Police Chief Awards Trump Shiny Badge He Gives All Little Children

President Trump was given an honorary U.S. Marshals badge at his executive order press conference on Monday, once again displaying how easily impressed he is by meaningless gifts.

“I think Gady Serralta had something he wanted to give you on behalf of all of the law enforcement who are out there every single night,” Attorney General Pam Bondi told Trump with a grin, speaking to the President of the United States like a kid on Christmas.

“Mr. President, thank you for putting me in charge of this search as the director of the United States Marshals Service,” Serralta said. “On behalf of all the federal law enforcement agencies that we’re working with, and those that have yet to join the team, we thought it was only appropriate to present you with [an] honorary United States Marshall service badge,” he told Trump.

He then handed the president the badge and a handcuff key, to Trump’s delight. “That’s very nice,” Trump said directly to the camera while smiling without his teeth.

“You continue, through your policies and your efforts with your staff to un-handcuff law enforcement officers all over this nation,” Serralta said. “And I can tell you personally that they thank you for that. You can continue un-handcuffing law enforcement.”

“That’s a very great honor,” Trump replied. “I’ll save that and put it some place up, which is important.”

An honorary service badge is something law enforcement officials hand out to just about anyone, even children. The most notable instance of this was DJ Daniel, the cancer-stricken child who attended the State of the Union earlier this year. Daniel was made an honorary Secret Service member for dressing up and pretending to be a police officer in his hometown. But from children’s badges, to golden paperweights, to a literal Diet Coke bottle, it doesn’t take much to flatter Trump.

Asserting federal control over the private sector is as American as apple pie, according to Donald Trump.

The president apparently sees nothing wrong with his administration’s latest deal with Intel, the only chipmaker allowed to make the tech parts in the U.S.

Last week, the government took a 10 percent stake in the company, purchasing 433.3 million shares for a total price of $8.9 billion. In a press release Friday, Intel underscored that the exchange came at a “discount” to the company’s current stock rate. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also confirmed the deal.

The transaction has made the U.S. government Intel’s largest single shareholder, though Intel said that the White House would not have a board seat or hold any governing rights of the company. The terms of the deal do, however, allow the U.S. to buy an additional five percent of Intel’s market shares if the company is “no longer majority owner of its foundry business,” according to MSNBC.

But Trump’s recounting of the events has been remarkably different. By Monday morning, Trump still refused to acknowledge that the stock purchase came with a price, deriding his critics of the deal with simple insults.

“I PAID ZERO FOR INTEL, IT IS WORTH APPROXIMATELY 11 BILLION DOLLARS. All goes to the USA,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Why are ‘stupid’ people unhappy with that? I will make deals like that for our Country all day long. I will also help those companies that make such lucrative deals with the United States States.”

“I love seeing their stock price go up, making the USA RICHER, AND RICHER. More jobs for America!!! Who would not want to make deals like that?” he added.

Trump’s insistence that the White House’s involvement in private business is a good thing does not bode well for the rest of the private sector: The government is already looking to take equity stakes in other companies, according to one of Trump’s top economic advisers.

“I’m sure that at some point there’ll be more transactions, if not in this industry, in other industries,” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told CNBC Monday.

The deal with Intel followed several weeks of personal attacks by Trump against Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, in which the president openly questioned the Malaysian-born American business executive’s previous investments in Chinese tech firms. Since the deal was announced, however, the president has noticeably pulled back on his calls for Tan’s resignation.

The Trump administration’s Intel deal represents only the first of more such interventions into the private sector, according to Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council.

Trump last week announced that the U.S. government will be taking a 10 percent passive ownership stake in the tech company Intel. The deal came just weeks after the president called for Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to resign after Senator Tom Cotton alleged the executive has problematic ties to China.

Trump made remarks Friday indicating that the move was something more of a shakedown than a deal, and that more such interventions may eventually be in the works. “[Tan] walked in wanting to keep his job, and he ended up giving us $10 billion for the United States,” the president told reporters. “So we picked up 10 billion. And we do a lot of deals like that. I’ll do more of them.”

On Monday, CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Hassett about that prospect.

“So, we should expect the U.S. government to be taking more equity stakes in businesses around the country?” Sorkin asked. “That is something that if you’re a CEO, this morning, watching us, you should say, ‘OK, the sovereign wealth fund may be coming and trying to effectively buy in some kind of equity stake?’”

Hassett replied in the affirmative. “It’s possible, yeah,” he said. “That’s absolutely right.”

To allay fears of government meddling in business decisions, the adviser insisted that the government would only ever acquire non-voting stock.

But such assurances are likely to be met with skepticism, given that a major tenet of Trump’s agenda appears to be bending American businesses and institutions to his will. Take, for example, recent reports that the administration is keeping a scorecard of companies’ loyalty to the administration’s agenda.

Donald Trump claimed the American people are asking for a dictator—and he seems more than happy to give them what they want.

While signing executive orders in the Oval Office Monday morning, Trump whined that people were up in arms after he suggested that he would deploy National Guard troops in Chicago, following his federal takeover of Washington D.C.

Not everyone in Chicago was unhappy with this plan, he claimed.

“A lot of people are saying ‘maybe we’d like a dictator,’” Trump said.

The president then attempted to course-correct. “I don’t like a dictator, I’m not a dictator,” he quickly said. “I’m a man with great common sense, and I’m a smart person.”

It’s not clear that there is any meaningful difference between a dictator, and a leader pleasing the people who are asking for one. What is apparent, however, is that Trump’s plan to move federal forces to other American cities is so unpopular that he’s concocting consent for tyranny as a means to justify it.

Crucially, Trump gets closer to becoming a dictator everyday. On Monday, he signed an executive order which would criminalize flag burning, an act of political expression protected by the First Amendment, claiming that it incited riots.

If Trump truly believed that inciting a riot earns you a year in prison, then the president himself is well overdue for a stint behind bars.

President Trump on Monday signed an executive order instructing the U.S. attorney general to pursue criminal charges against anyone caught burning the American flag, blatantly violating basic freedom of speech and expression laws.

“Flag burning. All over the country they’re burning flags. All over the world they burn the American flag,” Trump said at his press conference, where he signed another executive order revoking cashless bail in Washington, D.C. “What happens when you burn a flag is, the area goes crazy. If you have hundreds of people they go crazy…. When you burn the American flag it incites riots at levels that we’ve never seen before.”

“If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail, no early exits, no nothing. You get one year in jail,” Trump said. “You don’t get 10 years, you don’t get one month, you get one year in jail. And it goes on your record. And you will see flag burning stopping immediately.”

The president claimed the Department of Justice would “investigate instances of flag burning” in situations where “prosecution wouldn’t fall afoul to the First Amendment.” But the order does exactly that. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that flag burning is a protected right under the Constitution.

Trump also made unsubstantiated claims that flag burning is a rampant practice in America right now (it is not) and that anyone doing it is being paid by the “radical left.”

It’s extremely unclear how exactly the administration can throw American citizens in jail for burning a piece of fabric without “running afoul” of the Constitution. This is a move that would be relentlessly vilified if someone like Russian President Vladimir Putin or North Korean leader Kim Jong Un did it. Instead, Trump is using this despotic tactic to crack down on protesters and further push his dark MAGA agenda.

The Covid vaccine could be off the shelves in a matter of months.

Despite the coronavirus shot saving millions of lives during the pandemic, the Trump administration is planning to nix nationwide access to the vaccine “within months,” a close associate of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the Daily Beast.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who has repeatedly claimed, contrary to scientific evidence, that the vaccine has more ramifications than the disease it is intended to treat, told the Daily Beast that people around Kennedy “cannot understand” why the vaccine is still on the market. Malhotra noted that the administration intends to remove it from shelves even if it sows a “fear of chaos,” or sparks major legal consequences.

“It could [happen] in a number of stages, including learning more about the data,” said Malhotra. “But given the increased talk of vaccine injuries in the past few weeks among the administration, it could also come with one clean decision.”

The skepticism stems from a 2022 paper, published in the science journal Vaccine, that examined “serious adverse events” that occurred during clinical trials of Pfizer and Moderna mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. The widely dismissed study found that individuals who had gotten the jab were at a 16 percent higher risk of “excess serious adverse events” than those who did not.

Critics of the paper claimed that the researchers underestimated the benefits of the vaccine, overstated methodological risks, selectively chose data, and ignored the broader public health impacts of the vaccine.

It wouldn’t be the first vaccine that Kennedy has canceled on the grounds of his unscientific doubts. Earlier this month, the health secretary said his agency would divest $500 million from mRNA research, effectively axing 22 mRNA studies since—according to Kennedy—the vaccines “fail to protect” against “upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”

Instead, Kennedy said that his agency would shift the funding toward “safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate”—which apparently does not include the latest and greatest medical advances.

The problem with Kennedy’s approach is twofold: It will result in a sacrifice of time and money. Traditional vaccines injected a weakened or dead version of a virus, triggering the body’s immune response and the development of antibodies. Researching and developing these vaccines is a “lengthy and costly” process that becomes further complicated when researchers have to respond to mutations in the virus, according to Penn Medicine.

mRNA technology, meanwhile, employs a synthetic genetic code that instructs the body to produce proteins akin to the viral protein, training the body’s immune system without ever actually exposing the individual to the disease. Once the response is initiated, the synthetic genetic sequence breaks down in the body, according to Medline Plus. The result is a “plug-and-play” vaccine technology that offers rapid development times at a lower cost to traditional vaccines.

In the years since mRNA technology debuted on the U.S. market, biomedical researchers have also framed mRNA as a potential cancer treatment. But its sudden emergence in the U.S. prompted suspicion from anti-vaxxers, including Kennedy.

After Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with vaccine skeptics. He also warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamins. And he founded his new directive for America’s health policy—the “Make America Healthy Again” report—on studies generated by AI that never existed in the real world.

Vice President JD Vance on Sunday botched World War II history in an attempt to support the Trump administration’s stance on Russia-Ukraine.

On Meet the Press, NBC host Kristen Welker asked Vance whether the administration’s plan to allow Russia to keep illegally seized Ukrainian territory as part of a negotiated resolution to end the war would embolden other countries to invade smaller powers.

Vance replied that territorial concessions would ultimately be up to Ukraine, before rewriting history to suit his narrative.

“Kristen, this is how wars ultimately get settled,” he said confidently. “If you go back to World War II, if you go back to World War I, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation.”

World War II ended with the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers, following Adolf Hitler’s suicide in Berlin as Soviet forces advanced on the city, and the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan.

Vance’s historical illiteracy was roundly mocked online, with some social media users simply sharing images of historic newspaper headlines from V-E Day and V-J Day.

“Imagine using as your example the biggest example of the exact opposite in the modern era,” wrote English journalist David Aaronovitch on X.

“Just wondering, who negotiated Hitler’s suicide,” tweeted Polish journalist Marek Magierowski.

On Bluesky, Tom Nichols of The Atlantic refuted Vance with iconic images of the execution of Benito Mussolini, the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, and the Soviet victory in the Battle of Berlin.

“I assume he means this,” Nichols wrote. “Some negotiations are harder edged than others,” joked Josh Marshall of Talking Point Memo in response.

“This guy is the vice president, a venture capitalist, and a Yale Law grad,” journalist Mehdi Hasan said of Vance on X. “And completely ignorant about the basics of World War 2. Sheesh.”

President Trump on Monday signed an executive order ending cashless bail for detained suspects in Washington, D.C. This is yet another aggressive move in his federal takeover of the nation’s capital.

Cashless bail allows people who are suspected of a crime to avoid spending time in a cage before they’ve actually been convicted just because they can’t meet bail. In states with cash bail, having money determines whether or not you’ll be behind bars.

Trump and U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro have framed a cashless bail system, which D.C. has had since 1992, as a “disaster” that leaves hardened criminals running rampant.

“Every place in the country where you have no cash bail is a disaster,” Trump said at his press conference earlier this month announcing the federal takeover of D.C. “That’s what started the problem in New York, and they don’t change it. They don’t want to change it. That’s what started it in Chicago … We’re gonna end that in Chicago. We’re gonna change the statute.”

Pirro echoed Trump’s sentiments.

“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 [heck] out of you or anyone else,” she said at the same press conference. “We need to go after the D.C. Council and their absurd laws. We need to get rid of this concept of ‘no cash bail … We need to recognize that the people who matter are the law-abiding citizens.”

The numbers don’t support this framing. There is no significant documented increase in violent crimes among arrestees out on cashless bail.

Even still, Trump’s order threatens to revoke funding from D.C. city projects if it doesn’t eliminate cashless bail, and will “work to ensure” that those detained are kept in federal custody instead of local. Trump eventually wants to force this order upon the entire country, banning cashless bail in every single state. D.C. is just the testing ground for this show of federal force.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has yet to comment on the order.

Donald Trump’s crudely covered wound is back in a birthday message to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

The Trump War Room account on X shared a photograph of Leavitt and the president walking through the White House to celebrate her 28th birthday Sunday. A large pale patch was visible on Trump’s right hand, even from a few feet away.

Reporters previously spotted the dismally disguised injury while speaking to the president outside of the White House last month. One reporter zoomed in on the president’s hand, giving the public the plainest view of the painted patch so far. Since taking office, Trump has been spotted with the bruise in at least February, April, June, and July.

It’s still unclear what exactly the makeup is covering. Leavitt has claimed multiple times this year that the president’s hand was simply bruised from all of his meet-and-greets, and taking a lot of aspirin.

“President Trump is a man of the people, and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other president in history,” Leavitt told the Daily Beast in July. “His commitment is unwavering and he proves that every single day.”

But Trump was spotted on Saturday with yet another bruise, this time on his left hand.

79-year-old Trump was recently diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, which can cause swelling in the lower limbs when the legs fail to pump blood to the heart.

Three days after Kilmar Abrego Garcia was freed from pre-trial detention, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him once again at a Monday immigration check-in.

Shortly after his detention on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced on X that the Salvadoran immigrant “will be processed for removal to Uganda,” and repeated disputed, still-unproven accusations of ties to MS-13.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said that the Maryland resident had been told to report to an ICE office on Monday for a routine check-in.

“As he was leaving the jail in Tennessee on Friday, he was given a notice requiring him to check in at 8 a.m. this morning. The notice stated the reason was ‘interview.’ Clearly that was false,” Sandoval-Mosheberg said. “There was no need for them to take him into ICE detention. He was already on electronic monitoring from the U.S. Marshall Service and basically on house arrest. The only reason that they’ve chosen to take him into detention is to punish him. To punish him for exercising his constitutional rights.”

Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported to El Salvador in March, as the Trump administration scrambled to push allegations of MS-13 membership. After enduring harrowing conditions in a notorious prison, he was returned to the U.S. where he has been slapped with human smuggling charges and detained, with the Trump administration vowing that he’ll “never go free.”

But after a judge ordered Abrego Garcia’s release on bond, this weekend he experienced freedom and was reunited with his family in Maryland for the first time in more than 160 days.

His release Friday came with bad news, however: Immigration officials informed his lawyers that, after Abrego Garcia had rejected a deal to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for a guilty plea and jail time, they now plan to deport him to Uganda. (Deportation to faraway and unfamiliar countries has become a grotesque hallmark of Trump’s deportation regime.) Monday’s news indicates that the administration is following through on this threat.

This story has been updated.