Trump Dumps Cold Water on Pete Hegseth’s New Restrictions on Reporters

The Pentagon’s latest round of press restrictions go too far, according to the president.

Donald Trump criticized the War Department while en route to Charlie Kirk’s memorial service Sunday, scolding the defense agency for forbidding reporters from publishing “unauthorized” reports—even if they’re founded on nonclassified information.

“Should the Pentagon be part of deciding what reporters can report on?” a reporter asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Trump responded, steps away from Marine One. “Nothing stops reporters. You know that.”

Unfortunately, a government’s white-knuckled control on the flow of information does stop reporters from disseminating information. Under War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new rules, journalists are required to pledge that they would not report on anything from the department that had not been approved for official release. The new policy, announced Friday, would have journalists either report government-sponsored propaganda or have their press credentials revoked.

But even those inside the Pentagon are not on board with Hegseth’s Orwellian scheme. By Monday, three Pentagon officials had already decried the initiative, with one insider telling The Intercept that the rules were a “mockery of American ideals.”

“The idea they want editorial control over the press is something I expect from a banana republic, not the United States,” the same official told The Intercept.

Representatives for America’s media institutions, meanwhile, came out in full force against the restrictions.

“This is a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the U.S. military,” National Press Club president Mike Balsamo said in a statement. “If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting. It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American.”

For months, paranoia in the Pentagon has swelled while Hegseth’s inner circle has continued to shrink. This latest act of censorship is another step in Hegesth’s long journey to rein in his department. So far during the Fox News star’s short tenure atop the military agency, the Pentagon has experienced several astounding leaks that have rattled the Trump administration and its credibility on the international stage.

Those include instances in which The Atlantic’s editor in chief was invited into a Signal group chat between multiple Trump officials where they discussed real-time updates to a U.S. airstrike in Yemen, and another eyebrow-raising situation in which Hegesth intervened in U.S. foreign policy by suspending an aid shipment to Ukraine without notifying anyone—including the president.

President Donald Trump delivered incoherent remarks as he departed for the memorial of Charlie Kirk, claiming the event would be a “time of whatever.”

Trump told reporters outside the White House that he was going to “celebrate the life of a great man today. Really a great man. He’s a young man, but a great man.”

“And we look forward to it. It really is,” Trump continued confusedly. “We want to look at it as a time of healing, a time of whatever.”

Trump has struggled to convey sincere sorrow over Kirk’s death. Just days after his right-wing ally was fatally shot in Utah, Trump repeatedly responded to questions about Kirk by plugging his own plans to add a $200 million ballroom to the White House.

The president also reportedly missed a September 15 vigil for Kirk at the Kennedy Center in favor of going golfing.

True to his word, Trump used the “time of healing” for whatever. The president spent most of his address at Kirk’s memorial complaining about his personal grievances, and even contradicted remarks from Kirk’s widow by promising to enact more political violence and retribution against his administration’s perceived enemies.

A new Forbes report reveals that the Trump family has profited enormously from the presidency, doubling its fortune to a total of about $10 billion.

For Donald Trump, the year of his White House comeback has also been “the most lucrative year of his life,” with the president raking in $3 billion, two-thirds of which came from cryptocurrency—including his meme coin and World Liberty Financial, a crypto company started by his family and that of Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy.

World Liberty is notably at the center of a scandal, as The New York Times revealed last week. In May, the firm secured a $2 billion investment from an Emirati royal who just  happens to control a company that—per a deal with the United Arab Emirates that was announced two weeks later, and which Witkoff helped negotiate—will receive precious AI computer chips from the U.S. government.

Trump’s second son, Eric Trump, has seen his wealth balloon from $40 million last year to an estimated $750 million, in large part thanks to crypto. His older brother, Don Jr., is worth $500 million, compared to $50 million last year, having also cashed in on crypto and “the anti-woke economy,” among other ventures. The president’s youngest son, Barron Trump, is worth $150 million at 19 years old—again, largely from crypto.

Melania Trump, Forbes reports, has profited in both “typical First Lady ways (books, speeches, a documentary)” and “unquestionably Trumpian ways.” The latter category includes her own meme coin, $MELANIA—whose inauguration-eve launch was quite a shady affair: A group of crypto traders took in nearly $100 million by buying $MELANIA minutes before it was announced, then off-loading most of their holdings when its value then spiked.

The president’s daughter Ivanka is worth an estimated $100 million, and her husband, Jared Kushner, is now a billionaire, with a major contributor being a private equity firm he founded the same month Trump left the White House in 2021. Kushner was a senior adviser in the first Trump administration, and has since relied on relationships he built during his tenure to court investors.

Across the board, according to Forbes, the president’s family has doubled its net worth since the 2024 election.

President Donald Trump appeared to feign ignorance over the weekend about shutting down a bribery investigation into White House border czar Tom Homan.

Speaking to reporters Saturday, Trump was asked about a MSNBC report that the Department of Justice had dropped an investigation into Homan, after he was allegedly caught on camera accepting $50,000 in cash payments from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives in return for favorable contracts.

“Did you see the reporting on Tom Homan—” one reporter began. 

“No, I haven’t,” Trump interrupted.

The typically verbose Trump kept quiet about the latest allegations against his border czar—and his administration’s role in covering it up. 

Homan was allegedly caught accepting payments during a September 2024 meeting with undercover agents in Texas, promising that if Trump won, he could ensure favorable contracts for border enforcement. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at the Department of Justice have reportedly shuttered the investigation into Homan.

In a statement to MSNBC, FBI Director Kash Patel and deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed the previous administration’s probe had found “no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.” White House deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson claimed it was a “blatantly political investigation” and that Homan was responsible for awarding contracts under the current Trump administration. Homan had previously served as the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first administration.  

President Trump plans to “save” TikTok by handing it over to America’s oligarchs. 

A senior White House official confirmed Monday that ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, plans to move an 80 percent stake of its company to America’s richest, most powerful men. ByteDance will create a separate, American copy of its infamous algorithm to lease to a new group spearheaded by Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz, Larry Ellison’s Oracle, and the private equity firm Silver Lake. Ellison and Oracle will then control U.S. user data and be able to shape the algorithm as they see fit. 

“The algorithm will be retrained from the ground up and protected by Oracle to ensure Americans’ data is safeguarded and foreign influence is removed,” a senior official told Fox News.

Trump, who has floated banning and saving TikTok multiple times now, has given the men 120 days to finalize a deal. On Sunday, the president also confirmed that Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell and conservative media moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch will also likely be involved in the deal.

The involvement of conservative billionaires and technocrats in the deal has raised valid concerns over the future of free speech. Conservatives are on the record blaming TikTok, for example, for the fact that the overwhelming majority of young Americans are opposed to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Writing for Bari Weiss’s Zionist news site The Free Press, former Republican representative and current Palantir “head of defense” Mike Gallagher outright blamed TikTok’s algorithm for making young people “support Hamas.”    

Gallagher isn’t alone. In fact, his position is identical to the rest of the GOP’s.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts,” Senator Mitt Romney said during a panel in May of last year. “So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the president will get the chance to make action in that regard.”

Now, that algorithm—and your data— will be retrained and refiltered by Oracle and by Ellison, who has a very close relationship with the Israel Defense Forces and believes that “there is no greater honor” than supporting Israel.

Charlie Kirk’s memorial was apparently just another opportunity for the president to espouse his typical talking points.

The Sunday service intended to honor Kirk’s legacy featured his family, friends, and crucial members of the Trump administration, from Vice President JD Vance to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Speaking before an arena of mourners, some of the country’s most high-profile Republicans painted Kirk as a martyr for the conservative movement, who they credited with transforming contemporary American youth politics.

But Donald Trump’s turn behind the lectern was a remarkable divergence from the lineup. While the president used some of his time allotment to heap praise onto Kirk, he also leveraged the name and memory of one of the GOP’s biggest firebrands to bolster his typical diatribe.

For more than 40 minutes, Trump lamented over late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel, aired the supposed success of his economic tariff plan, damned the rate of autism in America, and even negated the message of Kirk’s widow by promising to enact more political violence and retribution against his administration’s perceived enemies.

“Just like Charlie and Erika made Turning Point hot, we are looking at a country that has a chance to attain a level like never before—tariffs are making us rich again, richer than anybody ever thought was possible,” Trump said. “And the only ones challenging them are people that hate our country, or foreign countries that are paying a price.”

“The election was big, but the tariffs—because of the election—came in.”

Trump also used some of his air time to talk about his planned deployment of the National Guard to Chicago, promising the stadium that he would bring the hard fist of the White House to several of the country’s biggest cities.

“I’m so proud of Washington, D.C., and now we’re going to Memphis, and we’ll get that one straightened out fast, and then we’re going into some others, but we’re going to go do Chicago, and we’re going to have Charlie very much in mind when we go into Chicago,” Trump told the roaring crowd.

President Donald Trump doubled down Monday on his threat to send Attorney General Pam Bondi after his political enemies.

Speaking to the press on Air Force One, Trump was asked whom he wanted Attorney General Pam Bondi to “focus” on prosecuting.

“Everybody, really,” Trump said.

“There are a lot of crooked people that were here before me. And people that almost destroyed our country,” he said. “If I didn’t win this election, our country would be destroyed.”

But Trump had no problem naming names in a Truth Social post Saturday addressed to Bondi, pressuring the attorney general to get to work prosecuting his political enemies, or risk “killing our reputation and credibility.”

“Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam “Shifty” Schiff, Leticia? ? ? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,’” he wrote.

Trump also celebrated the resignation of Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, whom Trump officials had pressured to seek an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Investigators have yet to produce a shred of evidence that James falsified bank documents to secure favorable terms on a mortgage for her Virginia home. Two Trump stooges, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte and Ed Martin, the head of the DOJ’s Working Weaponization Group, reportedly urged Siebert to seek an indictment against James at Trump’s direction. When federal prosecutors declined, Pulte reportedly encouraged Trump to fire Siebert and have him replaced with someone else. On Friday, Trump was ready to drop the ax.

Trump called Siebert “A Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job” in his Saturday post and claimed that he’d had Siebert fired.

“Lindsey is a really good lawyer, and likes you, a lot,” Trump continued. He later reposted this rant, clarifying that he was writing about Lindsey Halligan, his personal attorney who now serves as special assistant to the president. Politico legal reporter Kyle Cheney suggested that Trump hoped to replace Siebert with Halligan to pursue his supposedly “GREAT case” against James.

Maggie Cleary, a new addition to the Justice Department’s Criminal Division who claims to have been wrongly accused of participating in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, has been named acting head of the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, delivered a deranged speech at the Sunday memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Arizona.

MAGA “patriots,” Miller claimed, have inherited a civilizing mission from their ancestors. To continue this mission, save humanity, and continue the legacy of Kirk, he said, they must vanquish the “forces of darkness,” their political opponents.

At the beginning of his remarks, Miller said Kirk’s widow, Erika, reminds him of a “famous expression”: “The storm whispers to the warrior that, ‘You cannot withstand my strength.’ And the warrior whispers back, ‘I am the storm.’”

“Erika is the storm,” Miller declared. “We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion.

“Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” Miller continued. “Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry,” he said, pulling “us out of the caves and the darkness into the light.

“We built the world that we inhabit now, generation by generation, and we will defend this world,” he later added.

Addressing “the forces of wickedness and evil,” Miller said: “You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.

“You have no idea the dragon you have awakened,” he warned, as the MAGA movement will strive to “save this civilization, to save the West, to save this republic, because our children are strong, and our grandchildren will be strong, and our children’s children’s children will be strong. And what will you leave behind? Nothing, nothing.”

The speech was consistent with Miller’s white nationalist sympathies, penchant for unhinged rants against his political enemies, and apparent mission to use Kirk’s murder as a pretext for broader crackdowns. Last week, he vowed to avenge Kirk’s death by “go[ing] after the left-leaning organizations” that, he claimed, “are promoting violence in this country.”

President Trump took the stage at Charlie Kirk’s memorial Sunday evening to promise more political violence and retribution against his enemies moments after Kirk’s wife, Erika, promised to forgive them. Both received similar applause. 

“In a private moment on his dying day, we find everything we need to know about who Charlie Kirk truly was,” Trump said at the podium. “He was a missionary with a noble spirit, and a great, great purpose. He did not hate his opponents, he wanted the best for them.”  

Then Trump went off script, turning the speech into something better suited for a campaign rally than a memorial. 

“That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent. And I don’t want the best for them, I’m sorry,” he said as the crowd roared with laughter. “I am sorry Erika. But now Erika can talk to me and the whole group, and maybe they can convince me that that’s not right. But I can’t stand my opponent.” 

Trump was referencing the slight 180 that Erika Kirk has done in her messaging since her husband’s killing. Initially, she claimed that “the evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination have no idea what they have done.… If you thought that my husband’s mission was powerful before, you have no idea. You have no idea what you have just unleashed across this entire country.”

This messaging fit in snugly with the other calls for war and revolution against the left from people like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon. But on Sunday, Erika Kirk made a point to emphasize that she forgave Tyler Robinson, her husband’s suspected assassin. 

“My husband, Charlie, he wanted to save young men, just like the one who took his life.… On the cross, our savior said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they not know what they do.’ That young man. I forgive him,” she said, evoking the actions of Jesus, while he took his dying breaths, in the Bible. 

Trump made it clear that he saw no value in that, and the crowd ate it up. Asking the president to embody Christlike qualities of forgiveness sounds like an insurmountable task, even for Erika Kirk. 

President Donald Trump will reportedly seek to increase the cost of an H-1B temporary visa by a factor of more than 10,000 percent via a forthcoming proclamation.* The program applies to foreign workers with bachelor’s degrees and job offers from U.S. employers in certain specialty occupations.

As soon as Friday, Bloomberg reports, Trump is planning on signing a proclamation barring entry under H-1B without a $100,000 payment. It is a marked increase from the $995 in fees currently required of H-1B applicants (a $215 registration fee, along with $780 for employer petition).

Economics journalist Catherine Rampell of MSNBC described the move as consistent with other Trump administration decisions poised to compromise “America’s role as a global leader in science and innovation,” including gutting the civil service, canceling research grants, and expelling international students.

“These are visas for skilled workers—doctors, scientists, and engineers,” wrote Representative Pramila Jayapal, a progressive Democrat, on X. “This move will hurt US innovation and exacerbate an already serious shortage of medical professionals. In what world does this make sense?”

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an American Immigration Council fellow, observed that the move would exacerbate an ongoing shortage of doctors in the U.S.: “Every year, hundreds of doctors get H-1B visas to help fill those gaps,” he noted. “If hospitals had to pay an additional $100,000 fee, it’s possible they would simply give up and not even try to fill positions.”

Reichlin-Melnick also pointed out that the action is “likely to be struck down in court,” given that the U.S. government lacks “statutory authority to impose fees designed to limit the use of a visa.” Sam Peak of the Economic Innovation Group too predicted that the administration will “get sued and lose” over the move, given that the Department of Homeland Security “has a biannual fee schedule where they can change fees after notice and comment.”

* This article originally miscalculated the size of the increase.