Trump “Jokes” About Rigging Elections With Turkish President

President Trump joked about rigged elections at the start of his press conference with Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan, who has amassed power in Turkey for over two decades. 

“It’s a pleasure to be with President Erdoğan of Turkey, and we’ve been friends for a long time, actually, even for four years when I was in exile unfairly, as it turns out, rigged elections, you know,” Trump said on Thursday. “He knows about rigged elections better than anybody, but when I was in exile, we were still friends.” 

This is yet another example of Trump’s affinity for strongman authoritarian leaders with sketchy records on political transparency, human rights, and free speech, from El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, to Erdoğan. 

Erdoğan first became prime minister of Turkey in 2003. Since then, he has jailed students, protesters (for things like throwing eggs), and hundreds of journalists. He has briefly blocked access to Wikipedia and nearly every social media platform and has overseen the Turkish Great Depression, all while hanging giant banners of himself throughout the country. (Sound familiar?)  

Most recently, Erdoğan arrested well-known opposition leader and political rival Ekrem Imamoglu on the grounds that he accepted bribes and rigged bids. Given Erdoğan’s history, it’s extremely likely that Imamoglu was arrested because he represents a serious threat to Erdoğan’s reign, even in the face of outright suppression and election rigging. 

Each thing listed here—muzzling journalists, cracking down on protesters, jailing political rivals, hoarding power for decades—is something Trump has already done or professed his desire to do. It’s no wonder he feels such a kinship with Erdoğan. 

Additionally, Trump referring to his losing the 2020 election and inciting a violent insurrection as his “exile” is rich. Let’s hope he doesn’t take any more notes from Erdoğan for 2028. 

The White House is planning to give its “tariff money” to U.S. farmers, though the exact figure could vary by billions of dollars, according to the president.

Speaking beside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the White House Thursday, Donald Trump claimed that his staffers had discovered an inordinate amount of uncounted cash in the budget for U.S. farmers, though he recklessly mixed up “billions” and “millions” when describing the amount of aid that could be available.

“The other day, it was very interesting, they found $31 billion,” Trump said. “They said, ‘Sir, we’ve found 31.’ I said, ‘You mean positively, right?’ They said, ‘Yeah, $31 million more than we knew.’ And they said, ‘We don’t know where it came from.’”

Trump then claimed he instructed his staff to “check the tariff shelf,” and that staffers later confirmed the money came from Trump’s tariffs.

“So what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be taking some money from all of the tariff money we’ve taken and we’re going to distribute it to our farmers, until the tariffs kick in to their benefit,” Trump said, promising that American farmers would eventually “be making a fortune” from his plan.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Wednesday that there was “potential” to leverage tariff assets to aid the country’s agricultural industry. In focus were the country’s soybean, corn, wheat, sorghum, and cotton farmers, all of whom Rollins said were facing “difficult times.”

“We should have an announcement very soon, perhaps in the next couple of weeks,” Rollins told reporters.

That plan could be completely upended, however, if the Supreme Court decides that Trump’s tariffs are illegal.

Of course, farmers may have avoided these difficult times altogether if Trump had never instituted his aggressive tariff plan to begin with. Tensions between the Trump administration and Beijing have practically halted trade with China, nixing a crucial market for American farmers. The end result, according to insiders, is a mandatory bailout—which will weigh heavily on the American taxpayer’s dime.

“The pitch being made to the administration is, ‘Look, if you don’t have some kind of ace up your sleeve here, like an imminent deal with China and/or a string of other trade deals that are about to be announced that also happen to lighten the load on soybeans, then there’s going to have to be a bailout,’” an anonymous agriculture industry representative told Politico.

The Trump administration on Thursday announced an agreement with Elon Musk’s company xAI, making his questionable chatbot, Grok, available to every federal agency over the next year and a half for a nominal fee of 42 cents.

“We value xAI for partnering with [the U.S. General Services Administration]—and dedicating engineers—to accelerate the adoption of Grok to transform government operations,” said Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, which handles government purchasing. Musk, who publicly feuded with President Donald Trump just a few months ago, expressed excitement about working with his administration “to rapidly deploy AI throughout the government for the benefit of the country.”

Grok’s potential integration within federal agencies is certainly a high point for a chatbot that, in its time as a feature on Musk’s social media platform X, has had some notorious low ones.

There was the period when it began producing antisemitic screeds and calling itself “MechaHitler.” Or when it randomly came to share its South African creator’s obsession with alleged “white genocide” in South Africa—so much so that it would bring it up in unrelated inquiries. Or when it made disturbing sexual comments about then-CEO of X Linda Yaccarino, or similarly harassed prominent liberal X user Will Stancil, providing users instructions to break into his house, and reminding them to bring “lockpicks, gloves, flashlight, and lube—just in case.”

Musk, for his part, has made comments raising concerns about his possible tinkering with Grok such that it shares his right-wing beliefs. When Grok told a user that “right-wing political violence has been more frequent and deadly” than left-wing violence since 2016, while providing evidence, Musk called it a “major fail,” accusing the chatbot of “parroting legacy media.”

Days later, he announced Grok 4, the model available to federal agencies under the new xAI-GSA agreement. He promised to train Grok 4 by having the previous version of the chatbot “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors. Then retrain on that.” He also asked X users to provide “divisive facts” on which to train the model—“things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true”—which elicited replies such as “Covid-19 Vaccines did not save a single life” and “Nonbinary isn’t a real thing.”

Ryan Walters, responsible for a yearslong campaign to suffuse Oklahoma public schools with Christian nationalist and right-wing messages, is out as the state’s education superintendent and headed for the private sector.

Speaking on Fox News late Wednesday, Walters announced that he plans to join the Teacher Freedom Alliance as its chief executive officer. “We’re gonna destroy the teachers’ unions,” Walters said, promising to “build an army of teachers” and take the fight national.

The nonprofit, which is an offshoot of the far-right Freedom Foundation, seeks to lure educators to opt out of their unions. According to the website, the TFA seeks to assist teachers in producing “free, moral, and upright” American citizens. As of Thursday, the organization boasted a small membership of more than 2,700 teachers, compared to the 1.8 million represented by the American Federation of Teachers union.

In March, Walters landed in hot water after he issued multiple news releases about the TFA, potentially violating ethics rules that prohibit state officers from using state resources to promote private interests. State Representative Ellen Pogemiller requested that Oklahoma’s attorney general “clarify the legality” of Walters’s promotions and “investigate the financial ties and contacts” between the public official and the TFA.

Now it appears that Walters has dropped the pretense and decided to make a buck as Donald Trump’s administration attempts a massive overhaul of the Department of Education.

“Walters fearlessly fights the woke liberal union mob,” the TFA website said. “TFA will take the fight straight to the unions and we will not stop.”

Walters has made outlandish criticisms of the teachers’ unions, referring to them as “terrorist organizations” and even attempting to tie them to actual terror attacks.

His hatred of teachers can be tied directly to his Christian nationalist ideology, which puts him at odds with educators, parents, and the U.S. Constitution. Walters previously pushed teaching the Bible in Oklahoma public schools, and was sued by parents. The Trump fanboy made clear that the only version of the good book that suited his guidelines was Trump’s God Bless the USA Bible, and he later attempted to shove his prayers for President Trump down his students’ throats.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has urgently called on hundreds of U.S. military officials around the globe for a spontaneous meeting at a Marine Corps base in Virginia next week, though the reason for the gathering remains top secret.

The unusual directive was received by top military commanders stationed around the world, ordering them to meet in Quantico on Tuesday, reported The Washington Post. There are approximately 800 U.S. generals and admirals in total. Hegseth’s order applies to “all senior officers with the rank of brigadier general or above, or their Navy equivalent, serving in command positions and their top enlisted advisers,” insiders told the Post. It does not apply to military officers who hold staff positions.

In a statement Thursday, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told the Post that Hegseth “will be addressing his senior military leaders early next week,” but did not clarify further.

The message shocked members of the U.S. military, who could not recall another instance in which a defense secretary summoned so many commanders for a sudden in-person meeting—especially without a clear rationale. Some warned that having so many integral military leaders in one place could pose a national security risk.

“People are very concerned. They have no idea what it means,” one source told the Post.

Another military source expressed frustration that commanders stationed overseas would also be required to attend: It’s “not how this is done,” they said. “You don’t call [general and flag officers] leading their people and the global force into an auditorium outside D.C. and not tell them why/what the topic or agenda is.”

“Are we taking every general and flag officer out of the Pacific right now?” a third U.S. official told the Post. “All of it is weird.”

Hegseth’s directive comes months after he announced a massive overhaul of America’s defense systems, promising to massively slash staffing. That includes firing about 100 generals and admirals, instituting a “minimum” 20 percent reduction in the number of four-star officers across the military and the National Guard, and a 10 percent reduction to the number of generals and admirals.

President Trump’s upcoming ballroom will be bigger than the White House.

Recent renderings obtained by CBS News show that the ballroom—which Trump has been obsessing over for some time now—shows a gaudy, gold-tinged, 90,000-square foot building that looks like it came straight from the Gilded Age. The White House is only 50,000 square feet.

“For 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed,” the White House’s July announcement read. “President Donald J. Trump has expressed his commitment to solving this problem on behalf of future Administrations and the American people.”

The construction project, which began earlier this month, is estimated to cost $200 million, and at this point has been funded by Google, tobacco company R.J. Reynolds, Booz Allen Hamilton, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin.

“They’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House for more than 150 years, but there’s never been a president that’s good at ballrooms,” Trump said in July.

In September, when asked about conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Trump immediately pivoted to the ballroom.

“And by the way, right there you see all the trucks; they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House,” he said. “Which is something they’ve been trying to get as you know for about 150 years, and it’s gonna be a beauty, it’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.”

As many have pointed out, this kind of project is what Trump actually cares about. He’s more concerned with projecting opulence and pomp than he is about governing. The White House is traditionally considered “the people’s house.” Now, there will be a massive ballroom next to it that “the people” will likely never step foot in, unless they have a couple hundred million dollars to throw at it. Above all, this ballroom shows that Trump really wants the White House to be just another Mar-a-Lago.

New Jersey’s only public television station, NJ PBS, is anticipated to shutter in just over nine months thanks to President Trump’s budget cuts.

As first reported by The New Jersey Globe this week, WNET, the company that has operated the station for 14 years since former Republican Governor Chris Christie shut down the state-run New Jersey Network, did not reach an agreement to extend its contract with the state beyond June 30, 2026.

The network relied on about $1.5 million in federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but the Republican-controlled Congress in July passed the Trump administration plan to cut all federal support for PBS and its member stations

Earlier this year, state funding was also cut, from $1 million to $250,000, under a spending plan signed by Democratic Governor Phil Murphy.

“The recent cuts by the federal government and New Jersey state government have been very significant,” NJ PBS said in a statement.

“I believe that the State’s intransigence or maybe even apathy, coupled with federal funding cuts and new media challenges, likely influenced WNET’s decision” not to renew, suggested NJ PBS Chairman Scott Kobler in an op-ed.

New Jersey’s Democratic senators, Cory Booker and Andy Kim, lamented the move, with Booker calling it “a loss for all of us who live here,” and Kim excoriating congressional Republicans for voting “to take money from Elmo and Daniel Tiger and give to billionaires.”

“NJ PBS doesn’t just have kids’ shows and trusted, local news programming, but also critical emergency notification systems that kept residents safe during disasters,” noted Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mikie Sherrill, who promised to “find new ways to fund public media” if elected in November.

“NJ PBS shutting down is more than a station dying,” said Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, “It’s a warning about who holds power when oversight fades. Without free public media, we lose the lens that keeps those in power honest.”

State Senators John Burzichelli and Andrew Zwicker called for “a top-to-bottom analysis of public television in New Jersey to determine what can and should be done to maintain the type of services the network has provided.”

Months after Elon Musk departed his position at the Department of Government Efficiency, Social Security is suffering extensive damage from the fledgling office’s onslaught of cuts.

Earlier this year, DOGE slashed the Social Security Administration’s workforce by 12 percent, leaving an already understaffed agency in a state of upheaval. The cuts have hit local field offices the hardest, reported The New York Times Wednesday.

Local branches are responsible for serving the 74 million Americans on Social Security, many of whom come to field offices for identity verification when applying for benefits and other in-person assistance. But due to cuts, people who need Social Security cards have had to wait multiple weeks to get an appointment.

And in every office that can’t meet demand, there are frontline workers struggling to manage more responsibilities with fewer resources.

“In my 24 years, I have never seen it so bad to the point that a lot of us are medicated,” said one Social Security technical expert in the Midwest who spoke anonymously to the Times. “We joke about it, because what else can you do?”

In addition to general staff cuts, the agency has shuffled local workers to the national hotline, leaving even fewer employees available for face-to-face communication. And for people seeking help over the phone, the added representatives aren’t making enough of a dent: Many callers still spend hours on hold.

Rebekah Walker, a 41-year-old woman who’s lived with heart abnormalities since childhood, has been fighting to get a payment issue resolved with the agency for three months. She’s had to borrow money for rent and postpone medical help.

“It’s as if I am not a real human being,” Walker told the Times. “I have three children. I’m a single mom.”

Jeffrey Epstein’s self-described “pal” Donald Trump apparently can’t grasp why the pedophile’s crimes are so upsetting for the American public.

Trump complained to aides about the intense public scrutiny of his failure to produce Epstein’s so-called client list, claiming that “Palm Beach in the 90s was a different time,” The Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday.

After longtime allies whipped up a furor over the dismal Epstein files rollout on the second day of a Turning Point USA Conference in Tampa, Trump wanted to know, “Why is everyone so fixated on the issue?” the Journal said, asking influential allies, “What would make it die down?”

Trump claimed he cut off contact with Epstein after the financier was convicted for soliciting underage prostitutes, referring to Epstein as a “creep.” But the pair of Manhattan socialites have shared a long and cozy history together.

Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The duo were named and photographed together on several occassions—including at Trump’s second wedding. The socialites were caught shepherding underage girls into casinos together, and Trump reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times. Trump penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the sex trafficker’s 50th birthday, and was quoted in a 2002 New York Magazine profile as saying that he had, at that point, known Epstein for 15 years, referring to him as a “terrific guy.”

Much to Trump’s chagrin, the botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague his administration. Instead of simply disclosing the contents of the files, the Trump administration has expended vast resources to reportedly strip the president’s name from the documents. The White House also tapped Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell to produce a new list of the deceased financier’s associates, which undoubtedly already exists in the Epstein files. The plot granted Maxwell improved living conditions, moving her to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas, and gave her time on the national stage to ask Trump for a pardon.

The Epstein story has remained an anomaly in Trump’s political career. For the better part of a decade, the MAGA leader became adjusted to an undyingly loyal base that rarely skews from or challenges his political vision. But Trump’s proximity to Epstein and his heinous crimes has been an outlier, prompting doubts that have undercut Trump’s influence with large swaths of his followers.

Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House attorney, told the Journal that the federal fiasco surrounding the Epstein scandal was “the worst managed PR event in history.” Its handling was unorganized and chaotic, with the Justice Department and the FBI regularly pointing fingers at one another.

At one point, Attorney General Pam Bondi complained that FBI leadership was “trying to destroy her,” according to the Journal.

President Donald Trump’s administration has upped the stakes of a potential government shutdown by threatening mass firings in federal agencies if the shutdown were to occur.

Whereas usually federal workers would be furloughed in the event of a shutdown and rehired once Congress reopens the government, this order from the White House budget office—first reported Wednesday night by Politico—instructs agencies to permanently eliminate jobs that aren’t consistent with the president’s priorities if the government shuts down.

The Trump administration decision to use the threat of firings as leverage ups the ante in negotiations with congressional Democrats over government funding.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the move an “attempt at intimidation” but didn’t seem swayed by the threat. He said earlier this month, when talking about shutdown negotiations, that the Trump administration’s attacks on federal agencies “will get worse with or without [a shutdown], because Trump is lawless.”

Schumer also believes that the firings likely aren’t as permanent as they seem—that they’ll be overturned in court or that the administration will just end up hiring workers back, as they’re aiming to do with employees fired during DOGE cuts.

“Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government,” Schumer said in a statement.