Elon Musk Whines That Trump Is Hanging Him Out to Dry

Donald Trump’s biggest 2024 donor isn’t too stoked about the administration’s spending habits.

Weeks after exiting his temporary role in the White House, Elon Musk is still speaking his mind on critical Republican affairs. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, the former government-diminishing task rabbit lamented that the “big, beautiful” bill being deliberated in the Senate would practically undo the Department of Government Efficiency’s work.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit—not decrease[s] it—and undermines the work the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said. “I think a bill could be big, or it could be beautiful—I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”

Musk’s DOGE was tasked with sizing down the federal government to cut spending. But in a separate interview Tuesday, the world’s richest man said he increasingly felt that his department was being used as a scapegoat for other administration failures.

“DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” Musk told The Washington Post. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”

But Musk isn’t the only powerful conservative to brush off Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill. Immediately after the House passed the reconciliation package last week, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham shot down some of the cuts included in the bill as “not real,” arguing that the House had done next to nothing to actually bring down federal spending.

Even a $880 billion cut in Medicaid couldn’t offset the gargantuan price tag on extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are estimated to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt. Those numbers have ruffled feathers among congressional budget hawks, who were under the impression that the Trump administration would be sizing down spending rather than beefing it up.

Several conservative senators have indicated they won’t vote for the bill if it includes a debt limit increase, including Senators Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and Rick Scott. The growing coalition of budget-conscious naysayers is threatening enough to potentially keep the bill from reaching the president’s desk, as Republicans grapple with their narrow majority in the Senate.

On Sunday, Johnson told CNN that he believes there’s enough opposition within the caucus to stall its advancement.

“We have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit,” Johnson told the network.

America’s national debt is currently more than $36.9 trillion, as of the time of publishing.

Donald Trump is pleading with the Supreme Court to make it easier to deport immigrants to countries they aren’t from, like South Sudan.

The president on Tuesday filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court, asking them to stay a lower court’s injunction last week that prevented the government from deporting a group of immigrants not from South Sudan to the country. U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy said that the White House provided “plainly insufficient” notice to the immigrants.

“It was impossible for these people to have a meaningful opportunity to object to their transfer to South Sudan,” Murphy ruled last Wednesday.

The Trump administration was not happy with the ruling,

“Many class members are aliens who have never been admitted into the United States,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the Justice Department’s filing to the Supreme Court. “Thus, they do not have due-process rights to any additional removal procedures beyond the ones the political branches have provided.”

“Those judicially created procedures are currently wreaking havoc on the third country removal process,” Sauer added. “In addition to usurping the Executive’s authority over immigration policy, the injunction disrupts sensitive diplomatic, foreign-policy, and national-security efforts.”

Murphy castigated the administration Monday evening for “manufacturing the very chaos they decry” by deporting the immigrants from Vietnam and Myanmar to South Sudan, which Murphy said violated his injunction.

“The court recognizes that the class members at issue here have criminal histories,” Murphy said. “But that does not change due process.… The court treats its obligation to these principles with the seriousness that anyone committed to the rule of law should understand.”

This point seems particularly difficult for Trump and the rest of his administration to understand: Immigrants they wish to deport still have the right of due process, and the judiciary has the ability to rule on the president’s decisions. Trump can claim “foreign policy” all he wants, but the immigrants residing on U.S. soil, who in many cases aren’t the criminals the president claims they are, are still subject to protections under U.S. law. Now he’s trying to convince the Supreme Court to give him what he wants.

Tension is bubbling in Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon.

The defense secretary’s senior advisers are falling further apart, causing rifts and scandals that are attracting the ire of the White House despite attempts to reset Hegseth’s team, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

“There’s a cold war that exists in between flash points,” one anonymous source told the Post while recounting flaring tempers on Hegseth’s team. “It’s unsettling at times.”

One of the more prominent rifts is between Eric Geressy, Hegseth’s former mentor, and Ricky Buria, a junior military assistant whom Hegseth tried and failed to morph into his chief of staff.

Shortly after The Atlantic revealed that its editor in chief had been included in a Signal chat where top Trump officials—Hegseth included—discussed sensitive war plans regarding the imminent bombing of Yemen, Geressy expressed frustration at the administration’s decision to rely on the unsecured and unclassified communication app.

Geressy has also voiced “disgust” at White House reports describing Buria as “self important” and willing to ostracize other officials in order to snag more time with Hegseth or the White House, according to the Post.

“Friction between the two senior advisers remains palpable, those familiar with the situation say, and is emblematic of the instability that reigns at the Pentagon as Hegseth attempts to regain his footing after several scandals that irked the White House, alarmed Congress and left the former Fox News personality on the defensive,” the Post reported, noting that several current and former defense officials weren’t sure how long Hegseth could survive in the role amid the searing divisions.

The story followed more bad news for Hegseth Tuesday, after The Guardian reported that the White House had “lost confidence” in his investigation into leaked details regarding U.S. military options to claim the Panama Canal.

Hegseth had used the press leak to justify expelling three top aides last month, but Trump’s advisers raised flags after claims emerged that information of the leak had been obtained via a blatantly unconstitutional National Security Agency wiretap—a scandal considerably worse than the initial leak.

That claim fueled a “breakdown in trust” between the Pentagon and the White House, The Guardian reported, with Trump advisers suggesting that they “no longer have any idea about who or what to believe,” with at least one adviser interpreting the botched investigation as a way to nix defense aides that had reportedly been involved in infighting with Hegseth’s first chief of staff, Joe Kasper.

Tommy Tuberville, one of the GOP’s most dim-witted senators, is leaving Capitol Hill to run for governor in his alleged residence of Alabama next year.

“Coach Tommy Tuberville is running for governor!” his newly minted campaign website reads. His platform consists of “standing up for Alabama values,” fighting “woke ideology,” keeping Alabama pro-life, among other cookie-cutter MAGA Republican positions. Tuberville is looking to succeed term-limited Governor Kay Ivey, and is the clear favorite in the deep red Heart of Dixie.

Tuberville confirmed on Fox News that he’s ending his Senate career after just one term to run for governor.

Tuberville’s time in the Senate has been defined by shameless, gaffe-ridden loyalty to Trump and the MAGA agenda. He spent nine months of 2023 personally blocking over 450 military promotions to protest the Defense Department’s policy of reimbursing soldiers forced to travel out of state for an abortion. In the end, he caved, and nothing changed at the Defense Department.

He has also made national headlines for refusing to acknowledge that white nationalism is racist, fumbling the question so badly that it led to questions about his general competency. He lied about his dad getting five bronze stars in World War I. He tried to goad President Trump into taking over the Panama Canal, and spread vaccine misinformation in defense of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And that was all in just one term. The upcoming gubernatorial campaign is sure to provide more classic, alarmingly ignorant moments from Coach Tuberville.

Donald Trump has a five-step plan to keep Republican control of the House of Representatives in 2026, as part of a desperate bid to stave off yet another impeachment inquiry, Axios reported Tuesday.

There is no shortage of potential subjects for an impeachment inquiry. Trump has openly profited from his seat, and helped his allies get rich too—whether by manipulating the market or by turning administration officials into salespeople. Not to mention, he claims to have accepted a massive gift from a foreign government, likely violating the U.S. Constitution. Suffice it to say, Trump needs to keep the Democrats out of power.

Trump “knows the stakes firsthand. He saw what can happen. It’s clear he doesn’t want that again,” Matt Gorman, a top official for House Republicans’ campaign arm in the 2018 midterms, told Axios.

“Investigations, impeachment—he knows it’s all on the table with a Speaker [Hakeem] Jeffries.”

In an effort to maintain a GOP-led House, the president will try to prevent lawmakers from leaving their seats, either to retire or to run for another office. Any defections could hurt the party’s chances of retaining the seats and cost millions of dollars—which could hurt them come the next general election.

Earlier this month, Trump endorsed New York Representative Mike Lawler to keep his seat, despite the congressman’s ambitions to run for governor. Last week, during a contentious meeting with Republicans to secure the passage of the president’s “big beautiful bill,” Lawler had fought to restore state and local tax, or SALT, deductions—in part, to boost his viability as a candidate statewide—but failed. Trump told him to forget the SALT, warning, “I know your district better than you do. If you lose because of SALT, you were going to lose anyway.”

The Trump team is already concerned over the defections of Michigan Representative John James, who has opted to run for governor, and Kentucky Representative Andy Barr, who is leaving his seat to run for Senate.

In that same vein, an essential part of Trump’s plan involves shutting down primary challenges. If the president endorses vulnerable Republicans in the early stages of their races, it could potentially ward off challengers. Over the weekend, Trump made posts endorsing New York Representative Andrew Garbarino and Montana Representative Troy Downing. Although Downing handily defeated his Democratic challenger, he’d also had to defeat eight Republican challengers in the primary.

The next two steps of Trump’s plan are to raise big and spend big. The president has proven to be the GOP’s most effective fundraiser, raising more than $35 million for the cowardly National Republican Congressional Committee at a dinner in April. More events like these are sure to fill the party’s coffers ahead of the midterm elections.

Additionally, Trump’s political operation already has about half a million dollars ready to spend on future elections, and has launched a massive ad campaign backing the president’s tax plan, which will cost an estimated $5.3 trillion over the next decade.

Finally, the president will get hands-on with his recruitment. Gorman explained that the president would act as a “closer,” bringing in candidates to run in swing districts.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t want government scientists to publish their work in the world’s leading medical journals.

In the Ultimate Human podcast on Tuesday, the secretary of health and human services accused the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet of being “corrupt” and in the pocket of major pharmaceutical companies.

“Unless those journals change dramatically, we are going to stop [National Institutes of Health] scientists from publishing in them and we’re going to create our own journals in-house,” Kennedy said. The NIH is the world’s largest funder of health research.

Last week, the HHS released a report saying that overprescribed medications were the source of increased chronic diseases in children, blaming the pharmaceutical industry and a culture of fear for preventing doctors and scientists from studying these diseases’ root causes. And earlier this month, the Justice Department sent threatening letters to medical journals around the country, accusing them of partisanship.

“It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications … are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” wrote Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia at the time, in a letter to the medical journal CHEST. According to NPR, the letters did not cite any evidence to back up Martin’s claims.

The head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, said in an interview earlier this month that he supports academic freedom, meaning that “I can send my paper out even if my bosses disagree with me.”

On the surface, that would seem to run counter to Kennedy’s proposed ban, but Bhattacharya and Food and Drug Administration chief Marty Makary, who are both also vaccine skeptics, just happen to have launched their own medical journal, Journal of the Academy of Public Health. The two are listed as “on leave” from the journal, which has raised concerns about promoting misinformation.

“It looks like a well-put-together journal, it’s been nicely designed and so forth,” Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, told the journal Science. “But when you look at the papers that have been published and at the editorial board, you see that it’s really dominated [by] a small clique of contrarians around the COVID pandemic. There is certainly nothing like even representation of consensus viewpoints within infectious disease epidemiology.”

For all of their talk about academic freedom and corruption, Kennedy, Bhattcharya, and Makary seem to be pushing their own views and stifling others’. Their appointments also coincide with mass layoffs and staff purges at their respective agencies, leaving behind smaller staffs less likely to raise objections out of fear of losing their jobs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is no longer recommending Covid-19 vaccines to young children and pregnant women—even though the agency’s own research recommends doing so.

The lifesaving jab was removed from the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule Tuesday at the direction of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Last year, the Biden administration urged healthy children to get yet another Covid shot despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children,” Kennedy said in a video statement, promising that the move would advance the Trump agenda to “Make America Healthy Again.”

But exactly how Kennedy came to the conclusion that avoiding the booster would be healthier for those groups is unclear, especially when the CDC lists pregnancy as a condition that increases the risk of experiencing “at least one severe Covid-19 outcome” based on its own research.

Young children are also at a higher risk of developing serious illness. Babies 6 months old and younger face the same health risks as adults who are between the ages of 65 and 74, American Academy of Pediatrics vaccine expert Sean O’Leary told The New York Times last week.

But vaccination during pregnancy can actually offset that risk, granting children temporary immunity to some illnesses, such as Covid-19, before they’re even born thanks to the transfer of protective antibodies.

“These antibodies can help protect your baby from those diseases during the first few months of life,” according to the CDC. But after six months of life, they wear off—a detail that alarms medical experts about Kennedy’s new strategy, as removing the vaccine from the vaccine schedule will make it harder for parents and pregnant women to get the shot as insurance companies stop paying for them.

Whatever the rationale for stripping the vaccine, it was made without the input of the CDC’s usual advisers: Its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is not scheduled to meet until the end of June.

What is clear though is that Kennedy—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist—has made it his mission to attack vaccine access in his time atop HHS.

Kennedy’s contagious beliefs are spreading in spite of the science. Vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The jabs are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox, a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.

The Trump administration is halting all student visa interviews while it decides on how heavily it wants to surveil the social media pages of applicants, according to an order to all U.S. embassies reviewed by Politico.

“Effective immediately, in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting, consular sections should not add any additional student or exchange visitor (F, M, and J) visa appointment capacity until further guidance is issued [in a separate telegram], which we anticipate in the coming days,” read the cable, signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

While the cable does not specify what platforms or content the State Department will be targeting, it’s likely that the process will target international students who showed solidarity with Palestine online. However, all student visa applicants are expected to undergo the social media vetting.

This move will impede the visa processes of thousands of students, upturning their education, and delay a massive portion of the student population of many American universities.

Donald Trump’s administration may have condemned a 4-year-old girl with a rare bowel condition to death by terminating her legal status as part of the president’s crackdown on immigration, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.

The young girl, who was identified by her initials S.G.V. by the Times, and her family were granted humanitarian permission to enter the U.S. legally from Mexico in 2023, so that she could receive treatment for short bowel syndrome, which prevents her from absorbing enough nutrients to remain healthy.

Deysi Vargas, 28, was committed to getting her daughter better treatment than they had received in Mexico City, where her daughter had been kept alive but inadequate care prevented her condition from improving. An appointment in Tijuana they’d made through the CBP One app was their best hope.

“God knew she needed better treatment,” Vargas told the Times. “When we got to the entrance, they saw her and asked us if we needed medical help.”

But last month, the family received a notice telling them to leave the country—threatening the child’s access to the care she needs to live.

In a letter requested by the family, Dr. John Asenault, who treats S.G.V. every six weeks at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, said that any interruption in her daily nutrition regimen could prove “fatal within a matter of days.”

Arsenault said that patients such as S.G.V., who use an IV-administered nutrition system at home called Total Parenteral Nutrition, are typically not permitted to leave the country at all.

S.G.V.’s treatment is incredibly complex. She must be hooked up to an intravenous feeding system for 14 hours a night, and must be administered additional nutrition for an hour, four times a day.

The family’s attorney, Rebecca Brown, of the pro bono legal firm Public Counsel, said that she believed the family’s status had been revoked by mistake.

“This is a textbook example of medical need,” Brown told the Times. “This child will die and there’s no sense for that to happen. It would just be a cruel sacrifice.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services declined the Times’ request for comment.

In April, the Trump administration deported a mother to Honduras, alongside her 7-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son, the latter of whom had been diagnosed with cancer. The Trump administration claimed that the mother had requested her children be removed from the country with her, despite her attorney’s insistence that she wished for her children, both citizens, to remain in the U.S.

Trump’s immigration crackdown has already proved deadly: At least seven immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody died in the president’s first 100 days in office.

Donald Trump has resorted to vague threats against Vladimir Putin in the hopes of getting him to agree to a ceasefire in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The president posted to Truth Social Tuesday morning claiming that if it wasn’t for him, “lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD,” accusing the Russian president of “playing with fire.”

Trump told the press on Sunday that he was “not happy with what Putin’s doing.”

“He’s killing a lot of people, and I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin. I’ve known him a long time, always gotten along with him, but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all,” Trump said. “We’re in the middle of talking and he’s shooting rockets into Kyiv and other cities. I don’t like it at all.”

Trump’s comments follow Russia’s largest drone and missile attack on Ukraine since the start of the invasion in 2022, with a barrage of bombs falling on Kyiv over the weekend. Putin hasn’t officially responded to Trump’s post, but Russian state media mocked the president.

Russian state television also dismissed the idea of an immediate ceasefire, with one host asking, “Why would we stop? The enemy is strong and cunning, and we are winning.” TV host Vladimir Solovyov also belittled the U.S.-European alliance, pointing out that Trump was pushing high 50 percent tariffs against the European Union.

Trump has long been deferential to Putin, irking Democrats and even some Republicans, and Putin probably feels as though Trump can do nothing to pressure him. And why would he? Trump has a long history of giving Putin whatever he wants. Meanwhile, Russia continues to bombard Ukraine no matter what Europe or the U.S. says.