Trump’s Budget Pick Grilled on What Exactly He Thinks Is “Woke”

Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, appeared before the Senate Wednesday and was grilled over what he considers a target in his anti-”woke” chopping block.

Democratic Senator Tim Kaine went after Vought during his confirmation hearing for what he wrote as president of the Center for Renewing America, specifically a budget proposal titled “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government.” In that proposal, Kaine said, Vought proposed deep cuts to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, also known as food stamps.

“Is providing nutrition assistance to low-income kids ‘woke and weaponized’? Kaine asked Vought, who refused to answer, replying that he “wasn’t here to talk about the budget that center put out.”

Kaine pressed further, but Vought claimed he was only there on behalf of the president. The Virginia senator then pointed out that in the same document, Vought proposed deep cuts to Medicaid for low-income families, tenant-based rental assistance, and low-income housing energy assistance.

“This was all in your document about ending woke and weaponized government. OK, let’s see, we want to traumatize federal employees and then we want to take all of these programs that help everyday people who are struggling and cut them because they’re ‘woke and weaponized.’ Those are your words, not mine,” Kaine concluded. “From the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks.”

Vought clearly did not want to address or defend his old recommendations in a Senate hearing, and it’s clear why, as the cuts he proposed would be unpopular with most Americans. In front of what he thought was a more friendly audience in August, though, Vought bragged to two undercover journalists about his love of “Christian nation-ism.” He also touted his organization’s efforts to draft executive orders and policy memos for Trump to use on day one of his presidency.

Vought also co-authored the conservative manifesto Project 2025. But in his hearing Wednesday, he refused to answer questions from senators about his role in drafting Trump’s new executive orders, just as he did last week over whether he would uphold the law if confirmed.

Kaine’s questioning of Vought exposed what the right-wing ideologue’s plans will be in the new Trump administration, and they seem to be straight from the Project 2025 and Christian nationalism playbook. Thanks to Republican control of the Senate, those plans won’t hurt his likely confirmation one bit.

House Republicans announced Wednesday that they will form a subcommittee to reinvestigate the January 6 insurrection, following Donald Trump’s sweeping pardons for the rioters.

The new select subcommittee will basically just be a way to continue to undermine the legitimate findings of the previous investigation into January 6, which Trump and MAGA Republicans have continued to claim are fraudulent.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said he hoped the committee would expose “false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 committee.”

The select subcommittee will be chaired by Representative Barry Loudermilk, who also leads the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight and last month released a 128-page “interim report” by House Republicans on the January 6 committee.

In his report, Loudermilk demonstrated that House Republicans are in lockstep with Trump over investigating the president’s political enemies, and called for Liz Cheney, the former January 6 committee vice chair, to be criminally investigated. Loudermilk accused her of witness tampering and colluding with former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified about Trump’s erratic behavior on the day of the deadly riot.

Just hours before Wednesday’s announcement, Senate Majority Leader John Thune had been downplaying Trump’s decision to pardon some 1,500 January 6 riots, insisting that people should not think about the insurrection anymore.

“We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward,” he said, according to CNN’s Manu Raju. Thune said that the pardons were given on a case-by-case basis, and that former President Joe Biden had “opened the door” because he had engaged in the “most massive use of the pardon power that we’ve ever seen in history.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson did the same. “The president’s made his decision; I don’t second-guess those,” Johnson said. “We move forward; there are better days ahead of us, that’s what we’re excited about. We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forwards.”

But of course, rushing them all through on his first day was anything but case-by-case, and Republicans aren’t the slightest bit interested in looking forward.

As Loudermilk told reporters Wednesday: “You’ve got to look backwards to look forward.”

Pete Hegseth doesn’t think women deserve the right to vote, according to his ex-sister-in-law.

NBC reported on Tuesday that senators received the affidavit of Danielle Hegseth that contained new allegations against Hegseth, including that he regularly passed out from alcohol abuse and made his second wife fear for her life. Senator Jack Reed noted that the affidavit contained claims that Hegseth’s ex-wife Samantha also had an “escape plan” and a “safe word” in case things went too far.

Within Reed’s review of the affidavit was another deeply alarming claim: Hegseth reportedly believed that “women should not vote or work and that Christians needed to have more children so they could overtake the Muslim population.” This backward and racist take perfectly aligns with the brand of warrior Christian nationalism he’s been subscribing to for years.

This is the same man who described our current historical moment as “much like the 11th century.”

“We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must,” he once wrote. “Arm yourself—metaphorically, intellectually, physically. Our fight is not with guns. Yet.”

The latest allegations come after Hegseth’s confirmation hearing last week. Many expected him to be confirmed before this news came out.

Fear of increased ICE raids have already negatively affected the nation’s agricultural sector, causing alarm that food prices could skyrocket in the near future as a result of Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration policies.

Bakersfield, California, saw a massive drop-off in the number of field workers showing up for work Tuesday while ICE agents in unmarked Chevy Suburbans rounded up and detained immigrants in the area, profiling individuals they believed to be field workers, reported CalMatters. The end result: acres of unpicked oranges roasting in the California sun at the height of the season.

Bakersfield makes up a small portion of California’s Central Valley, which produces approximately a quarter of the nation’s food. Kern County, where Bakersfield is located, has ranked within the top three agricultural counties in the nation for the last several years, largely off the backs of undocumented laborers, who are estimated to comprise more than half of the county’s workforce, according to CalMatters.

Undocumented workers have been targeted walking in and out of gas stations, getting breakfast, at Home Depot, or while driving along the 99 Highway, leaving many with no other option than to simply stay at home.

“We’re in the middle of our citrus harvesting,” Casey Creamer, president of the industry group California Citrus Mutual, told CalMatters. “This sent shockwaves through the entire community. People aren’t going to work and kids aren’t going to school. Yesterday about 25 percent of the workforce, today 75 percent didn’t show up.”

Losing the bulk of America’s agricultural workforce overnight is a recipe for “absolute economic devastation,” according to Richard S. Gearhart, an associate professor of economics at Cal State-Bakersfield, who spoke with the nonprofit news outlet.

“You are talking about a recession-level event if this is the new long-term norm,” Gearhart said, arguing that the end result of Trump’s policies will be felt in the grocery store checkout lines across America.

The forty-seventh president has effectively promised a full-throttle immigration crackdown for the next four years that includes attacking birthright citizenship and ordering high-profile ICE raids around the country against undocumented immigrants.

But just two days into the administration, it appears that anti-immigration efforts will be a relative free-for-all. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would roll back an Obama-era directive, suddenly allowing the immigration agency to detain people in sensitive areas such as hospitals, places of worship, courtrooms, funerals, and weddings.

“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” a spokesperson for the agency said in a statement. “The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”

Recently pardoned former Proud Boys founder Enrique Tarrio promised “retribution” in an interview with Alex Jones shortly after being freed from prison on Tuesday.

“I’d like to thank again President Donald J. Trump for helping us through these difficult times and releasing me, Joe Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola. Right? And all the J6ers,” Tarrio said. “We went through hell, and I’m gonna tell you, it was worth it, because what we stood for and what those guys stood for was what we’ve been fighting for and what we saw yesterday on the inauguration stage. I can’t tell you it’s been easy, but I will tell you it’s been worth it.”

The former Proud Boy was serving 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy over his role in planning January 6. He was freed after Trump pardoned or commuted every single person involved with the insurrection on Monday.

Tarrio struck a vengeful tone in what was nearly a 45-minute interview with Jones after his release.

They didn’t care about the evidence. They cared about putting Trump supporters in prison. Well, now it’s our turn. Now it’s our turn. I’m happy that the president’s focusing not on retribution and focusing on success, but I will tell you that I’m not gonna play by those rules. The people who did this, they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars, and they need to be prosecuted. They pardon the J6 committee? Fine. In this country, our case proves that you could be put in prison for anything. They need to be imprisoned. We need to find and put them behind bars for what they did. They need to pay for what they did.

“We’ve got to do everything in our power to make sure that the next 4 years sets us up for the next 100 years.”

Tarrio split with the Proud Boys in 2021 after his former work as a federal informant came to light.

Donald Trump repeatedly promised during his presidential campaign to quickly end Russia’s war with Ukraine. It appears his plan to do so involves the threat of sanctions against the country.

In a Truth Social post Wednesday morning, Trump called out Russian President Vladimir Putin by name, saying that if “we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”

Although Trump began by praising Russia and the Russian people, as well as touting his close relationship with Putin, the rest of the post contains possibly some of his toughest language to date against the country and its leader. Some of Trump’s threats are already in place, however: Sanctions have been in place against Russia since the early days of the Ukraine war, hurting the country’s economy.

Trump repeatedly bragged on the campaign trail that he could end the Russia-Ukraine War in “24 hours,” but after he won the election, Russia threw cold water on that idea, even boosting its troop levels less than a week later. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, the new president’s choice for special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, a post solely focused on ending the war, has suggested withholding aid for Ukraine in order to force negotiations with Russia.

Kellogg has already backtracked on a quick end to the war, suggesting that Trump never really had a concrete plan to quickly end hostilities as he promised. The fact that the president is now bringing up sanctions when only four months ago, he decried their use against Russia, seems to indicate that his threat is a bluff and he’s making up a plan on the fly. Russia is probably not going to respond in the way Trump wants.

Vivek Ramaswamy was pushed out of the fledgling Department of Government Efficiency because his vision didn’t align with the sieg heil-ing shadow president Elon Musk, according to an exclusive report from The Washington Post.

Ramaswamy was behind November’s Wall Street Journal op-ed that outlined a plan to slash trillions of dollars’ worth of essential government services and contract out the functions of the administrative state. He wanted DOGE to function more like a think tank, determining which government agencies could be shut down and which regulations could be repealed without congressional approval.

While Ramaswamy focused on that, Musk was meant to focus on spending and technology. But, the technocrat billionaire—glued to the president’s side—was reportedly on an entirely different page about how to best eviscerate the administrative state, according to several people who spoke with the Post. And his vision seems to have won out.

Monday’s executive order officially establishing the Department of Government Efficiency was merely a rebranding of the U.S. Digital Service, an Obama-era group created to respond to manage issues with the Affordable Care Act’s website, and that now determines best practices for the government use of technology.

While it seems like a pivot from creating a brand-new agency, this change is far more aligned with Musk’s technology-forward vision for the organization. It also lands him a White House office, and all the unfettered access that entails.

The executive order gave Musk “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” a privilege that will likely benefit the billionaire technocrat who has already made tens of billions of dollars from government contracts.

Musk also imagined DOGE being structured as a small team within the government, not the nongovernmental body structure Ramaswamy imagined. Because it’s a White House office, Musk will also be able to sidestep federal hiring rules—and Trump’s hiring freeze.

None of the work from Ramaswamy’s team garnered mention in an executive order Monday, according to the Post.

Earlier reports said that Ramawamy exited the cost-cutting department over clashes with rank-and-file members. Someone close to Trump said that Ramaswamy had “worn out his welcome.”

And it seems that held true up the ranks. “They’ve been wanting Vivek to step aside so Elon could have more control,” one person briefed on the matter told the Post. “There was tension, and then they had an out and kind of took the out.”

Donald Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget continued his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, but his uncanny ability to slide past tough questions—and the committee’s complicity in allowing him to do so—didn’t get past some of the Democratic lawmakers interviewing him.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse torched Russell Vought’s evasive and bureaucratic non-answers, arguing that the nominee didn’t have any special privileges that afforded him the ability not to be completely transparent with the American public.

“Why can I not get an answer—is there some new rule in this committee?—as to where these executive orders came from?” Whitehouse pressed. “That’s perfectly, to me, legitimate congressional oversight. Over and over again this witness has told us what questions he will answer, but the oath he took was to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in response to our questions.”

“So if there’s some new limitation about what question I can [have answered], I would like to understand that. And if not, I would like to have the chair tell the witness to answer my questions,” he added.

That roped Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsay Graham into the heated back and forth, who impressed on Vought that he did not have attorney-client privilege to evade a line of questioning as some of Trump’s other nominees did.

“I am not claiming a privilege, Senator,” Vought said.

“Generally speaking, you know, I guess the question is, did you advise on executive orders and which ones?” Graham insisted. “Can you kind of tell us that please?”

“Senator, I was not a member of the transition, I was not a member of the campaign,” Vought said, before adding that he did not have a “comprehensive knowledge of where the executive orders were drafted.”

But despite the clarification, Vought still refused to pinpoint where the sudden flurry of Day One executive orders had been drafted, despite the fact that many of them fell in line with Project 2025, a plan of Vought’s own design.

Last week, Vought similarly dipped and dodged hard inquiries by the committee, claiming that a Congressional statute used to reexamine executive branch withholdings from the budget was unconstitutional, and refusing to pledge that he wouldn’t deny grants based on the requester’s political alignment.

Vought ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021, during which time he froze military aid for Ukraine, claimed that foreign aid expenditures were “wasteful spending,” and worked to expand the number of federal employees required to work during a government shutdown.

He scooped up another supporting role in Trumpworld during the incoming executive’s presidential campaign: developing a 180-day “transition playbook” to expedite Project 2025’s implementation into the federal government. But his appointment to run the nation’s budget office could see him enter a critical role in shrinking the federal government and advancing Trump’s agenda.

Vought was also the architect of Trump’s “Schedule F” proposal, which plans to fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with as many as 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists to the executive branch via executive order.

The Fraternal Order of Police has finally spoken: Trump was wrong for pardoning January 6 insurrectionists who were convicted of assaulting police officers.

The country’s most powerful police union released a statement condemning Trump’s pardons after not having a “statement about that” when the pardons initially dropped.

“The [International Association of Chiefs of Police] and FOP are deeply discouraged by the recent pardons and commutations granted by both the Biden and Trump Administrations to individuals convicted of killing or assaulting law enforcement officers,” the union said in a statement. “The IACP and FOP firmly believe that those convicted of such crimes should serve their full sentences. Crimes against law enforcement are not just attacks on individuals or public safety—they are attacks on society and undermine the rule of law. Allowing those convicted of these crimes to be released early diminishes accountability and devalues the sacrifices made by courageous law enforcement officers and their families.”

The FOP endorsed Trump for president in 2024. On Monday, he pardoned over 1,500 people in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Some, like Julian Khater, who pepper-sprayed Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick in the face, committed deliberate violence against police and were found guilty of doing so (Sicknick died the day after the attack). Multiple Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were also pardoned.

The FOP’s statement is actually fairly weak, as it doesn’t name a single person or pardon it has issue with and even takes time to throw stones at the prisoners Biden pardoned. The union being “discouraged” with both Trump and Biden for pardoning “individuals convicted of killing or assaulting law enforcement officers” could be referring to Biden’s commutation of the sentence of Native American activist Leonard Peltier—a man whose own prosecutor thinks he is innocent. If the FOP truly thinks that Trump pardoning violent insurrectionists is wrong, it should say that with its chest.

Donald Trump’s executive order on Monday against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives includes a provision to investigate DEI “discrimination” at “institutions of higher education with endowments over $1 billion,” and the MAGA right is celebrating.

The provision would target a large section of universities in the country, including wealthy institutions in the Ivy League, such as Harvard University. The news has right-wing personalities and pundits celebrating, including public education foe Christopher Rufo.

Rufo’s X post received several approving replies from conservatives, including from Elon Musk, and demonstrates the deep hatred among the right wing for colleges and universities that seek to improve diversity.

It would appear that this executive order is the result of Rufo’s efforts. Rufo met with Trump shortly after the election in November, presenting him with a plan to withhold federal money from universities unless they end diversity measures. The conservative activist has sought to push Christian nationalism and right-wing ideology into a dominant place in American life, having given the right its talking points on “critical race theory” and tested out his anti-DEI efforts as a trustee at Florida’s New College.

Now Trump’s executive order seems to be the first step in remaking all of American society to push racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ minority groups out of public life, not just in education but also in the workforce. It’s essentially a culture-war purge that will play out in federal lawsuits.