Karoline Leavitt Crashes When Asked if Trump Is Abusing His Power

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt could barely cobble together an answer Tuesday when asked to explain how Donald Trump’s executive order targeting specific individuals wasn’t an abuse of power.

Last week, Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate Chris Krebs, his former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who was fired in November 2020 for publicly contradicting the president’s false claims of “massive voter fraud” in the presidential election that year.

Leavitt was clearly caught off guard during a press briefing when The New York Times’ White House correspondent Jonathan Swan asked about the hypocrisy of Trump’s order targeting Krebs.

“The president has long said that it would be an abuse of power for a president to direct prosecutors to investigate him. Last week, President Trump explicitly directed the Justice Department to scrutinize Chris Krebs to see if it can find any evidence of criminal wrongdoing,” asked Swan. “How is that not an abuse of power, to direct the Justice Department to look into an individual—a named individual?”

“Look, the president signed that executive order. It’s the position of the president in this White House that it’s well within his authority to do it, otherwise he wouldn’t have signed it. And he signed it, and that’s his policy,” Leavitt said.

According to Leavitt’s logic, Trump’s order to investigate Krebs was not an “abuse of power” for the simple fact that Trump was the one doing it. It doesn’t get more authoritarian than that.

Trump had previously railed against former President Joe Biden after Trump became the subject of multiple federal lawsuits and was indicted for allegedly mishandling classified documents and alleged election interference. Both cases have now been dismissed. Trump also claimed that Biden was “virtually leading” Trump’s hush-money case in New York, in which he was found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Donald Trump is scrambling to reassure farmers they’ll be protected from his volatile trade war with China.

“Our farmers are GREAT, but because of their GREATNESS, they are always put on the Front Line with our adversaries, such as China, whenever there is a Trade negotiation or, in this case, a Trade War,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday. “The same thing happened in my First Term,” he added, pointing to the $28 billion he spent bailing out farmers from his first trade war with China.

“I rewarded our farmers with a payment of $28 Billion Dollars, all through the China deal. It was a great transaction for the USA, until Crooked Joe Biden came in and didn’t enforce it.” In a press conference Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the Trump administration is considering a tariff bailout this time around too.

The president is urging farmers to grit their teeth as he tanks the economy with a staggering 145 percent tariff on Chinese goods. China imposed a 125 percent tariff on U.S. goods in retaliation, which will devastate American farm markets designed for export. American soybean farmers still haven’t recovered from losing one of their biggest markets in China during Trump’s first term.

For cattle ranchers, the tariffs will likely result in the loss of one of their biggest customers—they sold $1.6 billion worth of beef to China last year.

For decades, American farmers have been incentivized to grow commodity crops like soybeans, corn, wheat, and rice for export rather than for domestic production. It’s led to an incredibly monopolized food system, with only the largest farms able to compete. The tariffs will only make that monopoly worse. Input costs will go up, and small and midsize farms will be shut out of export markets.

“More than 20% of farm income comes from exports, and farmers rely on imports for crucial supplies like fertilizer and specialized tools,” the American Farm Bureau said in a statement earlier this month. “Tariffs will drive up the cost of critical supplies, and retaliatory tariffs will make American-grown products more expensive globally. The combination not only threatens farmers’ competitiveness in the short-term, but it may cause long-term damage by leading to losses in market share.”

The trade war comes as Trump has also made drastic cuts to crucial federal farming programs, a devastating blow to thousands of farmers navigating extreme weather events and unprecedented economic circumstances.

Trump’s words of advice to farmers as he ruins their livelihoods? Just hold on.

“China was brutal to our Farmers, I these Patriots to just hold on, and a great trade deal was made,” he wrote in his typo-ridden message. “The USA will PROTECT OUR FARMERS!!!”

JD Vance can’t stop insisting on the lie that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a dangerous gang member who can’t be returned to the United States from a prison in El Salvador. 

The vice president got into an argument on X with musician and writer Mikel Jollet Tuesday morning over President Trump’s defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling that the administration return Abrego Garcia. It all started when Vance posted that “the entire American media and left wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien).” 

Jollet responded shortly afterward, correcting Vance. 

“No, the most important issue is that the Supreme Court ruled by a 9-0 decision that you must return him,” Jollet posted. “Trump is not a dictator or a king. He’s a president and a president must follow the Supreme Court’s ruling. If he does not, he must be removed from power. It’s that simple.”

Vance then doubled down, saying the U.S. is powerless to retrieve a “terrorist” from El Salvador, using a similar argument to what Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said Monday and echoing the rest of the Trump administration’s quibbling over semantics.  

“Are you proposing that we invade El Salvador to retrieve a gang member with no legal right to be in our country?” Vance responded. “Where in the Supreme Court’s decision does it require us to do that?”

Jollet’s reply left the vice president silent. 

“No, the ruling states clearly that you are required to take steps to facilitate his return and update the court on your progress. You have plenty of tools at your disposal (diplomatic and otherwise) to do this without invading El Salvador,” the writer posted.

For the record, the Trump administration already admitted that it wrongly deported Abrego Garcia in court, yet Vance insists on pushing the lie that the building trades worker is in fact a violent gang member. 

In fact, Vance and Trump are doubling down on purpose because they don’t want any deportation to be overturned, nor do they want to give a win to their opponents. They want immigrants in the U.S. to continue to live in fear and cement their absolute power, even if it means destroying the Constitution’s separation of powers and becoming a dictatorship.

Donald Trump’s administration is planning to shutter U.S. embassies around the world, continuing to dilute American soft power in its latest effort to shrink the federal workforce.

A memorandum that was part of a broader budget for 2026 that is due to the Office of Budget Management Tuesday outlined a plan to close 10 embassies and 17 consulates, according to Punchbowl News. This includes U.S. missions in Eritrea, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Scotland, and South Sudan, as well as five outposts in France and two in Germany.

In Canada, U.S. consulates in Halifax and Montreal would be significantly downsized, according to the document. The consolidation of U.S. embassies in Canada comes as relations have rapidly deteriorated after Trump announced steep tariffs on aluminum, steel, cars, and autoparts.

The memo stated that the targets for downsizing “were evaluated based on feedback from regional bureaus and the interagency, consular workload, cost per [U.S. direct hire] billet, condition of facilities, and security ratings.”

The State Department is also planning to “reduce or eliminate” its footprint in Mogadishu, Somalia, due to a “non-permissive environment,” according to the memo. Trump claimed in a post on Truth Social Monday that the U.S. would continue to “support the Somali People” against the Houthis attempting to “embed” there. The American mission in Mogadishu is the only U.S. outpost in the country.

State Department officials also pitched closing the America’s Diplomatic Support Center in Baghdad because it was “by far” the most expensive.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has yet to sign off on the reductions, but the recommendations were reportedly made by José Cunningham, who has served as the undersecretary for management at the State Department since April 5.

Last month, Politico reported that the Trump administration was planning to cut the State Department’s budget by nearly half, zeroing out the funding for programs to promote democratic processes and counter drug trafficking, and shuttering up to three dozen embassies. This proposal would shrink the department’s budget from $54.4 billion in 2025 to $28.4 billion in 2026.

The New York Times had previously reported that senior State Department officials had drawn up plans to close a dozen consulates overseas as soon as the summer, and were considering wider shutdowns. Roughly 700 State Department employees, including 450 career diplomats, resigned just within Trump’s first two months in office.

Trump is increasing his threats against Harvard University after the school refused to set up an admissions council to bring in MAGA personnel.

After Harvard announced Monday it would not comply with the Trump administration’s absurd demands in exchange for $9 billion in federal funding, the White House cut $2.2 billion in grants to the school along with a $60 million contract. As if that wasn’t enough, Trump then threatened to revoke the school’s tax exempt status the following day.

“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Tuesday. “Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”

Trump’s war on Harvard comes after an April 11 letter to the school from the General Services Administration and the Department of Education, listing a series of outrageous demands. It states Harvard should dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, limit student protests, and reduce the admission of international students “to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values”—all on-par with what Trump has demanded from other institutions.

But buried deeper in the text of the three-page letter are even more fantastical demands that would give the White House complete control over the university’s operations and student body.

“Harvard must abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests,” the section on “Viewpoint Diversity in Admissions and Hiring” reads.

“Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.” In other words, bring in a new crop of far-right students and faculty to take over every department.

The letter also stated Harvard must “make organizational changes to ensure full transparency and cooperation with all federal regulators,” and submit an annual report detailing its compliance with the federal government. America’s oldest post-secondary institution would essentially become a state-run university.

Harvard is the first Ivy League university to stand up to Trump in his egregious assault on academic freedom after a number of other schools crumbled at his knees amidst mass funding cuts.

“The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government,” Harvard University President Alan M. Garber said in a statement. “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

“Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community,” another letter to the Trump administration from Harvard’s lawyers reads. “But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is very likely stealing sensitive labor data from the National Labor Relations Board, according to a whistleblower from inside the agency.

NPR reports that a whistleblower reached out to Congress and other federal watchdogs, alarmed about what they saw happen when DOGE employees gained access to the NLRB’s internal systems. Ostensibly, the DOGE staffers said they were reviewing the agency’s data to comply with the Trump administration’s new policies, as well as to cut costs and increase efficiency.

But, according to the whistleblower report, the NLRB’s technical staff were shocked to see a sharp increase of data leaving the agency and DOGE employees covering their tracks. The NLRB holds sensitive information about unions, legal cases about workplace complaints, and corporate secrets, data which, according to four labor law experts who spoke to NPR, is highly sensitive and should rarely, if ever, leave the agency.

“I can’t attest to what their end goal was or what they’re doing with the data,” the whistleblower, Daniel Berulis, told NPR. “But I can tell you that the bits of the puzzle that I can quantify are scary.… This is a very bad picture we’re looking at.”

A former White House cybersecurity official, Jake Braun, told NPR that a foreign actor could be involved in the increase in data leaving the agency.

“If he didn’t know the backstory, any [chief information security officer] worth his salt would look at network activity like this and assume it’s a nation-state attack from China or Russia,” Braun told NPR.

According to Berulis, right after DOGE gained access to the NLRB, a Russia-based I.P. address tried to log in. While that attempt was blocked, it happened to be using one of the new DOGE accounts and had the correct name and password.

Berulis also said DOGE employees requested accounts that would allow them to read, copy, and alter NLRB data, the highest level of access in the agency. When one IT staffer suggested a streamlined way to set up the accounts that would track DOGE’s actions, all I.T. employees were told to stay out of DOGE’s way.

“That was a huge red flag,” Berulis said. “That’s something that you just don’t do. It violates every core concept of security and best practice.”

The whistleblower report pointed out that controls to prevent insecure or unauthorized mobile devices, such as phones and tablets, from logging into the NLRB system were disabled. Some of the agency’s system was left exposed to the public internet, leaving it vulnerable to attacks. On top of that, internal alerts and monitors had been turned off, with login authentication disabled.

All of this raises disturbing questions about what DOGE did not only with the NLRB’s data but with the data it has collected from across the federal government, which includes Americans’ sensitive personal information. But with Musk exercising unchallenged authority in the government with Trump’s blessing, what can be done?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has broadly claimed that students who participated in protests opposing the genocide of Palestinians aided in the spread of antisemitism on college campuses, as a justification for the Trump administration revoking their visa status. 

But Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Monday at his citizenship interview in Vermont, strongly condemned antisemitism during an interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes in December 2023.

During the interview, Mahdawi was asked about his experience hearing someone say, “Death to Jews” at a pro-Palestine walk-out  at Columbia a month after the massacre on October 7, which launched Israel’s catastrophic military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 50,000 people. 

“I was shocked, and I walked directly to the person, and I told him, ‘You don’t represent us because this is not something that we agree with,’” Mahdawi recounted. 

“And I took the megaphone and I gave a speech and I said, ‘We here, are conscious, educated students and we know how to separate right from wrong. What this guy has said is clearly antisemitic against Jews.… To be antisemitic is unjust, is unjust. And the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” he said. 

Mahdawi, a Palestinian from the West Bank who said he’d seen his best friend killed by Israeli soldiers, was also president of the Columbia Buddhist Club and founder of the Palestinian Student Union. Mahdawi is a green card holder, like Mahmoud Khalil, another Columbia graduate student who was arrested by ICE last month. On Friday, a Louisiana immigration judge ruled that Khalil could be deported because he had endangered U.S. foreign policy. 

Last week, in an op-ed for Fox News, Rubio invoked supposed antisemitism as a reason to crack down on student protesters. 

“In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks against Israel, some of these foreign student visitors engaged in antisemitic activities and intimidation of Americans, many who happened to be of the Jewish faith,” Rubio wrote. “These foreigners shut down college campuses for American citizens, harassed Jewish students, blocked highways, and stormed buildings.”

Despite Rubio’s claim that visa revocations targeted students engaged in “antisemitic activities,” the State Department has already admitted that some of its targets don’t fit the bill. 

Before Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk was grabbed off the street by ICE agents, the State Department determined that the Trump administration had no evidence linking her to antisemitic activity.

Kristi Noem is obsessed with being the face of Homeland Security, and it’s starting to annoy officials across White House agencies.

The Homeland Security secretary is known for her live tweeting of deportation raids and publicity stunts. She’s filmed videos while accompanying ICE on deportation raids in Arizona and on a helicopter ride with the Coast Guard. She often sports an ICE baseball cap, cowboy boots, a bullet-proof vest and always with a full blowout, fake eyelashes, and a $50,000 Rolex watch on her wrist—a desperate attempt to glamorize the White House’s mass deportation plan.

On her first day in office, Noem tweeted about a New York ICE raid (with a photo of herself of course) before the raid was even over, which hindered the element of surprise and pissed off ICE officials, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

As the face of national security, Noem seemingly feels the need to be physically part of her department’s (often illegal) deportation efforts, or at least be the spokesperson for them. Following the unlawful deportation of more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, many of whom had no criminal record, Noem herself flew to the megaprison where they were being held to film a propaganda video.

“I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you can face,” Noem said from the prison in a video posted on X. “Know that this facility is one of the tools in our tool kit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”

Her frequent travel means she is pretty much never at her office in Washington, D.C., “which has irritated many at DHS,” sources told the Journal. Her internal credibility is further weakened by the appointment of other officials like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, who control much of the deportation logistics. Noem reportedly can’t handle losing the spotlight in the office (where you’ll find framed photos of her on ICE ride-alongs).

“Noem has grown so distrustful of agency staff that she has started threatening and even administering polygraph tests to people suspected of leaking, including Trump appointees, according to officials familiar with the matter,” the Journal wrote.

Though DHS has deported more than 23,000 people since January under Noem’s leadership, the president is frustrated she’s nowhere near his goal of deporting one million people per year. Add him to the list of people pissed at Kristi Noem.

At a rally in Nampa, Idaho, on Monday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a message for her colleague, Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

“How can anyone possibly make an objective vote on health care, energy, or war when their own money is tied up in pharmaceutical, oil and gas, or defense company stocks? You can’t. And we saw it just happen with Trump’s corrupt and disastrous and rushed tariff scheme, Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd at the Fighting Oligarchy rally with Senator Bernie Sanders.

“We saw Marjorie Taylor Greene buy that dip,” Ocasio-Cortez added to boos from the audience. “I got one question for her: How much did you make? How much did you make off of people’s despair? How much did you make off that panic? How much did you make off of that suffering?”

According to a public disclosure Monday, Greene bought between $21,000 and $315,000 in stocks last Tuesday and Wednesday in 17 companies including Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, and Palantir, just hours before President Trump announced he was partially pausing some of his tariffs and deepening a possible ethics violation. Trump later bragged about how much money his friends made off of the pause, blatantly admitting to market manipulation.

“I hope we see now that it was all about manipulating the markets so that he could quietly enrich his friends who bought the dip before reversing it all in the morning,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have been barnstorming the country, holding rallies against oligarchy and the Trump administration. They have drawn large crowds angry at Trump and the GOP, even in areas that strongly support Republicans, by calling out the influence of billionaires in American politics at the expense of everyone else. If their attacks keep landing, their rallies will only grow and build momentum for a long-overdue political revolution.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is ignoring the obvious illegality of President Donald Trump’s outrageous request to exile U.S. citizens to foreign prisons.

During an interview Monday night, Fox News host Jesse Watters asked the attorney general whether Trump’s pitch to outsource the imprisonment of U.S. citizens was even legal.

“Now, the president was musing about sending some of the most horrible people in this country down to that megaprison, you know, people that push ladies into subways and hit old ladies with baseball bats to the head. Is that legal to do, is that something you’re allowed to do?” Watters asked.

“Well, Jesse, these are Americans who he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country, and crime is going to decrease dramatically because he has given us the directive to make America safe again,” Bondi replied. “These people need to be locked up as long as they can, as long as the law allows, we’re not gonna let ’em go anywhere. And if we have to build more prisons in our country, we will do it!”

Bondi’s answer is lacking, well, an actual answer—probably because deporting U.S. citizens is not legal. Trump’s plan to exile Americans who are incarcerated to foreign countries not only violates multiple federal codes on the keeping of U.S. prisoners, it would also potentially violate the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

Bondi’s canned answer came just hours after Trump said during a press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele that he had specifically asked her to look into the legality of sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador to be imprisoned. Trump made no mention of building additional prisons in the U.S., but said that the U.S. would be willing to financially support the construction of more prisons abroad.

Clearly, Bondi is waging a political battle as much as a legal one, despite her promises that she would not act merely as an operative for Trump. Bondi must know that committing a “most heinous” crime does not actually disqualify citizens from their legal rights—but when faced with Trump’s despotic plot, the attorney general declined to offer an answer in accordance with U.S. law.