Trump Fires Top Official Over Loose Ties to “Anonymous” Author

The White House fired an official because he knew the guy who criticized President Donald Trump in the famous “Anonymous” op-ed in The New York Times seven years ago, The Washington Post reported Friday.

The executive director of the Office of Trade Relations at Customs and Border Protection, George E. Bogden, was abruptly asked to leave his post over apparent ties to Miles Taylor, the author of the anonymous 2018 op-ed, sources told the Post. Taylor was Trump’s chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security at the time, and the piece revealed his and his colleagues’ internal efforts to thwart parts of the president’s agenda. Taylor made his authorship public in 2020 after leaving his position as chief of staff.

The president has reportedly been obsessed with the op-ed ever since. He ordered the Department of Justice to investigate Bogden’s seemingly thin ties to Taylor, despite Bodgen’s centrality to implementing the president’s absurd tariff scheme. Bodgen’s job was to listen to the trade industry’s complaints and grievances amid the economic chaos spurred by Trump in recent weeks.

It’s unclear what the DOJ found to merit Bogden’s ousting, and there are few ties connecting the two men other than a Facebook photo of Bogden at Taylor’s wedding in 2019, one year before Taylor revealed he wrote the op-ed. Sources told the Post that Bogden and Taylor “have not been close” and that “few Trump allies, including Bogden, were aware of Taylor’s role in writing the piece at the time it was published or by the time of the wedding.”

Taylor’s humiliating revelation to the public clearly instilled a deep sense of paranoia in the president that hasn’t dissipated even seven years later. “From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions,” Taylor wrote at the time. “Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.”

As Trump works to rid his administration of any Taylor-like officials, his firing of a yearslong supporter like Bogden (while he continues to defend a Cabinet member who shared national security information over text) is a stark reminder that the president values unwavering loyalty above all else.

In the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency, Elon Musk lost nearly twice as much money as he cut in government spending as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Following a particularly humiliating earnings report from Tesla Tuesday, Musk told investors that starting in May, he would be reducing the amount of time he spends in the White House to pay more attention to his struggling electric car company.

In the first three months of the year, Tesla’s profits crashed 71 percent, falling to a mere $409 million, compared with $1.39 billion from the same quarter last year. The drop is undoubtedly a direct result of Musk’s entanglement with Trump’s administration, where Tesla has become a symbol of extreme cost-cutting measures that have led to sweeping layoffs and essential services being gutted.

During his time in the White House, Musk’s net worth has plummeted a whopping $122 billion, nearly twice as much as the $61.5 billion he was able to save the government, according to the Musk Watch DOGE Tracker, which tallies DOGE’s itemized cuts to contracts, grants, and real estate. Only $12.6 billion worth of cuts have actually been verified, according to the tracker.

DOGE still claims a far higher figure of $160 billion in estimated savings, but a closer look at Musk’s activities at DOGE show that the billionaire bureaucrat barely made a dent in the trillions of dollars he set out to slash in government spending.

“DOGE’s verified savings have been less than 1/10 of 1 percent of federal spending,” Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow and budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute told Axios Friday. “There have been embarrassing accounting errors, lots of public statements that turned out to be false or misleading, or actions slapped back by the courts.”

Reidl told Axios that Musk’s minute cuts will likely be offset by the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts at the IRS.

“The spending savings are so small that they will be undoubtedly overwhelmed by the significant tax revenue losses which result from gutting IRS tax enforcement,” she said. “It makes a mockery of claims that DOGE is really just about cutting deficits.”

Musk’s net worth began sinking last month after Trump failed to dispel rumors of a recession on the horizon, wiping out $29 billion of his ally’s own wealth. Things only got worse after Trump announced his sweeping “reciprocal tariff” policy at the beginning of April.

Sure, Musk was the biggest individual winner when Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, sending Tesla stock shooting up 23 percent. But his time in the White House has taken a bite out of his wealth and done considerable damage to Tesla’s brand.

“The brand damage caused by Musk in the White House/DOGE over the past few months will not go away,” said Wedbush Securities analyst and beleaguered Tesla bull Dan Ives, according to Axios.

It seems that Musk may not be long for Washington—Trump even referred to him in the past tense Thursday. His status as a special government employee is set to expire next month anyway. And he clearly isn’t getting along with members of the administration, publicly picking fights over the IRS with the treasury secretary and starting rows with Trump’s top trade adviser over tariffs.

But it’s too soon to rejoice at the permanent departure of the billionaire bureaucrat. He told investors that he’d be cutting down to one or two days a week but that he’d have to continue working with the White House at least until Trump’s term had ended. But if Musk is hoping for a brand reset, he may have another think coming. No amount of cutting days in the office can erase the image of Musk gleefully waving a chain saw around.

President Trump told Time magazine that he is essentially doing nothing to comply with the Supreme Court order to bring back wrongly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador.

In an interview published Friday, Trump said he hadn’t asked Salvador President Nayib Bukele to release Abrego Garcia because “nobody asked me to ask him that question.”

Here is the transcript of that absurd moment.

In our interview last year, Mr. President, you committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders.

I said what?

You committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders—

Yeah.

When you and I spoke last April. Are you still committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders?

Sure, I believe in the court system.

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that you have to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You haven’t done so. Aren’t you disobeying the Supreme Court?

Well, that’s not what my people told me—they didn’t say it was, they said it was—the nine to nothing was something entirely different.

Let me quote from the ruling. “The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.” Are you facilitating a release?

I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you’re saying. But I leave that to my lawyers. If they want—and that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country. I don’t make that decision.

Have you asked President Bukele to return him?

I haven’t, uh, he said he wouldn’t.

Did you ask him?

But I haven’t asked him positively, but he said he wouldn’t.

But if you haven’t asked him, then how are you facilitating his release?

Well, because I haven’t been asked to ask him by my attorneys. Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.

Do you believe he deserves his day in court?

I believe that they made him look like a saint, and then we found out about him. He wasn’t a saint. He was MS-13. He was a wife beater and he had a lot of things that were very bad, you know, very, very bad. When I first heard of the situation, I was not happy, and then I found out that he was a person who was an MS-13 member. And in fact, he had a tattooed right on his—I’m sure you saw that—he had it tattooed right on his knuckles: MS-13. No, I believe he’s a man who has got quite a past. This is no longer just a nice, wonderful man from Maryland, which people, which the fake news had me and other people for a period of time believing. Now, nobody believes that. And I think this is a very bad—I think this is another men [in] women’s sports thing for the Democrats.

Trump’s answers here convey both a disdain toward Abrego Garcia and an active ignorance of the critical situation he and the likely hundreds of other wrongfully detained migrants are in. The Supreme Court orders him unanimously to bring back Abrego Garcia, and he just shrugs his shoulders and tells Time that his lawyers said otherwise—“They feel that the order said something very much different from what you’re saying.… Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.”

In the same interview, Trump states again that he would “love to” send U.S. citizens to jails like CECOT if he could.

Donald Trump suggested Thursday that the fate of the world rested on the United States gaining control of Greenland.

During a press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Trump made a dramatic claim as he dismissed a question about securing NATO backing in his outlandish bid for control of the world’s largest island.

“Greenland’s gonna be interesting, but that’s for another day,” Trump said. “I think we need that for international peace, and if we don’t have that it’s a big threat to our world. So I think that Greenland is very important for international peace.”

Trump has been outspoken about his pipe dream to acquire the Danish-controlled territory for its value as a geopolitical asset and mineral and oil resources. Crucially, Greenland is strategically significant to the United States because it sits between Russia and the eastern coast of the United States and is the fastest way from Europe to New York.

Greenland is also located beside the Norwegian Sea, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea, where the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet operates.

In March, Trump told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that he could be very “instrumental” in helping the U.S. acquire the semiautonomous territory from Denmark, which the U.S. desperately needed for “international security, not just security.”

Rutte responded by saying he wouldn’t drag NATO into the issue but that the island did have critical proximity to Chinese and Russian routes.

For now, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump appear as allies, as the president attempts to conduct Ukraine peace negotiations that will result in a fruitful deal for the U.S. and Moscow. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned during his visit in February that although there was a “nice ocean” between them, the U.S. might “feel” Russia’s war in the future.

Meanwhile, tensions with China have only continued to rise as Trump struggles to de-escalate his foolish trade war, which has seen tariffs on Chinese imports to the U.S. rise to 145 percent.

As preposterous as Trump’s dreams of acquiring the island are, the Trump administration has already set to work to make it a reality, holding multiple meetings of the White House National Security Council about the proposal and launching a massive public relations campaign intent on somehow convincing Greenlanders to annex themselves. In Greenland and Denmark, the reception to such efforts has been about as frosty as the icy tundra.

A group of Democratic lawmakers are demanding answers from nine major law firms that struck deals with Donald Trump’s administration to avoid being targeted by the president’s fury.

In a series of letters Thursday, 16 Democratic lawmakers warned the managing partners of several large law firms that the agreements they’d made with the Trump administration—offering millions of dollars in pro bono work on issues that support the president’s agenda, among other concessions—were unenforceable and potentially violated federal and state laws.

The 16 lawmakers that sent the letters included Representatives Dave Min of California, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Becca Balint of Vermont. They warned that by issuing executive orders targeting certain law firms, the Trump administration had used “coercive and illegal measures to target certain law firms and threaten their ability to represent and retain their clients.” In total, the law firms had pledged a whopping $940 million in pro bono work to the Trump administration.

The letters alleged that Trump’s scheme to blackmail firms into abolishing their DEI practices and cough up millions in free work could potentially violate federal laws against bribery, defrauding the public, and even racketeering. The deals could also potentially violate the Hobbs Act, according to lawmakers, which “prohibits obstruction, delay, or affecting commerce by extortion under color of official right.”

The deals potentially violated state laws and rules of professional conduct too, the lawmakers said.

Not every firm that struck a deal, or received a letter, had been openly targeted by the Trump administration. Several had preemptively approached the government to make concessions, according to statements from the firms. The lawmakers warned that the deals would have a “chilling effect” on “the availability of legal services for those clients and matters targeted by the Trump administration.”

The nine law firms that received letters were Allen Overy Shearman Sterling LLP; Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft LLP; Latham & Watkins LLP; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP; Milbank LLP; Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP; and Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

In the letters, each firm was asked a series of questions about the details of their individual deals with the Trump administration, and how exactly they’d come about.

For example, Paul Weiss, the first law firm to bow to Trump, had agreed to acknowledge that one of its attorneys, Mark Pomerantz, had committed wrongdoing, according to the White House. Trump had targeted Pomerantz for his efforts to build a case against the president when Pomerantz served at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office—not illegal in the slightest. The lawmakers asked Paul Weiss to explain specifically what alleged “wrongdoing” Pomerantz had committed. Like many of the other firms, Paul Weiss had also offered millions in free legal services and revoked their hiring practices that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Other questions were the same for every firm. “Outside observers have also stated that these agreements represent a ‘Sword of Damocles,’ with a risk that the administration will again threaten to target firms with Executive Orders if they do not again yield to the President’s demands,” one question read, asking what the firm planned to do to “ensure that the administration will not be able to require more from the firm beyond the provisions currently in place?”

Earlier this week, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut penned letters to five major law firms that they accused of being “complicit in efforts to undermine the rule of law.”

Trump thinks that Russia not completely colonizing Ukraine is a concession on the path to peace.

“Mr. President … what concessions has Russia offered up thus far to get to the point where you’re closer to peace?” a reporter asked Trump, during a meeting with the Norwegian prime minister in the Oval Office on Thursday.

“Stopping the war. Stopping taking the whole country. Pretty big concession,” Trump replied dryly.

Promising to not invade a neighboring country is not a concession, especially not when you’ve already bombed said neighbor for over two years. Just hours before, Trump had resorted to Truth Social to beg Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop bombing Ukraine, after the worst assault on Kyiv in months.

The Trump administration continues to reveal that the so-called peace deal it wants to broker between Russia and Ukraine is just a way to force the latter to give up more land and resources. It’s not a deal, it’s not a ceasefire, it’s a shakedown.

Russian propagandists were practically giddy as they celebrated top U.S. officials—including Donald Trump—bending to the Kremlin’s demands.

“No one could have imagined we would live to see the day where the correct answer about to whom Crimea belongs would come from the president of the United States, and he will not only give it but will also teach the president of Ukraine what this correct answer is,” said business daily Kommersant writer Sergey Strokan on the Russian broadcast program 60 Minutes Wednesday night.

“April 23, 2025, can be confidently written into textbooks on modern history as a special date,” Strokan said. “It changed many things.”

State Secretary Marco Rubio spontaneously pulled out of Ukraine peace talks Wednesday after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy plainly rejected a U.S.-backed deal that would permanently hand over Crimea, an internationally recognized portion of Ukraine that has been under Russian occupation since 2014, to Russia.

“Ukraine will not legally recognize the occupation of Crimea,” Zelenskiy said at a press conference in Kyiv Tuesday. “There’s nothing to talk about here. This is against our Constitution.”

But Trump’s response to the land debate was seen as a massive win for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies. In a post on Truth Social Wednesday, Trump claimed that the territory was “lost years ago” and “and is not even a point of discussion” in the peace talks. Trump further threatened that Zelenskiy should give up Crimea or risk “losing the whole Country,” and said that the Ukrainian leader’s rejection of the peace deal would “do nothing but prolong the ‘killing field.’”

The Russian talking heads interpreted that message in just one way: that the U.S. had rescinded its international military dominance and aligned itself with Moscow, practically signing Ukraine’s death warrant and that of Europe’s protection along with it.

“The United States may withdraw its entire military contingent from Europe and remove American tactical nuclear weapons from the European NATO bases,” predicted military expert Igor Korotchenko. “We will see a totally new political reality, when Europe will be left one-on-one with Russia.”

Another state-backed TV show, The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, saw its host “prancing and grinning” as the U.S. cowered in submission, according to The Daily Beast.

Allowing Russia to keep Crimea is an incredible reversal of long-standing U.S. policy—and comes as a new approach for the Trump administration. In 2018, Trump’s former State Secretary Mike Pompeo called Russia to end its annexation of the Black Sea peninsula.

But in a White House press conference Thursday, Trump couldn’t muster a coherent explanation for the switch-up, only further deflecting responsibility for the ongoing conflict.

“This isn’t my war. This is Biden’s war,” Trump said. Earlier on Thursday—nearly 100 days into his second term—Trump had resorted to begging Putin to end the violence.

During the press briefing, Trump further claimed that Russia had offered major concessions in a possible peace deal. Those concessions, however, amounted to “stopping taking the whole country.”

“Pretty big concession,” Trump added.

Donald Trump is targeting a massive Democratic fundraising tool in an upcoming presidential memorandum banning foreign donations in U.S. elections, according to reporting from Politico.

Donations platform ActBlue, which almost all Democratic candidates use in both primary and general elections, has often been criticized by Republicans—without evidence—for what they see as fraudulent donations from foreign actors. Republican Representative Bryan Steil ordered ActBlue to turn over its records in October and found nothing of the sort. There was actually evidence of ActBlue’s new program for automatic rejections of donations from foreign nationals.

ActBlue raised $400 million in the first three months of 2025, and Trump’s order would effectively choke off donations to the Democratic Party.

“Nothing will deter or interrupt ActBlue’s mission and work to enable millions of Americans to participate in our democracy. There is an ongoing and persistent effort to weaken the confidence of the American people in what’s possible. This is the next version of ‘the big lie,’” ActBlue CEO and President Regina Wallace-Jones wrote in an email on Wednesday. “More than 28 million Americans participate in our democracy through our platform. We are not going to sit back idly and let their voices be silenced.… It is time for us to unify—as Americans—and create a powerful blue wall to fight against the creeping despotism of the Right, and to win back power in Washington D.C and the halls of government across the country.”

Trump’s presidential memorandum has yet to be released.

For anyone still doubting whether Donald Trump is contemplating a third term, consider that the president is currently selling “Trump 2028” hats.

The red caps were spotted on the online Trump store retailing for $50 a pop.

“Make a statement with this Made in America Trump 2028 hat. Fully embroidered with a snap closure in the back, this will become your new go-to hat,” the item description reads.

Trump has been continually suggesting the idea of running for a third term since he was on the campaign trail last year, but last month, the president insisted he was actually “not joking” about staying in power.  

During a phone call with NBC News’s Kristin Welker, the president said that he was actually very serious about potentially circumventing the Constitution in order to lead the country for another four years after his second term ends.

“No, no I’m not joking. I’m not joking,” the president said during a call in which he agreed with Welker that one such plan to keep him in office involved having Vice President JD Vance front the next Republican presidential ticket with Trump as his number two—roles that they would then switch once back in office.

“That’s one. But there are others too. There are others,” Trump said, refusing to clarify what the other plans are.

Another seemingly far-fetched idea, which involves altering the Constitution in order to keep Trump in power, would require the consent of most of the country. But that’s only if the president intends to lean on traditional methods, such as an election, to stay in the Oval Office.

As outlined in Article 5 of the Constitution, any such change requires at least two-thirds of the Senate and the House to agree on the modification, with that change then requiring ratification by a minimum of three-quarters of states in the nation.

A second approach to repealing the term-limiting amendment could be via a Constitutional Convention, though two-thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states.

A federal judge ruled Thursday to block parts of Donald Trump’s executive order last month attempting to overhaul elections and voting processes. 

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted a preliminary injunction to halt several of the order’s initiatives, including requiring proof of citizenship on voter registration forms and requiring people on public assistance to have their citizenship checked before they can register to vote. 

Late last month, Democratic Party–affiliated organizations, as well as several other nonprofit groups, filed two lawsuits seeking to halt the executive order, calling it unconstitutional. Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee, left other parts of the order intact, such as narrowing mail ballot deadlines.

Trump claimed in the order that the U.S. “fails to enforce basic and necessary election protections,” unlike other countries. 

“Many American elections now feature mass voting by mail, with many officials accepting ballots without postmarks or those received well after Election Day,” the order states. 

The ruling temporarily puts a roadblock against one right-wing attempt to disenfranchise voters. But another attack on voting rights, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, also seeks to require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Unlike Trump’s order, though, the SAVE Act goes even further in potentially making it harder for some married women to vote, as it would require the name on a registration form to match that on proof of citizenship documents, such as birth certificates. That bill has already passed the Republican-controlled House, aided by four Democratic votes.  

Republicans have long attacked the legitimacy of any election in which they have not performed well, led by Trump. In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump attacked the electoral process as “rigged,” pushing lies that “noncitizen voters” would skew the results. These claims seemed to miraculously disappear after Trump won, but conservatives are determined to right this imagined travesty. 

This story has been updated.