Trump’s Defense Pick Refuses to Answer One Very Easy Question

Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, refused to answer whether or not he’d undergo an expanded FBI background check, at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

“I assume you’d be willing to submit to an expanded FBI background check that interviews your colleagues, accountants, ex-wives, former spouses, sexual assault survivors, and others?” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal asked the embattled defense secretary nominee.

“Senator, I’m not in charge of FBI background checks,” Hegseth replied tersely.

“But you would submit to it and support it?”

“I’m not in charge of FBI background checks,” Hegseth repeated before taking a sip of water.

Hegseth has submitted to an FBI background check, but it disturbingly did not include interviews with his ex-wives or any of the women who accused him of sexual assault, according to several people who spoke with NBC News. A more thorough background check could shed more light on allegations that Hegseth has vehemently denied at his hearing—sexual assault, alcoholism, financial fraud, and more. It makes sense that Hegseth pleaded the Fifth.

The MAGA fight to dissolve the Education Department is on.

North Carolina Representative David Rouzer introduced legislation in the House on Monday to eradicate the agency. H.R. 369, titled “To provide for the elimination of the Department of Education, and for other purposes,” was subsequently referred to the House Committee on Education and Workforce.

Ridding the country of its national education system will follow through on one of Donald Trump’s boldest and most Project 2025–inspired campaign promises. Other components of Trump’s agenda are quietly dependent on generating extra cashflow that the elimination of the Department of Education could (barely) muster. A major plan is extending Trump’s 2017 tax plan, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations and could add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit.

Republicans in favor of the extension have mused over several potential cuts to help offset that massive expenditure, including nixing the Department of Education. That would save some $200 billion from the deficit—while simultaneously dismantling the nation’s education system, which already is drowning under the pressure of historically low teacher salaries and scant resources, particularly in low-income regions. The federal government provides 13.6 percent of funding for public K-12 education across the nation.

Trump himself has said that his Department of Education plan involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to parents, who famously have all the time in the world to oversee educational curricula while simultaneously working jobs and raising their children.

During a rally in Milwaukee in October, the MAGA leader promised that his vision for the nation’s educational system would involve very limited oversight from any government, including the states’.

“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the soon-to-be forty-seventh president said at the time. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary, and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’”

He also openly admitted that the plan would, unfortunately, be to the detriment of a great swath of states—particularly poorer ones in the middle of the country.

Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing for defense secretary Tuesday was interrupted three separate times less than 10 minutes into his personal statement. Four protesters were removed from the room.

“You are a misogynist.… Not only that, you are a Christian Zionist!” the first protester yelled while Hegseth spoke of his vision for the Defense Department.

Another protester wearing pink was dragged out, followed by two more. Senator Roger Wicker called for security to remove them.

Donald Trump posted a furious rant Tuesday over the release of Jack Smith’s damning report detailing the president-elect’s alleged efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.

In the sweeping 170-page report, which summarized Smith’s investigation and interviews with more than 250 individuals, the former special prosecutor dismissed allegations that he was politically influenced as “laughable.” He asserted that if not for Trump’s election in November, “the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial” on the charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.

Trump melted down in a rant on Truth Social posted in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

“Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his ‘boss,’ Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another ‘Report’ based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were,” Trump wrote, referring to the now-defunct bipartisan House committee that investigated the January 6 riot.

“Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide,” Trump added. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”

Of course, the voters don’t determine guilt; a jury does.

House Republicans have previously claimed that the committee hid evidence undercutting Cassidy Hutchinson’s claim that Trump lunged for the steering wheel of his SUV to try and steer himself toward the Capitol on January 6—a claim that no one else backed up, including the driver of the SUV. The driver did say that Trump was “insistent on going to the Capitol.” House Republicans have also alleged that essential testimony about Trump’s activities that day were deleted. Despite the fact that those responsible for the investigation have insisted this claim is false, Trump has repeatedly claimed the deleted files would have exonerated him.

Trump wasn’t quite done: He also seemed pissed about the timing of the report.

“To show you how desperate Deranged Jack Smith is, he released his Fake findings at 1:00 A.M. in the morning,” Trump wrote in a separate post. “Did he say that the Unselect Committee illegally destroyed and deleted all of the evidence.”

Special counsel Jack Smith did not hold back in his final report on the investigation into Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

While much of it contains information already made public, such as the fake electors schemes from Trump’s cronies and the pressure placed on then–Vice President Mike Pence, Smith made some powerful statements regarding the criminal charges against the president-elect. For example, Smith flat-out said the evidence would have been enough to convict Trump, had he not been reelected.

The Department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a President is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Office stands fully behind. Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the Presidency, the Office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.

Smith spelled out Trump’s culpability, calling out his efforts to subvert the election, nullify the result for Joe Biden, and put himself back in the White House.

“As alleged in the original and superseding indictments, substantial evidence demonstrates that Mr. Trump then engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power,” the report states.

Smith defended himself from attacks from the right, who claim that his investigation was politicized or influenced by the Biden administration.

“While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters,” Smith wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland in a letter included with the report. “I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters.”

Smith also called out Trump’s attempts to attack and undermine the investigation, noting that a “significant challenge” for the counsel’s team was Trump’s “ability and willingness to use his influence and following on social media to target witnesses, courts, prosecutors.” Ultimately, Smith’s office sought a gag order for the case.

“Mr. Trump’s resort to intimidation and harassment during the investigation was not new, as demonstrated by his actions during the charged conspiracies,” Smith said.

The report arrives less than a week before Trump is sworn into office, and came after a last-ditch appeal from the president-elect to his favorite judge, Aileen Cannon, to prevent its release. She declined late Monday night, and the report was subsequently released.

Read the full report here.

The world’s richest man will literally be moving in next door to President-elect Donald Trump.

The New York Times is reporting that Elon Musk is preparing to set up the Department of Government Efficiency in the Eisenhower Building, which is less than a five-minute walk from the White House. It’s still unclear if the billionaire will have complete unfettered access to the West Wing (that requires a “special pass”), but at this point it’s obvious that the CEO—who has billions of dollars in federal and international contracts—will be a full-time cast member in Trump’s second term.

It’s still unclear what exactly DOGE will look like in D.C., as it is not an official government department and Musk is not a government employee. This would mean Musk and DOGE should be kept out of certain meetings and relationships, especially given the federal contracts Musk’s companies hold. Some Trump transition officials who spoke with the Times suggested that Musk could get an all-access West Wing pass by becoming a “special government employee.” But Trump is also very comfortable blurring those lines, or just erasing them altogether.

Musk has been glued to the president-elect since campaign season. He donated millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign and spoke at multiple rallies. Since Trump’s victory, Musk has sat in on multiple calls with Trump and foreign leaders, cyberbullied Speaker Mike Johnson to kill the spending bill, and has even been “renting” a cottage at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where has been constantly parked, aside from Christmas.

The close relationship underscores the technocrat’s shift rightward that is just in its early stages.

Republicans seem to be trying their hardest to make placing conditions on relief to victims of devastating natural disasters seem like a normal or reasonable thing to do—by the end of the week, probably everyone will be on board.

As large swaths of Los Angeles County burned over the past week, and 24 people lost their lives, Republicans have been quick to play the blame game and use the disaster relief as an opportunity to play politics. One by one, they’ve fallen in line with their eerily identical, half-baked pitches to reform California’s liberal politics, without ever making clear exactly what politics had to do with the wildfires in the first place.

During an interview Monday on Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo Show, Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville was asked why people who’d lost their homes, belongings, and businesses deserved help from Congress.

“Senator, why should other states be bailing out California for choosing the wrong people to run their state?” asked Salcedo.

“We shouldn’t be,” Tuberville replied. “They got 40 million people in that state, and they voted these imbeciles into office, and they continue to do it.”

As Tuberville explained, he didn’t blame all Californians. Just the liberal ones living in cities.

“And it’s just a very small part of ’em in that state that’s doing it. If you go to California, you run into a lotta Republicans. A lotta good people. And I hate it for them,” Tuberville explained. “But they are just overwhelmed by these inner city, uh, woke policies, with the people that vote for ’em.”

“And it—you know, I don’t mind sending ’em some money, but unless they show that they’re gonna change their ways, and they’re gonna get back to building dams and storing water, and doing the maintenance with the brush, and the trees—everything that everybody else does with the country, and they refuse to do it—they don’t deserve anything,” Tuberville said.

The Alabama Republican could barely explain what kind of policies he was criticizing—and that’s because he doesn’t even know. He’s just playing a game of telephone with every other Republican lawmaker and conservative pundit: There’s just no way for the actual ideas to make their way to the end. The important part is that the message sounds the same. House Speaker Mike Johnson took his turn on the horn just hours before Tuberville.

And, for what it’s worth, Republicans’ criticism about “woke” policies didn’t hold very much water to begin with. Nearly every reservoir in California is holding an amount of water that is at its historical average, or higher, despite the fact that it has been a particularly dry winter, Rolling Stone reported.

Donald Trump has claimed that California Governor Gavin Newsom “refused to sign the water restoration declaration” (there is obviously no such thing), and blamed the state’s efforts to preserve rivers and wetlands. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Water District, which feeds into the Los Angeles Aqueduct, has “the most water stored in its system in the history of the agency,” according to Mark Gold, the water scarcity director for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a board member of the MWD.

Those on the ground, namely the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, have said that it was the immense size, speed, and geographical location of the fires that caused the Pacific Palisades to run out of water, not some gross liberal mismanagement. But that won’t stop Republicans from singing their tune.

One can scarcely imagine if Democrats had tried to pull this schtick when Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, home to a density of Republican voters—but this is the future of the Republican Party under Trump.

Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is trying to rewrite the narrative on the term “family separation.”

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, the relatively mum MAGA official candidly brushed off criticisms that Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration policies are needlessly cruel, claiming instead that the language used by opponents to the highly controversial program is “dishonest.”

“This term is something you’re gonna hear a lot in the next couple of months, the next couple of years, Shannon: ‘family separation,’” Vance told host Shannon Bream. “I think it’s important—that’s a euphemism, that is a dishonest term to hide behind the fact that Joe Biden has not done border enforcement.”

Vance then went on to disingenuously liken family separation to a program that only jails violent offenders, thereby separating convicted criminals from their families ipso facto. But that’s not what family separation does. Instead, the immigration deterrence program (launched by Trump during his first administration) instituted a “zero tolerance” policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, targeting immigrants attempting to enter the country. At the time, Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed the Justice Department to prosecute every adult who entered the United States irregularly.

It was made possible by the vicious combination of two federal laws. First, the government prosecuted immigrants with minor federal charges for improper entry. Officials then transferred them from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to the U.S. Marshals Service during their court hearings, labeling their children as unaccompanied throughout the process. U.S. Customs and Border Protection then used a different law to send the children to a subsidiary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that was responsible for handling unaccompanied children.

The program separated more than 4,600 children from their parents before it was ended in 2021. As of December, 1,360 children remain unaccounted for, according to a report by Human Rights Watch, which said the practice met the definition for “enforced disappearance,” amounted to “torture,” and was a “crime under international law.”

“If you come into this country illegally, you need to go back home,” Vance told Fox. “And what the Democrats are going to do is they’re going to hide behind this. They’re going to say this is all about compassion for families.”

But experts who have sized up the scope and devastation of Trump’s family separation policies don’t agree.

“It’s chilling to see, in document after document, the calculated cruelty that went into the forcible family separation policy,” Michael Garcia Bochenek, senior children’s rights counsel at Human Rights Watch and an author of the December report, told the international organization. “A government should never target children to send a message to parents.”

Republican leadership continues to use one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history as political leverage.

On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju that there should be “conditions” on the proposed federal aid to California in the wake of the deadly wildfires in Los Angeles County.

“It appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in many respects, so that’s something that has to be factored in. I think there should probably be conditions on that aid.”

Asked whether he planned on conditioning the aid to debt ceiling negotiations, Johnson said that option is on the table. “There’s some discussion about that, but we’ll see where it goes.”

Nearly 200,000 L.A. residents have been placed under evacuation order, and many won’t have homes to return to. Over 12,000 buildings—including a public library, a medical center, a church, a synagogue, and large swaths of a predominantly Black neighborhood—have been destroyed so far in the wildfires. At least 24 are dead, and likely counting. The total land burned in these Los Angeles wildfires is bigger than Paris.

In short, the wildfires are a devastating national catastrophe. For Johnson to so casually suggest that there should be any conditions at all on aid to the affected areas of California is absolutely cruel and unusual.

Johnson isn’t the only one. Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso told Face the Nation on Sunday that he expected “there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved, and it has to do with being ready the next time, because this was a gross failure this time.” He thinks that because the “policies of the liberal administration” had “made these fires worse,” the people of that administration should suffer too.

On Monday, Senator Ron Johnson told Wake Up America that he wouldn’t vote for any aid to California “unless we see a dramatic change in how they’re gonna be handling these things in the future.… These are decisions Californian Democrats have made.… It’s their fault.”

At the time of this writing, the fires continue to burn through Los Angeles County.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is already helping Donald Trump get his plan for mass deportations started.

On Monday, DeSantis called for state legislators to hold a special session to help the incoming Trump administration’s immigration plans, with the president-elect’s inauguration taking place in one week. The session will be the week of January 27, one week after Trump is sworn in.

“State and local officials in Florida must help the Trump administration enforce our nation’s immigration laws,” DeSantis said. “In order to do that effectively, we are going to need legislation to impose additional duties on local officials and provide funding for those local officials.”

DeSantis has suggested that he would take action against any elected officials who “neglect their duties” and do not work to implement Trump’s mass deportations. It wouldn’t be the first time for the Florida governor: DeSantis previously suspended State Attorneys Monique Worrell and Andrew Warren for opposing him.

The Florida governor said he plans to spend tens of millions of dollars in new funding to expand immigration detention, and would consider activating the Florida National Guard and the Florida State Guard to help with enforcement. All of these actions show that DeSantis has apparently buried the hatchet with Trump, who called him “Meatball Ron,” “Rob,” “Ron DeSanctimonious,” and “Ron DeSanctus” during the Republican presidential primaries.

Trump even called DeSantis a “groomer,” a slur akin to calling him a pedophile. But DeSantis warmed up to Trump last spring after his own presidential bid flopped, helping to fundraise for Trump when the then–Republican presidential nominee’s funds were dwarfed by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign fortune. DeSantis also looked the other way on whether Trump’s felony conviction allowed him to vote in the 2024 election.

DeSantis’s tenure in Florida has been criticized as authoritarian, and policy-wise, he’s quite close to Trump, so it makes sense that he would support the president-elect. Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara also happens to be angling for a Senate seat, which DeSantis can give her if Marco Rubio is confirmed as secretary of state. It seems that one of Trump’s scariest plans already has a powerful backer.