GOP Senator Draws Outrage After Speech on Who America “Belongs To”

At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri proposed a new direction for his party—essentially arguing for the self-styled “party of Lincoln” to abandon Lincoln for white nationalism.

Schmitt’s speech took issue with the “old conservative establishment” for embracing legal immigration, instead positing that there are select true Americans to whom the country belongs.

“That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract ‘proposition,’ but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests,” Schmitt said. The Continental Army soldiers at Valley Forge, Pilgrims at Plymouth, pioneers in Missouri, and “Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks,” Schmitt said, “believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants.”

“America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny,” the senator continued. “If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all. But we know that’s not true.”

He went on: “When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America—with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It is a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.”

Schmitt failed to include any nonwhite people in the true-American pile. He did, however, include his German ancestors, who came to America in the 1840s: a time when, he omitted to mention, arriving European immigrants were met with no shortage of nativist challenges to their American-ness.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln—during his Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas—observed that much of the U.S. population could not trace their lineage to the Revolutionary era and Founding Fathers. These “men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here,” he said, had no “connection with those days by blood.”

But he affirmed their claim on America nonetheless: The Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal,” he said, makes them as much American “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.”

Two new victims of serial sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein came forward publicly for the first time at a press conference on Capitol Hill Wednesday to demand the government release the Epstein files.

The first to appear was Rosa, who chose to allow her lawyer Arick Fudali to speak for her as she was overcome with emotion. Her tears began as soon as Fudali started speaking.

“This is Rosa. You may not realize this, but what I just did is the first time anyone has ever said Rosa’s name publicly as being attacked and being abused by Jeffery Epstein. And this is also the first time she has ever appeared publicly as a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein, and I say that because it was last night that she flew into Washington, D.C., inspired by the solidarity of all of you,” Fudali said. “But the truth is Rosa shouldn’t be here today … because Rosa was trafficked from Uzbekistan under the guise of a modeling contract in 2009.”

Fudali went on to note that Rosa’s abuse occurred just a year after former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alex Acosta gave Epstein that sweetheart plea deal that let him avoid any real accountability for his sexual crimes. “Had [Acosta not done that], Epstein never would have met Rosa, and Rosa never would have to be here today.” He also rebuked the Trump administration’s platforming and favorable treatment of Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

“They should just release the files,” Fudali continued. “No more slow-rolling, no more meetings, no more strategy, no more interviews behind closed doors. Release the files and give you all, and Rosa, the accountability, the exposure, and most importantly the closure you all deserve.”

The next victim to introduce herself was Marina Lacerda, who was abused by Epstein when she was just 14 years old. She had been referred to as “Minor Victim 1” in Epstein’s indictment.

“My name is Marina Lacerda, I was Minor Victim 1 in [the] federal indictment of Jeffrey Epstein in New York in 2019. I was one of dozens of girls that I personally know who were forced into Jeffrey’s mansion on 9 East 71 Street in New York City when we were just kids,” Lacerda said, her eyes covered by large, dark sunglasses. “Today is the first time I ever speak publicly about what happened to me. The only reason that I am here is because it feels like the people in this country finally care about what we have to say.”

Lacerda said that she was working three jobs to support her family the summer before high school when she was approached by a friend who told her she could make $300 giving an old man massages. She accepted, and was forced to be at Epstein’s mansion so frequently that she even dropped out of ninth grade.

“From 14 to 17 years old, I went and worked for Jeffrey instead of receiving an education. Every day, I hoped that he would offer me a real job as one of his assistants or something, something important.... That day never came. I had no way out, until he finally told me that I was too old.”

Lacerda went on to note that her body has repressed much of her memory from that time as a trauma response. The government has more information about her that it could release and help her heal, she said. Representative Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna’s discharge petition could provide information that could change that.

Lacerda also detailed some of Epstein’s intimidation tactics against her. FBI agents showed up at her front door in 2008, and she feared for the safety of her family back in Brazil. Then everything went away, “like nothing happened,” she added, referring to Acosta’s plea deal.

“Our government could have saved so many women, but Jeffrey Epstein was too important, and those women didn’t matter. Why? Well, we matter now.”

It took an unfathomable amount of courage for these women to step forward. And yet the vast majority of Republicans can’t even muster up the courage to back Massie and Khanna’s bill. They’ve released heavily redacted information and old, duplicated information. It’s time to simply tell the whole truth, for past accountability and future safety.

Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein insisted Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s administration knows exactly who was involved in alleged sex trafficking.

Speaking at a press conference Wednesday to call for more transparency on the Epstein files, Haley Robson, a survivor of the convicted child sex offender, reminded lawmakers that her fellow survivors knew exactly who was to blame.

“We have the truth. And the FBI knows the truth. The government knows the truth,” Robson said. “You may pull the wool over the sheep’s eyes, but we are the keys, we know who was involved.”

Robson continued, saying, “We know the game, we know the players. And we are sitting here for twenty years waiting for you to get up and do something. Well guess what? Your time is up, and now we’re doing it.”

Her warning to lawmakers followed remarks from Lisa Phillips, another accuser, who said she and other survivors had discussed making their own list of Epstein’s clients.

“Epstein was not just a serial predator, he was an international human trafficker,” Phillips said. “And many around him knew this, many participated, and many profited. And yet he was protected.

“We know the names,” Phillips said, adding: “Many of us were abused by them. Now together as survivors we will confidentially compile the names we all know were regularly in the Epstein world, and it will be done by survivors for survivors.”

On Tuesday night, the GOP-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released more than 33,000 documents on the child sex offender. But Democrats on the House Oversight Committee found that 97 percent of documents included in the release had already been made public, and one journalist at the Miami Herald noted that the dump contained multiple duplicates of old reports.

Representative Thomas Massie is leading the charge on moving for a House vote to release the Epstein files in full, despite a warning from the White House that it would be seen as “hostile act.” So far, at least three Republicans have defied Trump and lent their signatures to Massie’s petition.

When the FBI and Justice Department issued their Jeffrey Epstein case-closed memo in July, they also released what they said was the “full raw” footage from a camera outside of his cell on the night of his suicide.

But observers quickly noticed that the recording jumped one minute, from 11:59 p.m. to 12 a.m.—a so-called “missing minute” that became conspiracy fodder for those who believe Epstein was actually murdered. Attorney General Pam Bondi attributed the jump to an automatic daily reset at midnight: “It’s old, from like 1999,” she said. “Every night, the video is reset.”

It turns out that was a lie. The House Oversight Committee’s Tuesday dump of some new Epstein-related files contains the security camera footage with two additional hours, including the “missing minute.” During the minute, relatively little can be made out, though guards are seen working around the area near Epstein’s cell. The additional footage also includes previously unpublished footage of Epstein being escorted to make a phone call, per CBS.

Thus far, the Trump administration has not publicly addressed its previous incorrect statements about the video footage.

Three of MAGA’s strongest soldiers are flipping on President Trump to back Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna’s bipartisan discharge petition to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein files in full.

Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace have all come out in support of the discharge petition, while virtually everyone else in their party cowers in fear of angering the president further. Speaker Mike Johnson has continued to offer distractions and outs to Republicans who don’t want to oppose Trump, even going so far as to declare recess early and offer a shadow vote to give GOPers cover and pretend they’re doing something about the Epstein files. Johnson could simply bring the bipartisan discharge petition straight to the floor if he wanted to. He does not.

At least one of the three MAGA Republicans (Mace) attended the House Oversight Committee’s Tuesday meeting with 10 of Epstein’s victims. She left with tears in her eyes.

“Since it’s already being reported—Yes I left the Oversight briefing with Epstein victims early. As a recent survivor (not 2 years in), I had a very difficult time listening to their stories. Full blown panic attack. Sweating. Hyperventilating. Shaking. I can’t breathe,” Mace wrote, after the meeting, on X. “I feel the immense pain of how hard all victims are fighting for themselves because we know absolutely no one will fight for us. GOD BLESS ALL SURVIVORS.”

It’s worth noting that just an hour before the meeting, Mace was calling the bipartisan petition a “political wedge for [Democrats] in the midterms.

Taylor Greene also offered her robust support for the petition.

“I was the second co-sponsor on Thomas Massie’s resolution. After reading the entire resolution … it protects the victims, and it provides the transparency that the country deserves, and most importantly the survivors deserve. Yes, I will be proudly signing the discharge petition,” Taylor Greene told reporters on Tuesday. “This shouldn’t have been a battle, and unfortunately it has been one. As a woman myself, as a mother of two daughters, I can’t imagine any young girl, or any young woman, being victimized and having … basically a cabal of powerful rich people, as well as the government, cover this up and not prosecute these monsters. And so yes, I’ll proudly sign the discharge petition and I’ll proudly vote for it when it comes to the floor.”

This all comes as the 10 victims who met with the House Oversight Committee behind closed doors on Tuesday plan to hold a press conference with Massie and Khanna at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday. Massie and Khanna need 218 votes to get their petition to the floor. Right now they have 216, with 212 Democratic signees, Massie, and these three congresswomen. Maybe the impending press conference will be enough to flip two more GOPers. We’ll know very soon.

President Donald Trump’s administration warned Republicans Tuesday that voting to release more files on Jeffrey Epstein would be seen as an act of war.

Republican Representative Thomas Massie is leading the charge on moving for a House vote to release the Epstein files in full, following the GOP-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s lackluster release of more than 33,000 documents on the child sex offender Tuesday night, 97 percent of which had already been made public.

Representatives Massie and Ro Khanna had previously introduced a bipartisan bill in July to get the Justice Department to release the full cache of the Epstein files within a month. Then, on Tuesday, Massie filed a discharge petition.

The White House was less than pleased.

“Helping Thomas Massie and Liberal Democrats with their attention-seeking, while the DOJ is fully supporting a more comprehensive file release effort from the Oversight Committee, would be viewed as a very hostile act to the administration,” a White House official said in a statement to CNN.

Massie has already managed to secure signatures for the petition from some of the biggest firebrand Republican representatives, including Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Their support means Massie needs only two more signatures to force a vote.

“There’s a major pressure campaign from the White House right now, and also from the speaker,” Massie said on Tuesday. “But I think there are enough Republicans who are listening to their constituents and care about these victims that we’ll get the 218 signatures we need.”

In her latest seeming appeasement to President Donald Trump amid his federal takeover of Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser on Tuesday ordered that the city work with federal law enforcement indefinitely.

With the one-month limit (sans congressional approval) on Trump’s takeover approaching, Bowser issued an executive order stating that D.C. will “ensure coordination with federal law enforcement to the maximum extent allowable by law within the District.” The order also requires that D.C. “continue to communicate its priorities to federal counterparts and other ways the federal government can assist the District.”

No expiration date is provided for the directive, which the Democratic mayor described as a “pathway forward beyond” Trump’s dubiously grounded 30-day crime emergency.

Trump is already delighted by Bowser’s order, a White House official told The Washington Post, and the president described the D.C. mayor as “very helpful,” in a press conference Tuesday.

While Bowser’s order takes a largely warm stance on the takeover, it does lay out plans to “advance requests” that “federal partners” make efforts to “maintain community confidence in law enforcement,” including by not wearing masks to conceal their identities—a practice that has, thus far, seemingly persisted despite Bowser’s objections.

Bowser has faced criticism for her increasingly conciliatory approach to Trump’s takeover, which is opposed by eight in 10 D.C. residents, according to a Washington Post poll last month. At a press conference last week, Bowser said she “greatly appreciate[s] the surge of officers.”

Prior to Bowser’s executive order Tuesday, a coalition of progressive groups in Washington, D.C., wrote a letter criticizing her perceived embrace of Trump’s occupation. “Your talk about crime fighting and crime rates only lends credence to the federal overreach, invites future attempts to degrade our home rule, and feeds a narrative that dehumanizes our neighbors and puts them at greater risk,” they wrote.

“History is calling upon you to lead our people, not to cower in the face of an authoritarian who does not have our best interests in mind,” the letter continued. “There is no strategy in appeasement, only the reality that the more we give, the more they will take.”

President Donald Trump ended his press conference in a huff Tuesday, after snapping at a reporter who asked him about his administration’s legal loss in California.

The journalist asked the president to respond to a federal judge’s ruling that the Trump administration’s decision to deploy the National Guard to Los Angeles had blatantly violated the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, an act prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law.

“Well, it was a radical left judge, but—very importantly—what did you not tell me in that question, or statement, that you made?” Trump asked, muttering a bit to himself.

“Well, I was asking for your response,” the reporter said.

“No, no, you didn’t say what the judge said though,” Trump said. “The judge said, ‘But you can leave the 300 people that you already have in place, they can continue to be in place.’ That’s all we need. But why didn’t you put that as part of your statement?”

Trump appeared desperate to reframe the judge’s ruling as a victory instead of a defeat, and was defensive that the simple question hadn’t aligned with that framing.

“’Cause, the judge, the same judge, ruled exactly as you said, except the judge said that you could leave the 300 people that you already have in place, they can stay, they can remain, they can do what they have to do,” Trump continued, before abruptly dismissing the reporters from the press conference to which he’d arrived an hour late.

The president was referring to U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruling that the Trump administration was not required to withdraw 300 National Guard troops already stationed in Los Angeles but that the government could not use them as it had, to “set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles.”

The judge barred the administration from using the military in California “to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants” in ways that violate the Posse Comitatus Act. He gave the Trump administration until noon on September 12 to comply.

Acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli gave no indication that the Trump administration planned to abide by the judge’s ruling, claiming that federal agents had needed protection from “thugs” supported by Democratic officials.

This weekend, the internet hummed with rumors that President Donald Trump, 79, had died. The half-joking gossip was spurred by a week-long stretch with no public appearances, as well as comments by Vice President JD Vance about his readiness to assume the presidency should a “terrible tragedy” occur.

Trump on Tuesday was asked about the speculation by Fox News reporter Peter Doocy, in the president’s first public appearance since then: a press conference during which he seemed his usual self—although the back of his right hand (which has received increasing attention of late for a recurring bruise, often covered with ill-matched concealer) did appear discolored.

“How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” Doocy asked—as the president remained silent and his gaze darted to the right. “You see that?” Doocy followed up, to which Trump replied, “No.”

Trump was clued in by the reporter, as Vance could be seen smiling over the president’s shoulder.

In response, Trump claimed that former President Joe Biden had evaded scrutiny for a lack of public appearances, before saying he’d had an “active” weekend, with media appearances, including a Friday interview (published Monday) with conservative news site The Daily Caller; posts to his Truth Social account (“long Truths, and I think pretty poignant Truths,” he said); and a trip to his Virginia golf club.

“I’ve been very active, actually, over the weekend. I didn’t hear that one. That’s pretty serious stuff,” he continued, before blaming the mainstream media for the rumors that were, in reality, driven largely by random social media users.

“Well, it’s fake news,” the president went on. “You know, it’s just so—it’s so fake. That’s why the media has so little credibility. I knew they were saying, like, ‘Is he OK? How’s he feeling? What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘I just—left.’ And it’s also sort of a longer weekend, you know. It’s Labor Day weekend, so I would say a lot of people—No, I was very active this Labor Day. I had heard that, but I didn’t hear it to that extent.”

Trump did not explain the bruise on his hand.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is replacing immigration judges with hundreds of military lawyers, following the Trump administration’s monthslong purge of immigration courts.

Hegseth approved more than 600 military lawyers from the Department of Defense to serve as temporary immigration judges, nearly doubling the ranks of jurists overseeing the president’s massive deportation efforts, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. It’s a move that indicates the Trump administration was simply clearing house to install its own ranks of loyalist judges, intent on seeing the president’s deportations through.

A memo dated August 27 said that the military would begin dispatching batches of 150 attorneys to the Justice Department “as soon as practicable” and have an initial group identified by next week. Appointments would last no longer than 179 days, expiring in February, but they can be renewed.

Since President Donald Trump entered office, a series of departures and firings have left only roughly 600 immigration judges to oversee the nation’s 71 immigration courts and handle a backlog of 3.7 million cases—and the number increases every day.

Most recently in July, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers claimed that another 17 immigration judges had been fired “without cause.” In February, Kerry Doyle, a longtime immigration attorney, who was part of an upcoming class of immigration judges who were all dismissed, alleged that her dismissal was politically motivated.

As a result of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the number of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has reached an all-time high. At the end of August, a record number of 61,226 people were detained by ICE, and 70 percent of them did not have criminal convictions.