Mike Johnson Caves to Trump and Trashes Separation of Powers

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is falling in line with the rest of MAGA and attacking the Constitution’s separation of powers.

CNN reporter Manu Raju asked Johnson on Tuesday what he thought about JD Vance’s Sunday X post attacking ​​a federal judge who blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Treasury Department records.

Much like Donald Trump, who said that “no judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision,” Johnson’s response was to back Vance and Musk. The Louisiana representative said he agreed with the vice president and met with Musk on Monday, adding that courts should “take a step back” to let the Trump administration continue.

On Sunday, Musk and Vance attacked the judge blocking DOGE, and by extension, the judicial branch of government and the concept of judicial review, which allows the courts to determine whether a law is in accordance with the Constitution. Musk claimed U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer was “a corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!” Vance had a more detailed, but equally worrying, response.

“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Vance posted.

Meanwhile, on Monday, another judge claimed Trump is failing to comply with the temporary restraining order on his funding freeze—making it clear his administration is testing the limits of executive power.

With leading Republicans, along with oligarch Musk, questioning any checks on the executive branch’s power, the United States might soon be headed to a constitutional crisis over Trump and Musk’s attempts to overhaul the government. Congress doesn’t have the two-thirds Republican majority needed to impeach judges who go against the president and his billionaire adviser/boss, so America might soon see a president who openly defies legal rulings. But hey, the Supreme Court already gave him near-total immunity.

Vice President and recently converted Catholic J.D. Vance was rebuked by the pope himself for using Catholic theology to justify mass deportations and isolationism. 

Vance started the fire when he recently went on Fox News and presented his own bastardized version of “ordo amoris,” Latin for “the order of love.” 

“There is … a very Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance said at the end of January. “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that; they seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside of their own borders.… The British prime minister should care about Brits, and the French should care about the French.”  

Pope Francis sent a message on Tuesday to clear up Vance’s comments. Without mentioning the vice president by name, he attacked Vance’s entire logic for the Trump administration’s cruel policies.

“Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: The human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation,” Pope Francis wrote (emphasis added). “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

The Good Samaritan parable tells of a Jewish man left beaten and bloodied, barely alive, on the side of a road. While a Jewish priest walks past him, a Samaritan—an enemy of the Jews—comes to his aid. Vance couldn’t be further off from the Bible’s original message. 

“This misses the point of Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan,” Jesuit priest and editor James Martin wrote shortly after Vance’s Fox interview. “Jesus’s fundamental message is that *everyone* is your neighbor, and that it is not about helping just your family or those closest to you. It’s specifically about helping those who seem different, foreign, other. They are all our ‘neighbors.’ But Jesus’s deeper point can only be understood from the point of view of the beaten man: our ultimate salvation depends, as it did for that man, upon those whom we often consider to be the ‘stranger.’”

This rhetoric comes as the Trump administration undergoes its ambitious and cruel mass deportation program, detaining immigrants in Guantánamo Bay and potentially soon Salvadoran mega-jails. They’ve also pushed for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza so that they can make their homeland prime real estate. So much for the party of God.

A weekend interaction between Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast and Elon Musk unexpectedly showcased just how little the world’s richest man understands about the effects of his slashing spree at the top of the federal government.

“I don’t think the richest guy in the world should be cutting funding for cancer research,” Jong-Fast posted to X on Sunday.

“I’m not,” Musk responded. “Wtf are you talking about?”

But despite Musk’s empty protestation, that is what’s happening. On Friday, the Trump administration—under the Department of Government Efficiency’s direction—announced it would cut billions of dollars in biomedical research funding, scheduled to take effect by Monday. The slashed spending was intended to affect $4 billion in “indirect funding” for research, a category that encompasses administrative overhead, facilities, and operations. But researchers that spoke with The Washington Post decried the move as a “surefire” way to “cripple lifesaving research and innovation,” and one that will contribute to “higher degrees of disease and death in the country.”

“America’s competitors will relish this self-inflicted wound,” Matt Owens, president of the Council on Government Relations, told the Post.

In an op-ed Tuesday, Jong-Fast argued that “it’s clear that the Tesla CEO doesn’t seem to realize that by having the government step back from commitments it’s made to world-leading researchers, his department is effectively slowing medical advances for millions of patients who desperately need critical care and is imperiling the economic position of America, a leader in biomedical innovation.”

Research funding into critical diseases was spared by a federal judge on Monday, who temporarily blocked the spending cuts. The suit was brought by a coalition of attorneys general from 22 states across the nation, who argued that initiative violated a 79-year-old law intended to dictate how agencies administer regulations.

“Without relief from N.I.H.’s action, these institutions’ cutting-edge work to cure and treat human disease will grind to a halt,” the lawsuit reads.

But at the end of the day, Musk’s un-spending campaign is just one facet of the Trump administration’s assault on American public health systems. Last month, Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization, breaching the one-year notice required to leave the WHO. Meanwhile, employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health were notified they wouldn’t have the money to buy even basic supplies for their work.

Trump has also nominated a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist—Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—to run the Department of Health and Human Services and, by extension, America’s health policy. Kennedy’s stances include unscientific beliefs that AIDS is not caused by HIV and that a large number of vaccines should be stripped from the market. Trump has promised that if confirmed, Kennedy would spend his time—and, presumably, significant funds—at the top of HHS researching the already thoroughly debunked conspiracy that ties vaccine usage to increased autism rates.

Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday liberating Americans from the “forced use” of paper straws, because why govern when you can just screw around?

The executive order stated that it would end the “irrational campaign” against plastic straws, and determined that paper straws were “nonfunctional,” more expensive to produce, and use harmful chemicals.

“These things don’t work, I’ve had them many times, and on occasion, they break, they explode,” Trump said, as he signed the order. “If something’s hot, they don’t last very long, like a matter of minutes, sometimes a matter of seconds. It’s a ridiculous situation.”

The real ridiculous situation is Trump thinking that anyone cares that much about paper straws while he rips away funding from essential government agencies, undermines the government’s checks and balances, and empowers a billionaire technocrat to sift through Americans’ private information.

But Trump has other things on his mind, such as destroying the symbols of the liberal regime he’s come to replace rather than actually doing anything to help struggling Americans—or sharks, as it turns out.

“I don’t think that plastic is going to affect a shark as they’re eating, as they’re munching their way through the ocean,” Trump assured reporters Monday.

The order stated that all federal agencies would stop the purchase of plastic straws, and instructed the assistant to the president for domestic policy to create a strategy within 45 days to impose the policy nationwide.

Of course, the “irrational” campaign Trump is raging against was really one against all single-use plastics. But thanks to Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and recently withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accords for a second time, plastic straws are back to fill the oceans, and the planet is free to burn!

Donald Trump is threatening to blow up the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas if the Palestinian group doesn’t release all of its Israeli hostages by midday Saturday.

“If they’re not returned—all of them, not in dribs and drabs, not two and one and three and four and two—by Saturday at 12 o’clock,” Trump said. “And after that, I would say, all hell is going to break out.”

On Monday, Hamas threatened to delay the further release of Israeli hostages in the Gaza Strip, accusing Israel of violating the terms of the ceasefire deal, which required Israel to send Gaza hundreds of thousands of tents, as well as other humanitarian supplies. Those supplies and tents have not arrived, Hamas said. Speaking anonymously, three Israeli officials and two mediators told The New York Times that Hamas’s claims are accurate.

Israel has also continued to launch targeted attacks on Gaza, killing more than 110 Palestinians in the three weeks since the ceasefire was supposed to take effect. Hamas said that Israel is playing “dirty games” in its ceasefire violations.

“This could threaten the deal to collapse,” Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told Drop Site News. “Netanyahu came back from the United States with all intentions to sabotage the deal.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments seem to confirm that. He told reporters on Monday that he made a strategic agreement with Trump and the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, about what positions Israel would take in negotiations. Netanyahu said he has new plans for Gaza and that he and Trump see “eye to eye.”

“You wanted a day-after [plan]? You got one.… It just doesn’t match the Oslo narrative.… We won’t repeat that mistake.… I’ve come back with a vision without Hamas and without the Palestinian Authority,” Netanyahu said. In a meeting at the Knesset, Netanyahu shook his fist and said, “We know what complete victory is, and we will not give up on it.”

On Sunday, Trump doubled down on his idea of the U.S. taking over the Gaza Strip, telling reporters he was “committed to buying and owning Gaza” and that “we’ll make it into a very good site for future development by somebody.”

All of this points to Trump and Netanyahu blowing up the already violated ceasefire deal, with Trump’s half-baked takeover plan becoming the new course of action. Palestinians in Gaza would be ethnically cleansed from the territory, with Trump seeking to force neighboring countries like Egypt and Jordan to take them or face tariffs. The convicted felon president and the wanted war criminal prime minister are primed to inflict more suffering on the Palestinians.

MAGA muse Steve Bannon pleaded guilty to fraud in New York Tuesday morning.

Bannon is taking a plea deal for defrauding New Yorkers who gave money to his “We Build the Wall” online fundraiser, which was allegedly pooling money from normal civilians for Trump’s border wall during his first term.

“Nobody lost money, find one,” Bannon told New York Daily News’s Molly Crane-Newman when asked how the Trump supporters he scammed felt, even though he had just confessed to the fraud.

Bannon will avoid jail time completely for this second criminal conviction, instead receiving a three-year conditional discharge after pleading guilty to one count of defrauding donors. He was originally facing five felony counts and up to 15 years in prison. The War Room host is likely to blame this all on corruption and cast himself as a political prisoner rather than admit that his “We Build the Wall” program was as flimsy as Trump’s original promise to construct it.  

This story has been updated.

Trump’s Justice Department is dropping its corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams—not because the charges aren’t credible, but because Adams could help MAGA’s extreme immigration agenda.

Acting Attorney General Emil Bove told New York prosecutors to dismiss the charges against Adams on Monday, while openly admitting that the Justice Department “reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.”

Instead, the memo notes that a criminal trial against Adams might restrict his ability to “devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration.”

“The Eric Adams memo doesn’t even pretend to be dropping the prosecution for a legitimate reason,” researcher Will Stancil wrote on X. “It says he shouldn’t be prosecuted because he’s running for reelection (?) and so he can carry out the president’s agenda (??). OPEN corruption: ‘MAGA politicians are above the law.’”

This isn’t just obvious and blatant corruption. It’s also a sign that the Justice Department has fully transformed into nothing more than a political tool for the president.

Adams has been begging for a pardon for months, and he bet on Trump giving it to him if he started acting like he was auditioning for a role in the administration. In December, the New York City mayor cast his indictments as political targeting akin to that of Trump and Hunter Biden. “Those who are here committing crimes, robbery, shooting at police officers, raping innocent people … I would love to sit down with the border czar and hear his thoughts on how we are going to address those who are harming our citizens,” Adams bizarrely said at the time. “This is not a new position. In the era of cancel culture, no one is afraid to be honest about the truth. Well, cancel me.”

That same month, he requested a meeting with Trump’s draconian border czar Tom Homan to help him crack down on immigrants who “snuck in” to New York City. In January, he met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and days later he was sitting down with Tucker Carlson talking about how the Democratic Party “left him.” The quid pro quo agreement has been cooking for some time now, and Adams got the best outcome possible. He gets off scot-free, and Trump and Homan get to run rampant through New York City.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to withdraw Army recruiters from the nation’s top Black engineering event has ushered blunt criticism from military leadership.

“It’s fucking racist,” one active duty Army general told Military.com on the condition of anonymity. “For the Army now, it’s ‘Blacks need not apply’ and it breaks my heart.”

The Baltimore-based Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) has historically been a key event for the Pentagon to recruit high-caliber STEM talent. One Army recruiter told the servicemember news outlet that BEYA is one of the “most talent-dense events we do,” and that the branch “need[s] the talent.” BEYA, in turn, recognizes on its website that the “U.S. military is one of the largest STEM employers in the nation.”

But despite its abundance of talent, recruiters were concerned that attending the event could infringe on Donald Trump’s anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion executive order. Hegseth has, from the jump, been totally on board with the radical shift, making the dissolution of long-standing diversity efforts a priority of his tenure.

On January 31, Hegseth declared that Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and other heritage month observations were officially “dead” and would no longer be recognized by the military. And on Monday, Hegseth made the first move in implementing Trump’s transgender ban on the armed forces, initiating a pause on integrating new trans troops.

“I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is, ‘Our diversity is our strength,’” Hegseth said Friday in an address to Pentagon staff. “I think our strength is our unity. Our strength is our shared purpose, regardless of our background, regardless of how we grew up, regardless of our gender, regardless of our race. In this department, we will treat everyone equally.”

“We will treat everyone with fairness,” he continued. “We will treat everyone with respect. And we will judge you as an individual by your merit and by your commitment to the team and the mission.”

Recruiters that would have attended BEYA weren’t left with nothing to do. Instead, they were redirected to participate in a National Rifle Association-sponsored event in Pennsylvania, which Military.com described as a “predominantly white gathering that recruiters acknowledge is less likely to yield high-quality applicants.”

Donald Trump is continuing to pretend that being a blathering fool is impressive.

During an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, which aired in full Monday evening, Trump went on several unwieldy tangents, skirting around answering simple softball questions that the interviewer offered on a silver platter.

At one point, in the middle of a thought, Trump diverted his answer to congratulate himself on just how obtuse he was being.

“And you know, let’s go back over there, because I’m the weaver,” Trump said, abruptly switching topics. “I’m the great weaver, you know that right? OK? I’m the great weaver.”

“Trust me,” Baier replied. “I get it.” The Fox News host put one hand up as if to physically stop the president from getting off track, but Trump chugged along like a runaway train.

“Somebody said, ‘Oh, he rambles,’ no, no. Only the fake news says that,” Trump said. “To weave you have to be brilliant; to ramble you don’t have to be brilliant at all.”

A smiling Baier interjected again, gently corralling the ranting president back toward coherence. “I’ll just get back in the weave there. I have to get you back in,” he urged.

“But I like the weave because it covers a lot of territory, and it covers it much more quickly,” Trump continued, before segueing back into a point about Israel.

Over the course of the chaotic interview, Trump tactlessly sidestepped a question about whether he was actually capable of lowering inflation, and went way off course when responding to a softball question about uniting the country. Trump also took the opportunity to throw Vice President JD Vance so far under the bus you could hear the bones crunch.

Donald Trump fumed over the state of New York’s fraud judgment against him in a Truth Social post Tuesday morning.

The president used to call New York his home, but in his post, he said it “is the most corrupt State in the Union.”

“We need great Judges and Politicians to help fix New York, and to stop the kind of Lawfare that was launched against me, from falsely valuing Mar-a-Lago at $18 Million Dollars, when it is worth, perhaps, 100 times that amount (The corrupt judge was replaced by another judge, only to be immediately put back on the case when the Democrat political leaders found out that a change of judges was made. It has become a great embarrassment for the New York Judicial System!),” Trump’s post read.

Last year, a New York state court ruled that Trump had to pay $454 million in fines for fraudulently inflating the value of his properties (including Mar-a-Lago). He had to scramble to come up with a reduced $175 million bond for his appeal, benefiting from the help of a shady surety company. But Ol’ Donny Trump might wriggle out of this jam again, as an appeals court seemed skeptical of the massive sentence against him in oral arguments in September. Regardless of that court’s judgment, Trump isn’t likely to stop crowing about it online, as the judgment against him now stands at over $500 million.