Trump’s Commerce Secretary Confirms Plan to Gut Medicare—and More

Howard Lutnick, Trump’s billionaire buddy turned commerce secretary, has confirmed that the administration was simply lying to MAGA supporters about not touching Social Security and Medicare.

“Back in October … I flew down to Texas, got Elon Musk to [set up DOGE], and here was our agreement: that Elon was gonna cut a trillion dollars of waste fraud and abuse,” Lutnick told Jesse Waters of Fox News Wednesday night. “We have almost $4 trillion of entitlements, and no one’s ever looked at it before. You know Social Security is wrong, you know Medicaid and Medicare are wrong. So he’s gonna cut a trillion and we’re gonna get rid of all these tax scams that hammer against America and we’re gonna raise a trillion dollars of revenue.”

Just last week, President Trump promised that “Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud or something. It’s going to be strengthened. Medicare, Medicaid—none of that stuff is going to be touched.”

Fast forward a week, and he endorsed House Republicans’ budget plan, which is expected to make an $880 billion cut to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

This is a long cry from the party that was telling its voters—many of whom are elderly conservatives on government benefits—that they wouldn’t lay a finger on the programs they need most.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s purge of federal government employees has apparently gone too far for one Fox News personality.

Jesse Watters begged Trump on The Five Wednesday to be “less callous” in his mass firings because his friend Chris, a military veteran for 20 years who “has killed a lot of bad guys” and “put his life on the line,” was among those set to be axed in cuts to the Department of Defense.

“He punched out after 20 years, and [is now] working for the Pentagon. And he’s only been there a few months, so he’s probationary, and he just found out he’s probably going to get laid off. He’s going to get DOGE’d,” Watters said, adding that he got a text message from the friend, who was upset.

“This guy is not a DEI consultant. This guy is not a climate consultant. This guy is a veteran. So when you’re talking about DOGE-ing people, veterans should get priority. Because if you’re going to go out there and kill enemies, and put your life on the line for this country, you should not be in the same category as people that are doing DEI,” Watters added.

Watters is only upset because someone he knows personally was affected by Trump and Musk’s mass firings. Otherwise, he’d continue to cheer on the arbitrary cuts across the federal workforce. What he and the rest of right-wing media don’t realize is that plenty of other federal workers like Chris have lost their jobs or will soon. Some are veterans, as are 30 percent of federal workers, and others were simply hired too recently.

The firings are taking place regardless of stellar personnel records, and have claimed workers vital to national security that the Trump administration has tried to walk back, such as people who work with the U.S. nuclear arsenal or whose expertise with bird flu is badly needed right now. Watters and his friends on the right ought to realize that Trump and Musk are simply gutting the federal government without any regard for the consequences.

If America was concerned about Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s relationship after their dual Oval Office press conference last week, the MAGA duo’s interview with Sean Hannity did nothing to assuage it.

Appearing side by side in the White House, the president of the United States was cut off and forced to defer to Musk’s language on the multi-billionaire’s missive to other ultra-wealthy people.

“I’d like to also just send a message—like, because, as the president said, like, this—there’s a lot of rich people out there,” Musk said. “They should be caring more about the country because—the reason they should be caring about—more about country is: America falls, what do you think is going to happen to your business?”  

“What do—what do you think—do you think you’re be going to be okay if—if the ship of America sinks? Of course not. Like, what—what I’m doing here, what the president is doing is it’s just long-term thinking. The ship of America must be strong.  The ship of America cannot sink.  If it sinks, we all sink with it.”

When Trump attempted to join in on the answer, Hannity seemed more eager to follow up on Musk’s response, explicitly cutting the president off.

“Sean, you’re a—” Trump started, pointing at the Fox News host.

“This is important,” Hannity responded to Trump, raising his hand to stop him.

Last week, Musk spent more time talking to reporters than Trump did during their joint press conference. The image to the rest of the world was clear: While Trump hunched over the Resolute Desk, the world’s richest man took the reins. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell measured the time spent talking by each administrative figurehead and found that Musk had spoken 3,666 words at the executive order signing, whereas Trump spoke 2,487 words.

Compare Musk’s constant presence to the role that Trump’s vice presidents play in his political realm: Former Vice President Mike Pence never spoke more than Trump did at a Trump-centric event during his first term, and Vice President JD Vance likely never will, either (in part because Vance has been conspicuously absent from many major events so far). That discrepancy calls into question what power Musk, who donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump’s presidential campaign, really has in the administration.

Elsewhere in the duo’s Hannity interview, Musk described criticism of his efforts to strip federal agencies as a nonelected, special government employee, as the “thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.”

“We must be over the target or doing something right,” Musk told Hannity. 

“They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful,” he continued. “What we’re really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president. And what we’re finding is that there’s an unelected bureaucracy—speaking of unelected, there’s a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and the cabinet.”

Donald Trump called Elon Musk the head of the Department of Government Efficiency Wednesday, and while this may seem obvious to everyone, the White House has been pretending like it isn’t—and the truth could land them in legal trouble. 

During an appearance at the Future Investment Institute Summit in Miami, Trump told attendees at the Saudi investment fund event exactly what Musk’s real job is.

“I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency, and put a man named Elon Musk in charge,” Trump said. 

For an administration that loves to tout its own radical transparency, they sure seem to want to mislead Americans on who is really calling the shots at DOGE.

The Trump administration filed a court declaration Monday asserting that Musk’s official title is “senior adviser to the president,” a position that holds “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.” It also claims that Musk isn’t a DOGE employee or its administrator, but an employee of the White House. 

The filing flies in the face of Trump’s original announcement naming Musk the head of DOGE, as well as everything we’ve seen from Musk since, as the unelected bureaucrat has taken aim at essential federal employees, sending agencies scrambling to hire them back. Most recently, he and his friends at DOGE pretended to save money by eliminating fictionalized government contracts. 

Monday’s filing came as Musk faces legal scrutiny in federal court this week. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ultimately declined to issue a temporary restraining order against Musk and DOGE Tuesday, saying that it wasn’t yet clear that their actions would cause irreparable harm. 

By obfuscating leadership, it seems that the Trump administration wants to avoid accountability for its actions. U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled last week that DOGE should be considered an “agency,” although Trump was “curiously” avoiding calling it that explicitly.  

“This appears to come from a desire to escape the obligations that accompany agencyhood—such as being subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act—while reaping only its benefits,” Bates wrote in his order.

Donald Trump’s gutting of the federal government is coming to the Department of Defense.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has told DOD and military leaders to make plans for cutting 8 percent of the defense budget for each of the next five years, The Washington Post reports, citing a department memo and unnamed officials.

Proposals for cuts are due back by February 24, the memo states, with the Trump administration including a list 17 exceptions from the chopping block. These include nuclear weapons and missile defenses, drones and other weapons, and military operations at the southern U.S. border.

“President Trump’s charge to DoD is clear: achieve Peace through Strength,” Hegseth wrote in the memo on Tuesday. “The time for preparation is over — we must act urgently to revive the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and reestablish deterrence. Our budget will resource the fighting force we need, cease unnecessary defense spending, reject excessive bureaucracy, and drive actionable reform including progress on the audit.”

So far, the massive DOD budget of $850 billion has been spared from the heavy-handed cuts elsewhere in the federal government led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, including the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development. This is despite the fact that the DOD has a long history of failing audits and funding bloated projects without facing any consequences.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Musk’s companies have hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in defense contracts. Until now, DOD employees were also spared from Trump and Musk’s mass purge of government employees, although that will soon change. The department has sent a list of all its probationary employees to the Trump administration, and many, if not most, of those employees will likely be sacked like those at other government agencies.

It remains to be seen how the coming budget cuts will affect national defense and national security. The Trump administration has already been forced to try and undo cuts at the Department of Energy after mistakenly firing critical employees who deal with nuclear weapons. The Department of Agriculture has also scrambled to rehire bird flu experts it says were “accidentally” fired. Will the Trump administration jump the gun again in the defense department?

Missouri Republicans are advancing an effort that would require pregnant people to register in a statewide database.

House Bill 807, called the “Save MO Babies Act,” is intended to target people “at risk for seeking abortion services” and to “reduce the number of preventable abortions.” If passed, the registry would start on July 1, 2026, and would be managed by the Maternal and Child Services division of the state’s Department of Social Services, according to the bill text. But the bill does not specify the scope and scale of such a registry, or exactly how “at risk” individuals would be identified.

Even the bill’s author, adoption attorney Gerard Harms, admitted that the bill was “very inartfully drafted” while making his case before the state House Children and Families Committee on Tuesday, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The effort was roundly condemned by both government-wary Republicans and pro-abortion Democrats.

“ARE YOU SERIOUS!?” House Democrats wrote in a post on Facebook, according to the paper.  

“We have to imagine even conservative Missourians would be horrified by this idea,” the Democrats said.

In November, Missouri voters narrowly approved a ballot measure that enshrined abortion access in their state constitution. 

The measure, called the Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative, solidified that the government has no role in a person’s “fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion care, miscarriage care, and respectful birthing conditions. It also undid the Show-Me State’s total abortion ban, which took effect one hour after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Still, that hasn’t stopped state lawmakers from fighting for stronger abortion restrictions. Last month, Missouri Representative Eric Burlison introduced the “Life at Conception Act” at the federal level, aiming to classify a fetus as a person under the 14th Amendment. Meanwhile, state Representative Brian Seitz introduced a bill—Joint Resolution 39—that would prevent abortion access after a fetal heartbeat is detected, allowing only narrow exceptions for medical emergencies. 

Vice President JD Vance issued a stark warning to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday, cautioning the war-battered leader against “badmouthing” Donald Trump even as the U.S. pushes forward with handing over Ukrainian land to Russia in lopsided peace talks.

“The idea that Zelenskiy is going to change the president’s mind by badmouthing him in public media,” Vance told the Daily Mail, “Everyone who knows the president will tell you that is an atrocious way to deal with this administration.”

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine.

The U.S. and Russia opened discussions Tuesday aimed at ending the three-year war in a meeting that excluded Ukrainian leadership. Hours after the meeting ended, Trump suggested that Kyiv had started the conflict—a Russian talking point that drew Zelenskiy’s ire.

“I would like to see more truth from the Trump team,” Zelenskiy told reporters in a sandbagged presidential palace Wednesday, adding that the MAGA leader lives in a “disinformation space.”

But Trump did not respond well to Zelenskiy’s words. In a lengthy and venomous post on Truth Social Wednesday, the U.S. president wrongly accused the democratically-elected Ukrainian leader of being a “dictator.”

“Zelenskiy admits that half of the money we sent him is ‘MISSING,’” Trump wrote, incorrectly asserting that the U.S. had provided $350 billion to Ukraine. In actuality, the U.S. has allocated $119 billion in Ukraine aid, according to the Kiel Institute, which has been tracking international financial assistance for Ukraine.

“He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle,’” Trump continued.

“A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskiy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only ‘TRUMP,’ and the Trump Administration, can do,” he added.

Not even other members of Republican leadership could give a full-throttled defense of Trump deriding Zelenskiy as a dictator.

“The president speaks for himself,” Senate Majority leader John Thune said Wednesday afternoon.

Vance met with Zelenskiy on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference last week as Russia navigated through Trump to organize a deal that defense experts have warned will overwhelmingly benefit Russian interests.

Earlier that week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the NATO conference in Munich that the administration’s peace talks with Russia had taken several chips “off the table,” including Ukraine’s possible NATO membership (something the military alliance had promised in 2008), the possibility of a U.S. presence in Ukraine to enforce postwar security guarantees, and the end of NATO missions to Ukraine. He also added that it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to return to its pre-war borders, effectively ceding land to Moscow.

Donald Trump called himself “THE KING” on Wednesday, and the rest of the White House was overjoyed to see the president was dropping the pretense of democracy. 

Trump announced in a post on Truth Social that his administration would challenge New York City’s recent policy installing congestion pricing, with an added rhetorical twist. 

“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” Trump wrote.

While not exactly surprising given Trump’s previous references to himself as the savior of the country, and his penchant for trolling, the president dubbing himself a “king” should theoretically rub everyone the wrong way—but not the fascists who work for him.  

Alas, the right-wing shills that run Trump’s communications basked in the wash of his declaration of unchecked power. 

Taylor Budowich, the White House deputy chief of staff posted an AI-generated picture of Trump wearing a jeweled crown and fur-trimmed cape on X. 

Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt also boosted the president’s disturbing missive on social media. 

It’s worth noting that Republicans weren’t always like this. Flashback to 2014, and Senator Rand Paul was tossing barbs at former President Barack Obama for being a “president who thinks he’s a king.”

Republicans’ sycophantic support demonstrates that Trump’s autocratic (or monarchic) ranting isn’t merely him going rogue; it’s a distinct rhetorical feature of his entire administration, which has already set to work uprooting the checks and balances that underpin American democracy, and replacing it with something wholly different. 

On Tuesday night, Elon Musk claimed that “if the will of the president is not implemented, and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented. And that means we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.” 

It’s not a bureaucracy Americans need fear, but a monarchy. 

Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that he has ended New York’s congestion pricing , boasting in all caps that he “SAVED” the city in a Truth Social post that ended with the declaration “LONG LIVE THE KING!”

Six weeks ago, the city of New York launched a program to enact tolls on cars in the central business district of Manhattan south of 60th Street. On Wednesday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sent a letter to New York Governor Kathy Hochul overturning the Federal Highway Administration’s approval of the program.

During his presidential campaign, former New York resident Trump promised to end the program, and at one point, even Hochul wasn’t in favor of it. But in November, the governor revived the plan, and after it went into effect this year, the program got positive reviews. Traffic was reduced, public transportation received a boost, and greenhouse gas emissions and pollution went down. 

But that didn’t have any effect on the Trump administration. Duffy wrote in his letter that he  shares “the President’s concerns about the impacts to working class Americans who now have an additional financial burden,” and said the highway administration would work with the program’s sponsors “to discuss the orderly cessation of toll operations under this terminated pilot program.”

Hochul replied swiftly with a statement of her own posted to her X account, saying, “We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king.”

“We’ll see you in court,” Hochul added, announcing that the Metropolitan Transit Authority had initiated legal action to save the program.

Trump’s action seems to be an attempt to stir up the right-wing’s blind support of car culture, as well as a vindictive effort aimed at his hometown and former place of residence, which has spurned him ever since he entered politics. It remains to be seen how the fight over congestion pricing will play out in court, but only a president as petty as Trump would try to dictate a city’s traffic laws. 

Washington D.C.’s interim MAGA U.S. attorney is coming after Chuck Schumer for supposedly leading an “attack” on Supreme Court justices.

In a weirdly aggressive officewide email Wednesday, U.S. attorney Ed Martin cast Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the greater Trump administration as potential victims of violence specifically due to the rhetoric of Schumer (which has been mild at best compared to anything the president has ever said).

“One of the most abhorrent examples was when Senator Charles Schumer led a rally to attack US Supreme Court Justices,” Martin wrote in the email, referencing a tiff that Schumer and the conservative justices had over Roe v. Wade. “Schumer said, reading from notes in his hand: ‘I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released a whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.’” 

Martin then posited that these remarks, which Schumer walked back shortly after he made them five years ago, led directly to the alleged attacks at Justice Kavanaugh’s home, in which a man was arrested near Kavanaugh’s house with a knife, firearm, and zip ties.

Meanwhile, it’s obvious that revenge has been on the minds of the Trump administration from the moment he was defeated in 2020.

“We are the DC U.S. Attorney’s office; we are the guardians of federal workers,” Martin continued in the email, striking a clear “us versus them” chord, with “them” being anyone who doesn’t align perfectly with MAGA. “You and I must do whatever possible to assure government work is safe for all involved. We must protect our cops, our prosecutors, our DOGE employees, the President, and all other government employees.”

Schumer has yet to comment.