Trump’s Gaudy Ballroom Donors Happen to Have Huge Government Contracts

Donald Trump boasts that his White House ballroom is being funded by private donors and not taxpayers. But it turns out that the donors to the $300 million monstrosity have a lot of business with the government, ranging from federal contracts to investigations into their companies.

The Washington Post reports that over half of the companies spending money on the project are dealing with federal law enforcement on actions including unfair labor practices, environmental infractions, and deceiving consumers. These companies, which include Nvidia, Google, Comcast, and Lockheed Martin, have received over $279 billion in government contracts over the past five years.

The Post cited a report from consumer advocacy group Public Citizen for its story, which focused on the more than three dozen corporate and individual donors disclosed by the Trump administration, as well as three more discovered by CBS News. Many of the companies and individuals also donated to Trump’s inauguration or other Republican projects.

None of the companies have said how much they have donated exactly, although Trump bragged at a White House dinner that some forked up as much as $25 million. The White House’s claims of transparency are further contradicted by the fact that fundraisers for Trump have told prospective donors that they have the option to remain anonymous.

The whole thing smacks of bribery and corruption, but that has never been a problem for Trump, and he isn’t likely to face any investigations or accountability over the donations. The public doesn’t even know how exactly the money is being spent on the ballroom, but is just receiving general figures. We only learn about what is happening based on the destruction we can see on the White House lawn.

President Donald Trump went rogue on Truth Social on Tuesday, contradicting his own administration’s decision a day earlier to fund SNAP benefits during the shutdown—and potentially violating a court order in the process.

“SNAP BENEFITS, which increased by Billions and Billions of Dollars (MANY FOLD!) during Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office … will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!” Trump wrote.

The Trump administration announced Monday that it would use an emergency fund to pay out SNAP benefits for November, with two major caveats: that the benefits would only be about 50 percent funded and that it may take multiple months to disperse the funds.

But Trump doesn’t seem happy with even that meager offering to hungry Americans. Instead, he brayed on Truth Social that no food stamps would be given out until the shutdown ends, playing with working people’s lives in an attempt to own the libs.

Trump’s announcement caught members of his own team off guard, with four people with knowledge of the matter telling Politico they aren’t clear whether his post means that USDA now won’t abide by the court order.

If Trump follows through on his threat, it would likely be in violation of a federal court order demanding that the government fund the program. But will the Trump administration follow the whims of the president or the USDA’s previously announced plan? USDA had no further comment for Politico, and the White House simply directed reporters to the president’s post.

From tariffs to funding cuts, contradictory policies and often-empty threats have been a hallmark of the second Trump term since day one. We all know that the president has no regard for the rule of law, but apparently he can’t even be bothered to extend any courtesy to his own appointees.

As New Yorkers go to the polls on Tuesday, Republicans in Congress pulled out every bigoted message they could think of to insult the city’s Democratic nominee and mayoral front-runner, Zohran Mamdani. 

Representative Andy Ogles posted a video on X of the 9/11 attacks in New York, calling on the city to “WAKE UP,” in a blatant attack on Mamdani’s Muslim faith.  

Representative Randy Fine, who already has a history of Islamophobia in his short congressional career, called for Mamdani’s deportation, in a speech to the Republican Jewish Committee’s Las Vegas summit over the weekend.

“The only thing I want to see him running for is his gate at JFK on the deportation flight back to Uganda,” Fine said, in a video posted on Monday. Both Fine and Ogles have called for the Department of Justice to investigate Mamdani’s citizenship. 

Also at the RJC summit, Senator Dave McCormick claimed antisemitism is “running wild on the progressive left” and that “the leaders of the Democratic Party are not confronting it, with their new star, Mamdani.”

Senator Ted Cruz called Mamdani a communist and a “Karl Marx-quoting, America-hating jihadist.”

The fact that a democratic socialist Muslim who campaigned on making New York City affordable is on the verge of being elected the city’s next mayor is too much for many on the right. Maybe these Republicans ought to worry about the government shutdown instead of the choices of voters in a city they normally denigrate.

The trial of Sean Dunn, the D.C. man charged with throwing a Subway sandwich at a federal agent this summer, is officially underway—and off to a hilarious start.

After federal prosecutors failed to charge Dunn with a felony, they’re now attempting to get him on misdemeanor assault. And the testimony the “assaulted” officer is sharing of his traumatic sandwich encounter is harrowing indeed.

According to court records and video footage of the foot-long fight, Dunn yelled at Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore and other federal agents, calling them “fucking fascists” and saying, “I don’t want you in my city!” before hurling the hoagie at Lairmore, who was wearing a bulletproof vest.

Lairmore testified in court Monday that he was not injured by the sandwich, according to HuffPost reporter Dave Jamieson. However, he said it “kind of exploded” on his chest.

“I could smell the onions and mustard,” Lairmore said.

However, the defense pressed Lairmore on whether the sandwich really exploded by referring to a photo of the sandwich, still wrapped, on the ground.

“The sandwich hasn’t exploded at all, has it?” the defense asked.

“It looks like a little bit is coming out towards the bottom,” Lairmore replied.

Lairmore also testified that he received gag gifts from fellow officers after the ordeal: a sandwich plushie toy and a patch that said “Felony Footlong.”

It’s a dark day in America when a man tasked with disappearing people without due process is forced to endure the horror of condiments.

Donald Trump took to Truth Social Tuesday morning to post about New York City’s mayoral election with his characteristic nuance and eloquence.

“Any Jewish person that votes for Zohran Mamdani, a proven and self professed JEW HATER, is a stupid person!!!” the president of the United States wrote about a historically oppressed minority group.

It goes without saying that Mamdani is not, in fact, a “Jew hater,” but a Muslim candidate who supports the equal application of human rights law across the globe. He has pledged to increase funding to prevent hate crimes by 800 percent. He was the preferred candidate of many Jewish New Yorkers in the primary, and was recently endorsed by one of the city’s Orthodox communities, the Satmar in Brooklyn.

One could argue that it’s more antisemitic to assume that there is no difference of opinion among Jewish voters, or that every Jewish New Yorker has a deeper allegiance to Israel than to their own city—an accusation of “dual loyalty” that is leveraged against Jews (and other religious minorities) to otherize and scapegoat them.

Mamdani’s opponents have helped fuel a surge in Islamophobia, pretending their racism is an acceptable strategy or a mere policy critique. From the fixation on the way the Democratic nominee eats to the disrespectful invocation of the September 11 tragedy as a “gotcha,” the relentless questions about Israel in a race that should be about rent prices in New York City, and even to credible threats on Mamdani’s life, attacks on the candidate simply due to his religion and his skin color have become shockingly normalized.

Voters in New Jersey awoke to worrying developments Tuesday: bomb threats at polling places across the state.

New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin issued a statement warning of emailed threats at polls in Bergen, Essex, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Ocean, and Passaic counties, and said law enforcement had worked to “secure these polling locations and ensure the safety of each voter.”

NJ.com reports that some polling locations have been closed while police investigate, with voters sent to alternative locations. In Newark, multiple phishing emails were sent with fake claims of bomb threats. And in Passaic County, there is a heavy police presence outside a Paterson voting location.

State officials are trying to reassure the public that everything is safe for voters Tuesday.

“Law enforcement has determined that there are no credible threats at this time. We are doing everything in our power to protect voters and poll workers and coordinate closely with state, local, and federal partners to ensure a smooth and safe election,” said Lieutenant Governor Tahesha Way, who also serves as New Jersey secretary of state.

Don’t expect any kind of help from the White House, though. Trump’s Department of Justice said it would “monitor” polls in New Jersey and California weeks ago, but has yet to say anything about Tuesday’s threats. That’s perhaps because Trump thinks fear will boost his party’s chances at the polls, and the GOP has gutted federal programs to safeguard elections. New Jersey’s elections were already predicted to be close, and there’s no telling how voters will respond to these threats as the voting day continues.

Non–New Yorker Elon Musk peddled the stupidest conspiracy about the New York City mayoral election Tuesday morning.

“The New York City ballot form is a scam!” Musk posted on X. “No ID is required. Other mayoral candidates appear twice. Cuomo’s name is last in bottom right.”

Musk’s tweet seemingly implies the ballot is somehow rigged against Andrew Cuomo, who lost the Democratic nomination to Zohran Mamdani in June.

All of Musk’s ramblings have easy explanations, which, if he or his rabid retweeters lived in New York City, they’d probably already know.

First, city election law doesn’t require voters to bring an ID to the polls—instead, you have to include a driver’s license or Social Security number when you register, so when you show up to actually vote, all you need is your name and address.

Second, you can run with multiple parties in NYC. Mamdani, and other progressive candidates, are running on the Working Families Party line in addition to the Democratic line. Candidates can also run on a ballot line detached from an organized party: Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, is listed a second time as well on the “Protect Animals” line.

Cuomo, an independent, chose to run on the “Fight and Deliver” line. If he wanted to be listed more than once, perhaps he should’ve considered winning a major party nomination.

And lastly, the ballot order is determined by how many votes a party received in the last gubernatorial election, with unaffiliated candidates (like Cuomo) appearing after the partisan ones.* Elon, you’re reaching.

This explanation is simple and clear—but that doesn’t matter, because Musk, like Donald Trump, couldn’t care less about whether his fearmongering is based in fact. As one X user in response put it, “When you’re a moron everything looks like a conspiracy.”

* This story has been updated to clarify the order in which New York candidates appear on the general ballot.

Former vice president and architect of the war on terror Dick Cheney passed away Monday at the age of 84 from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.

According to a statement from his family, Cheney “was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing.”

The rest of the country, however, knows him for being one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history, helping to lead the United States after the 9/11 attacks into a myriad of military campaigns, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and having the U.S. commit torture and extrajudicial assassinations across the world.

Cheney was unapologetic about his actions during his tenure as vice president, saying in an interview in 2014, “Torture, to me … is an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York on 9/11.”

When pressed about the CIA’s interrogation program from those days, which included waterboarding, prisoners shackled in stress positions, and people of mistaken identity tortured, Cheney said, “I’d do it again in a minute.”

Cheney also expressed no regrets over leading the U.S. into the Iraq War, calling it “the right thing to do” more than a decade later, even after it plunged the U.S. into debt, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis at a minimum, and destabilized the country so much that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, was later able to gain a foothold.

Later in life, Cheney was critical of the Republican Party, breaking with Donald Trump along with his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney, and later endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024. But he died without facing any accountability for his earlier actions.

This story has been updated.

Did Kash Patel make up a terrorist plot? The lawyer for one of the accused seems to think so.

The FBI director announced Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had thwarted a potential terror plot in Dearborn, Michigan. Patel said that multiple young men had been arrested in a raid for plotting a “violent attack” on “pumpkin day,” which investigators believed referred to Halloween.  

But Amir Makled, an attorney representing Mohmed Ali, one of the men facing criminal charges in connection to the plot, claimed that after reviewing the case, he believed there had never been a terror plot to begin with, the Associated Press reported Monday.

“If these young men were on forums that they should not have been on or things of that nature, then we’ll have to wait and see,” Makled said. “But I don’t believe that there’s anything illegal about any of the activity they were doing.

“I don’t know where this hysteria and this fearmongering came from,” Makled said. 

“We are confident that, once the facts are reviewed objectively, it will be clear there was never any planned ‘mass-casualty’ event or coordinated terror plot of any kind,” he told CNN Sunday. He said that three men had been arrested, and two were taken in for questioning. 

Hussein Bazzi, an attorney representing another suspect arrested in the raid, told CNN that “pumpkin day” may have referred to “online gamer chat that was misinterpreted.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi released a criminal complaint Monday alleging that two men, Ali and Majed Mahmoud, had planned a “major ISIS-linked terror plot.” The pair face charges of “receiving and transferring, and attempting and conspiring to transfer, firearms and ammunition knowing and having reasonable cause to believe that the firearms and ammunition would be used to commit a Federal crime of terrorism,” according to the complaint. 

Makled pointed out that the firearms were all legally bought and registered. “The reality here involves a small group … with a lawful interest in recreational firearms, not a terrorist cell or organized attack,” he told CNN. 

After the arrests were first made public Friday, MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian reported that something had been off about the timing of the announcement. “There seems to be consternation within the FBI that the director announced these arrests prematurely,” he wrote on X.

The timing of Patel’s seemingly heroic feat was quite convenient, as it landed amid a firestorm of backlash after he reportedly used a government-funded jet to visit his girlfriend.

Neo-Nazi livestreamer Nick Fuentes is tearing the Heritage Foundation apart.

Ryan Neuhaus, the Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’s chief of staff, has walked away from the conservative think tank. Neuhaus’s departure comes during an internal maelstrom sparked by Roberts’s defense of Tucker Carlson and the ex–Fox News host’s decision to interview Fuentes, a known white supremacist and Hitler fan.

“Ryan was not fired. He offered his resignation, which was accepted,” a Heritage spokesperson confirmed to The Hill Monday. “Ryan is a good man, we appreciate his service, and we have no doubt he will serve the movement in another capacity.”

Carlson extended his national platform to Fuentes last week, offering the fringe influencer a chance to swim in the MAGA mainstream. The interview has since come under fire from several corners of the Republican Party, highlighting that the former primetime TV host threw the antisemite a string of softball questions while failing to challenge Fuentes’s radical and violent beliefs.

Neuhaus’s critical error was in resharing a number of social media posts backing his boss’s defense of Carlson, including one that appeared to attack his Heritage Foundation co-workers by arguing that those “virtue signaling” over the Fuentes interview should “resign if so outraged” and that it would be an “addition by subtraction for the institution.”

Roberts released a video on X Thursday in support of Carlson and Fuentes, noting that while he disagreed with Fuentes’s beliefs, he did not believe that “canceling” the Christian nationalist Holocaust-denier was an appropriate reaction to the interview.

A handful of Heritage staffers, including Jason Bedrick, Jay Greene, and John Peluso, have since retweeted criticism of Roberts’s message. Conservatives outside of the institution also condemned Roberts’s perspective, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, prompting a follow-up statement by Roberts in which he clarified that he did not condone Fuentes’s antisemitic views.

“Our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place. Join us—not to cancel—but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation, and be confident as I am that our best ideas at the heart of western civilization will prevail,” Roberts wrote in a social media post.