RFK Jr. Takes Trump Corruption to Next Level With Vaccine Pledge

The Trump administration is already parading its corruption in all of our faces.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has disclosed that even if he’s confirmed as health secretary, he will continue to collect payment from the law firm suing the pharmaceutical company Merck over its HPV vaccine—which Kennedy incorrectly believes is a “dangerous and defective” vaccine that causes cancer in children.

This means that Kennedy would be making money off an anti-vaccine lawsuit while having direct control of the nation’s vaccine policy.

“Pursuant to the referral agreement, I am entitled to receive 10% of fees awarded in contingency fee cases referred to the firm,” wrote Kennedy in a signed ethics agreement. “I am not trying these cases, I am not an attorney of record for the cases, and I will not provide representational services in connection with the cases during my appointment to the position of Secretary.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts called RFK Jr.’s fee collections “outrageous conflicts of interest that endanger public health.”

“This disclosure shows that R.F.K. Jr. made millions off of peddling dangerous anti-vaccine conspiracies,” Warren said. “Even worse, if he is confirmed, his finances will still be tied to the outcomes of anti-vaccine lawsuits—even as he’d be tasked with regulating them as health secretary.”

There has been no connection found between the HPV vaccine and cervical cancer.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rushed to Elon Musk’s defense Thursday, claiming that the billionaire’s disturbing inauguration gesture—which millions of people around the world recognized as the Sieg Heil salute used by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party—was little more than a misunderstanding.

“Elon is a great friend of Israel,” Netanyahu wrote in a post on X claiming that the South African was being “falsely smeared.”

“He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre in which Hamas terrorists committed the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” Netanyahu continued, explicitly thanking Musk. “He has since repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes who seek to annihilate the one and only Jewish state.”

Individuals the world over have fiercely debated what Musk meant by giving the alarming salute (twice) on Monday. German journalists torched Musk for making the gesture, acknowledging that such an act would never be allowed in their country.

“Whoever on a political stage, making a political speech in front of a partly far-right audience, elongates his arm diagonally in the air both forcefully and repeatedly, is making a Hitler salute,” journalist Lenz Jacobsen wrote for the German paper Die Zeit in a piece titled “A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute.” “There’s no ‘probably’ or ‘similar to’ or ‘controversial’ about it. The gesture speaks for itself.”

Others argued that Musk’s increasingly far-right politics were a better target for the Nazi label, claiming that the rhetoric around the salute had gone too far. Meanwhile, Musk himself fanned the controversy by refusing to deny the allegations as to whether he meant his gesture to resemble Hitler’s salute.

Hitler-loving personalities on the far right of America’s political spectrum, though, weren’t confused about the meaning behind Musk’s actions whatsoever. Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist Hitler fan who has called for a “holy war” against Jews, referred to Musk’s salute as “straight up like ‘Sieg Heil,’” with “loving Hitler energy.”

Donald Trump’s first phone call with a foreign leader on Wednesday was with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who made a hefty and incredibly unlikely pledge of investment. 

MBS told Trump on the call that the country hopes to expand trade and investments with the United States by $600 billion, reports Bloomberg, citing Saudi state media. MBS reportedly said that his country was eager to take advantage of investment opportunities the Trump administration is creating, saying that they could result in “unprecedented economic prosperity.”

But MBS’s investment pledge is a stratospheric amount, representing close to 55 percent of Saudi Arabia’s gross domestic product, and the country is currently posting fiscal deficits, due to its multiyear Vision 2030 plan, which seeks to diversify the country’s economy. Plus, the oil-rich nation has been hurt by falling oil prices. 

Journalist Gregg Carlstrom pointed out that $600 billion over four years is more than what Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has invested in the entire world to date. Not so coincidentally, Trump on Monday floated the idea of making Saudi Arabia his foreign visit as president this term, but only if the country was willing to buy $450 to $500 billion of American products. Trump made Saudi Arabia his first foreign visit in 2017 as well, reportedly also after an investment pledge from MBS at the time.  

MBS’s $600 billion pledge was almost certainly tabulated to please the new president and entice him into visiting. It’s another example of how Trump is making policy transactional. When it comes to Saudi Arabia, Trump’s business operation has already cut a deal to build a Trump Tower in Jeddah, and unlike in his first term, the Trump Organization will not be shying away from business deals with foreign companies this time around. It looks like Trump’s business relationship with Saudi Arabia is already overlapping with the new foreign policy of his presidency.

Donald Trump suggested that Joe Biden might regret not giving himself a presidential pardon.

During an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity Wednesday night, Trump was in the middle of complaining about Biden’s last-minute pardons for his family members and Trump critics when the president suggested that his predecessor could use the same protections.

“This guy went around giving everybody pardons. And you know, the funny thing—maybe the sad thing—is he didn’t give himself a pardon,” Trump said. “And if you look at it, it all had to do with him.”

Trump’s menacing comment indicates that he is keeping the door open for possible prosecution of Biden. It also seemed like the former president’s decision to leave himself vulnerable really bothered Trump.

“Joe Biden has very bad advisers. Somebody advised Joe Biden to give pardons to everybody but him,” Trump continued.

Trump was so worked up about it that when Hannity tried to change the subject to the economy, Trump argued with the interviewer to keep complaining about it. “I don’t care,” Trump snipped. “This is more important because right now the economy is gonna do great!”

Trump’s complaint about Biden pardoning “everybody” is also pretty hypocritical considering that one of Trump’s first actions in office was to enact sweeping pardons for some 1,500 rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, has vowed to go after a list of the president’s “deep state” political enemies, including Biden. Meanwhile, the president’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, has declined to say whether she was planning to prosecute people such as Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, or Liz Cheney, who tried to hold Trump accountable for his alleged crimes.

The Trump administration’s anti-DEI snitching plan is getting flooded with fake reports after it tried to strong-arm federal workers into ratting out their colleagues.

Federal employees received emails Wednesday reading: “We are taking steps to close all agency [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] offices and end all DEIA-related contracts in accordance with President Trump’s executive order.… These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination.”

Then came the draconian kicker: “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024 to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances to DEIAtruth@opm.gov within 10 days. There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting this information. However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.”

The threat was loud and clear: Report your so-called “DEI” employees or else. What exactly “DEIA or similar ideologies” means is up in the air, but the message was out there. And so was the email address of the DEIA snitching hotline.

Fake emails quickly started to roll in. ‘I don’t care, fuck these McCarthyite bastards,” one BlueSky user said, with an screenshot attached of an email to the hotline where he ironically reported Donald Trump and JD Vance for being “put in their positions solely because of their race and/or gender despite the fact that they are wholly unqualified for their jobs and, in some cases, have criminal records.”

“Anyone have a script to fire off a billion e-mails an hour??” another user asked in the replies.

“Anyone can email anything of any size even if it crashes the site,” one X user noted.

The scope and effectiveness of this latest phase of Trump’s anti-DEI crusade remains to be seen.

A Milwaukee weatherwoman who criticized Elon Musk’s inauguration salute has since been stripped of her professional responsibilities.

Sam Kuffel, 31, made two posts to her personal Instagram story in the wake of the inauguration, torching Musk for making a gesture that millions of people around the world recognized as a Nazi salute.

“Dude Nazi saluted twice. TWICE. During the inauguration,” read one of Kuffel’s posts. “You fuck with this and this man, I don’t fuck with you. Full stop.” In the second post, Kuffel shared a meme from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, in which one of the show’s characters is subtitled as saying, “Screw that old bitch. He’s a Nazi.”

But that was, apparently, too far for the meteorologist’s station, WDJT-TV (Channel 58), which notified staffers by email on Wednesday that the popular weather forecaster would no longer be employed by the network.

“Meteorologist Sam Kuffel is no longer employed at CBS58,” news director Jessie Garcia wrote in a staff memo obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “A search for a replacement is underway.”

The Anti-Defamation League, a hate-speech watchdog that considers pro-Palestinian activism to be antisemitic, sided with Musk amid the backlash, claiming that the Trump adviser had simply made an “awkward gesture.”

“This is a delicate moment. It’s a new day and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety,” the ADL wrote in a statement on X Monday. “This is a new beginning. Let’s hope for healing and work toward unity in the months and years ahead.”

But not everyone agreed with that analysis of Musk’s double salute—least of all the Germans, who quickly pointed out that making such a gesture on the continent is plainly illegal.

“Whoever on a political stage, making a political speech in front of a partly far-right audience, elongates his arm diagonally in the air both forcefully and repeatedly, is making a Hitler salute,” journalist Lenz Jacobsen wrote for the German paper Die Zeit, in a piece titled “A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute.” “There’s no ‘probably’ or ‘similar to’ or ‘controversial’ about it. The gesture speaks for itself.”

Others argued that Musk’s increasingly far-right politics were a better target for the Nazi label, claiming that the rhetoric around the salute had gone too far. Musk, meanwhile, fanned the flames of the controversy by refusing to deny the allegations over dozens of posts as to whether he intended the gesture to resemble Hitler’s Sieg Heil salute.

The moment was only cluttered by Musk’s family history, which descends from Nazi sympathizers—at least according to his father, Errol Musk, who told the Podcast and Chill Network in November that the billionaire’s maternal grandparents supported Adolf Hitler and were members of the German Nazi Party in Canada before moving to South Africa in support of apartheid.

Donald Trump said that he’s considering scrapping the Federal Emergency Management Agency because he’d “rather see states take care of their own problems.”

During an interview Wednesday night with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Trump claimed that his thinking about FEMA had recently shifted, not the least bit because it sometimes helps people in liberal states and cities. 

 “Los Angeles has changed everything. Because a lot of money is gonna be necessary for Los Angeles, and a lot of people on the other side want that to happen,” Trump said, admitting that he didn’t want to give disaster aid for the sole purpose that Democrats wanted it.

Hannity gently reminded the president that North Carolina also required funding from FEMA.

“Well, they don’t care about North Carolina; the Democrats don’t care about North Carolina,” Trump said. “What they’ve done with FEMA is so bad. FEMA is a whole ’nother discussion because all it does is complicate everything. FEMA has not done their job for the last four years.

“You know, I had FEMA working really well, we had hurricanes in Florida, we had Alabama tornadoes, we had—but unless you have certain types of leadership, it’s really, it gets in the way,” Trump bragged. 

It’s unclear what leadership he’s referring to here, whether it be the Biden administration or the liberal governments of states like California. 

“And FEMA is going to be a whole big discussion very shortly because I’d rather see the states take care of their own problems,” Trump said. 

“If they have a tornado someplace, let that state—Oklahoma is very competent,” Trump said. “I love Oklahoma. Seventy-seven out of 77 districts; that’s never been done before.”

Trump’s fantasy that Oklahoma is somehow totally self-sufficient because it swung fully for him in the 2024 elections clearly defies all logic and reason. Between 2015 and 2024, Oklahoma received more than $48 million in FEMA funding. 

In that same period, Florida, Texas, and Louisiana have received the lion’s share of federal disaster aid, according to Axios. It seems that if Trump does in fact scrap FEMA altogether, he will be taking money away from a range of Republican-led states that all supported him in the last election.  

It’s also possible that Trump is simply setting up a rhetorical worst-case scenario, a kind of kill-switch to get states to back off demands for disaster relief he doesn’t want to give. Keep asking, and no one will get it. 

Trump has been claiming that California needs to reform its environmental regulations since long before the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, and FEMA funding has offered him a lever to try to enforce it. Republicans have followed suit, saying that they want to put conditions on aid for what House Speaker Mike Johnson desperately tried to repackage as a “man-made disaster.”

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed the Senate’s version of the Laken Riley Act, which allows for the deportation and detention of any undocumented immigrant merely suspected of a nonviolent crime, with 46 Democrats joining every Republican in approving the bill.

With the House’s passage, the bill now heads to Donald Trump’s desk, where he will likely sign it into law and claim his first victory. Law enforcement will soon be able to detain undocumented immigrants merely accused of a crime, without being convicted or even formally charged, and begin deportation proceedings. The bill does not include protections for children or DACA recipients. On Monday, 12 Democrats joined every Republican in the Senate to pass the bill.

The following 46 Democrats in the House voted to enact the Laken Riley Act:

1. Sanford Bishop—Georgia
2. Brendan Boyle—Pennsylvania
3. Nikki Budzinski—Illinois
4. Janelle Bynum—Oregon
5. Jim Costa—California
6. Joe Courtney—Connecticut
7. Angie Craig—Minnesota
8. Henry Cuellar—Texas
9. Sharice Davids—Kansas
10. Don Davis—North Carolina
11. Shomari Figures—Alabama
12. Laura Gillen—New York
13. Jared Golden—Maine
14. Vicente Gonzalez—Texas
15. Maggie Goodlander—New Hampshire
16. Josh Gottheimer—New Jersey
17. Adam Gray—California
18. Josh Harder—California
19. Jahana Hayes—Connecticut
20. Steven Horsford—Nevada
21. Marcy Kaptur—Ohio
22. Greg Landsman—Ohio
23. Susie Lee—Nevada
24. Mike Levin—California
25. Stephen F. Lynch—Massachusetts
26. John Mannion—New York
27. Lucy McBath—Georgia
28. April McClain-Delaney—Maryland
29. Kristen McDonald Rivet—Michigan
30. Dave Min—California
31. Joseph Morelle—New York
32. Jared Moskowitz—Florida
33. Chris Pappas—New Hampshire
34. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez—Washington
35. Hillary J. Scholten—Michigan
36. Kim Schrier—Washington
37. Terri A. Sewell—Alabama
38. Eric Sorensen—Illinois
39. Greg Stanton—Arizona
40. Suhas Subramanyam—Virginia
41. Tom Suozzi—New York
42. Emilia Sykes—Ohio
43. Dina Titus—Nevada
44. Ritchie Torres—New York
45. Derek Tran—California
46. Eugene Vindman—Virginia

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.”