GOP Governor Defies Her Party and Vetoes Seven Republican Bills

New Hampshire Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte on Tuesday struck down seven separate right-wing bills in an open rebuke of her party’s MAGA arm.

Ayotte vetoed House Bill 324, which gave parents greater power to remove any classroom content they felt was obscene, placing a target on LGBTQ+ literature and themes.

“Current state law appears to provide a mechanism for parents through their local school district to exercise their rights to ensure their children are not exposed to inappropriate materials,” Ayotte said. “Therefore, I do not believe the State of New Hampshire needs to, nor should it, engage in the role of addressing questions of literary value and appropriateness, particularly where the system created by House Bill 324 calls for monetary penalties based on subjective standards.”

There was also House Bill 148, which would have allowed stores, jails, and workspaces to ignore gender identity and categorize people based on their assigned gender at birth.

“I believe there are important and legitimate privacy and safety concerns raised by biological males using places such as female locker rooms and being placed in female correctional facilities,” Ayotte wrote in her veto of the bill. “At the same time, I see that House Bill 148 is overly broad and impractical to enforce, potentially creating an exclusionary environment for some of our citizens.”

She killed House Bill 358, which would have streamlined the “religious exemption” process for parents who don’t want to vaccinate their children; House Bill 446, which would have required schools to receive parental permission to conduct non-academic surveys; and House Bill 667, an anti-abortion bill that would have forced students to view “a high quality computer generated animation or ultrasound video that shows the development of the heart, brain, and other vital organs in early fetal development,” according to The New Hampshire Bulletin.

There was also House Bill 475 and House Bill 115, both budget-centered bills that Ayotte deemed unnecessary.

Ayotte’s vetoes are a rejection of her party’s attempt to assert cultural control throughout the state, and the country. Lawmakers would need a two-thirds majority in both the state House and Senate to overturn Ayotte’s vetoes, which will be a very tall task given that Republicans don’t have those numbers.

Donald Trump started his Tuesday morning with a stark warning to his MAGA followers still interested in the Jeffrey Epstein case: Anyone who wants answers is falling for a Democratic “bullshit.”

“The Radical Left Democrats have hit pay dirt, again! Just like with the FAKE and fully discredited Steel Dossier, the lying 51 ‘Intelligence’ Agents, the Laptop from Hell, which the Dems swore had come from Russia (No, it came from Hunter Biden’s bathroom!), and even the Russia, Russia, Russia Scam itself, a totally fake and made up story used in order to hide Crooked Hillary Clinton’s big loss in the 2016 Presidential Election, these Scams and Hoaxes are all the Democrats are good at - It’s all they have - They are no good at governing, no good at policy, and no good at picking winning candidates,” Trump posted on Truth Social, in the longest, most nonsensical run-on sentence ever.

“Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years,” he continued, directly attacking those interested in the case as falling for leftist propaganda.

“I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any President in our Country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the Fake News and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!”

The post is proof that Trump is losing control of his base—and it’s getting to him. On Tuesday, he declared that those still interested in the case about the deceased sex criminal are “pretty bad people.” Despite all of Trump’s efforts, which have included directly calling MAGA influencers talking about Epstein and asking them to fall in line, his followers are still talking about how and why the administration suddenly closed the case. Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Charlie Kirk, and many, many more have attacked the Trump administration and promised they won’t let this go.

Who better to re-investigate the Epstein case for the Trump administration than another alleged sex trafficker?

That’s apparently Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert’s line of thinking. Speaking with far-right commentator Benny Johnson on Tuesday, the QAnon-friendly Republican suggested that former Representative Matt Gaetz could serve as special counsel.

“I think moving forward, we need a special counsel,” Boebert said, offering up Gaetz’s name. “There has to be a special investigation into this if we aren’t going to be provided information.”

Gaetz was Trump’s original pick for attorney general before his candidacy fell apart over a string of controversies, including allegations that the 43-year-old Florida politico had paid for sex with a minor.

“I hope it doesn’t become a false idol to Republicans where we lose sight of everything else, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want answers,” Boebert underscored.

The lawmaker doubled down on the request after the interview, asking Gaetz directly on X if he would consider the post, despite hours earlier joining her party in blocking a Democrat-led effort to release the Epstein files. The final vote was 211 to 210—just one dissenting Republican would have tipped the scales.

Much to Trump’s chagrin, the botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague his administration. A Morning Consult poll conducted earlier this month found that Trump’s popularity had tanked by six points since the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Epstein’s so-called “client list.” The fallout has been so substantial that the president directed Fox News and some far-right influencers such as Charlie Kirk to stop discussing the topic altogether.

QAnon believers—who turned out at the polls in November to re-elect Trump—have believed for years that the 79-year-old billionaire would rid the world of Satan-worshiping, liberal-minded pedophiles who run the government and media. But Trump’s sudden refusal to offer up what he has promised his conspiratorial followers has cast his messiah-like status with the group into doubt.

Trump has told his Epstein-focused supporters to “move on,” claiming that the unreleased files are a political concoction that “nobody cares about.” On Tuesday, Trump told reporters that those still invested in uncovering the associates of the notorious child sex trafficker are—according to him—“pretty bad people.”

A reminder that Trump was named and photographed as an associate of Epstein, who even described Trump as a “best friend,” and reportedly slept with his now-wife Melania for the first time aboard Epstein’s plane, the “Lolita Express.” But Trump has a terrible track record with how he treats women outside of Epstein’s world, as well: the current president was found liable by a jury for sexually abusing Elle columnist E. Jean Carrol last year, was convicted as a felon for crimes relating to his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, and famously boasted on a hot mic before his ascent to America’s political vanguard that he grabs women “by the pussy.”

President Trump thinks his own supporters are “pretty bad people” for demanding full transparency on the Jeffrey Epstein case, which his Justice Department effectively closed.

“I know you’ve urged people to move on, but I’m curious, why do you think your supporters in particular have been so interested in the Epstein story, and so upset about how it’s been handled?” a reporter asked Trump on the tarmac on Tuesday.

“I don’t understand it, why they would be so interested. He’s dead for a long time, he was never a big factor in terms of life. I don’t understand what the interest or what the fascination is, I really don’t,” Trump replied. “And the credible information’s been given. Don’t forget, we went through years of the Mueller witch hunt … all that information was fake. But I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody. It’s pretty boring stuff, it’s sorted but it’s boring. And I don’t understand why it keeps going. I think really only pretty bad people, including fake news, wanna keep something like that going.”

The Epstein case is still of interest to Trump’s supporters because he and multiple people within his administration allowed it to fester. Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Deputy Director Dan Bongino, and Vice President JD Vance have each questioned the outcome of the Epstein case multiple times. Bongino claimed outright that Epstein didn’t kill himself a few years ago, and Bondi claimed that she had the client list sitting on her desk just a few months ago. Now all of those people have reneged on basically everything they’ve said about Epstein, much to the chagrin of the MAGA supporters who expected them to expose the deep state, not become it.

“Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking ring?” Vance wrote in 2021. “And then that guy died mysteriously in a jail? And now we just don’t talk about it.”

Now they don’t want anyone to talk about it. The reasons for this are varied. But it’s not a stretch for Trump’s supporters to assume he saw something that incriminated himself or one of his friends, especially given that he has well-recorded connections with Epstein going back to the 90s. In a 2002 New York Magazine piece, he called Epstein a “terrific guy” who likes “beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Even if he’s telling the truth, Trump has damaged a significant amount of goodwill with the base that got him here. Time will only tell how they react to his betrayal.

Officers from the Department of Homeland Security who arranged the arrests of foreign university students over their pro-Palestinian speech claimed that the orders they received were so unusual, they weren’t sure if they were legal, Politico reported Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Willliam Young heard testimony from four veteran DHS officers as part of a lawsuit alleging that the Trump administration is implementing a policy of “ideological deportation,” violating the First Amendment rights of non-citizens in the United States. Across the country, federal judges have ordered the release of multiple students and faculty detained as part of Donald Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech.

Darren McCormack, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, said orders to arrest Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University grad student and green card holder, came from the very top.

“Somebody at a higher level than the people I was speaking to had an interest in him,” said McCormack, who oversaw Khalil’s arrest. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had attempted to justify Khalil’s months-long detainment and pending removal by claiming he was a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests because he would create a “hostile environment” for Jewish students.

McCormack said he’d been instructed to surveil Khalil ahead of his arrest, leading McCormack to consult with ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations office in New York, which typically handles deportation arrests.

“We historically in recent times had not enforced those laws,” McCormack said. “I wanted to confirm there was a legal basis for arrest.”

When asked why ERO wasn’t responsible for carrying out the arrest, McCormack said he didn’t have an answer. “I wondered why HSI was effecting this arrest and not ERO,” he said. “I still don’t know.”

Brian Cunningham, an assistant special agent at HSI in Boston, said there had been “a lot of hands in the fishbowl” regarding the horrific arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University grad student who was swarmed by six masked plainclothes officers on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Cunningham also said the orders for that arrest came from somebody high up. “I can’t recall a time that it’s come top-down like this with a visa revocation, under my purview anyway,” he said. “I did contact our legal counsel to make sure that we’re on solid legal ground.”

“The operation kind of developed pretty quickly,” he added.

Öztürk was detained over an op-ed she’d written for the school paper that advocated for the school to make good on student resolutions to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza and to divest from Israel.

Cunningham, who said that he’d skimmed the op-ed, testified that he “didn’t see anything in the op-ed that suggested she’d committed a crime.”

He admitted he didn’t have “much experience, if any” with conducting a deportation arrest. “Most of my career as an agent and as a supervisor has been in enforcement of drug laws, drug smuggling, money laundering,” Cunningham said.

“That’s changed recently,” he added. He said that shortly after Trump entered the White House, HSI had several meetings about prioritizing immigration enforcement.

Inside ICE, staff members from the HSI division, which typically focuses on transnational crime, are now being moved to ERO, in what some perceive to be a retaliatory move for HSI distancing itself from the agency’s deportation arm.