National Guard Admits Everyone Hates Trump’s D.C. Takeover

The National Guard produced an internal analysis of public opinion on President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C.—and, spoiler alert, it’s pretty damning.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that an internal “media roll up” analyzing public opinion in social media posts hadn’t produced favorable results for Trump’s decision to deploy more than 2,300 troops in Washington to help with his so-called “public safety emergency.”

The assessment, produced last Friday, found that a vast majority of social posts disapproved of the National Guard’s mission in the nation’s capital. Fifty-three percent of social media posts about the military mission were negative, 45 percent were neutral, and only 2 percent were positive, according to the assessment.

A summary of the assessment said that the most popular videos showed D.C. residents responding to troops with “alarm and indignation.”

“One segment features a local [resident] describing the Guard’s presence as leveraging fear, not security—highlighting widespread discomfort with what many perceive as a show of force,” the summary said.

In addition to residents’ responses, the assessment found that individuals who self-identified as veterans and active duty troops viewed the National Guard’s domestic deployment “with shame and alarm.”

A National Guard official acknowledged that the assessment was legitimate, and claimed it had been accidentally sent to the Post.

The assessment also included highlights such as “mentions of Fatigue, confusion, and demoralization—‘just gardening,’ unclear mission, wedge between citizens and the military.” Some National Guard troops have been roped into helping with Trump’s expensive beautification efforts across the small part of the city that he sees on a daily basis. Servicemembers have been spotted around the National Mall picking up trash and laying out fresh mulch.

In evaluating public sentiment about the legal battle spurred by Trump’s actions, the National Guard found that there was “debate about the legality of the mission, whether it’s needed and if it has been successful,” and criticism of its being “federal overreach and politically motivated.”

That poor sentiment is only likely to fester, as the deployment of National Guard troops has officially been extended to December. Maybe they can help hang Christmas lights?

The Trump administration’s blatant disregard for human life has put Republicans in a tough position.

The U.S. military’s decision last week to kill 11 people aboard a small Venezuelan boat that American officials alleged contained drug shipments has sparked fights within the conservative party. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, for one, said earlier this week he felt compelled to address the attack, particularly after Vice President JD Vance praised the unconstitutional killings.

Paul doubled down Tuesday. In an interview with Fox News, he was forced to explain why killing people without evidence, warrants, or oversight would seed “chaos” as a federal policy, particularly as dozens of boats off of U.S. coasts are stopped, boarded, and searched everyday.

“The reason we board them before we blow the crap out of them is some of them don’t have drugs,” Paul said.

“Think about it this way. This is how people don’t quite get this. Let’s say there’s a house in your neighborhood and they’re all selling fentanyl, and thousands of people are dying, and you’re just so mad,” he continued. “Do you go over there and just kill them or burn them? No, you go to a judge and you get a warrant and you do that. We have an interdiction program.

“We’re talking people speeding along off of Miami. Are we going to just simply blow them up? No, we’re not. I mean, if we were, that would be extraordinary. That would be extraordinary to blow up ships,” Paul said.

In an X post on Saturday, Vance wrote that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” In a follow-up post, the vice president suggested that the action had protected U.S. citizens from the “scum of the earth.”

When a political commentator noted that killing citizens of another country without due process is a war crime, Vance simply retorted, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

President Donald Trump finally decided to step out in Washington, D.C., to prove how safe the city was and was immediately called “the Hitler of our time” to his face. 

On Tuesday night, Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, and other Cabinet members pulled up to Joe’s Seafood, an upscale surf and turf restaurant about a block from the White House.  

The motley crew was both booed and cheered lightly as they entered the restaurant. 

“I wouldn’t have done this three months ago, four months ago, I certainly wouldn’t have done it a year ago,” the president told reporters outside the restaurant. “This was one of the most unsafe cities in the country. Now it’s as safe as there is in the country.”  

Once they got inside, they were met by a group of activists from women’s antiwar group CODEPINK.

In the video, the activists can be heard chanting “Free D.C., Free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time,” while Trump and his Cabinet stand across the room, trying to ignore them. Then Trump comes to the table and stands directly in front of them, smiles wryly and tilts his head, then waves his index finger in their direction as if to say, “Get ’em outta here.” 

 “What do you want your legacy to be?” one woman asked Trump. 

Security began to attempt to herd the women out. They continued to yell directly in the faces of Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth. “All right, time to go!’ security told CODEPINK.

“He is terrorizing communities in D.C., he is terrorizing Gaza, and communities all over the world. To Puerto Rico, to the Philippines!” they said. CODEPINK later put out a press release taking responsibility for the action.  

“Two years into genocide, Gaza is under evacuation orders, Puerto Rico and Venezuela are in the crosshairs, and the Pentagon proudly calls itself the Department of War. Trump looked us in the eyes, and we made sure he would never dine in peace while communities are under siege,” an organizer wrote. 

Trump has been making ridiculous statements for weeks about how everyone in the city was just too afraid of crime to dine out at night before his federal takeover. Now, as he shows how safe it all is by driving barely a block away from the White House, community members have made their dissatisfaction known. 

And regardless of what he says, most D.C. residents report that they don’t feel safer seeing guys in military gear with machine guns on the Metro. 

As for Gaza—Trump has doubled down on U.S. fealty to the Israeli war machine as famine tears through the region. Just yesterday, Israel bombed a neighborhood in Doha, Qatar, in an attempt to kill Hamas leaders, a shocking move of aggression against another close U.S. ally in the Middle East. 

All of that came to a head last night before dinner. But it didn’t seem to disrupt his Cabinet’s appetites much. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who was also in attendance, said the food at Joe’s was “phenomenal.”

The House Oversight Committee’s Monday release of Donald Trump’s disturbing 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein has sent GOP lawmakers reeling.

Some have unquestioningly swallowed the White House’s dubious denials of its authenticity. Some even suggest it was somehow planted by the Biden administration.

Republican Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri, for his part, expressed his interest in examining the signature on the letter. But when faced with a hard copy, he refused to look.

In a Monday interview aired Tuesday evening on CNN’s Laura Coates Live, reporter Manu Raju asked if he had seen the letter.

“I have not,” Burlison replied. “But I would love to see it, like, matched with his handwriting. It just is really, really, um, wild.” (Despite the Trump administration’s claims, the signature on the 2003 letter is a perfect match for contemporaneous examples of his handwriting.)

As the representative answered, CNN reporter Manu Raju produced a printed copy. “Here’s the letter.”

Looking down, Burlison said, “Yeah, I don’t, I don’t really—I don’t want to see that,” chuckling.

The Missouri representative’s ignorance-is-bliss reaction recalls that of Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who, when asked about the letter and whether he wants “to learn more about Trump’s relationship and friendship with Epstein,” answered, “No. I want to have [FBI] Director [Kash] Patel in next week, where we’ll ask him about all kinds of things.… I haven’t seen it. Don’t buy it.”

Missouri Republican state Representative Tony Harbison rebuked his party on the state House floor for choosing to submit to President Trump’s gerrymandering demands rather than address the actual problems of their constituents.

“The needs are heavy, the list is long. Our plate is full of things that we need to be doing for the people of this state, and this ain’t one of ’em,’” Harbison said on Monday. “I thank you for your time, Mr. Speaker.”

The room immediately erupted with applause.

Even still, the House on Tuesday voted to pass the redistricting effort after Republican Governor Mike Kelhoe called the legislature back at the behest of Trump. The gerrymandered congressional map will now head to the Senate, where Republicans also hold the majority.

The House proposal would split the Democrat-held 5th congressional district into three districts, giving Republicans a 7-to-1 advantage heading into the 2026 midterms.

State Democrats have condemned the move.

“The Missouri GOP is aiding and abetting the systematic destruction of our democracy by an authoritarian regime led by a geriatric conman who knows the only way he can win is to cheat,” House Minority Leader Ashley Aune told The Missouri Independent. Democrats and Missouri NAACP have also argued that it’s unconstitutional to draw congressional maps before the completion of the next census.

Harbison wasn’t the only Republican against the gerrymandering decision, either. Several Republicans came out against it, including Speaker Jon Patterson.

“Unfortunately, it’s not ethics.… It’s not morality. It’s definitely not liberty. It’s just political power,” said Republican Bryant Wolfin. “There’s certainly nothing conservative about ignoring the moral implications of our actions.… Morality is not defined by what is legal. Morality is not defined by what you can get away with.”

The Republican-led state Senate is eager to get it over with and get good news back to Trump in D.C.

“The map and the initiative petition reform measures will strike a huge blow to progressives and their efforts to turn Missouri into California,” Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin wrote Saturday on Facebook. “We are not California. We are not progressives.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt unleashed an angry, nonsensical tirade Tuesday claiming that she’d never said the Jeffrey Epstein files were a “hoax.” 

Actually, she’d said it less than 24 hours before.

On Monday, Leavitt published a statement claiming that Trump had not drawn the crude picture on the birthday note to Epstein, or signed it, writing, “This is FAKE NEWS to perpetuate the Democrat Epstein Hoax!” 

But speaking to reporters at a White House press briefing the next day, Leavitt fumed when asked to explain her claims undermining the Epstein documents. 

“You said the Epstein documents are a hoax the Democrats are perpetrating against the president,” reporter Maggie Haberman of The New York Times asked. “You said he didn’t sign that check, that he didn’t sign the birthday card that he allegedly signed. So, what is the theory, since these documents came from the Epstein estate? Who is, I guess in your view, faking these documents?” 

“I did not say the documents are a hoax,” Leavitt snapped. “I said the entire narrative surrounding Jeffrey Epstein right now that is absorbing many of the liberal cable channels on television is a hoax, that is being perpetuated by opportunistic Democrats—” she ranted.  

“What exactly is the hoax?” Haberman pressed. “I’m just trying to understand what’s fake. What’s fake is not the documents?”

“The hoax is the Democrats pretending to care about victims of crime, when they do not care about victims of crime,” Leavitt explained. “When they have done nothing to solve crimes, when they have done nothing to lock up child pedophiles and child rapists across the country, and when they are now using victims as political props, to again, try and smear the president of the United States—” she went on, lost in the spiral of her own semantic spin.

It seems that by contrast, Trump is not even pretending to care about the victims of crime. Last week, the president described calls to release the documents from survivors of Epstein’s abuse as a “Democrat hoax that never ends.” 

Spin aside, Leavitt seems to know that there is nothing fake about the government’s documents on Epstein—but that conviction doesn’t extend to the ones that might incriminate her boss. 

As the White House flailingly denies the authenticity of Donald Trump’s lewd 2003 birthday note to his then-friend Jeffrey Epstein, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is, apparently, just creating evidence out of whole cloth.

Since the letter was released Monday—as a result of the House Oversight Committee subpoenaing Epstein’s estate—Leavitt and other Trump spokespeople have sought to deny its veracity by arguing that the signature at its close doesn’t match Trump’s current handwriting.

In reality, examples abound of nearly identical signatures by Trump from around the time of the letter’s writing.

Nonetheless, Leavitt dug in her heels at a Tuesday press conference, where she even claimed to have brought receipts: “I have already seen many forensic analysts of signatures coming out. I believe it was The Daily Signal that published a piece with three separate signature analysts who said that this absolutely was not the president’s authentic signature,” the press secretary said.

No such Daily Signal story exists, as Matthew Gertz of Media Matters observed on X. Instead, Leavitt was likely thinking of an article by another conservative website, The Daily Wire. But even that story was a far cry from her description.

The Daily Wire, for instance, did not cite “three separate signature analysts,” It cited three “AI research systems”—which did not remark, at all, on Trump’s signature, but rather compared the diction in the 2003 letter to Trump’s other publicly available writings. The AI models apparently cast doubt on the note’s authenticity, finding it inconsistent with the president’s speech habits (namely, too “sophisticated” for Trump).

And the AI models’ conclusions are quite dubious. For example, although the AI systems flagged that the 2003 letter employs third-person narration, words like “enigma,” and a theatrical opening line (“There must be more to life than having everything”), these by no means prove Trump was not the author.

In July, when The Wall Street Journal first reported on the existence of the letter, Judd Legum of Popular Information showed that each of these elements of the letter are plausible Trumpisms. This is not to mention that The Daily Wire overlooks the fact that one’s verbiage varies depending on context.

The Daily Wire story, in other words, is quite thin gruel—failing in its desperate mission to prove the letter was faked (and certainly not proving that Trump’s signature was forged). It’s no wonder Leavitt had to invent an imaginary article instead.

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman had a gross and callow response to Israel’s attack on Qatar’s capital city.

Israel struck Hamas’s political leadership in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday, as they gathered to discuss a U.S. ceasefire proposal, killing six people.

Qatar, a U.S. ally, has condemned what it called a “flagrant violation of international laws and norms,” and President Donald Trump said in a statement that this bombing “does not advance Israel or America’s goals.”

But Fetterman’s take on the strike, which left five lower-ranking Hamas members along with a Qatari security guard dead, was horrific and infantile all at once.

The senator shared the AP’s story with a gif of Winnie the Pooh gleefully dancing, about to dig into a pot of “hero hunny.”

Pod Save America host and former Obama staffer Tommy Vietor wrote of Fetterman’s response, “I fucking hate this idiotic, childish memeification of deadly serious issues. Any hope of getting the remaining Israeli hostages out alive could be gone, any hope of ending the war in Gaza could be dead, and this clown is posting a Winnie-the-pooh gif.”

Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and during the ensuing genocide in Gaza, Fetterman has been fervently pro-Israel—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even gifted him an honorary pager, mocking the Israeli attack on Hezbollah in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed at least 12 people, including two children, and wounded around 2,800, in September 2024.

In addition to being a likely violation of international law, the strike may very well destroy any progress that’s been made toward reaching a ceasefire agreement, and comes as Israel threatens a full invasion of Gaza City, which is sure to add to the already horrific death toll of more than 64,000 Palestinians.

But that significance is clearly lost on Fetterman.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump is awfully sorry about Israel’s military strike on Qatar Tuesday—but wouldn’t divulge whether Israel had told them ahead of time.

Speaking to reporters at a White House press briefing Tuesday, Leavitt delivered a strange statement on behalf of the president, expressing just how sad he’d been to hear about the deadly attack.

“This morning the Trump administration was notified by the United States military that Israel was attacking Hamas, which—very unfortunately—was located in a section of Doha, the capital of Qatar,” Leavitt said. While attacking Qatar “does not advance Israel or America’s goals,” eliminating Hamas was a “worthy goal,” Leavitt said.

Leavitt claimed that Trump had “immediately directed” U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff to inform the Qatari government of the impending attack.

“The president views Qatar as a strong ally and friend of the United States, and feels very badly about the location of this attack,” Leavitt said, adding that Trump believed that the incident could be an “opportunity for peace.”

Unsurprisingly, Qatar didn’t quite see it that way. It condemned the attack as a “flagrant violation of all international laws and norms.”

Leavitt also repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether Israel had warned Trump about the strike on the U.S. ally ahead of time, referring reporters back to her “lengthy and thorough” statement.

In the aftermath of Israel’s attack on Qatar Tuesday, Israeli sources told multiple outlets—including CNN and Israel’s Channel 12—that the U.S. had prior knowledge of the attack. It looks like not even a $400 million luxury jet could buy Trump’s protection, and Leavitt’s statement was just crocodile tears.

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration hasn’t been forthcoming about its coordination with Israel.

When Israel launched a sweeping attack on Iran in June, two Israeli officials claimed that Trump had given them the green light to do it, despite the U.S. president’s claims that he’d had nothing to do with it. The sources said that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had lied to reporters about coordinating the attack in the days before. Later, when Trump was asked whether Israel had given him a “heads-up,” he replied: “Heads-up? It wasn’t a heads-up. It was, we know what’s going on.”

A Georgia judge plans to throw out the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, charges against the 61 defendants who were protesting the construction of “Cop City,” the $90 million, 85-acre police training facility in the lush forest of a majority-Black Atlanta neighborhood in 2023. The facility opened in April. 

Fulton County Judge Kevin Farmer told the court that he did not think Attorney General Chris Carr had the authority to pursue the sweeping RICO indictments under Georgia law, as he had never obtained the necessary permission from Governor Brian Kemp. 

“It would have been real easy to just ask the governor, ‘Let me do this, give me a letter,’” Farmer said. “The steps just weren’t followed.” 

The “Stop Cop City” protests and subsequent arrests that followed were sparked by the police killing of environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a.k.a. Tortuguita, at the Stop Cop City Encampment in January 2023. Autopsy reports showed that they were shot over 50 times while sitting cross-legged with their hands up, and no traces of gunpowder were found on them, contradicting the police report stating that Terán shot first.  

“The 61 defendants together have conspired to prevent the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center by conducting, coordinating and organizing acts of violence, intimidation and property destruction,” Carr said when the Cop City protesters were first indicted.

In addition to the RICO charges, three of the defendants were originally hit with charges of money laundering after organizing a bail fund, but those charges also failed to stick. Another three activists were charged with federal intimidation after making flyers calling Jonathan Salcedo, the state trooper who murdered Tortuguita, a “murderer.” Five of the protesters were charged with domestic terrorism and arson. Farmer is considering dismissing all of the separate charges attached to the RICO, allowing Carr to pursue the domestic terrorism ones. 

Even still, this is a massive victory in the face of a state looking to bring the hammer down on people trying to stop an environmentally destructive, military-style police base from being built in their city after all legal options had been exhausted. That shouldn’t get you charges that used to be reserved for the Mafia. 

At 61 defendants, this was one of the largest RICO cases in U.S. history.