Ron Johnson Goes Full 9/11 Truther in Deranged Rant

Senator Ron Johnson may now be a 9/11 truther. 

The Republican and senior senator representing Wisconsin told right-wing commentator Benny Johnson on the latter’s podcast Monday that he has questions about the official story of the September 11, 2001, attacks. 

Specifically, the senator echoed a conspiracy theory about the collapse of Building 7, suggesting that the building on the World Trade Center complex fell as the result of a controlled demolition and attacking the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s investigation into the collapse.  

“I don’t know that you can find structural engineers other than the ones that had the corrupt investigation inside NIST that would say that thing didn’t come down in any other way than a controlled demolition,” the senator said. 

“Within these agencies, a lot of them are going to cover their tracks and cover things up and destroy a lot of evidence,” the senator noted, alleging a government cover-up. “It’s gonna be very frustrating for the American public because this is their information. They deserve the truth. It’s been hidden from them way too long.”

The senator said he expects there to soon be congressional hearings on the attacks, and praised the podcaster for “opening up the aperture on 9/11.” 

“I know you and I are both considered conspiracy theorists, but that’s exactly how they keep this stuff covered up,” the senator said. 

The senator was narrowly reelected in 2022, facing a tough Democratic challenger in Mandela Barnes, then Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor, but this isn’t the first time he has embraced an unfounded conspiracy. He embraced and even assisted Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, claiming that Democrats used fake electors, in a classic case of projection.

He also downplayed the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, calling the rioters “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law.” As a senator of a battleground state whose Senate term is up in 2028, the same year as Trump, Johnson may want to watch his words, lest he be ousted. 

Republicans are quietly pushing to slash Medicaid to fund Donald Trump’s tax cuts and immigration spending.

The effort has been subtle and behind the scenes, and disguised as a way to eliminate Medicaid  fraud and protect the program’s most vulnerable recipients. But several Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, are desperately trying to revive a yearslong fight to eliminate the expanded Medicaid eligibility requirements included in Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which gives millions of low-income adults health coverage.

“The change has been easy to miss, because so many other stories are dominating the news—and because the main evidence is a subtle shift in Republican rhetoric,” The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn wrote in a recent piece. “But that shift has been crystal clear if you follow the ins and outs of health care policy—and if you were listening closely to House Speaker Mike Johnson a week ago, when he appeared on Fox News.” 

Speaking to Fox News, Johnson stuck to MAGA’s well-rehearsed safety-net program script. 

“We have to root out fraud, waste, and abuse.… When you have people on the program that are draining the resources, it takes it away from the people that are actually needing it the most and are intended to receive it,” Johnson said. “You’re talking about young, single mothers, down on their fortunes at a moment—the people with real disabilities, the elderly. And we’ve got to protect and preserve that program. So we’re going to preserve the integrity of it.”

The Louisiana Republican made a similar argument when he pushed for a budget resolution in February that would cut at least $880 billion from a funding pot that includes Medicaid to pay for Trump’s tax cuts. At the time, he argued Medicaid is “not for 29-year-olds sitting on their couches playing video games.”

But there are millions of low-income people on Medicaid—which provides health coverage to one in five Americans—who need health coverage regardless of their age, gender, or marital status, and many of them are GOP constituents. Nearly three dozen House Republicans represent districts with more people than average receiving coverage through Obama’s expansion, according to a data analysis from health nonprofit KNN. 

In Johnson’s own district in Louisiana, 38 percent of the population relies on Medicaid, the analysis found. The House speaker will clearly not be stopped by anything, not even the health of his constituents, in his never-ending tirade against universal health care.

The Trump administration is trying to figure out how to get American women to have more babies, according to The New York Times.

They are exploring options like reserving 30 percent of Fulbright scholarships to applicants who are parents and/or married, giving mothers that $5,000 “baby bonus” that Trump promised during the campaign season, and even a government-funded program to better educate women on their own menstrual cycles so that they know when they should be trying for a baby. The administration has not yet settled on its final plan, according to the Times report.

“The President wants America to be a country where all children can safely grow up and achieve the American dream,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “As a mother myself, I am proud to work for a president who is taking significant action to leave a better country for the next generation.”

The impetus for this right-wing pronatalism is undeniably Project 2025 and the white ethnonationalists at the heart of it. Vice President JD Vance has also made childbearing a focus point, noting at the 2025 March for Life that he wanted more “babies in the United States of America” and more “beautiful young men and women” to parent them. He also infamously described the Democratic Party as full of “childless cat ladies” who are anti-children.

An NPR report that a search is underway for a new secretary of defense is being met with vehement denials from the White House. 

In a post on X, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the news that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s job was in trouble, calling the story “total FAKE NEWS based on one anonymous source who clearly has no idea what they are talking about.”

“As the President said this morning, he stands strongly behind [Hegseth],” Leavitt’s post said. 

President Trump was asked by a reporter at the White House Easter egg roll Monday morning, prior to the report’s publication, if he had confidence in Hegseth, to which he replied, “Why would you even ask a question like that?

“Ask the Houthis how much dysfunction there is. There’s none. Pete’s doing a great job. Everybody’s happy with him. We have the highest recruitment numbers I think we’ve had in 28 years,” Trump said. “No, he’s doing a great job. It’s just fake news.

“They just bring up stories. I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people, and that’s what he’s doing, so you don’t always have friends when you do that,” Trump added. 

Hegseth is under fire for sharing details about U.S. airstrikes against targets in Yemen in a private Signal chat last month that included his wife and brother, at around the same time he shared the war plans in another group chat with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

According to other reports, the Pentagon has been in disarray for the past month, not just because of “Signalgate” but also due to other sensitive leaks and mass firings. On Friday, three top Pentagon employees were fired over a leak investigation in the department. If the NPR report is true, the president may be getting fed up with Hegseth’s constant flow of bad news. Perhaps his narrow confirmation was a sign that Hegseth shouldn’t have gotten the job. 

MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared to mock Pope Francis’s death on Monday, calling him “evil.”

“Today there were major shifts in global leaderships,” Taylor Greene wrote on X, alluding to the death of one of the world’s most influential religious leaders without naming him directly. “Evil is being defeated by the hand of God.”

She did not issue any clarification after coming under fire for the post.

This is par for the course for a far-right congresswoman who has expressed that she thinks Catholic bishops are “destroying” the country and that the Catholic Church as a whole is “controlled by Satan.”

American conservatives have maintained a fraught relationship with Pope Francis, as the first Latin American pope was often critical of the Trump administration and its policies.

Vice President JD Vance met with Pope Francis Sunday, just hours before the progressive pontiff passed. Coincidence? Yes—but good luck telling that to the internet, which won’t stop joking that Donald Trump’s antagonistic ally had something to do with it.

During his 12-year papacy, the pope was an advocate for the rights of LGBTQ+ people and Palestinians and a staunch critic of Trump’s MAGA agenda. He even openly spoke against Vance, who tried to refashion Catholic teaching to justify Trump’s massive deportation scheme.

Suffice it to say, the internet is now suggesting that Vance made quick work vanquishing the Vicar of Christ.

Not everyone was accusing him of doing something, just asking questions.

But people on X certainly had their theories. Specifically, that Vance might be the Antichrist.

Others weren’t quite as convinced.

To be sure, not everyone was suggesting that Vance had carried out some kind of unholy hit. But he certainly didn’t help things.

Some suggested there could be evidence of an emerging trend that Vance has a bad touch.

Pope Francis’s death report, released Monday afternoon by the Vatican, indicated he died of a cerebral stroke, which caused him to fall into a coma and suffer “irreversible cardiocirculatory collapse,” The New York Times reported. He had long suffered from chronic lung disease and developed double pneumonia earlier this year.

This story has been updated.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele wants to exchange Venezuelan deportees from the United States being unlawfully held in prison for political prisoners being held in Venezuela.

He made the terrifying proposition to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro via X Sunday evening.

“Mr. @NicolasMaduro, you have said on numerous occasions that you want the Venezuelans back and free,” Bukele wrote. “Unlike you, who have political prisoners, we don’t have political prisoners. All the Venezuelans we have in custody were detained as part of an operation against gangs like the Tren de Aragua in the United States.”

Last month, Donald Trump invoked the rarely used Alien Enemies Act to unlawfully deport more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants—the majority of whom have no criminal record—based on unfounded claims that they were part of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua Gang. He also ignored a court order telling him to stop the deportation. The deportees are now being held in CECOT, a notorious prison in El Salvador that has no contact with the outside world.

Bukele happily agreed to hold the Venezuelan deportees captive in exchange for a $6 million payment from the U.S. government. In complete disregard for the lives of innocent Venezuelans, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” is now proposing to trade human beings he was paid to lock up for a handpicked group of people he wants in El Salvador.

“The only reason they are imprisoned is because they opposed you and your electoral fraud,” Bukele said of the political prisoners he wants released. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that includes the repatriation of 100% of the 252 Venezuelans who were deported, in exchange for the release and delivery of an identical number (252) of the thousands of political prisoners that you hold.”

Among those he wants released include the son-in-law of former Venezuelan presidential candidate Edmundo González, lawyer and activist Rocío San Miguel, journalist Roland Carreño, four political leaders seeking asylum in the Argentine embassy, and nearly 50 detained citizens of various nationalities.

Venezuela’s chief prosecutor, Tarek William Saab, said in a statement that Bukele’s proposal was “cynical” and called the 44-year-old dictator a “neofascist.”

“The treatment received by Venezuelans in the United States and El Salvador constitutes a serious violation of international human rights law and constitutes a crime against humanity,” Saab said in the statement.

Bukele’s alarming idea for a swap comes as the Trump administration is desperately trying to deport more Venezuelan immigrants through the Alien Enemies Act. It looks like Bukele will do everything he can to capitalize on Trump’s stupidity and benefit his own authoritarian government.

Trump administration aide Stephen Miller thinks the United States deserves reparations for mass immigration.

That was Miller’s response to Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s idea that the administration be held in civil contempt and fined $1 million for each day it refuses to follow the Supreme Court’s ruling that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Savador, be returned to the United States.

“Where does our whole country go to get repaid for all of the wealth, all of the prosperity and security, that has been stolen from us by decades of uncontrolled, illegal mass migration?” Miller said. “We all deserve reparations for what has been stolen from us.”

Miller didn’t stop there, complaining that “we used to have a functioning public school system in this country,” until it was ruined by “open borders.”

“An entire generation of Americans—multiple generations, in fact—have been robbed of educational opportunities,” Miller complained, raising his voice.

The White House aide went on to blame immigrants for deaths from fentanyl, the rise of gangs, and violent crime against Americans.

“Where do any of their families go to get reparations?” Miller said. “There aren’t enough volumes that could fit into a library to calculate the carnage that has been inflicted by the Democrat Party’s policy of open borders.”

The Trump administration has accused Abrego Garcia, with no evidence, of being a violent member of the MS-13 gang and already admitted his deportation was an “administrative error.” He has no criminal record but continues to be held in El Salvador due to a deal the Trump administration made with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whom it is paying to hold undocumented immigrants in the country.

Miller’s absurd demand belies the fact that previous administrations, including Democratic presidents such as Joe Biden and Barack Obama, deported countless undocumented immigrants. It also ignores the fact that, statistically speaking, native-born Americans commit more crimes than immigrants. But Miller’s views have long been influenced by xenophobia and racism, which is commonplace in the Trump administration.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed it was “fake news,” but purported plans to shutter huge sections of the Department of State sent shivers down the spines of U.S. diplomats over the weekend.

An alleged draft order circulated through the State Department over the weekend, outlining a complete overhaul of the agency to “streamline mission delivery” while eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse,” according to The New York Times. The plan recommended eliminating the department’s bureaus focusing on African affairs and all “non-essential embassies and consulates in sub-Saharan Africa.” It would also shutter bureaus on democracy and human rights, refugees and migration, and one that works with international organizations. It would abolish the special envoy on climate and shrink the U.S. diplomatic presence in Canada to a “significantly reduced team” overseen by Rubio himself.

The document also pitched changes to how the foreign service works, ending an “outdated and disorganized generalist global rotation model” for a model that promotes specialization in one particular area. The plan called to terminate the foreign service’s contract to recruit fellowship candidates from Howard University, a historically Black institution.

Rubio responded to the report in a post on X Sunday, writing that it was “fake news.” But the proposed changes reportedly rattled diplomats, who thought the memo could be real, according to Politico.

“There’s a lot that could be reformed, but you could give infinite monkeys infinite typewriters, and they would come up with something better than that,” said one U.S. diplomat who spoke to Politico. They called the plan “bonkers crazypants.”

Amid the massive cuts proposed by the Trump administration, it’s no surprise that the radical reshuffling seemed like the real thing. 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.

Last week, a memorandum that was part of a broader budget for 2026 that is due to the Office of Budget Management outlined a plan to close 10 embassies and 17 consulates. 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.

Politico reported that there was significant reason to doubt the veracity of last week’s memo, which was not consistent with other communications from the Trump administration to Congress and did not follow the typical structure of an executive order.

Pope Francis has died at 88. The first Latin American pope, Francis was both beloved and reviled by many for his progressive, humanistic principles, repeatedly warning against the dangers of climate change and creating greater acceptance of LGBTQ people within the church. He also made his deep distaste for Trump and his anti-immigrant policies well known. 

Here are four times the pope talked about Trump and his dangerous MAGA agenda:

1. “A person who only thinks about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” the pope said in February 2016, when asked about then-candidate Trump’s proposal to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it. “That is not in the Gospel.” 

“For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful,” Trump replied. “If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which, as everyone knows, is ISIS’ ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president.”

2. Francis was also directly critical of Trump’s attack on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. 

“The President of the United States presents himself as pro-life and if he is a good pro-lifer, he understands that family is the cradle of life and its unity must be protected,” Francis said in 2017, after Trump ended the program giving legal protections to about 800,000 “Dreamers” who entered the country as children. “I think this law comes not from parliament but from the executive.… If that is so, I am hopeful that it will be re-thought.”

3. In 2025, he criticized Trump and border czar Tom Homan’s mass deportation plans.

“The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.… What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”

4. The Pope’s final public criticism of the Trump administration came in February 2025, when vice president and recently reformed Catholic JD Vance used the Catholic concept of ordo amoris to justify mass deportation, isolationism, and a general resentment of immigrants.  

Francis attacked the very logic of Vance’s claim. 

“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. “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.”

Pope Francis’s death will leave us without a powerful moral barometer who always put principles over politics.