“I’m Gonna Punch You”: Two Top Trump Officials Erupt in Public Fight

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told senior housing finance official Bill Pulte that he would punch him in his “fucking face” at a lavish private dinner party in D.C.  last Wednesday, according to Politico.

The party was for the grand opening of the Executive Branch, a new exclusive club in Georgetown marketed to the highest-profile members of the MAGAverse. It also served as the birthday venue for popular right-wing podcaster and donor Chamath Palihapitiya. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler, and Medicare and Medicaid chief Mehmet Oz were all in attendance. 

While it was unclear who started the altercation, Bessent certainly appeared to escalate it, pressing Pulte on rumors that he had been “bad-mouthing” Bessent to President Trump. 

“Why the fuck are you talking to the president about me? Fuck you,” Bessent said to Pulte. “I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face.”

Witnesses told Politico that Pulte looked “stunned” as club co-owner Omeed Malik tried to separate the two men. But Bessent wasn’t going quietly. 

“It’s either me or him,” Bessent told Malik. “You tell me who’s getting the fuck out of here. Or … we could go outside.”

“To do what?” Pulte replied. “To talk?”

“No,” Bessent said. “I’m going to fucking beat your ass.”

No one went outside. Bessent and Pulte were put at opposite ends of the 30-person long table, and the event continued without them coming to blows. But the beef likely isn’t going anywhere. Bessent has reportedly complained about Pulte overstepping boundaries and taking work away from him for some time, according to Politico sources. Additionally, Pulte is very close with Lutnick, with whom Bessent has formed a sort of finance-guy rivalry. 

More than anything, this event is yet another example of the raised levels of tension and testosterone in this administration. And this isn’t the first time Bessent has gotten in someone’s face. Recall that in May, Bessent brawled with Elon Musk when the billionaire tried to force through his pick for IRS head—Gary Shapley—behind Bessent’s back.

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” Bessent reportedly shouted at Musk then, as the two men nearly came to blows as they screamed at one another while walking through the halls of the White House. (Musk eventually lost this battle, as Shapley lasted less than three days before Bessent chose Michael Faulkender to replace him.)

Musk is gone (for now), but Bessent is still here, and he’s on edge, this time due to communication lapses and lack of trust, which likely won’t dissipate anytime soon. 

Bessent, Pulte, the Executive Branch Club, and the White House have all declined to comment. 

Donald Trump, 79, was spotted Sunday at the U.S. Open men’s final taking a mystery tablet, leaving social media abuzz with speculation. Argentinian photographer Andres Kudacki captured the moment, in which the president bared his teeth and revealed what appeared to be a light-blue tablet between them.

Some social media users believe the object is a breath mint, with many identifying sugar-free, wintergreen-flavored Altoids as a possible culprit.

But many websleuths have suggested that the president was taking a prescription medication—with a popular guess being that Trump’s little blue pill was, well, a “little blue pill,” i.e., the erectile dysfunction medication sildenafil, sold commonly under the brand name Viagra, which can also treat high blood pressure in the lungs. Others are pointing to Adderall, the stimulant used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy.

According to a recent medical report, the president takes two cholesterol medications, rosuvastatin (commonly light pink) and ezetimibe (typically white), as well as a daily aspirin.

The image comes as the president faces enduring scrutiny for his age and health.

Most recently, the back of Trump’s right hand has received significant attention, as perennial bruising, often poorly concealed with a smear of make-up, has appeared there frequently during his second term. The location of the injury has led some to suggest Trump has been receiving undisclosed intravenous treatment. Also, in July, photos of significant swelling in the president’s ankles forced the White House to reveal that the president has “a benign and common condition” called chronic venous insufficiency, which causes blood to pool in the ankles.

As for his frequently empurpled hand, the White House has dubiously attributed the bruise to frequent handshaking—despite it appearing on the portion of his hand subjected to the least pressure, if any, in a handshake.

President Trump has closed a very one-sided trade deal with Japan that just happens to give him an immense amount of power. 

Under the terms of the trade deal, Japan is expected to invest $550 billion in the United States in order to avoid the lofty retaliatory tariffs that Trump has set for it. Additionally, Japan has also agreed to let Trump decide where those billions go. The unpublished memo was signed by both countries on Wednesday, according to The Financial Times.

Trump initially levied 25 percent tariffs against Japan. He’ll now lower them to 15 percent, as long as Japan invests that $550 billion in his preferred projects before the 45-day deadline he’s imposed. If it doesn’t, the tariffs go back up to 25 percent. 

Assuming the deal is made, the U.S. and Japan would split whatever profit is generated from the deal until Japan pays off the investment. Then the U.S. will take 90 percent of the profit from that point.

This aligns with the recent trend of cash investments from some of our oldest allies in exchange for tariff protection deals. South Korea and the European Union have promised to invest massive amounts of funds, and U.S. chipmakers Nvidia and AMD plan to give the government a portion of the profit generated by their sales in China.  

The Japan trade deal comes as a federal appeals court this week dealt Trump a serious blow, ruling that the vast majority of his tariffs were illegal. 

CBS News has once again caved to President Donald Trump’s administration by offering up the journalistic integrity of Face the Nation, one of the longest-running television news broadcasts.

Freshly merged Paramount Skydance announced Friday that it would no longer air edited interviews on Face the Nation, after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem attacked the program for editing out her smears about Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

“This extra measure means the television audience will see the full, unedited interview on CBS and we will continue our practice of posting full transcripts and the unedited video online,” the company said in a statement.

Earlier this week, Noem complained that the show had removed a phrase referring to Abrego Garcia as a “known human smuggler, MS-13 gang member” and claiming that he’d solicited nude photographs from minors.

But Noem’s claims weren’t fit to air. The government has repeatedly failed to provide any evidence that Abrego Garcia was a member of a foreign gang. And a Tennessee magistrate judge ruled in June that the government’s other claims were an “impossibility” and that its evidence included “double hearsay.”

Paramount Skydance’s new policy transforms the Face the Nation newsroom into nothing more than a microphone for the Trump administration, stripping its own journalists of their editorial independence to report the facts.

The decision will likely allow guests’ grandstanding to go unchallenged and reduce host Margaret Brennan’s ability to push back against her interviewees or add essential context to their talking points. An official such as Noem has a tendency to present allegations as fact, and the Trump administration doesn’t seem to care about the difference.

This is just the latest in a long series of moves that demonstrate the rightward shift of Paramount Skydance and, by extension, CBS News. Earlier this week, it was reported that Paramount Skydance had nearly closed a deal to bring in a new news head: Bari Weiss, a bastion of the anti-woke movement.

And last month, the company canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, whose titular host had called out the company for agreeing to pay a “big fat bribe” of $16 million to the Trump administration to settle a lawsuit over an edited 60 Minutes interview of failed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Many speculated that by winning the favor of the Trump administration, it had ensured the long-awaited merger between Paramount and Skydance would be allowed to proceed.

During and after his Thursday train-wreck Senate hearing, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has faced growing calls to resign. Now his own family is joining that chorus.

On Thursday, Kennedy flailed as he was grilled on his actions at the Department of Health and Human Services, such as his anti-vaccine agenda and mismanagement of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Democratic lawmakers, top American medical groups, and more than 1,000 current and former HHS personnel have called for Kennedy’s termination.

Joining them, former Representative Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts, the health secretary’s nephew, took to X Friday, calling his uncle “a threat to the health and wellbeing of every American,” who has chosen to “dismiss science, mislead the public, sideline experts and sow confusion.”

“None of us will be spared the pain he is inflicting. It doesn’t matter how rich or powerful you are or what state you live in—the heartbreak of watching a loved one fall ill knows no borders,” Kennedy wrote. “The challenges before us—from disease outbreaks to mental health crises—demand moral clarity, scientific expertise, and leadership rooted in fact. Those values are not present in the Secretary’s office. He must resign.”

This is not the first time members of the Kennedy family have condemned RFK Jr.—with his long-shot presidential campaign and, later, his endorsement of Trump both drawing public objections from his family. During his confirmation process, his cousin Caroline Kennedy urged the Senate to reject his nomination, writing that the American public “deserve[s] better than Bobby Kennedy.” During Thursday’s hearing, John F. Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg (RFK Jr.’s first cousin once removed) posted on X, “RFK LOSER is choking so badly LIVE.”

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, seems to be taking orders from notorious far-right hate account “Libs of TikTok.”

On Thursday afternoon, Libs of TikTok tagged Hegseth in a post targeting a military doctor whose LinkedIn page listed her title as the “EMF-Bravo Navy Deputy Medical Director for Transgender Healthcare.”

“Yikes. This she/her Navy Commander is apparently a medical director for ‘transgender healthcare’ at a Naval center in California. Can you please look into this?” the post read.

Hours later, Hegseth tweeted back, writing, “Pronouns UPDATED: She/Her/Fired.”

It’s so wonderful that the man running our military can make a grammatically unsound joke after potentially ruining a Navy doctor’s life.

It’s unknown whether Janelle Marra, the doctor in question, was actually fired by Hegseth, but the speed with which she went from anonymously serving her country to being the target of social media hate, to possibly even being fired for her beliefs by a federal official, is staggering.

Libs of TikTok is run by Chaya Raichik, who has been designated an extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center for her rabid anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda. On Bluesky, lawyer Alejandra Caraballo called Libs of TikTok “the digital stasi,” comparing the account to the East German secret police. “It’s all a spectacle packaged as content. Destroying people’s lives for profitable ideological bloodsport.”

She continued, “Anything as innocuous as a pride flag can cause a federal investigation now or people to lose their jobs.… The spectacle is there to create fear in everyone else that they need to comply or they are next.”

Gun rights groups are, well, up in arms over reports that the Trump administration is considering banning transgender Americans from possessing firearms.

As conservatives use the deadly mass shooting in Minneapolis last week to vilify the transgender community—the shooter was transgender—CNN and The New York Post reported Thursday that Donald Trump’s Justice Department is in preliminary talks about implementing a gun ban for transgender people.

While Republican presidents are typically the darlings of Second Amendment advocates, this idea was denounced swiftly and roundly by every major gun rights organization.

The National Rifle Association condemned “any policy proposals that implement sweeping gun bans that arbitrarily strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process.”

Gun Owners of America said the organization “opposes any & all gun bans. Full stop.” In another post, GOA deplored the addition of “any new category of persons to the unconstitutionally broad ‘mental defective’ category,” which would “not only block them from purchasing firearms but could result in door-to-door gun confiscation from that new category of individuals.”

On X, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights wrote, “As history proves, any new rules the government invents today will be abused against ill-favored communities, including conservatives and law-abiding gun owners, tomorrow.” The proposal is “just insanity,” an NAGR spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal.

The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms issued a statement saying, “We needn’t make scapegoats of others who had nothing to do with that outrage, just to create the impression something is being done.”

The Firearms Policy Coalition warned: “If the Trump Administration—or any administration—unwisely and immorally chooses to wield the force of government in conflict with the Constitution, federal law, or our values, FPC will take aggressive action to defend the rights of peaceable people, just as we have many times before.”

Kostas Moros, director of legal research and education at the Second Amendment Foundation, called the idea “blatantly unconstitutional” and lacking “any legal basis.” Considering the outpouring of criticism from gun groups, Moros wrote on X: “To the extent [the proposed ban] was a trial balloon, we all hit it like a clay pigeon.”

The Department of Homeland Security has already started bragging about its agency’s biggest single-site enforcement operation at a Hyundai plant in Georgia—but one close U.S. ally isn’t happy at all.

Most of the nearly 500 people arrested in a massive raid at a Hyundai plant Thursday were South Korean citizens, said Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Steve Schrank, who oversaw the operation. The New York Times reported that the detainees included employees and executives at two South Korean companies, Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solutions, a battery manufacturer.

Now South Korea seems seriously pissed.

In a statement Friday, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry warned that the “economic activities of Korean investment companies and the rights and interests of Korean citizens must not be unfairly infringed upon during U.S. law enforcement operations.”

The Foreign Ministry added that it would dispatch diplomats to respond to the raid and that it had urged the U.S. Embassy in Seoul “to exercise extreme caution” in regard to the rights of Korean citizens.

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lee Jaewoong confirmed Friday that a “large” number of the individuals detained were South Korean, but did not provide an exact figure.

Schrank, the officer who oversaw the operation, declared that the raid “in fact was the largest single-site enforcement operation in the history of homeland security investigations.”

While Schrank claimed the workers arrested were either undocumented or working illegally, he said that some lawful U.S. citizens and permanent residents had been detained and released.

Trump met with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung late last month, in a conversation that spanned several geopolitical topics—and also included the topic of forced prostitution.

President Trump is sending 10 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico to use against what he claims to be state-sponsored drug cartels in the Caribbean. This comes just days after the administration bombed what it claimed was a Venezuelan “drug boat” with 11 Tren de Aragua “narco-traffickers.” 

The fighter jets will arrive in Puerto Rico next week, according to sources who spoke with Reuters, and will be part of Trump’s new military campaign in the region.

Trump has claimed that Venezuela is offering direct support to drug traffickers working in and around the United States. The country has also been central to his immigration crackdown.

“We have to protect our country and we’re going to. Venezuela has been a very bad actor. They’ve been sending millions of people into the country. Many of them are Tren de Aragua, some of the worst people anywhere in the world,” Trump said shortly after the boat attack on Tuesday.   

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed Trump’s comments, claiming that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “is acting as the kingpin of a narco state.… He’s involved in the kind of drug running that has affected the American people directly.” 

Maduro has denied this frequently, instead focusing on the fact that the U.S. is bombing his citizens and accusing him of sponsoring drug traffickers, all while it increases military pressure against him. 

“They are seeking a regime change through military threat,” Maduro told journalists plainly on Monday. 

Eighty percent of illegal maritime drug flow comes from the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic, where Trump has sent bombs and fighter jets. The administration is seeking to use excuses like the “immediate threat” posed by Venezuela in order to further broaden Trump’s use of the military in situations where he has no legal authority to use it. Just look to his threats to Mexico, his military crackdowns in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and his threats against countless other American cities for further confirmation.  

President Donald Trump has reportedly set his sights on yet another museum: the 9/11 Memorial.

According to two White House officials, the president is exploring ways that the federal government could take control of the museum, though it’s unclear exactly how it would gain power over the site, The New York Times reported.

His campaign promises may provide a clue: Last year, Trump pledged that he would designate the site a national monument.

The 9/11 Memorial and Museum would be the administration’s latest acquisition in its quest to control America’s cultural institutions. Trump is currently pressuring the Smithsonian to eliminate exhibits that represent “improper ideology.” The president is also on a mission to restore and replace Confederate statues.

In this case, it seems that Trump’s interest in the site could stem from complaints made by 9/11 victims’ families about the memorial. For years, some have complained about high ticket prices and the large salaries earned by museum leadership. The tickets are $36 for adult admission, with veterans and the families of victims receiving free entry.

As the 9/11 memorial’s current leadership pointed out, taking over the museum would be a bad financial move for a government hypothetically focused on cost efficiency. “At a time when the federal government is working to cut costs, assuming the full operating expenses for the site makes no sense,” Beth Hillman, the president and chief executive of the memorial, said in a statement to the Times.

And as far as Marc La Vorgna, another spokesperson for the museum, knows, there’s no legal way for Trump to mount his takeover.

“We are certain that there is nothing in existing law that would give the federal government the unilateral ability to take the site over,” he said in a statement.