Even France’s Far-Right Thinks Steve Bannon’s CPAC Salute Was Extreme

The French far-right has decided to actually take a stand after Steve Bannon made what appeared to be a Nazi salute similar to the one Elon Musk did weeks ago.

Bannon performed the salute yesterday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after declaring, “The only way that they win is we retreat. And we’re not gonna retreat. We’re not gonna surrender. We’re not gonna quit. FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT. Amen!”

Jordan Bardella, leader of the French far-right National Rally party, immediately pulled out of the conference.

“Yesterday, while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers out of provocation allowed himself a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology,” Bardella said in a statement. “I therefore took the immediate decision to cancel my speech that had been scheduled this afternoon.”

Bannon of course denied that he did a Nazi salute, saying that it was a “wave” that he used to “thank the crowd.” He then proceeded to excoriate Bardella.

“He’s unworthy to lead France. He’s a boy, not a man,” Bannon told French reporter Claire Meynial, fingers wagging in the camera. “If he took what the mainstream media said … I did that exact same wave at [National Rally] seven years ago when I gave a speech to them. If he’s that worried about it, and wets himself like a little child, then he is unworthy and will never lead France.”

“Was it a Nazi salute?” Meynial asked.

“No, it was a wave!”

Musk and Bannon are trying to gaslight millions of Americans. Roll the tape and see for yourself.

Donald Trump’s plans to make cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency are starting to worry his fellow Republicans. 

GOP politicians in Congress fear that these cuts could hurt disaster response, and they aren’t clear about what exactly the president has in mind. Last week, Trump said on his Truth Social account that he wants to get rid of FEMA, calling it “slow and totally ineffective.” FEMA is critical in the U.S. as natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires occur more often thanks to climate change. And Republicans acknowledge its importance, even if they don’t acknowledge the changing climate. 

“FEMA provides a critically important role in disaster recovery,” Senator Ted Cruz told CNN, while stopping short of criticizing Trump. “I feel confident the president knows full well the importance of FEMA and responding to a disaster.”

“Whether FEMA exists or not, there needs to be an agency that provides emergency management services when catastrophes are too big for the state and local community to handle,” said Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. “Could there be reforms in FEMA? Absolutely.”

Fellow Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, whose state was hit by Hurricane Helene, told the outlet that he’s trying to convince the Trump administration to reform FEMA rather than killing or cutting it. 

“If it’s with an eye towards more efficiency and resiliency, great. If it’s an eye towards cutting funding to western North Carolina, not great,” Tillis said of Trump’s plans. 

The president has already created the FEMA Review Council to come up with possible changes to the agency. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative has been to FEMA’s offices, meeting with the agency’s employees and reviewing files. Senior agency officials were told recently to send the administration a list of “anyone who worked or works on climate, environmental justice, equity, DEIA” so that they could be fired, according to an email obtained by CNN.  

The Trump administration also plans to cut another critical government agency that responds to disasters, the Office of Community Planning and Development. That agency often provides billions of dollars in rebuilding efforts to supplement FEMA, and stands to be reduced by 84 percent. 

Trump’s attempts to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Department of Education have only been stalled thanks to pending court battles. It remains to be seen what happens to FEMA.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is hacking and slashing the federal government to size down the budget, but in doing so, they seem to have let go of a few mission-critical employees—despite the agency’s promises against it.

Some of DOGE’s cuts this week were aimed at the Department of Energy. That included layoffs for 1,200 to 2,000 workers at the department’s power grid office, the nuclear security administration, and the loans office, per Reuters. DOGE pledged that the mass firing only affected non-critical employees who “held primarily administrative and clerical roles,” but that appears to be a bold-faced lie.

One of the staffers forced out of his position included Acting Chief of Defense Nuclear Safety James Todd, a senior executive official and the “top authority for all nuclear-safety matters in the agency,” The Bulwark reported Friday.

Other critical employees dismissed in the purge included staffers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is responsible for maintaining and minimizing radiation and potential damage from accidents at the nuclear site. The cut workers included an emergency preparedness manager, a radiation protection manager, the security manager, the fire protection engineer, and two facility representatives.

The losses were considered so ill-advised and extreme that the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration had reversed course on the hatchet job, welcoming the affected employees back to their jobs.

But the process hasn’t been as easy as simply having them return to work the next day. Instead, dejected and “shell shocked” employees at the NNSA are considering early retirement or looking for work in more stable sectors, unsure of if or when the Trump administration might try to dismiss them again, according to The Bulwark.

“We are now hearing disturbing news reports that fired nuclear safety employees whose dismissals were meant to be reversed cannot be contacted,” Senate Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Patty Murray and Ohio Representative Marcy Kaptur, both Democrats, wrote in a joint statement last week.

DOGE’s government-wide probationary layoffs are predicted to affect as many as 200,000 employees in the public sector as the agency seeks to trim 10 percent of the federal workforce. The DOE employs some 14,000 federal employees as well as 95,000 contractors.

Trump posted through the pain after a series of devastating national polls showed his approval rating quickly plummeting after his first month in office.

“I won the Presidential Election in a landslide, won ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, THE POPULAR VOTE, AND ALL FIFTY STATES SHIFTED REPUBLICAN, a record, and now I have the best polling numbers I’ve ever had,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday, seemingly in response to the news this week. “The Democrats, run by broken down losers like James Carville, whose weak of mind and body, are going crazy, and just don’t know what to do. They have lost their confidence and spirit - They have lost their minds! We are going to have big WINS for our Country, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. It’s already happening, and will get bigger and better than ever before!”

A CNN poll published Thursday found that just 47 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance, while 52 percent disapprove. Moreover, 55 percent of respondents don’t think he’s focused enough on the most pressing issues in the U.S., and 62 percent don’t think he’s done enough to bring the costs of common goods down.

The Washington Post and Gallup released similarly negative results this week. The Post-Ipsos poll found that 57 percent of Americans thought that Trump was “exceeding his authority” and that 48 percent opposed his actions outright. Gallup’s poll showed that 51 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump.

According to CNN, about half the country (52 percent) also thinks Trump has gone too far with his executive power, and about half (48 percent) think he’s gone too far with the federal purge and DOGE overhaul. If this is how Trump is reacting to mostly normal polling numbers in month one, there’s no telling how he’ll be reacting to criticism after a year or two.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is once again lying about how much money it’s saving for American taxpayers, The Intercept reported Friday.

DOGE’s wonky wall of receipts claimed that it saved $231,864,794 by cancelling an I.T. contract between the Social Security Administration and Leidos, an engineering company. DOGE claimed the total value of the contract was $1,033,638,089.

The Social Security Administration confirmed to The Intercept that the real savings were limited to work on the Gender X Marker Project, which sought to add ‘X’ as a gender option on U.S. passports. The project was canceled last month as part of Trump’s anti-trans executive order insisting the federal government would only recognize two genders. At the time, DOGE claimed canceling the contract could save the government more than $1 million.

But DOGE’s cut didn’t save the government $1 million, let alone the nearly $232 million the agency now claims on its website. In reality, the cut only saved $560,000, a spokesperson from the Social Security Administration told The Intercept.

“The task order referenced on the DOGE receipt website includes numerous I.T. development efforts, one of which was Social Security’s former Gender X Marker project,” Darren Lutz, the SSA spokesperson, said. “While the overarching task order was not terminated, we continue to assess and identify other projects under this task order that may be cancelled or streamlined to create further cost savings.”

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the head of government affairs at the watchdog Project on Government Oversight, slammed DOGE’s sloppy work.

“This, to me, is just part and parcel of the amateur-hour nature of what DOGE is doing,” he told The Intercept. “They’re going to destroy more than they help. It’s absolutely counterproductive.”

Earlier this week, it was discovered that DOGE somehow added a couple of zeroes when claiming to have cut one ICE contract worth $8 billion. In actuality, the contract was worth only $8 million. Even as DOGE’s accounting discrepancies are uncovered, the total savings touted by DOGE on its website remains at $55 billion—and that number becomes more dubious with every passing day.

The Trump administration’s Federal Aviation Administration firings are much worse than they initially let on.

Politico has reported that the 130 terminated FAA workers last month included critical employees who directly and indirectly reinforce all of the FAA’s moving parts to keep passengers safe. The Trump White House had previously stated that no “critical” employees had been fired.

Concerns about aviation safety have been compounded since 67 people were killed when a passenger plane collided with an Army helicopter at DCA outside Washington, D.C., in January.

“I would argue that every job at the FAA right now is safety critical,” aviation safety consultant Jeff Guzzetti told Politico. The firings “certainly [are] not going to improve safety — it can only increase the risk.”

One recently fired employee was an aeronautical information specialist who helped plan airplane routes, or “highways in the sky.”

“Air traffic controllers cannot do their work without us,” the employee said anonymously to Politico on Wednesday. They went on to state that their fellow FAA workers were “targeted just as a senseless line item on an Excel sheet.”

“To put it frankly, without our team ... pilots would quite literally be flying blind,” they said.

The Rolling Stone’s Andrew Perez reported that other cut positions included “lawyers who help keep drunk or reckless pilots out of the skies,” “employees who track potential new flying hazards like cranes,” and staffers in charge of medically clearing pilots.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and the White House provided no actual specifics regarding what positions were emptied. Rather, they chose to talk down to Americans who just want to be assured that their next flight will land safely.

“No air traffic controllers nor any professionals who perform safety critical functions were terminated,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, directly contradicting Politico’s reporting. The FAA is already understaffed.

Now that he’s back in office, Donald Trump is looking to finalize one of his former agenda items: nixing the United States Postal Service.

The president is expected to issue an executive order “as soon as this week” that would dissolve the Postal Service’s governing board and place it under the control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to several sources that spoke with The Washington Post in a story published Thursday.

During an emergency meeting on Thursday, the postal board issued instructions to sue the White House should it attempt to remove members of the board or alter its independent status, the Post reported. Two of the group’s Republican members—former Trump official Derek Kan and former RNC Chair Mike Duncan—were conspicuously absent during the meeting.

Restructuring USPS into the folds of the Commerce Department would probably violate federal law, according to postal experts that spoke with the Post.

The U.S. Postal Service is practically as old as the country. It was developed by the Second Continental Congress during the American Revolution, and Benjamin Franklin was appointed as its first postmaster general.

Since then, the Postal Service has reinvented itself again and again, keeping up with the myriad shipping demands of the American public and supporting trillions of dollars in commerce.

It also “generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations,” according to USPS’s website.

Still, that hasn’t prevented America’s public mail system from becoming a favorite target of the president. In 2020, Trump argued that the Postal Service should be dismantled to prevent voting by mail. That was in the throes of Covid-19, when the agency asked Congress for a $25 billion cash injection to offset losses caused by the pandemic.

That trend has continued through the decade, though the agency’s losses have been slightly less egregious. In November, USPS said it had lost $9.5 billion in the prior fiscal year—$3 billion more than it did in 2023—blaming noncash contributions to workers’ compensation for the bulk of the deficit.

The agency, which is in the midst of a 10-year overhaul, has reportedly made regaining its financial footing a chief priority. Still, the path ahead is not an obvious one. In November, Postmaster Louis DeJoy (a Trump appointee) warned that there would be “many economic, legislative, and regulatory obstacles for us to overcome.”

Meanwhile, Trump and his allies are slashing and hacking federal programs in order to afford an extension to his 2017 tax plan, which will overwhelmingly benefit corporations and is projected to add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit.

A Republican member of Congress thinks that Donald Trump’s executive order spree has gone too far.

Representative Troy Balderson, whose district comprises areas in central and southeastern Ohio, said Thursday that the president’s orders are “getting out of control,” adding that Trump and Elon Musk are exceeding their authority.

“Congress has to decide whether or not the Department of Education goes away,” said Balderson at the Westerville Area Chamber’s business luncheon. “Not the president, not Elon Musk. Congress decides.”

Balderson said that he respected Trump, the need for executive orders, and the right to investigate government agencies, but that “Congress has to do their work.” The congressman was endorsed by Trump since his first run for Congress in 2018, in a district that has voted Republican going back at least 46 years, so his opinion shows that Trump’s actions are becoming unpopular even among Republicans.

Trump’s new commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, confirmed Wednesday that the president plans to make cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, all programs that are popular with Republicans as well as Democrats. If Trump follows through on those cuts, Republican voters in areas like Balderson’s district could lose patience with Trump and the GOP by the time the 2026 midterm elections come up, and perhaps even in 2028.

Representative Robert Garcia hit back at threats from the Department of Justice and criticized the agency for trying to “silence” lawmakers speaking out about Elon Musk.

Earlier this week, Garcia received a letter from the DOJ regarding comments he’d made on CNN about opposing Musk’s takeover of the federal government. “What the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight. This is an actual fight for democracy,” Garcia said.

Ed Martin, the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, had responded as if the California Democrat might’ve made an actual threat on the DOGE czar’s life.

On a recent episode of the IHIP News podcast, Garcia wasn’t buying it.

“We as members of Congress should have the right to oppose an administration that we disagree with,” Garcia said during the Thursday episode.

“It’s important for folks to be able to know that Democrats need to be in a fight. This is a fight that we’re in for our very democracy. And the fact that the Trump DOJ now wants to silence members of Congress, because we’re actually willing to take on Elon Musk is quite dangerous.”

On the podcast, Garcia insisted he hadn’t used fighting words, and that the government was attempting to silence his dissent.

“And I think that that’s something we’re really, really concerned about—that the Department of Justice has essentially said we cannot use metaphors, we cannot use figures of speech, we cannot talk about actually fighting the policies of the Trump Administration. And if we do so, we’re going to face prosecution,” Garcia said.

“So, incredibly disturbing. But we’re not going to be silenced. We’ve got to push back, and this is a moment for us to be really tough and aggressive.”

A Republican congressman was booed and heckled incessantly at his own town hall Thursday, as Trump’s sweeping federal cuts have begun to hurt the very same Republican constituents who voted for them.

At his town hall in Suwanee, Georgia—in a district Trump won by 22 points—Representative Rich McCormick was faced with hundreds of voters who were deeply disturbed by his complicity—as well as the rest of the Republican Party’s—in allowing Elon Musk and DOGE to transform the federal government in just weeks.

One person told McCormick he had done a “disservice” to his constituents. “You don’t think I’m going to stand up for you?” the lawmaker replied, as the town hall booed him. Another pressed McCormick on what he’ll do to “rein in the megalomaniac in the White House.”

McCormick’s comments on Medicare and Medicaid also drew immediate backlash. “If you don’t do something with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which is 75 percent of our budget—”

This comment, a far cry from the Republicans’ earlier promise not to touch these programs, led to an uproar from the crowd, as some constituents even yelled out “no it isn’t” in response to the 75 percent line McCormick rattled off. Others implored him to tax billionaires rather than cut programs that people use every day.

“If you cut all of your military, and all of your discretionary spending, you still have a shortfall. We are heading towards a cliff,” McCormick continued before being overpowered by angry citizens again. “Google it right now,” he implored.

When asked about the hundreds of Atlantia-based CDC employees working on bird flu recently fired by DOGE, McCormick had the gall to tell the crowd that many of them were easily replaced by AI.

“Why is a supposedly conservative party taking such a radical, and extremist, and sloppy approach to this?” one constituent asked pointedly.

“I’m in close contact with the CDC,” McCormick replied. “They have about 13,000 employees…. In the last couple of years, those probationary people, which is about 10 percent of their employee base … a lot of the work they do is duplicitous with AI.”

This led to another string of boos and jeers from his constituents. McCormick got to be so bothered by the heckling that he compared his own base to January 6 insurrectionists, telling the crowd they were similar to “Jan. 6ers who are yelling just as loud as you.” This led to another round of boos.

Scenes like this one may become more and more common as Trump and Musk sign checks that lower level Republican politicians have to cash.