Team Trump Warns Cabinet Nominees to Keep Their Mouths Shut

Donald Trump has two words for his controversial Cabinet nominees: Be quiet.

The president-elect’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, issued a frank missive to Trump’s nominees on Sunday, warning the cohort to tone down their social media activity ahead of their Senate confirmation hearings.

“While this instruction has been delivered previously, I am reiterating that no member of the incoming administration or Transition speaks for the United States or the President-elect himself,” Wiles wrote in a memo obtained by the New York Post.

“Accordingly, all intended nominees should refrain from any public social media posts without prior approval of the incoming White House counsel,” she continued.

Wiles—dubbed the “Ice Maiden”—did not specify in her memo if she was responding to any singular incident. But one Trump transition source told the Post it wasn’t related to the heated debate between the “tech-right” and far-right factions of Trump’s base over H-1B visas.

Incoming Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, co-chairs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have found themselves at the epicenter of a digital brawl over their ardent defense of the work visa program. Last week, Musk claimed that H-1B visas offer a solution to a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in the U.S. Far-right opponents of immigration—and Musk’s position—claim the H-1B visa disincentivizes companies from hiring American labor.

The H-1B visa program has an annual cap set by Congress, admitting 65,000 foreign workers per year. In 2023, it was estimated that there were more than 700,000 H-1B visa holders in the U.S., according to data from the American Immigration Council.

Republicans are in a tight position to push Trump’s controversial picks through the Senate process. Assuming that all Democrats will vote against Trump’s nominees, the president-elect can only afford to lose three Republican votes to squeeze his candidates into the executive branch.

Some of Trump’s more contentious Cabinet picks—such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard—have noticeably quieted their social media presence since Christmas.

Elon Musk has been “renting” a place to stay at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, and he didn’t leave until Christmas, according to recent reporting by The New York Times. Musk is expected to return in the next week.

Since election night, Musk has been lodging at the Banyan, one of the cottages closest to the main house on Mar-a-Lago, where Trump and his family stay. While other members of Trump’s circle have also stayed on the property, none have been as constant as the billionaire CEO, sources close to the situation told the Times.   

Trump has apparently been bragging that the world’s richest man is “renting” one of his properties. But no one actually knows if Trump will end up charging Musk for the stay. The Banyan usually rents for around $2,000 a night. Trump reportedly has raised the annual membership fee at Mar-a-Lago to $1 million. 

This underscores how close Trump and Musk have grown this year, and especially since the election. The Times noted that Trump posted on Truth Social a message meant privately for Musk, which read: “Where are you? When are you coming to the ‘Center of the Universe,’ Mar-a-Lago. Bill Gates asked to come, tonight. We miss you and x! New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT.”

Other members of Trump’s inner circle have griped about this bromance, complaining that Musk is overstepping boundaries. Musk has attempted to smooth things over with posts on X, but the “President Musk” meme persists.  

Laura Loomer still isn’t done with Elon Musk.

Appearing on Steve Bannon’s War Room, the anti-immigration activist on Monday torched the billionaire as a “welfare queen” and technocrat with outsize influence on U.S. politics thanks to his ongoing relationship with Donald Trump.

“If you have a bunch of tech bros with billions of dollars and direct unfettered access to the vice president and the president of the United States, and then they are also very cordial with our adversaries as in China and Iran—we see that Elon Musk is having these meetings off the books with Iranian officials, with Chinese officials—what does that mean for us?” Loomer posited.

The self-described “white advocate” has been in a social media brawl with the Tesla CEO for the last week over Musk’s ardent defense of the H-1B work visa program, which he claimed offers a solution to a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in the U.S. Far-right opponents of the immigration program—and Musk’s position—claim that the H-1B visa disincentivizes companies to hire American labor.

In several posts, Loomer accused Musk of having “bought his way into MAGA,” claimed he was a pawn of China, and said that the “divorce” between the “stage 5 clinger” and President-elect Donald Trump was on the horizon.

That was apparently enough back talk to strip Loomer of her verified status on the site—a loss that, for her, warranted a public appeal to Musk to reinstate her blue check. Loomer has been banned from practically every other social media platform for her incendiary and violent rhetoric.

The H-1B visa program has an annual cap set by Congress, admitting 65,000 foreign workers per year. In 2023, it was estimated that there were more than 700,000 H-1B visa holders in the U.S., according to data from the American Immigration Council.

The German government has accused Elon Musk of using his platform X to influence their election.

“It is indeed the case that Elon Musk is trying to influence the federal election,” German government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann told reporters on Monday. She added that Musk is free to opine on German politics: “After all, freedom of opinion also covers the greatest nonsense.”

“Chancellor Oaf Schitz or whatever his name is will lose,” Musk said in response on X, referring to current German chancellor and center-left Social Democrat Olaf Scholz.

Musk has been making his support for Germany’s right-wing, anti-migration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party clear for weeks. Earlier this month, the billionaire wrote, “Only the AfD can save Germany.” Last week, he wrote an opinion column in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper endorsing the party, calling it the “last spark of hope.”

“The AfD, even though it is described as far-right, represents a political realism that resonates with many Germans who feel their concerns are ignored by the establishment,” Musk wrote. “Portraying the AfD as far-right is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!”

The paper’s head opinions editor resigned after this was published.

Musk was also extremely influential as an advocate for President-elect Donald Trump this election cycle, and will likely continue to be as he co-leads DOGE with Vivek Ramaswamy.

As for Germany, the results of his meddling are still unknown. Their election will be held on February 23, 2025.

In the wake of his death, hundreds of obituaries have memorialized President Jimmy Carter as a devoted and disciplined public servant. President Joe Biden, who was the first senator to endorse Carter’s bid for the White House in 1976, described the 100-year-old Democrat as a man and politician who “embodied the most fundamental human values.”

But few eulogies for the one-term Georgian have underscored his firm moral positions on U.S. foreign policy, which effusively torched both parties for transforming the United States into what he once described as “the most warlike country on earth.”

Here are some of his most powerful quotes:

1. “A superpower not only should be the top country as far as military power is concerned, which we’re going to continue to be, but I think that the American superpower goal should be to be the champion of peace, and to be the champion of human rights, and to be the champion of the environment, and to be the most generous nation on earth,” Jimmy Carter said in 2015, later highlighting that the U.S. had been at peace for just 16 of the 242 years that it had existed as a nation.

2. “There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq recently,” Carter told The Independent in 2004, long before most of the political class dared criticize the U.S. invasion. “That was a war based on lies and misinterpretations from London and from Washington.”

3. “We cannot be peacemakers if American government leaders are seen as knee-jerk supporters of every action or policy of whatever Israeli government happens to be in power at the moment. That is the essential fact that must be faced.” Carter wrote those words in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, criticizing Israel for failing to end its occupation of Palestine, its apartheid system, and its pursuit of punishment of Palestinians.

Facing intense backlash from right-wing Israel pressure groups, Carter doubled down, arguing that balanced debate on the two nations was “practically non-existent” in Congress and the executive branch, and accused American leaders of being in Israel’s pocket.

Despite direct orders from President-elect Donald Trump, some House Republicans appear to be teeing up to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Trump voiced his support for Johnson Monday, just two weeks after the speaker went toe-to-toe with several House Republicans outraged that he had offered a lengthy bipartisan bill to fund the government. And despite Trump’s endorsement, not every Republican is following his lead.

Representative Andy Biggs was the latest to signal a reticence to follow the president-elect’s marching orders. During an interview on Fox News Monday, the Arizona Republican said that he wasn’t in the bag for Johnson, yet.

“I haven’t publicly or privately committed yet,” said Biggs. “I do want to speak with the speaker just to see what his plans are, because there are some issues that I think need to be worked out, specifically dealing with the budget issues.”

Representative Thomas Massie doubled down on his opposition to Johnson in a post on X Monday, reckoning back to another unpopular House speaker Trump once championed.

“I respect and support President Trump, but his endorsement of Mike Johnson is going to work out about as well as his endorsement of Speaker Paul Ryan,” Massie wrote. “We’ve seen Johnson partner with the democrats to send money to Ukraine, authorize spying on Americans, and blow the budget.”

Beneath his statement undermining Trump’s judgment, billionaire technocrat Elon Musk replied, “You might be right, but let’s see how it goes.”

Massie wasn’t the only one to bring up Ryan. Representative Victoria Spartz demanded Monday that Johnson outline how he would follow Trump’s agenda to the letter before she could deign to support him for speaker.

“I understand why President Trump is endorsing Speaker Johnson as he did Speaker Ryan, which is definitely important. However, we still need to get assurances that @SpeakerJohnson won’t sell us out to the swamp,” she wrote in a post on X Monday.

Spartz sent Johnson a list of demands, including a request for “unbiased ‘non-swamp’ professionals” to help her do her job. The two are expected to discuss the list at a meeting Monday.

Steve Bannon thinks that Americans deserve reparations for having to coexist with immigrants on H-1B visas.

“We haven’t fought these battles over years and years and years to allow American citizens of every race, ethnicity, religion, be gutted by the sociopathic overlords in Silicon Valley,” Bannon opined on his War Room show Monday morning. “David Sacks, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Elon Musk … there’s no reform. We want it gone.… We want reparations for the tech workers that you stole their lives.”

This is another installment in the current schism between the “America First” MAGA faithful and the tech-world MAGA plutocrats who want more high-skilled immigrants. Former presidential candidate and current DOGE co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy started the fire last week by declaring, “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” asserting that it was American culture that was leading CEOs to look elsewhere for labor. This talking point was parroted by Elon Musk and other right-wing techies, inviting a MAGA backlash that even included Nikki Haley, the torchbearer of the old GOP establishment who was vanquished by Trump earlier this year.

“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” Haley wrote. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”

This anti-H-1B energy has culminated in Bannon’s calls for reparations, something usually invoked for African Americans historically disenfranchised by slavery and racism.

“We’re gonna get H-1B visas out, root and stem, and all the workers you brought in. Just like we’re deporting 15 million here, we want them deported, out,” Bannon said later in his show. “And give those jobs to American citizens today … we demand they get reparations. You stole from them.”

Donald Trump tried to stem the growing tide against House Speaker Mike Johnson Monday with a post endorsing his reelection, but whether all House Republicans are actually interested in getting back on the bandwagon is another issue entirely.

In a rambling post on Truth Social Monday, Trump urged the “Party of COMMON SENSE” to support Johnson’s bid to keep the gavel in the new year.

“LETS NOT BLOW THIS GREAT OPPORTUNITY WHICH WE HAVE BEEN GIVEN. The American people need IMMEDIATE relief from all of the destructive policies of the last Administration. Speaker Mike Johnson is a good, hard working, religious man. He will do the right thing, and we will continue to WIN. Mike has my Complete & Total Endorsement. MAGA!!!” he wrote. Most of the post’s word count was dedicated to his own “flawless” reelection campaign.

In voicing his support for Johnson, Trump has set up yet another loyalty test for House Republicans.

Earlier this month, Johnson came under fire after introducing a 1,547-page continuing resolution to keep the government open until March, among a slew of other bipartisan provisions, inviting the outrage of small-government types like technocrat billionaire Elon Musk, and a slate of sycophantic Republicans.

Republican Representative Thomas Massie was so distraught that he claimed he would not vote for Johnson in the upcoming House speaker election in January.

Johnson then worked with Trump on crafting another spending bill that suspended the debt ceiling, one of the president-elect’s core demands. But this time, 38 House Republicans broke with Trump and voted against the bill. In the end, Trump’s demand that Republicans find a way to raise or abolish the debt ceiling got left on the cutting room floor.

Last week, Representative Andy Harris, who chairs the far-right House Freedom Caucus, said that Republicans need to think about whether their current leadership “is what we need” and that he was “undecided” on what House leadership should look like moving forward.

More than a few other Republicans have similarly voiced their dissatisfaction with Johnson, as it seems that the GOP’s antiestablishment bent has turned against the party itself.

Elon Musk is asking you to make X a more upbeat place.

The tech billionaire pleaded with his 209 million X followers on Sunday, placing the onus of change for his dwindling social media investment on site users rather than himself.

“Please post a bit more positive, beautiful or informative content on this platform,” Musk posted.

X accounts were quick to throw the ball back into Musk’s court, urging him to create an algorithm where positive content could actually proliferate.

“You first,” snapped back lawyer and bluegrass banjo player Steve Martin.

“Getting tired of the toxic wasteland you created?” replied author Karen Piper.

Musk likely began to notice his site’s more toxic elements after he became enmeshed in a far-right feud over H-1B work visas last week. Last week, Musk vowed to “go to war on this issue,” insisting that foreign tech workers need to be allowed to work in the U.S. due to a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent.” That resulted in a backlash that has framed Musk and other H-1B proponents, like unofficial DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy, as MAGA targets amid Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. (The H-1B visa program has an annual cap set by Congress, admitting 65,000 foreign workers per year. In 2023, it was estimated that there were more than 700,000 H-1B visa holders in the U.S., according to data from the American Immigration Council.)

But surely, if anyone is to blame for the site’s increasingly volatile and disturbing content, it’s none other than Musk himself.

In the early days of Musk’s takeover, Twitter witnessed a mass exodus of employees, with Musk claiming he was simply trimming fat by firing upwards of 80 percent of site staff. His “free speech agenda” has further capped and undermined the site’s content moderation abilities, allowing dangerous rhetoric to flow freely on his platform. His dismantling of the site’s infrastructure has also translated to monumental changes on the website that have proved overwhelmingly unpopular. His tweaked algorithm has aggressively promoted advertisements and reshare accounts, restructured threads to the point that they no longer elevate relevant replies, and has even swapped code to ensure his own posts universally appear at the top of users’ timelines.

But despite his plea, even the most unsavory posts haven’t seemed to disturb Musk, who has himself spread Nazi conspiracies via his personal account, and allowed 105 percent more antisemitic hate speech to spread on the platform, according to a 2023 study.

Last year, the tech billionaire admitted that the site had lost 90 percent of its value since he acquired it for $44 billion in 2022.

A three-star U.S. Army general thinks that Elon Musk’s foreign business relationships could make him a significant threat to national security. 

Retired Lieutenant General Russel Honoré argued in a Sunday New York Times column that the SpaceX CEO’s willingness to capitulate to Chinese demands over the years should make his recent influence within Trump’s circle all the more questionable.  

Honoré referenced 2023 quotes from Musk’s DOGE buddy Vivek Ramaswamy to make his case. “I have no reason to think Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need,” Ramaswamy said in an interview. “It’s deeply concerning that @elonmusk met with China’s foreign minister yesterday to oppose decoupling and referred to the U.S. & Communist China as ‘conjoined twins,’” he wrote in another statement that year. “The U.S. needs leaders who aren’t in China’s pocket.”

Ramaswamy has since made amends with Musk, but his concerns still apply. Musk and SpaceX have already been flagged thrice by the Air Force, the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General, and the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security for failing to disclose his meetings with foreign leaders, something his current security clearance requires him to do. And his China business isn’t going anywhere either. 

Musk has borrowed at least $1.4 billion from Chinese government–controlled banks to pay for his massive Tesla “gigafactory” in Shanghai. He borrowed this money knowing full well that China’s laws allow the Chinese Communist Party to demand information from any company doing business in China in exchange for doing business there—a huge red flag for Honoré.

“Mr. Musk’s business dealings in China could require him to hand over sensitive classified information, learned either through his business interests or his proximity to President-elect Donald Trump. No federal agency has accused him of disclosing such material, but as Mr. Ramaswamy put it, China has recognized that U.S. companies are fickle,” Honoré wrote. “Mr. Musk’s relationship with China’s leaders could prove a problem for America’s national security given that SpaceX has a near monopoly on the United States’ rocket launches … the last thing the United States needs is for China to potentially have an easier way of obtaining classified intelligence and national security information.”

This has drawn the ire of Democrats and Republicans alike. In 2022, Senator Marco Rubio accused Tesla of obstructing justice for the CCP, and in 2023 he introduced a bill to stop NASA and other federal agencies from giving contracts to companies connected to the Chinese Communist Party. Two Democratic senators very recently called for a probe into Musk’s “reliability as a government contractor and a clearance holder” because of his reported phone call with Vladimir Putin. 

The line between civilian and elected official has become blurrier as Musk further cements himself as part of Trump’s inner circle. As Honoré wrote, the world’s richest man funding Trump’s return to the presidency “does not give the incoming White House the license to look the other way at the national security risks he may pose.”