Pope Leo Slams Trump, Vance, and Hegseth All in One Go

On Tuesday evening, the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV spoke out against anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, as well as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bellicose rhetoric.

At an unusual gathering of military leaders earlier that day, Hegseth had told the top brass to be “prepared for war, not for defense,” while espousing the use of “overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy” and promising to “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.”

Speaking to reporters in Italian, Leo called Hegseth’s rhetoric “worrying,” per the Catholic News Agency, “because it shows each time an increase in tensions.” Citing Hegseth’s change in job title from “secretary of defense” to “secretary of war,” the pope said, “Let’s hope it is only a way of speaking.”

The pontiff also discussed Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich’s decision to present a lifetime achievement award to outgoing Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who represents Illinois and is a Catholic, but whose support of legal abortion stirred conservative backlash against his announced honor. (Durbin ultimately opted to decline the award.)

“I’m not terribly familiar with the particular case,” Leo said in English when asked about the controversy. “I think that it’s very important to look at the overall work that a senator has done during, if I’m not mistaken, 40 years of service in the United States Senate.”

The pope noted that some people claim to be “pro-life” while failing to extend that sentiment to other issues.

“Someone who says, ‘I am against abortion,’ but says, ‘I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” he observed. “Someone who says that, ‘I am against abortion, but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

While Leo didn’t name names, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance fall squarely into this category, as professed pro-lifers whose administration’s policies on the death penalty and immigration are anything but Christian.

Ethics be damned, the Trump administration is blatantly pinning the government shutdown on Democrats.

An email issued to federal workers Tuesday left little room for doubt about how the executive branch wanted to frame the congressional failure.

“President [Donald] Trump opposes a government shutdown, and strongly supports the enactment of H.R. 5371, which is a clean Continuing Resolution to fund the government through November 21,” the email, which was obtained by HuffPost, stated. “Unfortunately, Democrats are blocking this Continuing Resolution in the U.S. Senate due to unrelated policy demands.”

The email was received by employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Social Security Administration, reported HuffPost. Leaders of those same agencies sent out the email.

That kind of language is in violation of the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch, according to ethics experts. It could also violate the Hatch Act, which is designed to limit partisan messaging from federal employees.

But it hasn’t been the only instance in which the Trump administration has ignored long-standing presidential principles in order for Donald Trump to get his way.

The official White House website featured similar messages Wednesday. A banner atop the page reads: “Democrats have shut down the government,” followed by a timer tracking the amount of time it’s been since both parties failed to reach an agreement to continue funding the country.

Above that, an animated banner reads, “Democrat Shutdown: Democrats in Their Own Words.” That banner links out to another White House page titled “Live News” that features a running feed of edited comments from top Democratic lawmakers about the continuing resolution. (To be clear, the feed is not live, and it does not feature news.)

The Department of Housing and Urban Development showed a similar banner on its web page Tuesday, attacking the “radical left” for refusing a funding plan that would advance Trump’s agenda.

“The Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish list of demands,” the notice read. “The Trump administration wants to keep the government open for the American people.”

Donald Sherman, the executive director and chief counsel of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told HuffPost Tuesday that it was “hard to imagine a worse message from a government agency” than the one delivered by HUD.

“But this is certainly consistent with an administration that makes enemies lists,” Sherman told the outlet.

Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened that he would weaponize a government shutdown against Democrats by having his White House budget director, Russell Vought, slash “things they like.”

The shutdown came overnight, and on Wednesday morning, Vought announced plans to freeze funds appropriated toward infrastructure projects in the state represented by the two top-ranking congressional Democrats.

On X, Vought said that “roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been put on hold,” specifically naming the Hudson Tunnel project and Second Avenue subway.

The Hudson Tunnel project is a plan to construct new and improved rail tunnels connecting New York City and New Jersey, expanding service along the country’s busiest rail route. The Second Avenue subway is planned to connect a station in East Harlem, in an area that has been a “subway desert” for more than 85 years, to one in Lower Manhattan.

Vought said the funds are being withheld to ensure they are not being used for diversity, equity, and inclusion purposes, though he did not immediately elaborate on the purported relationship between the two key transit infrastructure projects and the right-wing bugbear that is DEI.

It’s difficult to interpret Vought’s choice as anything but an attempt to punish Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, both of New York, who are the minority leaders in the House and Senate, respectively.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz—who is currently leading the acquisition of TikTok’s U.S. assets—told former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2015 that they had to “embed the love and respect for Israel in the American culture.” Now, as Oracle moves to take control of TikTok’s algorithm, Catz and Oracle chief technology officer (and avowed Zionist) Larry Ellison will seek to do just that. 

Catz’s message, first reported on by Responsible Statecraft and obtained in a hack of Barak’s email, was titled “I’d like your input.” 

“We have all been horrified by the growth of the BDS movement in college campuses and have concluded that we have to fight this battle before the kids even get to college,” Catz wrote. “We believe that we have to embed the love and respect for Israel in the American culture. That means getting the message to the American people in a way they can consume it.” 

Catz, who was still head of Oracle at the time, also mentioned that her sister, Saritz Catz, was a “longtime Hollywood writer-producer” as well as a “prominent pro-Israel activist and AIPAC national leader.” She added that her sister was working on a reality show, Women of the IDF, meant to “humanize the IDF in the eyes of the American public.” 

The Israeli American CEO of one of the country’s most powerful companies was asking Israel’s former prime minister for advice on how to better spread pro-Israel propaganda back in 2015. Now she’ll control the algorithm that many conservatives and liberals alike believe is responsible for helping shatter Israel’s (tailored) image among the vast majority of young Americans, who have woken up to the reality of  Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. 

This report comes just days after current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly admitted that TikTok was the most important arena to push pro-Israel propaganda in. 

“We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield.… The most important purchase going on right now is … TikTok. Number one. And I hope it goes through because it can be consequential. And the other one? X. We have to talk to Elon. He’s not an enemy, he’s a friend. We should talk to him. Now, if we can get those two things, we get a lot.… We have to fight the fight, to give direction to the Jewish people and give direction to our non-Jewish friends.”

While sources say that Catz will be “nowhere near the algorithm of TikTok,” her past actions and emails paint a very clear agenda. 

Qatar now has NATO-level security protections, thanks to the Trump administration.

In an executive order signed Monday, Donald Trump pledged that the tiny, energy-rich, non-NATO ally would receive the same level of protection from the United States as some of America’s most powerful allies.

The order specifies, “The United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States.” It further reads that, in the event of such an attack, the U.S. will undertake “diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military” measures to defend both America and Qatar.

The strengthened alliance comes weeks after Trump effectively permitted an Israeli strike on the Middle Eastern nation. America’s failure to take action to stop Israel’s attack left those in the Qatari capital with a sense of shock and betrayal, according to CNN, especially after Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani had agreed to act as a mediator to end the war between Israel and Gaza. He later referred to Israel’s attack as “state terror,” and said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had broken “every international law” and must be “brought to justice.”

The Qatari leader’s directive followed a stateside visit by Netanyahu Monday and a Trump-organized call to Qatar, in which Netanyahu “expressed his deep regret” for killing six people in the attack, according to the White House.

Qatar and the U.S. are strategic allies: The Biden administration deemed Qatar to be a major non-NATO ally in 2022. But the Gulf nation’s attempts to sidle up to Washington became more brazen after Trump returned to office.

Just months ago, Qatar solidified a deal with the Trump Organization to build a Trump-branded golf course and a beachside project as part of a $5.5 billion development project. The tiny nation also bestowed a wildly controversial superluxury jumbo jet to Trump, all in an apparent attempt to shore up its relationship with America’s notoriously flighty leader.

The Supreme Court will allow Lisa Cook to remain on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors despite President Donald Trump’s attempt to oust her.

In a brief one-page order Wednesday, the court said Cook could keep her position pending oral arguments early next year, denying Trump’s application to stay an appeals court decision keeping Cook in place.

“The application for stay presented to The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is deferred pending oral argument in January 2026,” the order stated.

Trump attempted to fire Cook in August over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud from Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte—who’s made similar accusations against a number of the president’s enemies. But the move was initially blocked by a federal judge, who said the claim had nothing to do with Cook’s actual job.

Last month, an appeals court said that Cook was likely to succeed in her statutory claim that she’d been fired without “cause,” as well as her procedural claim that she did not receive her due process prior to her removal. But federal attorney John Sauer argued that she was not entitled to due process, and that Trump has sweeping discretion to fire whomever he wanted as long as he claimed it was related to their job.

This latest Supreme Court decision is a notably different outcome from similar challenges to Trump’s firings. Last month, Justice Elena Kagan slammed the Supreme Court’s conservative majority for approving Trump’s emergency request to remove Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission. The conservative justices also had previously allowed Trump to oust Gwynne Wilcox at the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris at the Merit Systems Protection Board—whose terms weren’t due to expire until 2029—as well as three Democratic appointees on the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

In December, the Supreme Court is expected to reexamine the 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, in which the court rejected Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attempt to fire a conservative commissioner appointed by President Herbert Hoover overseeing his New Deal policies. Depending on how the court rules, Trump could be granted sweeping discretion to fire members of independent agencies, like Cook, and Justice Clarence Thomas has already hinted that past precedents may be turned on their heads.

Last week, an amicus brief was filed arguing that removing Cook would “threaten [the] independence and erode public confidence in the Fed,” stressing the historical importance of the agency’s freedom from political considerations. The brief was signed by every living former Federal Reserve chair, and several other economic policy experts that spanned political boundaries.

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump used his merchandise to mock Democratic leaders during a meeting while pretending he was working to avert a government shutdown.

The president shared multiple photographs on Truth Social Wednesday of his meeting the day before with House House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to Truth Social, showing two bright red “Trump 2028” hats sitting on the Resolute Desk.

Speaking to CNN’s Abby Phillip Tuesday night, Jeffries said the president hadn’t tried to hand out his merch, suggesting that they “just randomly appeared in the middle of the meeting.”

“It was the strangest thing ever,” Jeffries said. “And I just looked at the hat, looked at JD Vance who was seated to my left, and said, ‘Don’t you got a problem with this?’ And he said, ‘No comment.’ And that was the end of it.”

It’s possible Trump thought he could win the Democrats over with free hats. In an effort to pass his behemoth budget bill in August, Trump had invited Republican holdouts to meet with him personally in the Oval Office, and they left with signed merchandise, photos with the president, and a new attitude.

But this time, it doesn’t seem that Trump was using his merchandise as part of a charm offensive. More likely, he wanted the meeting to serve as an unwitting photo op to create visuals highlighting the futility of negotiating with a president and a party intent on being in power for the next five years. The Democrats left with nothing to show for it.

Vance also mocked the Democrats over the hats’ presence, saying Wednesday morning on Fox & Friends he thought the hats “made the … minority leader in both the House and Senate very uncomfortable.”

For his part, Vance has expressed no displeasure with Trump’s threats to defy the Twenty-Second Amendment, curb-stomping his own potential run. The president’s fundraising efforts have kicked 5 percent of donations to the vice president’s PAC, so maybe Trump’s number two is not too bothered by hat sales.

It would be a mistake to think that Trump ever took the prompt of working with Democrats seriously. The 79-year-old had already shared an AI video falsely depicting Schumer criticizing the Democrats’ “woke trans bullshit” next to a silent Jeffries in a superimposed Mexican sombrero with a curled mustache. Trump posted a similar video again Tuesday.

Donald Trump was very presidential about the government shutdown.

America’s social media–obsessed leader was busy posting racist, artificially generated cartoons as the clock ticked down Tuesday evening.

It’s the first government shutdown since late 2018, when the 116th Congress failed to come to an agreement on how to fund the country for 34 days under Trump’s first administration. But having experience with these sorts of things apparently doesn’t lend to improved leadership.

There were many things that Trump could have done before the government ran out of funding. For instance, Trump actually did have congressional leadership in the White House on Tuesday—but rather than leverage the weight of his office to mediate between the country’s diametrically opposed political parties, the president used House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for a “Trump 2028” photo shoot without their consent.

The 79-year-old had already used their images and voices without their consent on Monday to create an AI video falsely depicting Schumer claiming that “nobody likes Democrats anymore” because of the party’s “woke trans bullshit.” Beside him is a silent Jeffries in a superimposed Mexican sombrero with a curled mustache. Mariachi music plays in the background.

Tuesday night, just hours away from the shutdown, Trump shared a clip of Jeffries on MSNBC in which the New York politician called Trump’s AI gimmick a “disgusting video” laden with “bigotry.” But Trump’s post was, in itself, another AI-generated taunt: Halfway into the tape, a mariachi band composed of several Trumps appears in the background, and another sombrero and a mustache is placed on Jeffries’s face.

The Trump War Room X account also posted an AI-generated photo of Representative Maxine Waters with a sombrero and cartoonishly large mustache.

The extremely mature response to the shutdown definitely did not denigrate the office of the president at all. Meanwhile, thousands of federal employees are expected to be furloughed (Trump has threatened to fire them while they’re gone); federal services—including their websites—have ground to a halt; and the stock market is already slipping in reaction.

The Senate is scheduled to vote on the same spending bills it failed to pass last night at 11 a.m. Wednesday.

In the latest sign that the labor market is experiencing a serious contraction, the U.S. private sector lost 32,000 jobs in September, according to the ADP National Employment Report released Wednesday.

The loss, the worst figure reported by the payroll-processing company in two and a half years, was far below the 45,000-job increase that had been forecast by economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal.

ADP data from August was also revised, indicating that the economy actually shed 3,000 private-sector jobs, rather than gaining 54,000 as was previously reported.

That makes August and September the first consecutive negative months since Covid-19 was ravaging the economy. The ADP also reported losses in June, meaning it’s also the first time since the pandemic era when three of four consecutive months have seen losses. (In 2020, the private sector shed jobs each month from March to July.)

The worrying snapshot of Trump’s economy comes as this week’s government shutdown has cast the United States into a blackout of government economic data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics was scheduled to deliver its much-anticipated monthly jobs report on Friday (after a delay from last week) but will not do so should the shutdown persist through the end of the week.

House Speaker Mike Johnson flailed Wednesday as reporters fact-checked his claim that Democrats had shut down the government because they wanted to lavish undocumented immigrants with free health care.

During an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Johnson was brutally fact-checked on his outlandish claims about the Democratic proposal to extend tax credits for the Affordable Care Act that were set to expire at the end of the year. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for those tax credits, and an estimated 5.1 million Americans will lose their insurance by 2034 if ACA funding expires at the end of the year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“The Democratic proposal is designed to prevent millions of Americans from losing their health insurance, losing Medicaid coverage, or paying higher health care premiums. Why are you against that?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“That’s an absurd statement, what you said there,” Johnson said.

“It’s a factual statement,” Stephanopoulos replied.

Johnson insisted his effort to pass a clean continuing resolution had been thwarted by Democrats. “The Democrats said instead that they wanted to give health care to illegal aliens instead of keeping critical services provided by the American citizens,” Johnson said.

The speaker didn’t fare any better Tuesday night. While speaking to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Johnson accused the Democrats of shuttering the government “because we won’t agree to restore health care to illegal aliens.”

But Collins knew that wasn’t what they were asking for.

“As you know, people who are here in the United States illegally have never been eligible for the Obamacare subsidies, for Medicare, for Medicaid,” she pressed. “So, what exactly are you saying that they’re trying to do when you talk about giving free health care to them?”

Johnson dodged the question, claiming that many people who were ineligible for Medicaid were receiving benefits, and that in Democrats’ counterproposal, taxpayer money would go toward benefits for undocumented immigrants.

Collins pointed out that this was impossible. “It’s against federal law for people who are here illegally to get health care,” she said.

“Yes! Yes, that’s why our reforms are so important, to enforce all that,” Johnson said.

“But I didn’t see that in the Democratic proposal that people who are here illegally should get health care—” Collins pushed back.

“Nope, because they don’t have the level of specification that we have in our bill, that will unbind that, all those things that the CBO just verified, will be reversed,” Johnson said. “Can’t afford to do that.”

“But you see my point—” Collins said.

“No, I don’t see your point,” Johnson said. “No, that is a red herring.”

In fact, it was Johnson who decided to keep the House out of session Tuesday as the government shutdown loomed.

Earlier Tuesday night, Johnson tried the same line on Fox News, claiming that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “wants to give free health care to illegal immigrants.”

“But he says that’s not true,” said Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. “Democrats say that it’s expanding Medicaid, getting dollars back for Medicaid, and it leaves some room for unauthorized immigrants.”

“Wrong,” Johnson said. “Read his own legislation.”

The House speaker claimed that undoing Republicans’ health care reforms would keep some undocumented immigrants on federal health insurance.