Trump Bullies MAGA Influencer to Fall in Line on Epstein

Over the weekend, right-wing media figure Charlie Kirk hosted the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit, where the young conservatives in attendance were up in arms about President Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein affair.

Now, after a phone call from the president himself, Kirk is backing off of the issue.

“Honestly, I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being,” Kirk said on the Monday episode of his talk show. “I’m going to trust my friends in the administration. I’m going to trust my friends in the government to do what needs to be done. Solve it. Ball’s in their hands. I’ve said plenty this last weekend.”

Attendees of Kirk’s conference were vocal about their disapproval of the Trump administration closing the Epstein case after entertaining—and promising to substantiate—conspiracy theories about the deceased financier and sex criminal.

On Friday, Kirk asked the crowd, “How many of you, raise your hand, think this is a big deal, the Epstein thing?” Hands shot up across the room, and Kirk observed, “Every hand has gone up.”

Another Friday speaker, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, asked the audience, “How many of you are satisfied … with the results of the Epstein investigation?” Boos resounded.

Many in MAGA, blaming Attorney General Pam Bondi for the Epstein fiasco, called for her firing, leading Trump on Saturday to attempt to dispel his base’s outrage on Truth Social. “What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’” he posted, defending Bondi and calling the Epstein files a concoction of MAGA adversaries that “nobody cares about.”

Kirk, whose conference was clear evidence to the contrary, nonetheless announced on Monday that he’ll devote no more airtime to the matter, instead deferring to his administration “friends” Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, Pam Bondi, and Todd Blanche.

A new CNN report may explain Kirk’s decision to turn away from the Epstein issue. In doing damage control over the weekend, Trump reportedly made phone calls to Bondi’s “most vocal critics” in order “to stem the bleeding over the Epstein files.” Trump is said to have called Kirk on Saturday.

It remains unknown which other conservative figures the president phoned in hopes of quelling dissent over the Epstein case, but it might be worth keeping an eye on who in MAGA world suddenly, inexplicably changes their tune.

The Department of Defense will start using Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot to “develop agentic AI workflows.”

Trump’s DoD awarded Musk’s xAI a $200 million federal contract to install “Grok for Government” into the national defense apparatus.

“Announcing Grok for Government - a suite of products that make our frontier models available to United States Government customers. We are especially excited about two new partnerships for our US Government partners,” xAI announced from its X account on Monday. “1) a new contract from the US Department of Defense 2) our products being available to purchase via the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule. This allows every federal government department, agency, or office, to purchase xAI products. We’re hiring mission driven engineers who want to join the cause.”

Grok has accrued quite a few lowlights since it has overtaken the X timeline, which makes the DoD’s strong commitment to it feel a bit troubling. A week ago, Grok referred to itself as “MechaHitler” multiple times while going on antisemitic rants. The chatbot has also pushed debunked claims of white genocide in South Africa, something its creator believes in, and has often blurred the lines between serving as an objective source of information or just another way for Musk to assert his own views on his “free speech” app.

“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” Chief Digital and AI Officer Dr. Doug Matty said in a press release. “Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems.”

Donald Trump unveiled his latest move to apply pressure to Russia—and surprise, surprise, it’s more tariffs.

While speaking to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office Monday, Trump set a 50-day deadline for Russia to end its invasion of Ukraine. The president said he plans to levy “secondary tariffs” of 100 percent on Moscow, should it fail to resolve the conflict.

“I’m disappointed in President Putin because I thought we woulda had a deal two months ago, but it doesn’t seem to get there,” Trump said. “So based on that, we’re gonna be doing secondary tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days, it’s very simple. And they’ll be at 100 percent.”

It’s notable that Trump would describe the tariffs on Russia as “secondary” considering that the country was specifically exempt from his initial round of sweeping “reciprocal tariffs.” Russian President Vladimir Putin certainly wasn’t among the paltry list of world leaders who received one of Trump’s copy-paste trade deal letters last week.

Crucially, Trump’s ever-fluctuating tariffs have proven to be a wildly ineffective tactic for settling deals. In the more than 90 days since Trump first announced his vast slate of tariffs, only three rough trade deals have actually materialized. Last week, the Trump administration once again extended its deadline to produce trade deals, but then Trump clarified that the offers they produced would only be “more or less final.”

Thus, Trump’s newest tariff threat can be considered similarly unlikely to perform on-schedule, or produce any actual resolution.

Trump also said the U.S. would no longer send military aid to Ukraine, but rather sell weapons to NATO countries that would then distribute the arms to Ukraine.

“We’ve made a deal today where we are going to be sending them weapons and they are going to be paying for ‘em,” Trump said.

“The United States will not be having any payment made. We’re not buying it, but we will manufacture it, and they’re gonna be paying for it,” he continued, barely coherent.

Trump had already announced this development last week, as reports spread that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had unilaterally paused weapons shipments to Ukraine, before Trump stepped in to resume them.

Donald Trump claimed that “Alligator Alcataraz” would hold the “most vicious people on the planet.” But in reality, it’s holding hundreds of people with no criminal record at all, according to records obtained by The Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times.

More than 250 of the nearly 750 people currently being held at the Trump administration’s premiere wetland-themed concentration camp have no criminal conviction or pending criminal charges. Only a third of detainees have had criminal convictions in the United States, ranging from attempted murder to traffic violations.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin gave a statement to the Herald/Times attempting to justify the Trump administration’s blatant targeting of innocent people. 

“Many of the individuals that are counted as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.,” McLaughlin told the Herald/Times. “Further, every single one of these individuals committed a crime when they came into this country illegally. It is not an accurate description to say they are ‘non-criminals.’”

But many inside the hastily constructed facility aren’t undocumented. 

Some, like Denis Alcides Solis Morales, came to the United States under a humanitarian parole program, which has since been canceled by the Trump administration. The 56-year-old Nicaraguan man was taken to Alligator Alcatraz following a traffic stop and has a pending asylum case.

Another detainee, Leamsy Izquierdo, who detailed the horrific conditions at the site, is a green card-holder and permanent U.S. resident.  

Already, Alligator Alcatraz has revealed itself to be a massive humanitarian disaster. Reports have alleged that detainees lack access to clean water, safe food, and showers, are attacked by massive bugs, and kept awake at all hours by bright lights. Last week, attorneys claimed that they have no way to reach their clients inside, and families said that their loved ones have disappeared from ICE’s registry upon entering the state-run facility. 

It seems that under the Trump administration, being undocumented—or just being from another country—is enough to justify your torture pending removal from the United States. 

Border czar Tom Homan’s speech at this weekend’s Turning Point USA convention was interrupted by a heckler who seemed to draw attention to the administration’s spurious efforts to justify its deportation campaign.

“Are you an MS-13 member?” a man shouted from the audience.

Sporting a T-shirt that read, “I IDENTIFY AS ULTRA MAGA,” and a Trump 2024 campaign hat, the heckler brandished a large poster depicting Homan with “MS-13” digitally added onto his knuckles—seemingly a reference to the Trump administration’s dubious attempts to frame Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident wrongly deported to El Salvador, as a leader of the criminal gang.

During the Trump administration’s scramble to tie Abrego Garcia to MS-13, one purported piece of evidence it invoked was an image of four tattooed symbols on the man’s fingers.

The Trump administration took the questionable position that the four symbols represented “M,” “S,” “1,” and “3,” and the White House accordingly published an image in which the tattoos were digitally annotated with text reading “MS-13.” Trump, however—in a moment revealing either his characteristic penchant for lying or his digital illiteracy—insisted that plainly photoshopped characters were the actual tattoos themselves.

At the summit on Saturday, Homan laid into the heckler, who also was jeered by conservative convention-goers as he was escorted out.

“Why don’t you come up here and hand me that picture?” Homan asked, before beginning a “USA” chant with the crowd.

“They got morons like this all over the country,” Homan continued. “This guy wouldn’t know what it’s like to serve this nation. This guy ain’t got the balls to be an ICE officer. He hasn’t got the balls to be a border patrol agent.”

“If you’re such a badass, meet me off stage in 13 minutes and 50 seconds,” Homan said, as well as hurling a number of insults (“I guarantee you he sits down to pee,” “This guy lives in his mother’s basement,” and “The only thing that surprises me is you don’t have purple hair and a nose ring.”)

After the brief interruption, Homan continued to tout the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. The border czar’s other recent defenses include a Friday appearance on Fox News, in which he seemed to advocate for Immigration and Customs Enforcement practicing racial profiling.

The Texas Newsroom requested records of all correspondence between Governor Greg Abbott and billionaire Elon Musk from their legislative session this year. After initially approving the request and charging the newsroom $244 for the records, Abbott’s office refused to share any documents, stating that the exchanges between Musk and Abbott were too “intimate and embarrassing” to be released.

“Section 552.101 encompasses the doctrine of common-law privacy, which protects information that is … highly intimate or embarrassing, the publication of which would be highly objectionable to a reasonable person and not of legitimate concern to the public,” a letter from Abbott’s counsel read.

“Embarrassment” is a ludicrous reason to block the public release of messages between one of the country’s most powerful Republican governors and the richest man in the world, who has plenty of his own political motivations. And as ProPublica notes, that “common law privacy” doctrine is usually only levied in situations that involve highly personal information, health data, or children, not to very wealthy, public, and powerful men.

Were Musk and Abbott chatting about bringing a Grok data center to Texas? Were they planning a trip to Mars? Were they flirting? What could be so embarrassing and intimate about these messages?

We’ll likely never know, as a recent ruling from the Texas Supreme Court has granted more protections to public officials who are asked to divulge public records. Abbott’s office has yet to elaborate.

Donald Trump is still just becoming wise to the notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin might not be a good-faith actor on the international stage.

On Sunday, the president announced plans to send an unspecified number of Patriot air defense missiles to Ukraine, and all but admitted that Putin has hitherto charmed and strung him along.

“We will send them Patriots, which they desperately need, because Putin really surprised a lot of people,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews. “He talks nice, and then he bombs everybody in the evening. So there’s a little bit of a problem there. I don’t like it.”

With his promise to end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours now broken by almost 175 days, Trump is slowly becoming disabused of his perception of the Russian president as a reliable partner.

In April, in response to the notion that Russia may be intentionally stalling negotiations with Ukraine to end the war, Trump insisted, “Nobody’s playing me.”

But later that month, when Putin conducted deadly strikes on Kyiv, the president posted exasperatedly on Truth Social, “Vladimir, STOP!” and, the following week, Trump wrote that “there was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days. It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along.”

At a Cabinet meeting last week, Trump vented in a similar tenor to his Sunday remarks, saying, “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth. He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Sunday that reports that she’d kneecapped FEMA’s response to the deadly flooding in Texas were “fake news.”

During an appearance on NBC News’s Meet the Press, host Kristen Welker asked Noem to respond to a New York Times report that found thousands of calls for assistance from flood victims to FEMA call centers went unanswered because the secretary had failed to renew contracts to keep call center employees in place until nearly a week later.

“Why did it take so long to extend those contracts?” Welker asked.

“It’s just false. Those contracts were in place. Nobody—no employees were off of work. Every one of them were answering calls. So false reporting, fake news,” Noem said.

“And it’s discouraging. It’s discouraging that during this time, when we have such a loss of life, and so many people’s lives have turned upside down, that people are playing politics with this, because the response time was immediate. And if you talk to anyone in Texas who was there, that was part of this operation, they would say the federal government and President Trump immediately responded,” she continued.

“Just to be very clear, on July 7, 15.9 percent of calls were answered,” Welker pressed. “I mean, does that concern you that only 15 percent of calls were answered? These are people in a desperate state, FEMA often the first call that they make. Only 15 percent were answered on July 7, several days after the floods?”

But Noem wouldn’t hear it.

“That report needs to be valid-ified,” she said. “I’m not certain it’s accurate, and I’m not sure where it came from. And the individuals who are giving you information out of FEMA, I’d love to have them put their names behind it. Because, the anonymous attacks to polit-ili-cize the situation is completely wrong.”

The New York Times reported that on July 5, as the floodwaters in Texas began to recede, Noem failed to renew contracts with the four companies staffing FEMA call centers, leading to hundreds of contractors being fired. Documents showed that on July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, about 35.8 percent. The next day, on July 7, the agency received 16,419 calls and answered only 2,613, roughly 15.9 percent.

By July 8, Noem still hadn’t renewed the contracts. “We still do not have a decision, waiver or signature from the DHS Secretary,” one FEMA official wrote in a July 8 email to colleagues, according to the Times.

This isn’t the first report that Noem botched the response to the flooding in Texas. Noem reportedly delayed FEMA’s initial response by instituting a policy that required her to personally sign off on all DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000. FEMA officials, who were unaware of the new rule, didn’t receive Noem’s go-ahead until Monday, at which point floodwaters had been raging for more than 72 hours. Meanwhile, she posted on Instagram asking her followers to vote for their favorite portrait of her to be used as her official governor’s portrait.

There’s been a mass exodus at the DOJ’s Federal Programs Branch—a unit specifically tasked with defending Trump’s most aggressive policies in court.

Of the 110 lawyers at the Federal Programs Branch, 69 have either already quit or announced that they’re quitting since Trump won in November, according to Reuters. Many of them left because they felt overwhelmed by the workload (they’re fighting an “unprecedented number of lawsuits,” one DOJ spokesperson said). Others felt ideologically compromised by the positions the administration was forcing them to defend, like the end of birthright citizenship, massive DOGE cuts from Elon Musk, or the countless extrajudicial deportations carried out by ICE.

“Many of these people came to work at Federal Programs to defend aspects of our constitutional system,” one of the outgoing lawyers told Reuters. “How could they participate in the project of tearing it down?”

The Federal Programs Branch plays a crucial role in pushing Trump’s agenda forward, and the Justice Department is working actively to refill the positions with individuals more inclined to mindlessly carry out the president’s will, no matter how blatantly unconstitutional.

Early signs bode ill for Trump after his base soundly rejected his attempt to smooth over the Epstein affair this weekend.

Trump in recent days has faced a revolt from his base over his Justice Department’s July 7 memo that Jeffrey Epstein had not kept a “client list” and that there had been no foul play in the disgraced financier and sex trafficker’s death. Top officials in the Trump administration had previously elevated Epstein-related conspiracy theories, promising full transparency on the matter and to release the supposed client list.

Trump on Saturday took to Truth Social to dispel MAGA outrage—which includes calls to fire Attorney General Pam Bondi—by insisting that the Epstein files are “Radical Left inspired Documents” created by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, and that the administration ought “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”

The president’s message evidently fell flat among large swaths of his supporters. Major MAGA media figures have registered their dissatisfaction with the statement, and the Truth Social post was Trump’s first ever post on his platform to receive more replies than likes—indicating that users gave Trump an earful over it.

A Morning Consult poll conducted from July 4 to July 10—a period during which the Epstein news broke and began to resonate (not to mention other developments, such as the passage of Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill)—seems to indicate a backlash against Trump. The polling firm, which collects data on global leaders’ approval ratings, has Trump at 44 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval between July 4 and July 10. This represents a six-point dip from a month earlier.

This reversal, of course, can only tell us so much, as the poll records favorability and unfavorability generally, rather than issue-specific data. But since it was conducted, Trump further stirred the pot with his Saturday plea on Truth Social. While we’ll have to wait for clearer quantifications of the backlash against Trump for the Epstein fiasco, MAGA rancor over the matter seems more clamorous than ever, with no sign of quieting down any time soon.