Trump Considering Pardons for Men Who Tried to Kill Gretchen Whitmer

Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer has spent the last month cozying up to Donald Trump—but the president is still considering pardoning her attempted kidnappers.

During a press conference Wednesday, Trump was asked whether he’d considered pardoning the nine men convicted of charges related to a conspiracy to kidnap Whitmer in 2020, in an attempt to liberate the state from her Covid-19 safety policies.

“I’m gonna look at it. I will take a look at it. It’s been brought to my attention,” Trump said. “I did watch the trial. It looked to me like somewhat of a railroad job, I’ll be honest to you. It looked to me like some people said stupid things, you know? They were drinking, and I think they said stupid things.”

Trump insisted that he’d heard that question from “both sides, actually.” Earlier this week, the Department of Justice’s new pardon attorney Ed Martin Jr. said that he would give the case a “hard look,” comparing the convictions to those of the January 6 insurrectionists Trump pardoned upon entering office.

It should be particularly unsurprising that Trump would consider pardoning those accused in the plot; he called the scandal a “fake deal” in 2022. Whitmer even blamed Trump’s incendiary rhetoric for giving “comfort to those who spread fear and hatred and division.”

But in recent weeks, Whitmer has become a surprising defender of the president’s disastrous tariff policy, and in doing so, kneecapped any chance she had to be a Democratic presidential nominee in 2028. Whitmer even appeared for a photo op in the Oval Office—seemingly against her will—where she stood awkwardly behind the president as he signed an executive order asking the Justice Department to investigate two former White House aides for treason.

During an address at the Council of Foreign Relations in April, Whitmer said she and Trump agreed on tariffs as a way to bolster domestic manufacturing. “I understand the motivation behind the tariffs, and I can tell you, here’s where President Trump and I do agree. We do need to make more stuff in America—more cars and chips, more steel and ships. We do need fair trade,” she said. “We should be able to celebrate good policy no matter where it comes from, and also criticize bad policy no matter where it comes from.”

But Trump’s stop-and-start economic policies have yet to yield positive results, as CEOs warn that rising prices are on the horizon and Wall Street has adopted a new term for Trump’s cowardly negotiations.

Donald Trump doesn’t seem to be aware of his own administration’s new restrictions on student visas. 

When asked by a reporter when the U.S. would resume interviews for student visas, which were halted Tuesday, the president was clueless.  

“When do you think your administration could resume these interviews?” the reporter asked. 

“On what?” Trump replied, clearly bemused. 

The reporter then said “on the foreign student visas.” Trump thought she was saying “French,” but then others around clarified that she was referring to all foreign student visas. Trump was still unclear, and seemed to be stuck on previous questions. 

“What are you refer—foreign visas for what? Are you talking about for colleges?” Trump asked. The reporter replied in the affirmative, to which Trump said, “OK, so you’re off of Israel, so now you’re talking about colleges, right?” 

The reporter again said yes, which seemed to clear things up for the president. His answer, though, was meandering, and he started to rant about Harvard University, which he said “has been a disaster,” accusing them of taking “$5 billion-plus” which “nobody” knew about. 

“I’d rather see that money go to trade schools, and by the way, they’re totally antisemitic at Harvard, as you know, and some other colleges too, in all fairness to them, and it’s been exposed. Very exposed,” Trump said, bragging about “exposing” how much money the university is taking, before expounding his idea to boost funding to trade schools.

The Trump administration’s ban on new international student visa interviews doesn’t just apply to Harvard, however. All new student visa interviews are frozen until the administration can determine how to vet the social media activity of applicants, according to a cable sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to U.S. embassies.

Trump’s mind seems to be all over the place, with noticeable signs of cognitive decline. Even if his initial answer to the reporter’s question was off due to not being able to hear, his answer once he understood the question wasn’t on topic. This suggests that Trump didn’t know about the halt in student visa interviews, even though the decision came from Rubio the day before. Perhaps Trump’s fellow conservatives should be worried about the current president’s mental fitness, instead of being fixated on Joe Biden.

Donald Trump is planning to kill Voice Of America and replace it with a MAGA propaganda machine.

The remaining 800 employees at the federally funded, award-winning newsroom are expecting to receive termination notices as soon as Wednesday, multiple unnamed sources told Politico. This would effectively shutter the agency, following the roughly 600 VOA employees who were fired earlier this month.

In March, it appeared that the Trump administration was attempting to interfere with the organization’s journalistic independence, suspending one of its top reporters for relaying others’ criticism of the president, and reassigning VOA’s veteran White House bureau chief to a different beat.

Later that month, Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the agency that oversees VOA, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, altogether, as part of a wider reduction in force throughout the federal government. The move sparked a lawsuit from journalists, federal workers, and their unions alleging that USAGM had not fulfilled its duty to protect the freedom of the press or maintain a separation of powers.

Further, by conducting a mass reduction in force, USAGM may have potentially violated its collective bargaining agreement with its employees. A representative for the American Federation of Government Employees, representing VOA employees, declined to comment to Politico.

Kari Lake, a Trump acolyte serving as a senior adviser to the USAGM, announced earlier this month that the agency was planning to partner with the pro-Trump One America News Network to provide its right-wing newsfeed to the outlets VOA oversees.

President Trump just awarded Emil Bove, his personal lawyer, with a nomination for a lifetime federal judiciary appointment.

Bove, who unsuccessfully defended Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial, could now soon be a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, if confirmed by the Senate.

“It is my great honor to nominate Emil Bove to serve as a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Emil is a distinguished graduate of Georgetown Law, and served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for nearly a decade, where he was the Co-Chief of the Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday. “Emil is SMART, TOUGH, and respected by everyone. He will end the Weaponization of Justice, restore the Rule of Law, and do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Emil Bove will never let you down!”

Bove was serving as acting deputy attorney general before Todd Blanche was confirmed. He was key in dropping the multiple corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, in exchange for Adams’s loyalty. He also fired prosecutors who investigated January 6 and accused the FBI of “insubordination” for not turning over the names of other staffers who worked on January 6 investigations. As a New York state prosecutor, he was described by colleagues as someone who could not “be bothered to treat lesser mortals with respect or empathy.”

“In my experience litigating against him, what he enjoyed most as a prosecutor was wielding power — the single worst possible trait for a public servant,” former federal prosecutor and Bove legal opponent Christine Chung told the Associated Press. “But people won’t speak against him publicly because he’s also vindictive, as he is now making abundantly clear.”

This story has been updated.

President Trump on Wednesday confirmed reports of a disagreement he had with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding Netanyahu’s desire to bomb Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities—while Trump is in the middle of negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran.

“Did you warn Prime Minister Netanyahu against taking some sort of action that could disrupt the talks there, in a phone call last week?” a reporter asked Trump, after he swore in former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as interim U.S. district attorney for D.C.

“Well, I like to be honest,” Trump said. “Yes, I did. Next question please?”

Rather than taking another question, Trump continued to describe the latest spat between himself and the Israeli prime minister.

“It’s not a warning. I said I don’t think it’s appropriate.”

“What exactly did you tell him?”

“I said I don’t think it’s appropriate, we’re having very good discussions with [Iran], and I said, ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate right now.’ Because if we can settle it with a very strong document, very strong … no trust, I don’t trust anybody. So no trust. I want it very strong, we can go in with inspectors, we can take whatever we want, we can blow up whatever we want, but nobody getting killed,” he rambled.

“I told [Netanyahu] this would be very inappropriate to do right now because we’re very close to a solution. Now, that could change at any moment. It could change with a phone call. But right now, I think [Iran wants] to make a deal, and if we can make a deal, [that would] save a lot of lives.”

This disagreement is the latest in a small but notable series of events in which the Trump administration has circumvented Netanyahu in a way the Biden administration did not. In March, the Trump administration sent its hostage envoy, Adam Boehler, to negotiate directly with Hamas to free Edan Alexander without Netanyahu’s consent.

When faced with criticism, Boehler stated that the Hamas officials were “pretty nice guys” who “didn’t have horns growing out of their head” and were “actually guys like us.” His response led to uproar among the Israeli center right.

Trump also skipped over Israel on his recent Middle East trip, suggesting that Netanyahu does not have the same sway with Trump as he did with the Biden administration.

“There’s a cadre in the administration who doesn’t particularly care for Israel; they have no special attachment to Israel. They view them as a partner but not one we should be going out of our way to be doing favors for,” a former Trump administration official told Politico, during Trump’s Middle East trip. “Netanyahu is one of those people who pushes and pushes, and that can rub Trump the wrong way.”

The president is taking his new Wall Street nickname very personally.

Earlier this month, Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong coined an acronym to describe a popular new trading strategy centered around Donald Trump’s start-and-stop tariff policies: TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

But when confronted with the reality of his new reputation, during a White House press briefing Wednesday, Trump flipped out.

“I kick out?” Trump said initially, misunderstanding the acronym.

“Chicken out,” the reporter clarified.

“Oh, isn’t that nice. ‘Chicken out,’ I’ve never heard that,” Trump said before ranting that he hadn’t lacked follow-through on his trade policies, referring to his arrangements with China and the European Union. Instead, Trump claimed that he had heard complaints he was too tough.

“You call that chickening out? Because we have $14 trillion now invested, committed to investing—when Biden didn’t have practically anything; Biden, this country was dying,” Trump said. “You know, we have the hottest country anywhere in the world. I went to Saudi Arabia, the king told me, he said, ‘You’ve got the hottest count—we’ve got the hottest country in the world right now.’ Six months ago, this country was stone-cold dead. We had a dead country.

“We had a country of people that didn’t think it was going to survive, and you ask a nasty question like that,” Trump continued, apparently blaming the media for reporting on the talk of the town.

The Art of the Deal author then continued to rant about how he had gone high on his initial tariff proposals with the aim of keeping the final negotiation at a higher rate than previously accepted. (This has proven to not be the case. In the last month, several countries, including South Korea and Japan, have decided to follow China’s tariff negotiating strategy, gambling that public pressure from within the U.S. will force the Trump administration to fold on its unpopular trade policy before their own economies feel the sting.)

“Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. To me that’s the nastiest question,” Trump scolded the reporter.

In a Wednesday note obtained by Market Watch, Sevens Report Research founder Tom Essaye insisted that Trump does, in fact, always chicken out. So far, that’s been true for enacting additional tariffs on Mexico and Canada, postponing his “reciprocal” tariff plan on dozens of countries after his “Liberation Day” announcement went south, delaying a tariff on imports from the European Union, and smashing his plan to fine China, temporarily decreasing tariffs on Chinese products to 30 percent from 145 percent.

“So, the returns are somewhat conclusive: The TACO trade has worked and buying stocks on extreme tariff-related threats has worked,” Essaye wrote, noting that the known gambit’s growing popularity will translate to diminished returns.

As the Russians predicted, the U.S. president’s “fire” has amounted to nothing.

Speaking with reporters in the White House Wednesday, Donald Trump was unable to pinpoint one consequence that Russia would face for continuing to attack Ukraine.

“Well, I’m not going to tell you exactly,” Trump said when asked. “The words speak pretty loud. We’re not happy about that situation.

“I think we’re going to see something very sensible, because there are only two outcomes,” he continued, completely evading specifics. “There’s a smart outcome and a violent outcome, and I don’t think anybody wants to see the second.… They still have to agree to the final stages of a document.”

On Tuesday, Russian state media effectively called Trump’s bluff, predicting that he wouldn’t have any follow-through on a social media–posted threat that Russia was “playing with fire” by refusing to negotiate toward an achievable peace deal with Ukraine.

Trump’s heavy hand on Ukraine and his repeated concessions toward Russia’s enduring violence have been interpreted by Kremlin propagandists as a massive win for Russian President Vladimir Putin, resulting in televised laughter at the downfall of American power. In the months since he took office, Trump has claimed that Russia has come ready and willing to reach a peace deal, even though many of their demands—such as staking a Russian flag in Crimea—reverse long-standing U.S. policy.

Following a deadly airstrike on Kyiv over the weekend, European leaders urged Western countries to enact sanctions on Moscow as a way to reel Putin back to the negotiating table. But when pressed Wednesday as to why America was still wringing its hands, Trump claimed that applying pressure would “hurt” a deal.

“If I think I’m close to getting a deal, I don’t want to screw it up by getting that,” Trump said, before attempting to redirect blame for the ongoing conflict. “This isn’t my war, this is Biden’s war, Zelenskiy’s war, and Putin’s war. This isn’t Trump’s war. I’m only here for one thing, to see if I can end it.”

But it’s unclear exactly how or when Trump will accomplish that. The president—who campaigned on a pledge to end the war within days of returning to the White House—told reporters Wednesday that he would circle back within two weeks with an answer as to whether Putin is even interested in ending the conflict.

Just about everyone in the U.S.—including Trump’s own party—wants the White House to act. Earlier this week, Senate Republicans resorted to begging Trump to take a stand against Russia while they mulled over the possibility of going over his head to enact the internationally recommended sanctions.

“The sanctions bill has 82 co-sponsors,” Senator Lindsey Graham wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Tuesday. “As [Senator John] Thune said last week, if Mr. Putin continues to play games, the Senate will act. I’m hoping for the best, but when it comes to the thug in Moscow, we should all prepare for more of the same.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced some bizarre new visa rules Wednesday against foreign officials curtailing the rights of Americans.

“For too long, Americans have been fined, harassed, and even charged by foreign authorities for exercising their free speech rights,” Rubio announced on X. “Today, I am announcing a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans. Free speech is essential to the American way of life—a birthright over which foreign governments have no authority.”

In a follow-up post, Rubio said, “Foreigners who work to undermine the rights of Americans should not enjoy the privilege of traveling to our country. Whether in Latin America, Europe, or elsewhere, the days of passive treatment for those who work to undermine the rights of Americans are over.”

It’s not clear what prompted these new rules, or if there’s a particular case of an American being punished by a foreign government that Rubio is referring to. However, Elon Musk is facing legal issues in a number of countries over incendiary posts on X, such as Brazil, which briefly banned the platform last year amid rampant disinformation about the country’s 2022 election.

Musk also pushed disinformation last summer over far-right riots in the United Kingdom and continues to attack the country’s Labour government, earning a rebuke from Prime Minister Keir Starmer in January. Last month, European Union regulators were reportedly considering fines for the X platform and demanding product changes for breaking EU laws against illicit content and disinformation.

Is Rubio’s move designed to protect Musk, a major benefactor of Trump and the Republican Party? It’s ironic for the country’s top diplomat to complain about the free speech of Americans overseas when Rubio himself is targeting immigrants in the U.S., particularly international students, for exercising their own free speech rights, revoking their visas and trying to deport them.

One such student, Rümeysa Öztürk, was arrested after writing an opinion piece about Israel’s war on Gaza in her school newspaper, and Rubio even seemed to confirm last week that her detention and visa revocation were for that reason. Whatever is behind these new visa rules, it’s highly likely that they’re for something other than free speech because Rubio is clearly a hypocrite.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon is threatening to withhold federal funding from universities that don’t align themselves with Donald Trump’s administration.

During an interview on CNBC Wednesday, McMahon discussed whether other universities had to fear federal funding for academic research being ripped away, following the news that Trump planned to gut roughly $100 million in government contracts to Harvard.

“Universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they’re abiding by the laws and are in sync, I think, with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish—but primarily, abiding by the laws,” McMahon said.

The Department of Homeland Security has alleged that Harvard did not do enough to counter antisemitism on campus and baselessly claimed that the school had collaborated with the Chinese Communist Party.

Earlier this month, Trump signaled plans to have the university’s tax-exempt status revoked, and most recently tried to strip Harvard’s ability to enroll international students. A judge temporarily blocked the administration’s effort after the university immediately sued, calling the move an “unlawful and unwarranted action.”

“We had conversations with President [Alan] Garber, and I expected that we would have more, but Harvard’s answer was a lawsuit so that’s where we are now,” McMahon said.

Republican Representative and House Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green wants the federal government to “listen” to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Russians don’t seem to be taking President Trump very seriously, it’s a sort of schizophrenic message coming out of them. I wouldn’t take what [Dmitry] Medvedev says very seriously, though. If you read his Twitter feed it’s … clearly absurd,” Green said, referring to the former Russian president, who recently alluded to the risk of World War III on X.

“I think we really just need to listen to Trump, Putin, the Kremlin, and our [National Security Council] folks. That’s who we need to be listening to,” the Tennessee congressman added.

A Republican congressman suggesting that we defer to the intelligence of the Kremlin is yet another example of just how far the party has departed from its long-held stance on Russia.

And exactly what NSC folks is Green talking about? Trump fired over 100 of them via email just before Memorial Day weekend. The NSC has been in disarray for months, as Signalgate saw the removal of Director Mike Waltz. Now, rife with internal turnover, it enters another crucial moment in Russia’s war on Ukraine.