Turns Out, Elon Musk Isn’t Leaving Trump’s Side Just Yet

Elon Musk isn’t done with the federal government after all.

Days after the tech billionaire confirmed on X that his time as a special government employee had come to a close, the vice president revealed that the administration isn’t ready to let Musk go.

“I think there’s an effort by the media to sort of say the Elon era is over, and I think that’s actually totally wrong,” JD Vance told Newsmax in an interview released late Thursday.

“Now, he has, obviously, a day job, and he’s got to go back to his day job to run his companies, but the DOGE effort will continue, [and] Elon will continue to be an important adviser for both me and the president,” Vance continued. “And most importantly, the job of making the government more efficient, of not wasting people’s money, that has to continue. I think it’s one of the most important mandates that we got from the American people, and we will keep on executing on that mandate.”

And Donald Trump similarly appears to be trying to extend Musk’s time in office. In a Truth Social post Thursday, the president announced that he would be holding a press conference with Musk the following day, calling him “terrific.”

“This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way,” Trump wrote.

It’s no secret that Musk had been a decidedly unpopular figure in the White House weeks before he refocused his attention on his struggling electric car brand. In the few short months that Musk ran DOGE, reports emerged that practically everyone in the White House hated him. He had stomped on the toes of Trump’s Cabinet, failing to consult them before paring down federal agencies technically under their control. He got into a screaming match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Earlier this week, Musk whined that DOGE had become a “whipping boy” for the administration’s failures. He interfered in a deal over an AI datacenter in the United Arab Emirates to try to get his company xAI a piece of the pie, and he told CBS that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” was actually a bad idea.

But there are plenty of reasons why Trump and co. might want to keep the world’s richest man in their pocket.

Musk was Trump’s top financial backer in the 2024 election, spending at least $250 million in the final months of the president’s campaign after Trump was shot in July. Musk had also promised to funnel funds toward other Republicans, declaring in the wake of the November election that his super PACs would “play a significant role in primaries.” In the following months, Musk threatened to use his money to fund primary challengers to Republicans who opposed Trump’s agenda and to go after Democrats, and that he would be preparing “for the midterms and any intermediate elections, as well as looking at elections at the district attorney level.”

The week after Trump returned from the Middle East trip, however, Musk announced at the Qatar Economic Forum that he had “done enough” political spending.

“I think in terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” Musk said.

Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestine activist detained by the Trump administration and threatened with deportation, thinks that government officials coordinated with anti-Palestinian groups and organizations to target him.

Zeteo News reports that Khalil and his legal team from the Center of Constitutional Rights filed a Freedom of Information Act request with several government agencies to “document and expose the reported collaboration between federal officials and private, anti-Palestinian organizations who have identified, doxxed, and reported him and others for purposes of securing the deportation of student activists advocating on behalf of Palestinian human rights.”

In their request, Khalil’s lawyers say that his arrest, as well as that of other pro-Palestine activists, shows patterns that indicate the government is working with outside groups who are working together to target such activists. These groups, which include the pro-Israel academic blacklist Canary Mission and far-right Betar USA, publicly take credit every time one of these arrests are announced.

As early as January, Betar, a Revisionist Zionist organization that has been labeled “extremist” by the Anti Defamation League was recommending foreign students and teachers to the Trump administration for deportation because they protested against Israel. Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at what he thought was a U.S. citizenship interview, was also on Betar’s list.

According to Zeteo, the FOIA request cites several examples of Betar and other organizations creating profiles for Khalil and attacking him on social media. Activists from these organizations, such as Betar head Ross Glick, reportedly met with Senator John Fetterman and the office of Senator Ted Cruz to discuss deportation efforts.

Fetterman denied working with Betar, telling Zeteo that “I do not support private organizations coming up with deportation lists, and in any event, I would never participate or assist in that.” The State Department, on the other hand, didn’t deny working with such organizations.

“Given our commitment to and responsibility for national security, the Department uses all available tools to receive and review concerning information when considering visa revocations about possible ineligibilities,” a department spokesperson told Zeteo.

If the Trump administration is taking deportation recommendations from extremist, anti–free speech organizations like Betar and Canary Mission, it is violating the First Amendment to the Constitution in its immigration policies. But Trump and his associates have already shown the public that they don’t care about such freedoms for the people they oppose, let alone the law.

After the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, met with Donald Trump at the White House Thursday, the bank took the unprecedented step of releasing a statement asserting its independence.

The statement said that the Fed has an independent, nonpartisan role using economic data to set monetary policy.

“Chair Powell did not discuss his expectations for monetary policy, except to stress that the path of policy will depend entirely on incoming economic information and what that means for the outlook,” the statement said regarding Powell’s meeting with Trump.

The Fed added that Powell told Trump that he and other officials “will set monetary policy, as required by law, to support maximum employment and stable prices and will make those decisions based solely on careful, objective, and non-political analysis.”

Such a statement is rare from the Fed, which normally remains tight-lipped. Trump has made no secret of his displeasure with Powell for not cutting interest rates at the president’s request, and at one point Trump threatened to fire Powell to get his way. Trump later tempered his threat, but not without spooking international markets and worrying investors.

Powell also has been honest about the negative economic effects on Trump’s tariffs, prompting the president to level insults at Powell from his Truth Social account. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt didn’t dispute the Fed’s statement Thursday, but noted that Trump “did say that the Fed chair is making a mistake by not lowering rates.”

Powell’s statement suggests that Trump challenged the Fed’s authority during their meeting. Did Trump revive his threat to fire Powell? What will the president do if Powell stands his ground on interest rates? With Trump being dealt two major setbacks over his tariffs in the past 24 hours, he might get impatient and angry.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt just cannot seem to grasp the whole “checks and balances” part of the U.S. Constitution.

During a press briefing Thursday, Leavitt railed against the recent ruling of a little-known federal court that found Donald Trump had exceeded his legal authority by imposing sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries, based on vague claims of “national emergencies.” In a separate ruling, another federal judge also found that Trump could not collect tariffs on any of his orders.

“The courts should have no role here. There is a troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges inserting themselves into the presidential decision-making process. America cannot function if President Trump, or any other president for that matter, has their sensitive diplomatic or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges,” Leavitt said.

But the first decision was made by the U.S. Court of International Trade, which has nationwide jurisdiction over civil cases arising from international trade. The three-judge panel ruled that Trump had wrongly invoked the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, which allows him to respond to national emergencies, to justify sweeping retaliatory tariffs on Canada, China, Mexico, and dozens more countries.

Shortly after the briefing, the Trump administration was granted a temporary stay of the trade court ruling while the government appeals. Leavitt also asked the Supreme Court to step in on behalf of the president. In the meantime, Trump officials have set out to downplay the impact of the rulings, which could potentially upend ongoing negotiations with other countries.

Leavitt has repeatedly claimed that federal judges have no jurisdiction over the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy matters, rendering them powerless to rule against his illegal deportation policies. Earlier this week, Trump asked the Supreme Court to back up the administration’s efforts to remove immigrants to countries where they did not originate, after a federal judge ruled that he couldn’t deport individuals to South Sudan if they weren’t from there. Leavitt has also railed against the judge who paused Trump’s deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

Donald Trump is a big fan of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and turns a blind eye to his administration’s myriad human rights violations and increasing authoritarianism, in exchange for El Salvador’s accepting deportees of any nationality.

But why does Bukele also have a fan in Democratic Representative Vicente Gonzalez?

The Texas moderate is the lone House Democrat to have met with Bukele while visiting El Salvador, and toured the country’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, where immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia was once held and where Venezuelan immigrants removed from the United States are currently detained. Other Democrats, including Senator Chris Van Hollen, were unable to visit the prison or meet with Bukele on their visits to the country.

“El Salvador is crucial in helping the United States curb the flow of irregular migration and is an important ally in the western hemisphere,” Gonzalez said in a press release after his visit.

Gonzalez’s district voted for Trump in 2024 and is 90 percent Hispanic, and also happens to be on America’s southern border. Gonzales has praised Bukele, claiming that the Salvadoran leader has created a model for Latin America with his crackdown on gangs in the country.

“I think it’s undeniable what he’s done has been spectacular, in terms of bringing security to over 98 percent of the population that lived in turmoil for over a generation,” Gonzalez told Politico Magazine. “He clean[ed] up the most dangerous country in the world and turn[ed] it into the safest in the hemisphere.”

Along with former Representative Matt Gaetz, Gonzalez is a founding member of the El Salvador Caucus in Congress, and now is only one of two Democrats in the pro-Bukele organization, along with Representative Lou Correa. That may be due to the fact that Bukele has trolled and mocked other Democrats on social media, who have criticized the Trump administration’s deal with El Salvador.

That doesn’t seem to matter to Gonzalez, who thinks “Democrats … shouldn’t shy from building a diplomatic relationship with the country of El Salvador,” despite the fact that human rights activists in the country have been arrested and journalists have been forced to flee. Perhaps Gonzalez should ask himself how he’d feel if Trump acted like the Salvadoran autocrat.

President Trump’s 250-year anniversary of America military parade (which, by complete coincidence, falls on his birthday) will most likely cost more than the exorbitant $45 million it’s already budgeted for.

The June 14 parade will feature 6,700 soldiers, 50 in-air helicopters, 34 horses, and 28 massive 70-ton M1 Abrams battle tanks, the latter of which may very well cause serious damage to D.C. city streets, resulting in the parade cost easily eclipsing $45 million.

“If military tanks were used, they should be accompanied with many millions of dollars to repair the roads,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said back in April.

The Trump administration has stated that the federal government will add protections to the roads and pay for damages, adding yet another taxpayer expense to this lavish day.

“As a prevention measure to ensure there are no damages to the roads, one-inch-thick steel plates, varying in size from 4 feet by 8 feet and 8 feet by 20 feet will be placed on the roads at any pivot point and all new rubber tracks will be placed on vehicles,” Army spokesperson Heather J. Hagan told The Intercept. Cleanup and higher police presence costs have also yet to be calculated.

This is a $45 million display of narcissism and militarism from President Trump, and you’re paying for it.

“This administration does not have a credible history of telling the truth about anything. And so, when they estimate $45 million, you know that’s a low-ball figure,” Representative Steve Cohen told The Intercept. “The egotist-in-chief wants taxpayers to foot the bill for a military parade on his birthday. This would be an unprecedented waste of money to please this self-absorbed con man.”

The White House can’t explain why its “Make America Healthy Again” commission report cited studies that don’t exist.

The report, released last week by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, projected a new vision for America’s health policy that would take aim at childhood vaccines, ultra-processed foods, and pesticides. But during a White House press briefing Thursday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt skirted around answering questions regarding seven citations for studies that researchers say were either wildly misinterpreted or had never occurred at all.

Instead, Leavitt blamed the report’s errors on “formatting issues,” but couldn’t confidently deny whether or not HHS had used artificial intelligence to draft the 68-page report.

“Does the White House have confidence that the info coming from HHS can be trusted?” asked NOTUS’s Jasmine Wright. A NOTUS investigation published earlier Thursday first reported the inconsistencies.

“I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed and it will be updated, but it does not negate the substance of the report,” Leavitt said, lauding the Kennedy report as one of the most “transformative reports ever released by the federal government” and adding that it was backed by “good science” that had “never been recognized” at the national level.

“Quick follow-up, can you talk about what tools or research goes into the production of these kinds of reports? For instance, is it AI that’s used to put together these reports now?” Wright pressed.

“I can’t speak to that, I’d defer you to the Department of Health and Human Services. What I know is what I told you,” Leavitt responded.

NOTUS found that the MAHA report was riddled with errors, including links that don’t work, incorrectly drawn conclusions, and even studies that appear to have been invented out of thin air.

Washington doesn’t know what to do about its tariff plan anymore.

Components of the White House’s tariff plan were shot down by two different judges on Wednesday and Thursday, sending the Trump administration’s controversial economic strategy—and its subsequent public defense—into a tailspin. During a White House press briefing on Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt aggressively asserted that the administration would “win” its appeals, all while insisting that other countries would blindly continue to negotiate with Donald Trump, even as the future of his tariff agenda is up in the air.

“Why would other countries continue these trade deal negotiations?” asked NBC News’s Gabe Gutierrez.

“Because other countries around the world have faith in the negotiator in chief, President Donald J. Trump. And they also probably see how ridiculous this ruling is, and they understand the administration is going to win,” Leavitt said. “And we intend to win, we already filed an emergency appeal, we expect to fight this battle all the way to the Supreme Court.”

Leavitt then shared a missive for foreign nations, claiming that the president “reserves other authorities” to enact the trade policy.

“But I can confirm our ambassador for trade, Jamison Greer, already heard from other countries this morning that they intend to continue with the negotiations,” she added.

Trump’s tariff plan was blocked by a trade court Wednesday, with a three-judge panel ruling that the president’s plan exceeded “any authority granted” by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Less than 24 hours later, another court intervened in Trump’s levies, denoting in a two-page order that the duties were “unlawful.”

Even Fox News’s Peter Doocy poked holes in the administration’s strategy, asking why—if the judiciary says the tariffs are illegal—Trump wouldn’t ask House and Senate Republicans to just draft a new law. In response, Leavitt lied.

“Well, these laws have already been granted to the president by the Constitution, and by laws that have been previously passed,” Leavitt said. (If that were true, the court system would not have blocked the trade policy.)

Earlier this month, Justice Department lawyers were rebuked by the Supreme Court for refusing to accept lower court rulings, with Justice Elena Kagan flaming administration officials for driving cases they had uniformly lost to the nation’s highest judiciary.

White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett insisted Thursday that Donald Trump “always wins,” even after the president’s vacillating tariff policies faced a massive defeat in federal court.

During an interview on Fox Business’s Mornings With Maria, host Maria Bartiromo asked Hassett for his reaction to a journalist teaching Trump about a new investing theory, TACO, which stands for “Trump always chickens out.” The economic adviser replied to the dig with another slogan.

“I think if President Trump had just a minute more, if you go back into the room behind the Oval, he’s got all his hats and things over there, and he has a hat which is the accurate response to what that person said, which is ‘Trump always wins,’” Hassett said. “If you go look, a lot of people are wearing that hat, ‘Trump always wins’ and ‘Trump was always right.’”

Hassett claimed that Trump’s tariffs had forced other countries to “come to the table with massive concessions, opening up their markets to our products, and lowering their tariffs on us.” So far, only Israel, India, and Vietnam have moved to slash tariffs on U.S. products. Negotiations with other trading partners, such as the European Union, are still ongoing.

Hassett insisted that Trump’s volatile tariff policies had been “really, really effective for the American people, and it’s unfortunate that people would attack it, as the journalist did or the way the judges just did, that these activist judges are trying to slow something down in the middle of really important negotiations.”

A panel of three federal judges in the U.S. Court of International Trade unanimously ruled Wednesday evening that Trump had exceeded his legal authority by imposing sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries, based on vague claims of “national emergencies.” The Trump administration has already said it will appeal the decision, and through his broad smile, Hassett desperately attempted to downplay the loss.

“And the idea that the fentanyl crisis in America is not an emergency is so appalling to me, that I’m sure that when we appeal that this decision will be overturned,” Hassett continued. Trump had used a domestic public health crisis as a rationale for imposing steep tariffs on China, claiming the country had failed to thwart fentanyl production and trafficking.

But contrary to Hassett’s claim, the panel had not found that the fentanyl was not an urgent issue but simply that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not authorize the president to impose worldwide, retaliatory tariffs.

The Department of Health and Human Services is canceling an enormous contract with Moderna, ending a multimillion-dollar partnership to develop vaccines for emerging flu strains.

The agency, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., signaled in February that it would be conducting a review of a $590 million contract penned during the Biden administration. Kennedy—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist—has been highly critical of the messenger RNA process utilized by Moderna to expedite vaccine development. The contract had been awarded through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which issues money for treatment programs aimed at curbing potential future pandemics.

The nixed contract comes on the heels of positive interim results from an early-stage trial of the shot for the H5 bird flu virus, months after strains of the virus wiped out millions of birds across America’s poultry farms.

“While the termination of funding from HHS adds uncertainty, we are pleased by the robust immune response and safety profile observed in this interim analysis,” CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement. Bancel noted that Moderna would “explore alternatives” to continue funding for the new vaccine, reported AFP.

The mRNA method of building new vaccines came under scrutiny in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, when critics of the government vaccine mandate poked at the strategy—which allows bodies to build resistance to a virus without ever being exposed to the real deal—for developing immunity. MRNA vaccines have been around for decades but were relatively new to the U.S. at the time, prompting suspicion from anti-vax circles.

The mRNA acts as a “cellular messenger,” according to the National Institutes of Health, influencing the body’s cells to develop spike proteins that latch onto a virus, evoking the body’s immune response “without a person ever having been exposed to the viral material.” Further still, mRNA is a temporary addition to the body that “degrades easily and does not last long inside cells,” according to the NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute.

But the science didn’t stop conspiracists from claiming that the jab was causing more harm than good, spreading misinformation that the vaccine could alter an individual’s DNA makeup. Years later, mRNA vaccines have proven to be entirely safe, with millions of real-world lives saved by the Covid-19 vaccine as plausible examples of their efficacy.

Kennedy brushed off concerns about his anti-vax beliefs during his confirmation hearings to run HHS, claiming that under his leadership, the agency would not be limiting access to well-vetted vaccines. But months later, that hasn’t proven to be the case.

Instead, the health secretary has made it his mission to attack vaccine access in his time atop HHS. On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that it would no longer be recommending Covid-19 vaccines to pregnant women and young children, a decision that experts claim will allow insurance companies to stop paying for the shots and make it significantly more difficult to obtain them. That directive—issued by Kennedy—was made without the input of the CDC’s usual advisers, as the body’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is not scheduled to meet until the end of June.

As a reminder: 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.