Republican Rep’s Town Hall Goes off the Rails as He Defends DOGE

Republican Representative Byron Donalds was met with boos and jeers at his town hall on Monday, after refusing to answer a basic question about Elon Musk and DOGE.

“As a member of the Oversight Committee, what oversight are you imposing on Elon Musk and DOGE?” a constituent asked. The question was followed by over 10 seconds of cheering and applause. 

Donalds proceeded to explain how DOGE works rather than answer the question directly, insisting that Musk’s anti-woke, government-slashing operation was in the same vein as what former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama did with “special employees” in their own administrations.  

“In terms of oversight from Congress, that’s much more of an Appropriations [Committee] aspect,” Donalds said. “What DOGE is doing right now, is they’re going through every agency and they’re examining any contracts or any lack of efficiency in spending federal dollars. This is something that—”

The crowd began to groan and boo, but Donalds continued. 

“Like I said, what they are doing is under the direction of the president of the United States. If you’re gonna talk about what oversight is doing, we actually have to let the DOGE uh, uh, Committee, the DOGE Department, actually finish its work,” Donalds explained. “What they are examining right now is inefficiency in the federal system. This is something that President Obama wanted to do when President Obama was elected—”

This nonanswer was met with even more frustration from the town hall crowd. 

“You can boo if you want to, but those are the facts,” Donalds replied.

Donalds essentially admitted that he’d be doing absolutely nothing to monitor DOGE as an Oversight Committee member. Trump already gave DOGE permission to fire thousands of people and start cuts to Social Security, so everything must be fine. 

Donald Trump blew his top at the Supreme Court Monday, complaining that the high court, along with the rest of the judicial system, is getting in the way of his removing “criminals from our Country.”

The president took to Truth Social to vent after the nine justices voted 7–2 over the weekend to block Trump’s deportation of Venezuelan immigrants under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act without due process.

“My team is fantastic, doing an incredible job, however, they are being stymied at every turn by even the U.S. Supreme Court, which I have such great respect for, but which seemingly doesn’t want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela, or any other Country, for that matterPeople that came here illegally!” Trump posted.

The president scoffed at the notion of every immigrant receiving due process before deportation.

“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years. We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do,” Trump added.

Trump is upset that his mass deportation efforts are running into legal hurdles. The self-proclaimed “law and order” president, however, seems to think that people he doesn’t like don’t deserve the right to due process but only the punitive measures of the law.

If Trump is concerned that there are too many people to stand trial, perhaps he should have increased funding for immigration courts and judges rather than divert so many government agencies and resources to arresting and detaining immigrants. But again, due process is something he doesn’t quite understand. After all, he refused to face accountability for his own criminal charges, and he pardoned some particularly violent criminals who rioted on his behalf.

Fox News host Will Cain inexplicably claimed Monday that he had never heard Donald Trump say he wanted to deport U.S. citizens—even though the president has now floated the idea several times.

During an interview, Florida Representative Maxwell Frost spoke about the stakes of the Trump administration’s removal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man with no criminal record who was deported to El Salvador due to an “administrative error,” on thin allegations of gang membership. 

“It’s not just about him, it’s about the fact that in the Oval Office, Donald Trump brought up that he wants to do the same thing to ‘homegrowns,’ homegrowns being U.S. citizens,” Frost said. The Florida Democrat was referring to a disturbing remark Trump made last week during a press conference with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. 

But Cain said he couldn’t remember, insisting he had never heard Trump say any such thing. 

“Donald Trump’s made a statement about wanting to deport American citizens? Do you have that in front of you? I’ve not seen that statement,” Cain said. “Can you please quote where that comes from, that he’d like to deport American citizens?”

“He said it in the Oval Office; he said he wants to go for homegrowns next, people born and raised in the United States—” Frost said, before Cain interrupted him. 

“Do you have anything? Do you have anything beside your word on that?” Cain said. “I’ve not seen, I’ve not seen that, so. Beyond your word, do you have a source of that? I would love to see that clip or that transcript of him saying he wants to deport American citizens.”

“There is a clip online; I encourage people to just google ‘Donald Trump homegrown,’” Frost said.

Crucially, the instance Frost cited wasn’t the first time Trump made a remark about deporting U.S. citizens to foreign prisons: The president had said in March that he loved the idea, and in February, he said he’d deport U.S. citizens to El Salvador “in a heartbeat.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the president was enthusiastic about the idea and was looking into “legal pathways.” Spoiler alert: There are none.  

During his meeting with Bukele, Trump had flat-out said that he’d asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into the legality. So it’s a little less than plausible that Cain, who hosts his own show on Fox News every weekday, hasn’t heard about the president’s pitch to deport U.S. citizens. 

Online, some theorized that Cain was simply attempting to demonstrate his aptitude for Defense, as the Pentagon may be preparing to undergo some reshuffling …

… while others pointed out how ridiculous it was to pretend not to know about a story his own news agency covered. 

Republican Representative Derrick Van Orden seems to think Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s time serving in the Army National Guard justifies leaking national security information over text, not once but twice.

“I don’t want to hear from any healthy American that was of fighting age on 9/11 who did not join the military and deploy to combat talking shit about @PeteHegseth,” Van Orden wrote on X Monday. “You had your chance to serve our Nation when She needed you and you did not. Stand down, the Warriors will take it from here.”

A “warrior” would probably know better than to share sensitive information about a U.S. military attack in multiple group chats or bring along his spouse to classified meetings with foreign military officials. People aren’t mad at the 44-year-old defense secretary because they haven’t served in the military; they’re mad because he’s causing utter chaos as the Pentagon’s lead and putting the country’s national security at risk while he’s at it.

But Van Orden is a staunch Trump loyalist, and he’ll clearly use whatever weird excuse he can come up with to defend the president’s wildly inexperienced defense secretary, even as other GOP members begin to to turn on him.

“The military should always pride itself on operational security. If the reports are true, the secretary of defense has failed at operational security, and that is unacceptable,” Republican Representative Don Bacon told Axios about Hegseth Monday. X users in Van Orden’s comments shared similar concerns.

“​​I served 13 years … then after 9/11 came back in and did another 9 years including 3 Iraq tours,” podcast host Fred Wellman wrote, in response to Van Orden. “I am a Ranger qualified having gone to the school and graduated unlike Pete. He’s a piece of shit. He is endangering our troops lives and you are too for defending the indefensible. Also … get f*cked with this ‘Warriors’ bullshit. You aren’t a warrior … you’re an asshole who talks and talks.”

The market plunged Monday as Donald Trump continued to level lame attacks against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank more than 1,000 points, the yield on a 10-year Treasury note rose to 4.89 percent, and the ICE U.S. dollar index—which measures the dollar against foreign currencies—sank more than 1 percent to its lowest level since March 2022, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Even Big Tech companies were struggling in the market Monday, with Nvidia, Apple, and Tesla all taking hits.

CNBC’s Kelly Evans pointed out in The Exchange newsletter that typically when the market sinks, as it did during the Covid-19 pandemic, the dollar goes up and Treasury yields drop. Now, the opposite is true—meaning that the costs of imported goods will be even higher than the boosted prices caused by Trump’s tariffs on nearly every country in the world.

And Trump is only exacerbating the problem by continuing to poke at Powell.

Last week, Trump started mocking Powell after the central banker refused to lower interest rates to offset the president’s destabilizing “reciprocal tariff” policy. Powell had also warned of the possibility of rising inflation and stagnated growth. Kevin Hassett, the National Economic Council director, claimed that the White House was reviewing having Powell removed—though the Fed chair has previously stated that the president cannot remove him.

Trump continued to chide Powell on Monday for denying his calls to lower interest rates. “With these costs trending so nicely downward, just what I predicted they would do, there can almost be no inflation, but there can be a SLOWING of the economy unless Mr. Too Late, a major loser, lowers interest rates, NOW,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

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.