The White House Is Beefing With a Musician Over ... Decor?

President Donald Trump is notoriously incapable of taking even petty criticisms in stride. The White House’s latest spat with the White Stripes’ Jack White does little to change that perception.

On Tuesday, White posted a photo on Instagram of President Trump sitting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office. Panning the president’s dictator-chic design choices, White wrote in his caption that the White House is “now a vulgar, gold leafed and gaudy, professional wrestler’s dressing room. Can’t wait for the UFC match on the front lawn too.”

White continued, writing, “Look at his disgusting taste, would you even buy a used car from this conman, let alone give him the nuclear codes? A gold plated trump bible would look perfect up on that mantle with a pair of trump shoes on either side wouldn’t it? What an embarrassment to American history.”

The musician also praised Zelenskiy. “Also pictured in this photograph, a REAL leader of a nation in a black suit,” wrote White, who has called Trump an “obvious fascist” and filed (but subsequently dropped) a lawsuit against his 2024 campaign for unauthorized use of the song “Seven Nation Army.”

In a statement sent to several media outlets, Steven Cheung, the famously hot-tempered Trump senior staffer, railed against White for his post.

“Jack White is a washed up, has-been loser posting drivel on social media because he clearly has ample time on his hands due to his stalled career,” wrote Cheung. “It’s apparent he’s been masquerading as a real artist, because he fails to appreciate, and quite frankly disrespects, the splendor and significance of the Oval Office inside of ‘The People’s House.’”

But if White’s post reveals that he has “ample time” on his hands, can’t the same be said about the White House for its reply?

This isn’t the first time Trump’s communications staff has deepened the impression of the president as thin-skinned. When the Comedy Central cartoon South Park featured a withering portrayal of Trump, the White House then too put together a statement defending the president’s honor. “This show,” it said, “hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.”

Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro once bragged about helping out President Donald Trump and the Republican Party as a Fox News host, according to newly unredacted court documents in Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News.

The electronic voting machine company sued Fox in 2021 over the network’s coverage of the 2020 election. Fox News helped perpetuate the conspiracy that Smartmatic’s voting machines helped rig the election against Trump. The lawsuit is ongoing, and Smartmatic is seeking $2.7 billion.

Fox settled a similar lawsuit with voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems in April 2023 for $787.5 million.

The 468-page filing made public Tuesday included private conversations between the conservative network’s hosts, showing just how far Pirro and her colleagues were willing to go to push Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen.

Here are the five craziest messages:

1. Pirro Boasted About Doing Trump’s Dirty Work

Pirro messaged then–Republican Party Chair Ronna McDaniel voicing her support for Trump and the party. “I’m the Number 1 watched show on all news cable all weekend. I work so hard for the President and party,” she wrote. Smartmatic claims that Pirro hoped to keep Trump’s favor in order to secure a presidential pardon for her ex-husband Albert Pirro, who’d been convicted of tax evasion and conspiracy. Albert Pirro was the last person Trump pardoned in his first term.

2. Pirro Cheered on Sidney Powell

Smartmatic’s suit alleged that Pirro served as a conduit to Trump’s associates, such as Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell—and the texts don’t lie. “It’s Jeanine P. Got a former CIA chief of station who knows [about] development of Dominion,” Pirro wrote, referring to Dominion Voting Systems, which had explicitly identified Pirro as a font of misinformation during its lawsuit. “Keep fighting,” she urged.

But Pirro’s producer Jerry Andrews warned her to stay away from claims of voter fraud. “You should be very careful with this stuff and protect yourself given the ongoing calls for evidence that has not materialized,” he said. Pirro later admitted as much during her deposition, saying that the election was “fair and free” and that Joe Biden had been “legitimately elected,” according to Smartmatic’s filing.

3. Bartiromo Asked Sidney Powell to “Please Please” Overturn the Election Results

Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo also urged Powell to keep up the good work attempting to overturn Georgia’s election results. “Sidney we must keep you out there,” Bartiromo wrote via Signal.

“Dobbs is considered very opinionated. I am news,” she said, referring to the late Fox News host Lou Dobbs.

“I am very worried,” she added. “Please please overturn this. Bring the evidence. I know you can.”

Bartiromo was the first person to interview Powell, a few days after the election. In 2023, Powell pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor charges connected with her efforts to interfere with Georgia’s election.

4. Baier Called the Claims a Load of “Crap”

Fox News anchor Bret Baier was so concerned about Bartiromo’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud that he warned Fox News executive Jay Wallace that they needed to verify her shoddy reporting. “None of that is true as far as we can tell,” Baier wrote, according to the filing. “We need to fact-check this crap.”

5. Gutfeld Fantasized About Boosting Ratings

Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, who has a penchant for spouting racist and antisemitic drivel, messaged his colleague Jesse Watters in December 2020 about how leaning into dubious claims of election fraud could prove to be lucrative. “Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL,” Gutfeld wrote, according to the filing.

He later testified that he’d seen “no evidence that Smartmatic Technology switched votes in the 2020 Election in the United States.”

After making fiery, aggressive promises to crack down on crime in Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has told prosecutors not to pursue felony charges against people caught with rifles or shotguns in the nation’s capital, according to The Washington Post.

This is a surprising move that contradicts almost everything the Trump administration has said and done regarding crime in D.C. thus far. The president has compared the District to Baghdad and said that people don’t even feel safe walking to a restaurant or “newspaper stand” (which are, unfortunately, in short supply these days) because they fear being attacked or killed. Pirro has all but echoed those statements.

“I see too much violent crime being committed by young punks who think that they can get together in gangs and crews and beat the hell out of you or anyone else.… They know that we can’t touch them. Why? Because the laws are weak,” Pirro said, just over a week ago at a press conference about President Trump’s federal takeover. “I convict someone of shooting another person with an illegal gun, on a public bus, in the chest. Intent to kill? I convict him. And you know what the judge gives him? Probation.”

This doesn’t sound like someone who would ever even consider lifting the District’s ban on shotgun and rifle possession without a very specific, local permit—and yet here we are.

This move certainly sends mixed signals to supporters and opponents alike, as firearm seizure has been a primary tactic in the early days of Trump’s D.C. crackdown. The Trump administration has already seized 68 guns within city limits as of Tuesday.

But Pirro now sees D.C.’s ban on shotguns and rifles as a liberal overreach that violates the constitution.

“Nothing in this memo from the Department of Justice and the Office of Solicitor General precludes the United States Attorney’s Office from charging a felon with the possession of a firearm, which includes a rifle, shotgun, and attendant large capacity magazine pursuant to DC Code 22-4503,” Pirro said, in a memo obtained by The Washington Post. What it does preclude is a separate charge of possession of a registered rifle or shotgun.”

This raises the question, though: How exactly does making it easier to carry large, powerful guns in the nation’s capital make people safer and decrease crime, even if they’re registered legally? If Pirro actually cared about safety more than shows of force, maybe she’d realize that.

Donald Trump is not cleared of wrongdoing in relation to the Epstein files, according to House Oversight Ranking Member Robert Garcia.

Speaking on former Attorney General Bill Barr’s testimony before the Oversight Committee Tuesday, Garcia contradicted Oversight Chair James Comer, who claimed Barr said that “he had never seen anything that would implicate Trump in any of this.”

Instead, Garcia wrote in a statement, “Barr could not clear President Trump of wrongdoing.”

“Chairman Comer should release the entire unedited transcript of his interview to the public,” Garcia said.

The Trump administration has been in a tailspin over the case files since the beginning of July, when the Justice Department directly contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list,” eliciting surprise and upset from the deepest pockets of the MAGA leader’s base.

Since then, new reporting has pointed to several new ties between the pedophilic financier and the man sitting in the Oval Office, revealing that the pair had a remarkably close relationship. Some of those details include a salacious letter Trump penned to Epstein for the sex trafficker’s 50th birthday, and testimony from the former COO of Trump’s Atlantic City casino that placed Epstein and Trump with three underage girls in the late 1980s.

And the Trump administration likely knows all about it: The Wall Street Journal reported in July that the Justice Department had notified Trump months earlier that his name appeared several times in the Epstein files.

But rather than release the Epstein files and provide the transparency so demanded by his supporters, Trump decided to go in a different direction, attempting to distract from the base-shattering scandal while seeking a new “list” from Epstein’s incarcerated longtime associate and girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Let’s put all of these tapes and depositions out to the public,” Garcia told Meidas Touch Tuesday. “We have nothing to hide here.”

“What I would say is that in no way [did] Bill Barr’s testimony—change the direction of this case,” he continued. “In no way did Bill Barr say anything that was groundbreaking in a way to halt our desire and need for justice for these victims and our certainty that Donald Trump and his name and other folks that may have been involved in different ways with Epstein are not in these files. We know that they are.

“So Bill Barr’s testimony was an act of Republicans trying to control a narrative,” he added.

Nobody is getting under MAGA skin like California Governor Gavin Newsom.

The Democratic bully-for-good has been on a social media crusade this week, rising to the top of algorithmic feeds by parodying Donald Trump’s posting style and his attention-grabbing stunts. Some of those low-brow trolling efforts include reposting a photoshopped image of Mount Rushmore with Newsom’s face on it, a mock-up of Newsom as a king on the cover of Time magazine, as well as an AI-hatched depiction of Newsom surrounded by Tucker Carlson, the late Hulk Hogan, and Kid Rock (and then writing in all-caps that he hates Kid Rock.)

The déjà vu is intended to serve as a jarring mirror for Republicans still allied with the authoritarian president, and, incredibly, it’s working.

“He’s trying to mimic President Trump,” Trump’s first term chief strategist Steve Bannon told Politico Playbook. “He’s no Trump, but if you look at the Democratic Party, he’s at least getting up there, and he’s trying to imitate a Trumpian vision of fighting, right? He looks like the only person in the Democratic Party who is organizing a fight that they feel they can win.”

“People in the MAGA movement and the America First movement should start paying attention to this, because it’s not going to go away, they’re only going to get more intense,” Bannon added.

The California governor’s social media strategy is a novel one for Democrats, fighting the right’s AI-generated slop with even more AI-generated slop. In one particularly viral post, Newsom ragged on the president’s latest variant of “covfefe,” mocking Trump for posting “bela” to his most frequented communication platform, Truth Social.

“DONALD (TINY HANDS), HAS WRITTEN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY THIS MORNING—UNFORTUNATELY (LOW IQ) HE SPELLED IT WRONG—‘BETA,’” Newsom wrote. “SOON YOU WILL BE A ‘FIRED’ BETA BECAUSE OF MY PERFECT, ‘BEAUTIFUL MAPS.’ THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!—GCN”

Newsom, in his own words, has “changed.”

“The facts have changed; [Democrats] need to change,” Newsom told Fox LA’s Elex Michaelson Tuesday.

Breaking character momentarily during a press conference last week, Newsom said that he hoped the dumbed-down antics would serve as a “wake-up call for the president of the United States.”

“I’m sort of following his example. If you’ve got issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns about what he’s putting out as president,” Newsom continued. “I think the deeper question is how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets, Truth Social posts over the course of the last many years, to go without similar scrutiny and notice?”

Newsom’s nonsense has ruffled feathers all the way to the Oval Office. Asked for a request to comment to Politico, the White House issued what could be the first official statement in meme format.