Thune intends to “protect” some of his fellow Republicans while still opposing Trump’s more preposterous picks, such as Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth and former Democratic representative turned MAGA acolyte Tulsi Gabbard.

“He can’t have all the same senators go out and say ‘no’ against all of the picks. And so he’s coming up with some kind of rotation scheme,” Kay explained. “Maybe it’s Thom Tillis votes against one of them, maybe if Joni Ernst votes against one of them—maybe somebody else votes against one of them, the thinking is that they could probably get rid of four, and that includes Matt Gaetz.”

For his part, Thune seems to have avoided ever becoming a full Trump sycophant. When the Access Hollywood tape came out in 2016, Thune called on Trump to withdraw his candidacy in favor of Mike Pence. Thune wasn’t the majority leader Trump wanted, but he was the one he got. Now, he may prevent Trump from getting his way, again.

However, MAGA activists have been quick to execute online pressure campaigns against any Republican senators who don’t comply with Trump’s demands for swift confirmations—recently targeting Iowa Senator Joni Ernst after she seemed reluctant to support Hegseth.

President Joe Biden has spent the majority of his White House tenure practically ignoring pardon requests—but now he’s working to pardon certain individuals before they’ve even been charged with wrongdoing.

In the last four years, Biden’s office has received 10,500 pardon requests, but out of those, he has issued just 25, according to Axios. Then, on December 1, the 82-year-old pardoned his son Hunter Biden, sparking immense backlash from members on the left and the right for going back on his promise to obey the jury’s decision in his son’s case.

The Biden administration is working around the clock to finalize more pardons before he exits the Oval Office on January 20, but some of the names in discussion don’t actually warrant a pardon—yet.

Biden is reportedly considering issuing preemptive pardons for Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson and former Republican Representative Liz Cheney, after Donald Trump told MSNBC’s Meet the Press that the pair should be “jailed,” reported TheGrio Wednesday.

“We are not done yet,” one high-ranking Justice Department official (who did not want to be identified due to the sensitivity of the pardons) told the publication.

But Biden’s plan to save his allies will only add fuel to the fire of his critics, who believe that he is advancing a devastating legacy that involves backtracking on his campaign promises and undermining the rule of law. The move could potentially give more fodder to Trump supporters who falsely believe people such as Cheney or Anthony Fauci, Trump’s chief medical adviser during the Covid-19 pandemic, have committed crimes.

The preemptive pardons would also set an egregiously dangerous precedent for future administrations, creating an executive privilege that could very easily be exploited by a Trump administration already surrounded by criminally charged allies.

In the week and a half since Biden saved his son from an imminent criminal sentence, interest groups have vied to focus the president’s attention on their own wannabe pardon recipients. Progressives are fighting to pardon “those that are elderly, those that are ill, those that are non-violent offenders, those who have been incarcerated because of cannabis convictions,” Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley told Axios. Republicans and libertarians, meanwhile, have pushed Biden to pardon government whistleblowers, including Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

Donald Trump may be off the hook for his criminal trials, but that doesn’t mean his associates are getting equal treatment.

Dozens of the president-elect’s aides and allies are still facing the music in five states—Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan—for their involvement in Trump’s 2020 election conspiracy.

“Our job is justice and that job does not change depending upon who wins the presidential election,” Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford told Politico. “The rule of law does not cease to exist because [Trump] has won the presidency.”

Eighteen of Trump’s associates are on the hook in Arizona, where they’re accused of orchestrating a scheme to use fake electors to flip Arizona’s 2020 election results over to Trump. They include Rudy Giuliani, Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and attorneys John Eastman and Christina Bobb. Two of the charged individuals have already pleaded guilty, including former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, who arranged a plea deal with state prosecutors in exchange for dismissed charges.

The rest of the lot are slated to start trial in January 2026. All of the indicted individuals in Arizona face the same slew of charges, which include counts for conspiracy, forgery, fraudulent schemes and practices, and fraudulent schemes and artifices—the last of which holds a potential sentence of up to five years in prison.

“I have no intention of breaking that case up. I have no intention of dropping that case,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told MSNBC last month. “A grand jury in the state of Arizona decided that these individuals who engaged in an attempt to overthrow our democracy in 2020 should be held accountable, so we won’t be cowed, we won’t be intimidated.”

Eighteen people close to Trump are charged in Georgia for their participation in the fake elector conspiracy, including some who overlap with the Arizona case, such as Giuliani and Meadows. Four individuals have already pleaded guilty, including the architect of the scheme Kenneth Chesebro, though he has since attempted to withdraw his plea.

In Wisconsin, Chesebro, Trump campaign operative Michael Roman, and veteran Wisconsin lawyer James Troupis have been charged with forgery in the alleged fraud. In Nevada, 21 GOP activists still face prosecution for their role in the scheme. And in Michigan, 16 GOP electors have been charged with felonies, though one has since been let off the hook through a plea deal.

But Trump’s return to the White House and his ability to suddenly walk free will put jurors and prosecutors deliberating the case in a strange position: identifying guilt in Trump’s allies as they dance around the soon-to-be president’s role at the epicenter of the vast conspiracy.

The criminal cases against Trump died overnight after the MAGA leader won the presidential election, effectively allowing him to skirt all responsibility by resuming an office that cannot be criminally prosecuted. Trump faced 91 criminal charges across four cases that prosecutors waited years to take to court. Separately, he was convicted on 34 criminal counts relating to covert hush-money payments made to porn actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election—but that sentencing dissolved just days after Trump won the election.

However, he’s still on the hook for eight civil cases relating to his involvement in the January 6 attack. The cases, which come from congress members and injured police officers, could be the last bastion in holding Trump to account for failing to intervene as his supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thinks that the CIA was behind his uncle’s assassination in 1963—and he wants Donald Trump to appoint his daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, to be deputy CIA director so she can deep dive into the agency’s history.

Axios has reported that RFK Jr. specifically wants to use his daughter-in-law to look to prove the CIA was behind the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.

The popular conspiracy theory, one of many that has sprouted, holds that the CIA was angered by Kennedy for a multitude of reasons, including his firing of then–CIA Deputy Director Allan Dulles, his reduced air support during the Bay of Pigs, his planned cuts to the CIA budget, or for simply not hating communism enough. RFK Jr. has stated his support for this theory multiple times.

“There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder,” Kennedy said on New York City radio in May. “I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.” He also thinks the agency was involved in his father Robert Kennedy’s assassination too, stating that the evidence is “very convincing, but is circumstantial.”

Fox Kennedy as deputy CIA director has divided the Trump transition team, as there are some grumblings that her politics are not sufficiently Trumpy. Fox Kennedy was an undercover CIA agent for more than a decade, and served as RFK Jr.’s most recent campaign manager.

But regardless of who takes the top CIA spot, the JFK assassination investigation will likely be a priority, given its focus in both Trump and RFK Jr.’s campaigns. Trump even vowed to release the very last of the JFK assassination files.

“I will establish a new independent presidential commission on assassination attempts, and they will be tasked with releasing all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” he said in August.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in 1963. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, or HSCA, found that the CIA was not involved in the assassination.

Representative Nancy Mace, known for her attention-seeking antics, called the police on a transgender advocate for foster youth, accusing him of assaulting her outside the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., Tuesday night.

According to three eyewitnesses, James McIntyre simply shook the congresswoman’s hand during a reception following an event celebrating the anniversary of a child welfare law, and asked Mace to protect the rights of transgender people. Mace’s account was very different, however. In a post on X, the congresswoman claimed she “was physically accosted at the Capitol tonight by a pro-tr*ns man.”

“One new brace for my wrist and some ice for my arm and it’ll heal just fine. The Capitol police arrested the guy. Your tr*ns violence and threats on my life will only make me double down. FAFO. #HoldTheLine,” Mace’s post read.

Other foster care advocates present at the reception disagreed with Mace’s account. Elliott Hinkle, a consultant who has advised the federal government on issues affecting youth in foster care, said McIntyre shook her hand and made a comment about how many transgender youth are in foster care, adding, “They need your support.”

“From what I saw, it was a normal handshake and interaction that I would expect any legislator to expect from anyone as a constituent,” Hinkle, a former foster child and now an advocate for LGBTQ rights, said in an interview with The Imprint. According to Hinkle, one of Mace’s aides later asked McIntyre his name and to repeat what he told Mace. McIntyre had left the reception but was asked to return to the office building by Capitol police.

The police arrested the advocate after searching him for several minutes. A Capitol Police Department officer said to a reporter at the scene that they were responding to a call about an “assault.”

The South Carolina Republican has used fearmongering about trans rights as her pet issue to grab attention in recent weeks, attacking incoming Representative Sarah McBride, who will be sworn in next year as the first transgender member of Congress, with a Capitol bathroom bill that specifically targets her. Former aides have criticized Mace for the attention grab, and the Republican has sought to milk the issue by selling bathroom-themed merchandise.

Donald Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba is claiming that Tulsi Gabbard was never actually a fan of Syria’s fallen dictatorial regime—even though Gabbard publicly defended it.

During an appearance on Fox News Tuesday, host Laura Ingraham claimed that Trump’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence had been wrongfully smeared as “an apologist” for Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, the dictator who fled Syria for Russia last week after rebels overtook Damascus.

“It looks like, both with Tulsi and with Pete Hegseth, that this stuff doesn’t seem to be sticking. Am I reading this right?” Ingraham asked, almost as if to clarify she’d gotten the Republican messaging right.

“Are you saying that perhaps they could create a dossier, or say that there’s a Russia-Russia hoax and continue it for years on end. I don’t believe it, Laura!” Habba deadpanned. “Yeah, no kidding. This is what they do when they’re desperate, we know this.”

Unfortunately for Habba, Gabbard, and the fate of U.S. foreign relations, Gabbard’s statements supporting Assad aren’t the invention of her critics or the liberal media.

In 2017, Gabbard, the then–Democratic Representative from Hawaii, met with Assad during a secretive four-day trip to Syria. She said she couldn’t turn down the opportunity to meet the leader responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrians.

“When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so because I felt that it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we can achieve peace,” she told CNN’s Jake Tapper at the time. She also criticized Assad’s opposition, insisting that there were no moderate rebels left in the country.

“Let the Syrian people themselves determine their future, not the United States, not some foreign country,” Gabbard said.

During an appearance on MSNBC in February 2019, Gabbard proclaimed, “Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.”

Gabbard has been criticized for her coziness with a slew of autocratic leaders, including Assad, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. When Trump nominated her to become the next director of national intelligence, the reaction in Moscow was reportedly “gleeful.”

Habba went on to describe Gabbard and Hegseth, both of whom are unqualified and preposterous nominees in their own rights, as “really strong candidates, with really amazing backgrounds.”

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is one of the first items on the Trump Justice Department’s chopping block. And they’re willing to destroy the Civil Rights Division to do it.

Trump’s nominee to lead the key division, conservative San Francisco lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, is expected to do a clean sweep of DEI initiatives in universities, government jobs, and other public organizations, sources familiar with the plans told CNN. And if there was any doubt about the DOJ’s new priorities, Trump’s announcement of her nomination put that to rest.

“Harmeet has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday. “Harmeet is one of the top Election lawyers in the Country, fighting to ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted.”

Dhillon, yet another faithful MAGA soldier in the right’s broader culture war, will likely overturn Biden-era policies regarding transgender rights, critical race theory, police behavior, and voting.

Book banning, genitalia policing, and censoring American history to make white people feel better will now all be on the table for a Civil Rights Division that is historically known for fighting discrimination and enforcing protective policies like the Voting Rights Act. Under Biden, the Civil Rights Division opened civil rights investigations into countless police departments for brutality and discrimination. The Division usually quiets down during Republican presidencies, but under Trump, it could become an anti-wokeism attack dog.

“The Civil Rights Division’s historical mandate from the beginning was to help fight against othering, was to help fight against societal branding of certain Americans as other,” Justin Levitt, Obama’s deputy attorney general for the division, told CNN. “And I am concerned the prospective nominee’s approach has been to lean into branding people as other rather than fighting against it.”

Luigi Mangione’s notebook details his rationale for allegedly killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week.

Police have recovered the notebook, which details Mangione’s thought process behind shooting Thompson on a midtown Manhattan street as he walked to an investor’s conference.

“What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,” one passage in the notebook said, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke with The New York Times.

Mangione allegedly concluded that using a bomb targeting Thompson “could kill innocents” and that a shooting would be more precise. The notebook also included a list of tasks to be completed before the killing and justifications for it, CNN reported, citing sources close to the case.

The notebook contained writings about the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who killed three people and injured 23 others in a mail bombing campaign from 1978 to 1995 in the name of fighting environmental destruction and technological advancement. Mangione had given Kaczynski’s book a nearly four-star review in his (now removed) Goodreads account, attacking the bomber’s methods but appreciating his perspective.

“When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution,” Mangione’s review said. “Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way and within a generation or two, it will begin costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun.”

In his alleged manifesto, revealed Tuesday, Mangione stated that he was working alone and that planning the shooting was “fairly trivial,” and referenced the spiral notebook.

“This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there,” he wrote.

“It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty,” Mangione’s manifesto concluded.

It looks like bullying works. A frenzy of activity from the most determined MAGA acolytes appears to have moved the dial for some Republican senators who voiced their concerns about confirming television host Pete Hegseth to be the next secretary of defense.

During an interview Tuesday on Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tonight, Texas Senator John Cornyn said that he and his fellow Senate Republicans planned to confirm Hegseth.

“I’m supporting Pete’s confirmation, and I believe that ultimately he will be confirmed,” Cornyn said. When asked whether Hegseth had secured the “full support of the party,” Cornyn said he wasn’t aware of any Republican holdouts.

“I know of no one who said they will vote against him,” Cornyn explained, despite previous reports indicating at least six Republican senators opposed Hegseth.

This comes after weeks of MAGA losing it online over any Republican who has shown the slightest bit of reticence about Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Defense Department, or voiced their willingness to do their due diligence about the allegations against Hegseth, who is not only radically unqualified but also accused of excessive drinking and sexual assault.

“What a disgrace. If you’re a GOP Senator who voted for Lloyd Austin, but criticize @PeteHegseth, then maybe you’re in the wrong political party,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote in a post on X last week.

Elon Musk replied, “Yes.”

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s reluctance to readily back Trump’s bad pick led to an online firestorm of criticism from MAGA activists, who couldn’t seem to understand why a ​​retired Iowa National Guard lieutenant colonel would vote to confirm Democratic nominees but not a man who made disparaging remarks about how women should not serve combat roles in the military.

“Senator Joni Ernst (R) voted to confirm Lloyd Austin for Secretary of Defense who turned our military into a woke laughingstock but is refusing to say if she will confirm Pete Hegseth,” wrote LibsofTiktok, a prominent far-right troll account on X. “So she supports all this trash but doesn’t support a strong Conservative who will strengthen our military and hold the DC war machine accountable?”

LibsofTikTok was just one among a swarm of MAGA trolls attacking Ernst and threatening to mount challenges to unseat her in the next election.

As a top Trump ally anonymously told Fox News Digital, “It’s really this simple: If you oppose President Trump’s nominees, you oppose the Trump agenda and there will be a political price to pay for that. We are well aware that there are certain establishment Senators trying to tank the President’s nominees to make him look weak and damage him politically, and we’re just not going to allow that to happen.”

At the Reagan National Defense Forum on Saturday, Ernst expressed a desire to hear more from Hegseth.

“I am a survivor of sexual assault, so I have worked very heavily on sexual assault measures within the military, so I’d like to hear a little more about that, and I’d like to hear about the role of women in our great United States military,” she said.

And by Monday, after a second meeting with Hegseth, Ernst seemed to have changed her tune.

Without outright saying she’d support his nomination, Ernst said that she’d had “encouraging” conversations with Hegseth, and said she was supporting Hegseth “through the process,” according to Politico. She also said Hegseth was suddenly “very supportive of women in the military.”

Without holdouts such as Ernst, it’s more likely than not that Hegseth’s nomination will go through. How long he’ll last in Trump’s Cabinet is another matter entirely.

Just shy of 75 million Americans voted against a second Donald Trump presidency—but the Capitol police officers who stood between the forty-fifth president’s supporters and Congress on January 6, 2021, are especially aggrieved.

Former Capitol officer Harry Dunn told MSNBC on Tuesday that the MAGA leader’s election night win felt like a “dagger through the heart.”

“I honestly can say I wish I was surprised,” Dunn said. “This has been four years in the making.”

“I had the opportunity to speak to Michael Fanone today, and he said something, that what we spoke out for was just accountability,” Dunn continued, referring to a fellow ex-officer who defended Congress during the riot. “It was doing what’s right. To see that he skated that, and there are people in this country that prioritized him being president over seeking accountability, it was a dagger through the heart, to be very candid with you.

“Election Night it was like our spirits were crushed because we thought all of our efforts had been in vain,” he added.

Dunn, who served 15 years in the Capitol Police, has claimed that Trump’s supporters attacked him and shouted racial slurs at him on January 6. He was a witness for the House select committee on the January 6 attack, and testified in the seditious conspiracy trial of the Oath Keepers.

In the years following the attack, Dunn tried and failed to win one of Maryland’s House seats, but ultimately used his residual funds to continue his fight against Trump, starting a PAC in June to exclusively support candidates running against Trump’s acolytes.

Trump, meanwhile, has made his loyalty to his most violent and ardent followers clear: On Sunday, he reaffirmed his intentions to free the men and women who rioted through Congress in 2021 on his behalf, forcing the legislature to delay the certification of the presidential election results. In an interview with NBC News’s Meet the Press, the MAGA leader said he would act “very quickly” to release the January 6 defendents—as soon as his “first day” in office.

“They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open,” Trump said.

He also invited one of the protesters to serve on his transition team.