Senate Confirms Next CIA Director With Penchant for QAnon

The Senate on Thursday confirmed former QAnon doomscroller John Ratcliffe to serve as Trump’s CIA director, 74–25. 

Ratcliffe, who served in Trump’s first administration as director of national intelligence, is a hard-line Trump loyalist with a penchant for conspiracy theories. 

Just four years ago, the “Following” list on his official Twitter account was rife with alt-right QAnon accounts. He followed often graphic accounts like Hobbit Frog and Political Madness, which to this day continue to advance right-wing conspiracy theories on X. While Ratcliffe has since made a new account on X that no longer follows them, his ideological alignment with them very likely remains unchanged. 

Ratcliffe’s nomination didn’t get much objection from Republicans or Democrats, perhaps thanks to the long list of unqualified people Trump has picked for his Cabinet. But Ratcliffe leading the CIA is still cause for concern. In 2019, his initial nomination for director of national intelligence was scuttled after he was caught exaggerating his involvement in counterterrorism efforts. After he was finally confirmed the second time he was nominated, he refused to seriously investigate the murder of Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, impeding the release of a report on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s role in the killing. He also called the FBI investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference a deep state, anti-Trump plot.  

Democrats contested Ratcliffe’s CIA confirmation much less than they did his 2020 DNI nomination, which passed by just a slim 49–44 vote.

Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski announced Thursday that she will vote against Pete Hegseth’s confirmation for secretary of defense because he’s inexperienced and undisciplined.

Murkowski’s decision about Hegseth’s nomination comes just days after his former sister-in-law accused him of making his second wife fear for her safety with his “volatile and threatening conduct.” The Alaska Republican announced her decision in a post on X, in which she cited her “significant concerns.”

“After thorough evaluation, I must conclude that I cannot in good conscience support his nomination for Secretary of Defense,” Murkowski wrote. “I did not make this decision lightly; I take my constitutional responsibility to provide advice and consent with the utmost seriousness.

“Managing the Department of Defense requires vast experience and expertise as the department is one of the most complex and powerful organizations in the world, and Mr. Hegseth’s prior roles in his career do not demonstrate to me that he is prepared for such immense responsibility,” Murkowski wrote, adding that Hegseth was facing allegations of “financial mismanagement and problems with the workplace culture he fostered.”

Hegseth has been accused of regularly abusing alcohol, according to some of his colleagues at Fox News and his family members.

Murkowski wrote that she was concerned what message it would send to women in the armed services, or those hoping to join, if Hegseth was appointed, considering his past statements about how women were not fit for combat.

The senator also addressed the allegations of sexual misconduct against Hegseth, including those in a shocking 2017 police report accusing him of raping an attendee at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California.

While he has vehemently denied these allegations, Hegseth has admitted to several other scandals, including five affairs that he had during his first marriage. It seems that his apparent lack of character became just too much for Murkowski to support.

“While the allegations of sexual assault and excessive drinking do nothing to quiet my concerns, the past behaviors Mr. Hegseth has admitted to, including infidelity on multiple occasions, demonstrate a lack of judgment that is unbecoming of someone who would lead our armed forces,” Murkowski wrote. “These behaviors starkly contrast the values and discipline expected of servicemembers. Men and women in uniform are held accountable for such actions, and they deserve leaders who uphold these same standards.”

A federal district court judge on Thursday temporarily blocked Trump’s revocation of birthright citizenship, striking the first blow against the president’s sweeping, aggressive executive orders.

Senior U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour listened to 25 minutes of arguments before rejecting the order, halting the policy from coming into effect for 14 days. There will be an injunction for a permanent block once the initial period is up.

Coughenour agreed with Arizona, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington—the four states that sued Trump—that the executive order was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades,” Coughenour said, according to NBC. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

Trump signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship on Monday, and has long pledged to end one of the bedrock principles of American identity. “The federal government will not recognize automatic birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens born in the United States,” a Trump official announced on Monday. The order would also ban birthright citizenship for children of parents temporarily in the United States, including those on student and work visas.

This was only one of six lawsuits filed against the Trump administration by Democratic attorney generals in 22 states and immigrants rights organizations across the country. More legal challenges are likely to come.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Thursday that every international business needs to make their products in the United States, or face tariffs.

“My message to every business in the world is very simple: Come make your product in America, and we will give you among the lowest taxes of any nation on Earth,” Trump said in a speech livestreamed from Washington, D.C. “But if you don’t make your product in America, which is your prerogative, then, very simply, you will have to pay a tariff.”

Trump’s tariff threats have not been welcomed by world leaders, especially countries such as Canada and Mexico. The president on Thursday again floated annexing Canada as the fifty-first U.S. state by using tariffs as leverage. He has previously threatened to enact tariffs against Mexico unless the country stops sending “Crime and Drugs” across the border.

On Tuesday, Trump threatened a 10 percent tariff against China “based on the fact that they’re sending fentanyl to Mexico and Canada,” and said he was considering tariffs against the European Union over a $350 billion trade deficit. But at Davos, these threats did not go over well.

“Tariffs against friends and allies is a crazy idea,” Finland’s Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen told The Wall Street Journal. Likewise, the head of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said tariffs would hurt global growth and could result in retaliatory tariffs, with devastating results.

“If we have tit-for-tat retaliation, whether it’s 25 percent tariff (or) 60 percent, and we go to where we were in the 1930s, we’re going to see double-digit global GDP losses. That’s catastrophic. Everyone will pay,” Okonjo-Iweala said at Davos Thursday.

Trump isn’t likely to listen to criticism over his tariff plans, even as economic experts say they will hurt the country, particularly areas that engage in cross-border trade like Texas. While he might engage in specific carve-outs for his corporate friends, for the most part, Trump plans to plow ahead with tariffs regardless of their devastating effects on the U.S. economy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have successfully convinced Donald Trump that diminishing America’s nuclear weapons reserves would be a good thing.

Speaking before the World Economic Forum on Thursday, the forty-seventh president said that Putin had warmed to the idea of “denuclearization” between the two countries.

“We’d like to see denuclearization,” Trump told the conference. “I will tell you that President Putin really liked the idea of cutting way back on nuclear, and I think the rest of the world, we would have gotten them to follow.

“And China too, China liked it,” Trump added.

On Monday, Putin indicated that he was ready to discuss nuclear arms control, the war in Ukraine, and other security issues with Trump, reported Reuters.

The last and only remaining nuclear arms deal between the U.S. and Russia—the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, otherwise known as New START—is set to expire on February 5, 2026. The deal capped the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the two nations could deploy, as well as the number of land and water vehicles used to deliver them.

Legitimate international disarmament would, of course, be a good thing. But whether Putin would actually follow through on diminishing his nation’s nuclear stockpiles is unclear. For decades, Russia has spent millions working to replace and upgrade its strategic and nonstrategic nuclear systems.

As of early 2024, Russia possessed a total of 5,580 nuclear warheads, the most of any country in the world, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The nonprofit organization argued that the war in Ukraine had drastically depleted Russia’s “conventional forces,” pushing it to deepen its reliance on nuclear weapons for its national defense systems.

“Russia’s nuclear modernization programs—combined with frequent explicit nuclear threats against other countries in the context of its large conventional war in Ukraine—contribute to uncertainty about the country’s long-term intentions and have generated a growing international debate about the nature of its nuclear strategy,” read a Bulletin column.

The global security group further argued that the U.S. ballistic missile system could stand in the way of Russia’s eventual nuclear disarmament, claiming that the missile system “constitutes a real future risk to the credibility of Russia’s retaliatory capability.”

Some of Trump’s domestic decisions prior to entering the White House were reportedly “thrilling” to Russian mouthpieces. Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT, mocked American politicians in December for their stupidity while claiming that some of Trump’s more unqualified choices for his Cabinet—such as onetime DOGE co-chair nominee Vivek Ramaswamy and director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard—are friendly faces that bring the Kremlin “lots of joy.”

Donald Trump’s decision to press pause on communications from health organizations amid an escalating bird flu breakout could take America’s soaring egg prices and make them even worse.

The consumer price index found that egg prices have increased 36.8 percent from this time last year, and experts believe the increase in price is the result of avian influenza, which is rapidly depleting the supply of chickens.

If one bird is infected, farms are required by law to cull the entire flock. Axios reported Tuesday that in the previous 30 days, the bird flu affected nearly 12 million birds, according to data from USDA. If nothing changes, egg prices will only continue to rise. Trump, who brags that he won the presidency by promising to lower the prices of groceries, is obviously acting swiftly and effectively to address the issue, right?

Not quite. On Tuesday, the acting director of the Department of Health and Human Services paused the release of “regulations, guidance documents, and other public documents and communications” from all U.S. health and science agencies.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been planning to publish an issue of their “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” which contained several items pertaining to the bird flu outbreak and dairy and poultry farms. But as all communications have been put on hold, the issue was not released, according to The New York Times.

Meanwhile, the bird flu has already infected at least 67 people, resulting in its first human death last month.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump pardoned two Washington, D.C., police officers convicted of the 2020 killing of 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown, a young Black man.

Officers Terrence Sutton and Andrew Zabavsky were sentenced last September to 66 and 48 months in prison, respectively, for an “unauthorized police pursuit.” The two cops pursued Hylton-Brown after spotting him driving a moped without a helmet, and pursued him for 10 blocks, including going the wrong way down a one-way alley, until another vehicle hit and killed him.

Trump’s pardon came after Sutton and Zabavsky were unanimously found guilty by a federal grand jury in 2022 of conspiracy to obstruct and obstruction of justice over the incident, as well as second-degree murder in Sutton’s case. The D.C. Police Union asked for a pardon for the pair.

On Monday, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 of his supporters involved in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, including violent criminals and people accused of attacking police officers. That drew a (delayed) condemnation Tuesday from the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, two police unions that endorsed Trump in the 2020 election.

The pardons to Sutton and Zabavsky indicate that the Trump administration is reviving its full-throated support of law enforcement, even when crimes are committed, with the lone exception for anything that goes against the right-wing culture war. Crimes committed by MAGA will also not be considered crimes, so long as they serve President Trump.

Donald Trump is promising the dawn of a new digital age for his second term, even if it means polluting the nation’s air and taxing its infrastructure.

During a speech at the World Economic Forum on Thursday, the forty-seventh president ranted and rambled through dozens of talking points related to a flurry of executive orders he signed earlier in the week. But he also elucidated some of the details related to his plan to expand the nation’s burgeoning artificial intelligence sector, including a pledge to use an emergency declaration to rapidly produce “electric generating plants” in support of the tech industry.

“We need double the energy we currently have in the United States—can you imagine?—for AI to really be as big as we want to have it,” Trump said. “So I’m going to give emergency declarations so they can start building them almost immediately.

“I think it was largely my idea because nobody thought this was possible,” Trump continued. “It wasn’t that they’re not smart because they’re the smartest. But I told them that what I want you to do is build your electric generating plant right next to your plant and connect it. And they said, ‘Wow, you’re kidding,’ and I said, ‘No, no, I’m not kidding.’”

Trump then went on to criticize the nation’s electric grid, calling it old while noting that he would allow the tech companies to rely on any fuel that they want to run the plants. And if the energy plants fail, Trump claimed the country could return to “good clean coal.”

“Coal is very strong as a backup,” Trump told the conference. “Nothing can destroy coal, not the weather, not a bomb, nothing. It might make it a little smaller, might make it a little different shape, but coal is very strong as a backup. It’s a great backup to have that facility … and we have more coal than anybody. We also have more oil and gas than everybody.”

On Tuesday, Trump announced Stargate—a public-private joint AI venture between the federal government, OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, which the fory-seventh president claimed could invest as much as $500 billion in the bubbling tech sector over the next four years.

OpenAI and SoftBank are set to lead the project, with SoftBank taking on Stargate’s financial responsibility, according to Fortune. OpenAI’s chief Sam Altman called the venture the “most important project of this era.”

Stargate involves an initial private investment of $100 billion into America’s AI infrastructure, a move that would begin a digital “re-industrialization of the United States,” ushering in “hundreds of thousands of American jobs,” OpenAI said in a statement Tuesday.

However, just hours after the deal was announced, Trump’s closest tech adviser—world’s-richest-man Elon Musk—told users on his social media platform that the effort was a dud.

“They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote on X, in response to a post from OpenAI announcing the digital infrastructure deal. “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”

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.”