Trump Is Suddenly on a Very Strange Disaster Aid Kick

Shortly after receiving an ultimatum from a frustrated North Carolina Republican, the Trump administration Thursday announced millions in federal disaster aid to the Tar Heel State for last year’s Hurricane Helene.

“I am proud to approve nearly $32 Million Dollars [sic] in assistance for the Great State of North Carolina,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

The president also announced disaster aid to Kansas, Wisconsin, and South Dakota. In each post, he was sure to note that the funds were going to states in which he’s had electoral successes in the past. In North Carolina, for example, he wrote, “I WON BIG all six times” (six, that is, because he included Republican primaries in his count). Notably, in his post about Wisconsin, Trump repeated his false assertions that he actually won the state in 2020.

Trump credited North Carolina Republicans such as Senator Ted Budd for requesting the aid. Two days prior, Budd had skewered Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security for delays in the disbursement of $5.95 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds—$4.2 billion of which the state was reportedly still waiting for as of June.

“Here we are, nine months later, we still haven’t seen the reimbursements,” Budd told CNN Tuesday. The senator assigned significant blame to Noem, citing her controversial policy requiring all DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000 to receive her approval.

“We’ve let leadership know we’re going to place holds on all DHS nominees until we get an appropriate dialog and response on the outstanding invoices that have not been paid to western North Carolina from FEMA,” he said.

Later that day, Noem announced FEMA grants to North Carolina amounting to $12 million.

On X Thursday, Budd responded to Trump’s announcement with gratitude. “Dramatically addressing the backlog of projects waiting for funding is great news for [western North Carolina] communities as we approach this storm’s 1-year anniversary,” the senator wrote.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau threatened Thursday to deport noncitizens that don’t demonstrate the requisite amount of sadness and sobriety about Charlie Kirk’s death.

“In light of yesterday’s horrific assassination of a leading political figure, I want to underscore that foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country,” Landau wrote on X. “I have been disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action.”

He also asked to be notified of any such “comments by foreigners” so that the State Department could “keep Americans safe.” In a separate post, the secretary said people should reply to his post with examples, and he’d “direct consular officials to monitor the comments to this post.”

Beneath Landau’s post, users on X submitted posts they’d seen making jokes about Kirk’s death. Each time, the secretary responded with an image of the Department of State seal, captioned with “El Quitavisas,” which roughly translates to “The Visa Revoker.”

Disturbingly, some of the posts Landau responded to didn’t include jokes. One post sent to Landau was of a news group describing Kirk as an “extremist,” which he was. Apparently, accurately describing a public figure’s political statements is now a privilege reserved only for American citizens.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s death Wednesday, some Republican lawmakers have begun a push for censorship online. Right-wing influencers such as Libs of TikTok and Laura Loomer have launched sweeping campaigns to dox and intimidate anyone whose characterization of Kirk doesn’t match their own.

Landau’s threat represents the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign to strip noncitizens of First Amendment protections that began with the government’s vicious crackdown on foreign students’ pro-Palestinian speech.

Republican messaging in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination is tearing the party apart.

Conservatives across the country seemingly interpreted Kirk’s death as an opportunity for more violence, intimating online that the brutal attack against the 31-year-old firebrand was a sign of “war” with their political opposition. But not every Republican was willing to hop on the dogpile.

Senator Thom Tillis was disturbed by his party’s language, telling National Journal’s Nancy Vu Thursday that he was disgusted by the way that Republicans had co-opted Kirk’s death to rack up digital attention.

“What I was really disgusted by yesterday is a couple of talking heads that sees this as an opportunity to say we’re at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this,” Tillis said. “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you’re a leader of a conservative movement. And there were two in particular that I found particularly disgusting.”

Tillis did not clarify which two comments he was referring to, though plenty of conservatives have shared their own twisted takes on Kirk’s murder.

Figureheads leading the charge included Laura Loomer, who decried the political left as a “national security threat”; Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik, who blatantly stated, “THIS IS WAR”; former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who claimed that Kirk was a “casualty of war”; and podcast bro Joey Mannarino, who demanded that the Democratic Party be “classified as a domestic terror organization.”

Donald Trump, for his own part, issued a four-minute video message in which he condemned American liberals for the political climate that led to Kirk’s assassination, admonishing them for drawing historical parallels between his administration and authoritarian regimes throughout history.

“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now,” Trump said, promising to hunt and root out left-leaning political ideologies that oppose his agenda.

Nebraska Representative Don Bacon, however, joined Tillis in pushing back. Bacon told NBC News that he wished Trump would focus on bringing the country back together in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, rather than continue to tear it apart.

“But he’s a populist, and populists dwell on anger,” Bacon said.

In their fury, Republicans have leveraged Kirk’s murder as evidence that they are political victims—despite the fact that they currently hold the majority of power in every branch of government—all while ignoring the reality that political violence is a bipartisan issue that has also taken the lives of several prominent Democrats recently.

“I have to remind people, we had Democrats killed in Minnesota too, right?” Bacon added, referring to Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, both of whom were fatally shot in June by a Trump supporter.

President Donald Trump inexplicably claimed that Missouri’s 2024 general election had been rigged, using that falsehood as an excuse to try to convince state Republicans to redistrict.

Writing on X Thursday, Missouri Times editor Jake Kroesen said that during a meeting of Missouri state Senate Republicans the day before, Governor Mike Kehoe had called in with a surprising guest: the president of the United States.

And Trump had a mission: convince the lawmakers to pass the state’s newly gerrymandered congressional map that would erase the Democratic seat in Kansas City.

Trump ranted to lawmakers about how popular he was for about 20 minutes, reciting inflated poll numbers and claiming he could even win a third term in office.

“Trump reportedly told Senators that polling data he has seen shows he is more popular than Reagan,” Kroesen wrote. “He added that his Missouri numbers in 2024 were lower than he had anticipated and claimed the numbers were possibly rigged.”

Trump then told lawmakers he “needed their help securing another seat to maintain control of the House.”

When Trump left the call, Kehoe reportedly said, “See how hard it is to say no to him?”

In 2024, Trump won nearly 59 percent of the vote in Missouri with 1,751,027 votes, beating out Democratic challenger Kamala Harris by more than 550,000 votes. Still, he suggested that the election had been rigged in a state he’d handily won.

Trump’s efforts to personally bully state lawmakers into gerrymandering district maps betray his desperation for Republicans to keep control of the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.

President Donald Trump told the country that his federal crackdown on Washington, D.C. would focus on ridding the streets of violent crime, theft, and gang violence.

In reality, that effort has been an extension of his deportation campaign, as a whopping 40 percent of arrests made since the occupation have to do with immigration, according to recent data collected by The Associated Press.

The Trump administration says that it’s arrested more than 2,300 people: around 12 for homicide suspicion, 20 for alleged gang membership, and a few hundred for drug-related crimes. But more than 940 people have been arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, more than any of the aforementioned categories.

While the Trump administration claims that deportation and violent crime go hand in hand, it’s hard to see how snatching UberEats drivers off their scooters midroute, harassing anyone who looks Latino at checkpoints, and forcing street vendors to stay inside out of fear helps curtail violent crime.

The president said he was going to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse,” after the Big Balls mugging. The results of his efforts have not reflected that.

In light of the immigration enforcement raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia last week, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Thursday issued a warning to the United States.

The raid saw hundreds of South Korean workers shackled and detained, straining diplomatic relations between Washington and Seoul, a key U.S. ally. Currently, 316 South Korean nationals and 14 others are in the process of being transported back to their country.

At a press conference, Lee said South Korean companies may think twice before establishing factories in the United States going forward, unless Washington improves the visa process for South Koreans.

“Under the current circumstances, Korean companies will be very hesitant to make direct investments in the United States,” Lee said, according to United Press International. “Companies will have to worry about whether establishing a local factory in the United States will be subject to all sorts of disadvantages or difficulties,” which “could have a significant impact on future direct investment.”

“It’s not like these are long-term workers,” the South Korean president observed, per the Associated Press. “When you build a factory or install equipment at a factory, you need technicians, but the United States doesn’t have that workforce and yet they won’t issue visas to let our people stay and do the work.”

Earlier this week, South Korean businesses reportedly suspended at least 22 projects in the United States in reaction to the raid.

“Korean workers are being treated like criminals for building factories that Washington itself lobbied for,” one executive in Seoul told The Korea Economic Daily. “If this continues, investment in the U.S. could be reconsidered.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is jazzing up his song and dance to further distract from the cooling economy.

Speaking with CNBC Thursday, the trade official hypothesized that the real benefits of Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs would be realized very soon—that is to say, next year.

“So now, everybody knows their tariff, right? So now you’re going to see factories getting built in America at a scale that you’ve never seen before,” Lutnick said. “More than $10 trillion of factory build coming. Alright? And so theres huge amount of construction jobs.”

“I would say the first quarter of next year will be the best quarter of construction jobs this country’s ever seen, and that’s going to roll all the way through ’26,” he continued. “So I think you’re gonna see GDP growth next year over four percent.”

“You do? Four percent? $10 trillion over what period of time, Secretary?” pressed one of the anchors.

But Lutnick’s perpetual growth promises have historically not panned out. Americans still weren’t feeling the boon of Trump’s plan by August, when the unemployment rate was 4.3 percent, up by more than 3 percent from the previous year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Applications for unemployment benefits jumped to 263,000 last week alone, the biggest spike since the pandemic, and consumer inflation grew to 2.9 percent last month—the highest point so far this year.

In the same interview, Lutnick once again said that major trade deals were still on the way—albeit with some major hiccups. A deal with India is apparently forthcoming, so long as the country “stops buying Russian oil.” Lutnick also claimed that a “big deal with Taiwan” is on the horizon, that a deal with Switzerland is “probably” in the works, and that a trade arrangement had been struck with South Korea, though Lutnick suggested that the country’s officials were dragging their feet with the paperwork. (South Korea has also threatened to indefinitely pause multiple projects in the U.S. in light of a massive ICE raid at a Hyundai factory in Georgia that saw hundreds of Korean workers arrested.)

Lutnick also said that he believed a “deal is going to be struck” on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises to support American homeownership, before the end of the year.

“We are going to take the company public. We’re going to sell. It could potentially be the largest IPO in history,” he said.

Republican lawmakers have had enough of the First Amendment in the aftermath of the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Representative Clay Higgins said Thursday that he planned to use his congressional seat to convince tech platforms to go after anyone who “belittled” Kirk’s death.

Kirk was fatally shot during a “Prove Me Wrong” table event at Utah Valley University, where he’d invited college students to debate him. Kirk’s final words were in a debate about gun violence in the United States. 

“If they ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man who dedicated his whole life to delivering respectful conservative truth into the hearts of liberal enclave universities, armed only with a Bible and a microphone and a Constitution … those profiles must come down,” Higgins wrote on X. 

“So, I’m going to lean forward in this fight, demanding that big tech have zero tolerance for violent political hate content, the user to be banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER,” he continued. “I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked.

“I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination,” he said. “I’m starting that today. That is all.”

Ironically, Higgins was the subject of social media censorship in 2020 after he posted on Facebook threatening Black Lives Matter protesters, writing that he would shoot and “drop any 10 of you where you stand.” Higgins’s post was removed for inciting or facilitating “serious violence.” 

Kirk seemingly supported the free expression of political ideas—no matter how controversial.

Now lawmakers disturbed by his horrific death want not only to curb free speech on the internet but to punish it too. 

Already, the notorious hate account Libs of TikTok has launched a doxxing campaign targeting apparent Democrats who made callous comments celebrating Kirk’s death on the internet, as part of a newly declared “war” on liberals. 

Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna also called on social media platforms to remove the videos of the shooting, and Representative Lauren Boebert agreed. 

“He has a family, young children, and no one should be forced to relive this tragedy online,” Luna wrote on X. “These are not the only graphic videos of horrifying murders circulating—at some point, social media begins to desensitize humanity.”

Boebert replied, “Thank you!!! I agree completely! I NEVER want to see that again!! I hate that I saw it at all.”

Lily Tang Williams, a Republican congressional candidate from New Hampshire, also responded: “I respectively disagree. Freedom of speech includes content we don’t like or hate,” she said.  

“It hurts to watch the video, but we must defend free speech as the foundation of our Republic, no matter how horrible it is,” she wrote. “Where would you draw the line?  Who decides what people can see?  Censorship is one of the primary tools of authoritarians for a reason—always couched in terms of safety or sentiment. Censorship is not the answer.”

Williams wrote that Kirk “would want us to speak the truth, protect free speech and practice civil discourse which he did!”

Team Biden has struck back after former Vice President Kamala Harris offered scathing criticism of her former boss in an excerpt from her forthcoming book, 107 Days.

In the memoir, Harris called former president Joe Biden’s decision to remain in the race amid rampant health concerns “recklessness,” and decried his ego and ambition.

One former Biden administration member sounded off on Harris in comments made to Axios, arguing that the former vice president’s own deficiencies were the problem.

“Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” they said. “She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration’s key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was.”

“[President Biden was] not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her 2019 [presidential] campaign,” they continued. “Or lost the 2024 campaign, for that matter. The independent variable there is the vice president, not Biden or his aides.”

In the memoir excerpt, Harris wrote that although she thought it was clear that Biden shouldn’t run again, she never felt comfortable expressing that earlier in his campaign because she thought it would look bad.

Biden’s staff, however, wasn’t buying it.

“I’m not sure the very robust defense of not having the courage to speak up in the moment about Biden running is quite as persuasive as she thinks it is. If this is her attempt at political absolution: Lots of luck in your senior year,” an aide said. “If she had spent a fraction of the time and energy doing the work that she did on complaining, about how she was perceived, she would have been perceived a whole lot better.”

Not all of Biden’s former staffers felt the same contempt for Harris and her memoir, though.

“We all know that the Biden folks treated her and her team like shit. We never thought she would actually say anything,” another aide said, corroborating the claims Harris made in 107 Days. “The staffers across a range of ages and positions that I’m talking to are proud of her.”

Both sides of this conflict feel extremely unsatisfactory. It seems abundantly clear at this point that Biden should have dropped out earlier, and the chorus of staffers and party leaders that told everyone to shut up until it was undeniable should be held accountable.

At the same time, for Harris to come out with all this well after the fact, when she could have tried to make a difference in the actual moment, feels like too little and far too late.

“There were others on the Biden team, though, who really tried to help her thrive as VP. But she and her team did not seize that support and make the most of it,” yet another staffer told Axios. “It is all a tragedy.”

President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered American flags to be flown at half-staff after the deadly shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk—something he did not do when Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, was assassinated months ago.

“In honor of Charlie Kirk, a truly Great American Patriot, I am ordering all American Flags throughout the United States lowered to Half Mast until Sunday evening at 6 P.M.,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after Kirk was shot and killed Wednesday, later issuing a proclamation to that effect. The president also announced Thursday that he would posthumously award Kirk the presidential medal of freedom.

Observers online noted that such commemorative measures were not extended to Hortman when she and her husband were fatally shot in June by a gunman who also targeted State Senator John Hoffman and his wife (both of whom survived).

On Truth Social, Trump described the June Minnesota shooting as an instance of “horrific violence” that “will not be tolerated in the United States of America.” Asked the next day if he’d called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz about the incident, the president said, “I could be nice and call him, but why waste time?”

The Minnesota shooting went notably unmentioned in Trump’s Wednesday address about Kirk’s death, in which he decried a general increase in political violence—but attributed it only to the “radical left,” overlooking myriad recent examples of right-wing violence.