Trump Education Secretary Gets Embarrassing Math Lesson in Hearing

The U.S. secretary of education is having issues with basic math. 

Linda McMahon testified on Trump’s 2026 budget before the Senate on Tuesday. While discussing spending on federal grants programs for disadvantaged students—TRIO and the Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, or GEAR UP—she made a massive math error. 

“We spend $1.58 billion a year on TRIO?” Republican Senator John Kennedy asked McMahon. 

“Yes,” she replied. 

“That’s one thousand five hundred and eighty million dollars a year? Is my math right?” Kennedy said, spelling out $1.58 billion.  

“I think that’s right, sir.” 

“And how long have we been spending one thousand five hundred and eighty million a year on this program?” he asked.

“I’m not sure the total length and time of the program.” 

“More than 10 years?”

“Yes.” 

“So that’s over a trillion dollars that we’ve spent on this program.... We give this money, as I appreciate it, to colleges and universities to encourage poor kids to go to college,” Kennedy said to no objection from McMahon, before going on to insinuate that the colleges were stealing this grant money from the government for their own purposes. 

Democratic Senator John Reed jumped in to check the math, as both Kennedy and the education secretary were way off.

“I’m not a great mathematician, but I think you were talking about a trillion dollars? I believe $1.5 billion times 10 is $15 billion, and that’s a little bit off from a trillion dollars,” Reed stated, referring to Kennedy and McMahon’s claim.

“I think the budget cuts $1.2 billion,” McMahon responded. 

“Well that would be $12 billion, not a trillion dollars,” said Reed, calmly holding McMahon and Kennedy’s hands through what amounted to a third-grade math lesson. 

“OK,” McMahon said stiffly. 

The hearing was a mess in other ways, as well. McMahon also refused to clarify to Senator Tammy Baldwin whether or not she would distribute congressionally appropriated funds for after-school programs.

“What we have done in putting forward our operating plan, the first operating plan to show where we’re making allocations, and then followed up with the second operating plan—”

“This isn’t a nuanced question,” Baldwin interrupted. “Congress passed a law appropriating this funding. You said in your confirmation hearing you would spend funding Congress appropriated. If the answer isn’t simply ‘yes,’ based on all the evidence before us, that leads me to believe that you are planning to withhold funding and short-change schools, students, and families across America.” 

Donald Trump decided to start his Tuesday morning by attacking Republican Senator Rand Paul.

“Rand Paul has very little understanding of the BBB, especially the tremendous GROWTH that is coming,” Trump angrily posted on Truth Social, referring to the budget bill. “He loves voting ‘NO’ on everything, he thinks it’s good politics, but it’s not. The BBB is a big WINNER!!!”

“Rand votes NO on everything, but never has any practical or constructive ideas,” he posted again five minutes later. “His ideas are actually crazy (losers!). The people of Kentucky can’t stand him. This is a BIG GROWTH BILL!”

The attack comes as Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which is predicted to make 13.7 million Americans lose health care over the next decade, faces an uphill battle in the Senate. Paul has said he’ll support the bill only if it removes language raising the debt ceiling. The House version of the bill would raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion, while the Senate version would raise it by $5 trillion—which the Kentucky senator finds outrageous.

“If they were to separate out and take the debt ceiling off that, I very much could consider the rest of the bill,” Paul told reporters on Monday.

Paul also said he “had a lengthy discussion” with Trump this week in which he expressed his thoughts on the bill. But if Trump’s Truth Social rants Tuesday morning are any indication, that call didn’t go exactly as the president planned.

A meteorologist at NBC6 in Miami took time from his weather report to call out the “gutting” federal cuts that have left the National Weather Service understaffed, underinformed, and with a quality of forecast that is considerably lower than it’s been in recent years, making it harder to accurately track hurricanes this upcoming season.  

Veteran meteorologist John Morales opened his segment with a six-year old clip of him accurately reporting on the path of Hurricane Dorian. 

“Confidently, I went on TV and I told you, ‘It’s going to turn. You don’t need to worry. It is going to turn,’” he said, referring to the NWS’s hurricane prediction ability. “And I am here to tell you that I am not sure I can do that this year, because of the cuts, the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science in general.… This is a multigenerational impact on science in this country.”

Morales first noted that all central and south Florida NWS sites are around 20 to 40 percent understaffed right now. There has been “nearly 20 percent reduction in weather balloon releases, launches, that carry those radio signs. And what we’re starting to see is that the quality of the forecast is becoming degraded because of some of these cuts,” he added. 

“There is also a chance that … NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft will not be able to fly this year. And with less reconnaissance missions, we may be flying blind. And we may not exactly know how strong a hurricane is before it reaches the coastline.” 

DOGE made massive cuts to NWS that caused the agency to lose 600 employees, due to layoffs or early retirement. Multiple local field offices had a vacancy rate of over 20 percent as of March, causing anxiety to rise as we enter hurricane season. 

The NWS’s mission is “protection of life and property.” The DOGE cuts are stopping them from doing that. More people will be in harm’s way with less information because of decisions made by Elon Musk and Donald Trump. This, not efficiency, is the real material impact of DOGE. 

“I was asked to talk about this today, I’m glad I was,” Morales concluded, “I just want you to know that what you need to do is call your representatives, and make sure that these cuts are stopped.” 

The U.S. economy is falling apart in front of our very eyes—but you wouldn’t know that to hear Donald Trump tell it.

The U.S. president took to social media in the wee hours of Tuesday morning to claim that his tariffs are the best thing ever.

“Because of Tariffs, our Economy is BOOMING!” he wrote.

Just a few hours earlier, he claimed that if “other Countries are allowed to use Tariffs against us, and we’re not allowed to counter them, quickly and nimbly, with Tariffs against them, our Country doesn’t have, even a small chance, of Economic survival.”

But Trump’s celebratory comments stood in stark contrast to a report released Tuesday by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The intergovernmental group slashed its forecast for U.S. economic growth through 2026. America’s growth outlook was revised down to 1.6 percent this year—compared to a March forecast of 2.2 percent—and 1.5 percent in 2026.

The report specifically cited Trump’s tariff policy, which has created economic uncertainty, and his efforts to cut immigration and the federal workforce as reasons for downgrading U.S. economic growth predictions.

In fact, not only is Trump’s tariff policy wrecking the U.S. economy, it’s also dragging down other economies. The OECD predicted that global growth will slow to 2.9 percent in 2025, compared to 3.3 percent the previous year “on the technical assumption that tariff rates as of mid-May are sustained despite ongoing legal challenges.”

“The slowdown is concentrated in the United States, Canada and Mexico,” the report noted.

The future of Trump’s pet tariff policy remains unclear. Since Trump imposed sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every other country in April, two separate courts have deemed his plan illegal. The administration plans to appeal at least one of those rulings.

The Department of Homeland Security says people are being a little too mean after acting FEMA head David Richardson said he didn’t know the United States had a hurricane season.

Richardson, who has led the emergency aid agency since last month, made the comment at a briefing on Monday that was first reported by Reuters.

The U.S. hurricane season began Sunday and will end in late November. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts “above-normal hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin this year,” with as many as 10 hurricanes on the forecast.

The national reaction to Richardson’s comment has been one of shock, disbelief, and outrage, with many Democratic lawmakers swiftly calling for his removal. But DHS, which oversees FEMA, says people are being a bit too mean.

“Despite meanspirited attempts to falsely frame a joke as policy, there is no uncertainty about what FEMA will be doing this Hurricane Season,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement to media outlets. “FEMA is laser focused on disaster response, and protecting the American people.”

Richardson initially joined the Trump administration in January as assistant secretary for DHS’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, after previously serving in the United States Marine Corps as a ground combat officer. His qualifications to lead FEMA are unclear.

Senior State Department staffer Darren Beattie, a passionate Putin supporter behind the move to dismantle a key agency fighting Russian propaganda, is married to a Russian woman whose uncle is a longtime Kremlin ally, according to The Telegraph.

Yulia Kirillova grew up in Moscow, studied abroad in North America, and married Beattie in 2021 in Florida. She moved to D.C. in January. Her uncle Sergei Cherniko is a drinks magnate who had an estimated net worth of $150 million in 2005. That year, he served in Russia’s ministry of natural resources and was then deputy governor of Siberia’s Nenets region. Cherniko later served in Putin’s civic chamber from 2008 to 2010.

The relationship raises even greater scrutiny around Beattie’s April decision to eliminate the Global Engagement Center, a State Department office tasked with dealing with Russian disinformation campaigns. Beattie has been a staunch supporter of Putin, setting himself apart from the traditional conservative right in Bannon-esque fashion.

“US gov’t has been supporting Ukranian neo-nazi groups in its obsessive proxy war against Russia,” he wrote on X in 2022.

“State Department could sell butt plugs and forward proceeds to fund resistance effort in ukraine,” he wrote again that year. “Iran Contra but with a modern American twist.”

“A big part of American ruling class’ hatred of Russia is that Russia is a major power that rejects the woke ideology at the core of American regime,” he wrote in 2021.

This is a clear conflict of interest that is extremely typical within the Trump administration. And on top of that, Beattie was initially fired from the Trump administration in 2018 for attending a white nationalist conference. He has a long history of many other deeply problematic views.

“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” Beattie wrote on X in October. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” On January 6, 2021, he spent the day on X warning Senator Tim Scott, “BLM,” Ibram X. Kendi, and Kay Cole James to “learn their places” and “take a knee” to MAGA.

That, on top of this personal in at the Kremlin, is highly questionable behavior for a ranking official, which has been overly normalized by this administration.

The Pentagon’s new press secretary is a chronically online 26-year-old white nationalist who believes in the “great replacement” theory, thinks Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskiy is an “entitled midget,” and pushed an antisemitic conspiracy theory about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched after being falsely accused of murder in 1915. 

Kingsley Wilson, who has served as deputy press secretary since January, is the daughter of right-wing talking head and former Trump adviser Steve Cortes and previously worked for Center for Renewing America, a think tank founded by Project 2025 architect Russel Vought. She will now act as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s primary mouthpiece at the Pentagon, a department that has not had regular press briefings for some time now. 

“The Office of the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs is announcing that Kingsley Wilson will serve as Press Secretary for the Department of Defense,” senior Defense Department adviser Sean Parnell wrote on X last week. “Kingsley’s leadership has been integral to the DOD’s success & we look forward to her continued service to President Trump!”

Wilson’s personal X page is a treasure trove of ultraright-wing content. 

“Minneapolis became Mogadishu in 10 years time,” she said over a video of Muslim Representative Ilhan Omar at a rally in her district. “The Great Replacement isn’t a conspiracy theory … it’s reality.”  

She has posted about the great replacement therory—a racist conspiracy theory that alleges there is a coordinated plot to decrease America’s  white population through immigration, in some iterations at the behest of Jewish leaders—incessantly for the past three  years. 

She said, “I hate this entitled midget,” in response to Zelenskiy receiving military aid from the U.S last year, and lauded Russian President Vladimir Putin for having “encyclopedic knowledge of his people’s history,” which she called “beyond impressive … especially when contrasted with the low-IQ lunatics working at the U.S. State Department.”

“Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl. He also tried to frame a Black man for his crime,” she wrote on X. “The ADL turned off the comments because they want to gaslight you.” The ADL stated that they were “deeply disturbed” by Wilson’s comments. 

While troubling, this is a predictable pick, as Trump has lined his highest ranks with fringe MAGA loyalists with often openly racist politics, like State Department official Darren Beattie and National Counterterrorism Center head Joe Kent. They, like Wilson, are anti-neocons who subscribe to the same far-right, deep-MAGA views as figures like Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel, rather than the more conventional conservatism of the GOP.

Trump officials claim the suspect behind Sunday’s attack in Boulder, Colorado, was in the United States illegally. But they’re leaving out one convenient detail: He had filed an asylum application.

Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national, has been charged with a federal hate crime for attacking peaceful demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages held captive in Gaza, leaving eight people injured.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, Soliman entered the country on a B-2 tourist visa in August 2022. He filed for asylum the next month, and his visa expired the following year.

Donald Trump and his entire administration seem to have seized on the expired visa as proof that an “illegal” immigrant committed such a heinous crime.

“He came in through Biden’s ridiculous Open Border Policy, which has hurt our Country so badly,” said Trump in his own statement on Monday, conveniently ignoring that Soliman entered the country on a tourist visa. “This is yet another example of why we must keep our Borders SECURE, and deport Illegal, Anti-American Radicals from our Homeland.”

“The Colorado Terrorist attack suspect, Mohamed Soliman, is illegally in our country,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.

“There’s certainly a concern that the previous administration allowed way too many terrorists and illegal immigrants into the interior of our country,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “This individual, this terrorist, was allowed into the country by the previous administration, was foolishly given a tourist visa, and then was illegally allowed to stay.”

But each of these statements seems to be obfuscating the truth: If you file for asylum, you are not here illegally until a judge denies that request. Until then, you have a pending asylum application.

“He entered the country in August 2022 on a B2 visa that expired on February 2023. He filed for asylum in September 2022,” McLaughlin said on X on Monday.

But what happened next? If his asylum application was denied and he stayed anyway, why wouldn’t she say so?

Perhaps because that’s not the case. Soliman entered the country legally, filed for asylum, and then very likely was living here while he awaited the decision. Asylum applicants who have been awaiting a response for longer than 180 days are typically granted work authorization, under laws passed by Congress decades ago.

In other words, Soliman was not in the country due to Biden’s “open border” policy. But then again, Trump and co. have never liked sticking to the facts.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was enraged to hear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had been focusing on arresting only criminals, The Washington Examiner reported Monday.

Last week, 25 field directors from ICE’s Enforcement Removal Operations, as well as 25 special agents from Homeland Security Investigations, were called to Washington for a meeting. Officials told the Examiner that the president’s ghoulish immigration czar wasn’t happy.

“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone,” said one official. “‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down.”

The official told the conservative outlet that Miller didn’t want ICE to narrow its field to just undocumented immigrants with criminal records. “Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recalled.

When one ICE official pushed back against Miller’s call to widen the deportation dragnet, citing border czar Tom Homan’s claims that ICE’s deportation efforts would target criminals, the deputy chief of staff seemed confused.

“What do you mean you’re going after criminals?” the official recounted Miller as saying. “Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest.”

Last week, Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced that the Trump administration had set a new quota of a minimum 3,000 ICE arrests per day. On Monday, ICE announced that it had completed its largest operation ever in Massachusetts and the Greater Boston Area—but as the number of arrests rose, so did the number of people detained with no criminal record or deportation order. Hundreds of so-called “collaterals” were arrested as part of the massive operation.