Now Trump Wants to Send in Troops to Save … a Shopping District?

Donald Trump’s latest excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act: commercial real estate vacancy in downtown Chicago.

“The Miracle Mile Shopping Center in Chicago, once considered our Nation’s BEST, now has a more than 28 percent vacancy factor, and is ready to call it quits unless something is done about the murder and crime, which is prevalent throughout the City,” Trump posted on Truth Social after midnight Tuesday, misnomering Chicago’s Magnificent Mile shopping district.

“CALL IN THE TROOPS, FAST, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE! ‘Just the News,’” the real estate mogul added.

The 19th-century law would let Trump utilize the military for domestic purposes, allowing troops to police and arrest citizens. If Trump invokes it, he would be able to deploy active duty forces in order to enact his agenda, which involves federalizing the law enforcement agencies of Democratic-led cities.

Trump has floated the idea of leveraging the Insurrection Act for years, though the idea has picked up steam since his inauguration earlier this year.

Late last month, Trump told U.S. troops stationed in Japan that he was prepared to send “more than the National Guard” to American cities to safeguard and enforce his presidential agenda—a threat that he said could involve any branch of America’s armed forces.

“And I’d be allowed to do whatever I want but we haven’t chosen to do that,” Trump said at the time. “And the courts wouldn’t get involved. Nobody would get involved. And I can send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. I can send anybody I wanted.”

The legal loophole has been used by 17 presidents but has not been invoked since 1992, when President George H. W. Bush used it to subdue riots in Los Angeles after the local police force brutalized Rodney King.

In an apparent bid to justify the legal grounds, Trump and his associates have tried to fabricate a fictitious bedlam that they claim has taken over Democratic cities. Instead, they seem to be the ones instigating the chaos.

The state-sanctioned violence has been nearly nonstop in Chicago over the last few months. Last month, agents used tear gas in residential areas “multiple times without audible warnings,” court documents said, surprising families with the painful chemical irritant. A couple of weeks later, federal agents allegedly tear-gassed a group of school-age children in a residential Chicago neighborhood on their way to a Halloween parade.

Meanwhile, Trump’s most militant supporters are ready and willing to thrust themselves into his violent fray as soon as he gives the signal: Stewart Rhodes said Sunday that he’s “relaunching” and “rebuilding” the Oath Keepers, the armed white supremacist organization that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

President Donald Trump is so deeply out-of-touch on what life is like for everyday Americans that even Fox News host Laura Ingraham had no choice but to correct him on her show Monday.

Trump, who over the weekend debuted a widely-derided 50-year mortgage plan on Truth Social (where he compared himself to FDR), sat with Ingraham to clear things up.

“Your housing director has proposed something that has enraged your MAGA friends, which is this 50-year mortgage idea,” said Ingraham. “So—significant MAGA backlash, calling it a giveaway to the banks, and simply prolonging the time it would take for Americans to own a home outright. Is that really a good idea?”

Trump, in classic form, dismissed her concerns: “It’s not even a big deal. I mean, you go from 40 to 50 years—”

Ingraham corrected him: “Thirty to 50.”

Trump pressed on, saying, “And what it means is you pay something less, from 30—some people had a 40—and now they have a 50. All it means is you pay less per month, you pay it over a longer period of time.”

As Ingraham pointed out, the standard number of years for a mortgage is 30—not 40. And according to many economists, lengthening the time it takes to repay your mortgage by 20 years is, in fact, “a big deal.”

Trump is right that longer mortgages would result in smaller monthly payments. But the overall interest payments would skyrocket.

CNN maps it out like this: If you have a $450,000 home with a 30-year mortgage at a 6.25 percent interest rate, your monthly payment is about $2,771. By the time you’ve paid off your loan, you would have paid more than $547,000 in interest. If you had a 50-year loan at the same rate, your monthly payment would be slightly lower—$2,452—but your total interest would swell to around $1.02 million. That’s 87 percent more than on the 30-year loan.

Plus, it’s likely that the interest rates for a 50-year mortgage would be even higher than a 30-year one, because a 50-year loan is more risky, and it’s harder to anticipate how inflation will affect the economy that far into the future.

But Trump, of course, knows none of this.

Fox News’s Laura Ingraham took a light jab at President Trump’s gaudy, gold-lined Oval Office decorations during a White House tour Monday evening, asking him if he’d got the ornaments from Home Depot.

“Why not silver?” Ingraham asked while Trump gave her a tour.

“You can’t imitate gold, real gold,” the president replied, brushing off her question about the silver. “There’s no paint that imitates real gold.”

“So these aren’t like, from Home Depot?” Ingraham said dryly.

“Nooo, this is not Home Depot stuff.”

“No? Not stuff you buy?”

“This is not Home Depot.”

The Home Depot remark clearly irked the president a bit, especially given just how much time he’s put into making the White House look like Mar-a-Lago, or one of his many other luxury hotels and resorts. Crown molding, golden cherubs, a demolished rose garden, and of course the upcoming $200 million ballroom that he’s treating like some act of service.

All of this is meaningless, especially to the working-class voters Trump promised to fight for on the campaign trail. Sure, SNAP benefits were lost and inflation is up and owning a home is just a dream for many, but at least Trump can stick it to the libs with a gold-plated fireplace that is not from Home Depot. A Democrat, especially a woman, would get absolutely slammed for playing HGTV while the country runs on fumes.

And perhaps even more worrying—these feel like renovations for someone who plans to spend the rest of their days in the White House, not just the next three years.

Can’t afford to buy groceries? President Donald Trump says you’re a chump who’s getting duped.

During an interview Monday evening on Fox News, host Laura Ingraham asked Trump about voter concerns about affordability, which was a key issue in the state elections Democrats swept last week. “Is this a voter perception issue of the economy, or is there more that needs to be done by Republicans on Capitol Hill, or done in terms of policy?” she asked.

“More than anything else it’s a con job by the Democrats,” Trump replied.

Trump proceeded to wind an outrageous conspiracy theory that the Democrats put out memos for liberal news outlets instructing them to fearmonger to Americans about prices—and the media did. His evidence? He claimed that they’d all started to use the word “manufactured.”

“It’s a ‘manufactured’ economy. Nobody uses that word!” Trump ranted.

But the only one attempting to control the media is Trump. Just moments earlier, the president hadn’t even let Ingraham get through a list of products that had seen price increases during his time in office. As she listed beef, coffee, and auto repairs, Trump actually tried to shush her.

“So, are you saying that voters are misperceiving how they feel, or … ? ’Cause you said Biden did that too,” Ingraham asked.

“Well Biden, and let’s say it’s synonymous. Biden and Kamala, because you didn’t know who the hell was campaigning, it got to a point,” Trump said. He proceeded to ramble about how unfair it was that Democrats had sought a new presidential candidate more than a year ago, never actually answering the questions about the issue plaguing voters today.

As inflation and layoffs have surged, grocery prices have soared, and SNAP benefits have been cruelly cut off, Trump has repeatedly insisted he doesn’t want to hear about affordability concerns.

Donald Trump has pardoned another criminal tied to his administration.

The president wiped the criminal slate Monday of Bob Harshbarger, who pleaded guilty in 2013 to health care fraud and the distribution of unauthorized Chinese drugs. Harshbarger is married to one of Trump’s congressional allies, Tennessee MAGA Representative Diana Harshbarger.

The pardon was not announced, but rather appeared on the White House website Monday.

An unidentified White House official told The New York Times that Bob Harshbarger was not granted the pardon because of his last name or for his affiliations. But Trump has been very vocal with his praise for Diana Harshbarger, endorsing the Tennessee lawmaker as an “unapologetic conservative Trump Republican.”

Trump’s use of the presidential pardon to free his friends and associates is “unprecedented” and “damaging to the rule of law,” according to at least one former Justice Department pardon attorney.

Liz Oyer told The Bulwark’s podcast Monday that she was “gobsmacked” by Trump’s recent choices on whom to pardon, including crypto billionaire and Binance exchange co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who was sentenced to four months in prison last year on charges related to money laundering.

Zhao and Trump’s family are financially tied. The presidential family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, has generated some $4.5 billion since the 2024 election thanks in large part to a partnership with PancakeSwap, an online exchange platform administered by Binance, The Wall Street Journal reported in August.

Last month, Trump publicly played dumb about Zhao, claiming he couldn’t recall the name of the person he had pardoned the day before.

“So that was truly stunning, and then even more stunning to hear the president claim on national television that he doesn’t know who this is,” Oyer said. “It was just a very bizarre moment.”

Another recent controversial pick, according to Oyer, was former Republican Representative George Santos, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for a litany of crimes before his detention was commuted by Trump for no clear reason other than the prolific fraudster’s undying loyalty to the president.

“Trump pardons a lot of people in whom he sees something of himself,” Oyer told The Bulwark.

Oyer also blasted Ed Martin, her successor as the DOJ’s pardon attorney, as someone “who does not even seem to have a basic understanding of how the Constitution works, how pardon power works, how federal law works, how the Justice Department works.”

Martin “is not a serious lawyer,” Oyer said.

The president issued a tsunami of pardons Friday for his alleged co-conspirators in the Georgia election interference case, including Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Boris Epshteyn, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, and 72 others tied to the effort to overturn the 2020 election results.

Martin shared details of the pardon on his personal X account Sunday night, replying to a post he made in May that read: “No MAGA left behind.”

It’s unclear, however, exactly how impactful Trump’s pardons will be for the presidential election conspiracy cronies, none of whom were charged with federal crimes.

Amid Donald Trump’s pardons of his fellow Republicans and corrupt business figures, one child sex predator has gotten a clean slate.

Andrew Taake, who was serving time for taking part in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, benefited from Trump’s broad pardons in two ways thanks to an unusual deal first reported by The Daily Beast.

Taake was convicted of attacking a police officer at the Capitol with bear spray and a whip during the riots. He had also previously been charged in Harris County, Texas, with sending explicit photos and messages to someone who he thought was a 15-year-old girl, and he was out on bond when he took part in the riots. The “girl” on the Plenty of Fish dating site Taake was communicating with was an undercover police officer, and he didn’t stop messaging her after learning her age.

But thanks to the time he served for January 6 before Trump’s pardon, most of which was in pretrial detention, Taake accrued about three years and seven months of “credit,” for his earlier sex crimes, according to Harris County court documents. Taake was only sentenced for his crimes at the Capitol last summer, and thanks to Trump’s blanket pardon, was released from the federal ADX Florence supermax prison in January just months into his six-year term.

Taake was held in pretrial detention between his arrest and sentencing because of how violent his crimes were. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols called his part in the Capitol insurrection “the farthest thing from First Amendment expression.” In his sentencing memorandum last year, prosecutors said Taake “has not exhibited an ounce of remorse for his actions, nor accepted responsibility—going so far as to deny responsibility even after his guilty plea.”

Now Taake walks free, not just for his violent actions for Trump in D.C. but also for being a convicted child sex predator. One wonders if Trump knows about Taake or how he feels about him, considering that the president was found liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll two years ago, and has numerous other sexual assault allegations against him.

Americans have lost so much faith in their government that they trust Congress less than they trust Immigration and Customs Enforcement—an organization already hated by the majority of the country.

New polling from the Institute for Global Affairs, a nonprofit at the Eurasia Group, raised the question: “For each group, how much do you trust that they act in the best interest of average Americans?”

Overall, Americans trusted the military at a 49 percent “net trust percentage.” They trust ICE at a negative 11 percent rate, and Congress ranks lowest at negative 32 percent.

The party breakdown for the answer is also revealing. Democrats have a negative 67 percent view of ICE, while Republicans have a 61 percent favorability of the agency. Independents were at negative 23.

This comes as the oldest Congress in history leads the country through an affordability crisis that has seen countless Americans, young and old, feel like they have no chance at achieving a better quality of life than their parents.

These numbers are particularly alarming given just how immensely unpopular ICE is, as federal agents descend upon communities and literally pull families apart to meet deportation quotas.

Read the full report from the Institute for Global Affairs here.

A group of Border Patrol agents decided to play tourists in Chicago and mock a neighborhood they hit with tear gas, and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is not having it.

Pritzker called out the federal agents on X for posing for a photo early Monday morning in front of The Bean, an art installation in the Windy City’s Millenium Park, and shouting, “Everyone say, ‘Little Village!’” The agents were referring to a Mexican-American neighborhood six miles away that federal immigration authorities have repeatedly targeted in raids.

Over the weekend, the agents used tear gas on one of Little Village’s streets, following an earlier tear-gassing incident in late October, despite a court order against using excessive force. Their bosses in the Department of Homeland Security claim the agents were shot at, although none of them were injured. The alderman who represents the area, Mike Rodriguez, said he was nearby and never heard any shots fired.

“It was a reign of terror,” Rodriguez said. Pritzker concurred.

“Making fun of our neighborhoods and communities is disgusting,” Pritzker posted Monday afternoon, linking to an article from local news outlet Block Club Chicago about the callous photo op. “Greg Bovino and his masked agents are not here to make Chicago safer. As children are tear gassed and U.S. citizens detained, they are posing for photo ops and producing reality TV moments.”

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, whose tactics have drawn criticism and judicial rebukes, was at the front of the group on Monday morning with some guard dogs, and told his fellow agents to “mask up” because the media was present. Bovino didn’t seem to care that the media heard his agents mocking Little Village, or joking about their heavy-handed tactics. As Pritzker said, these agents only care about themselves.

President Donald Trump’s administration is desperately hoping that the Supreme Court will give it a free pass on funding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Benefits for this month.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer on Monday reiterated the Trump administration’s intention to ask the Supreme Court to intervene over District Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr.’s order requiring the government to pay full SNAP benefits for November.

After the Department of Justice leapt to challenge McConnell’s order last week, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued an administrative stay order Friday in order to give the court of appeals enough time to weigh in. On Sunday, the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s motion to stay while it appealed the decision, triggering a 48-hour deadline on Jackson’s administrative stay. Her stay gave the government until Tuesday night to pay for SNAP in full, unless the Supreme Court decided to grant a longer stay.

In the filing Monday, Sauer said that the government intended to file a supplemental brief that afternoon, and he included “developments” to their application to the highest court in the land. He pointed to a federal judge in Boston who blocked a Department of Agriculture memo Sunday that ordered states to “immediately undo” steps to issue full benefits, though he did not say whether the government intended to challenge that order.

He also noted that the government shutdown, which had precipitated the funding lapse in the first place, might soon be coming to an end after a group of mostly Democratic lawmakers dropped their demand for Obamacare tax credits Sunday evening, in what some are calling a major betrayal to their party and the American people.

It was only a week ago Trump claimed it would be an “honor” to fund SNAP, should a court order him to do so. And it was the president’s own blatant unwillingness to follow through on that offer that signaled an “intent to defy” the judge’s order, prompting McConnell to demand the government pay up immediately.

Trump has repeatedly blamed the funding lapse on the shutdown, but with an end to the shutdown now on the horizon, it seems clear that Trump simply doesn’t want people to be able to buy food.

The Oath Keepers are coming back better than ever, according to the group’s founder.

Stewart Rhodes revealed to The Gateway Pundit Sunday that he’s “relaunching” and “rebuilding” the white supremacist organization that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

“They tried to take us out after January 6 but what man means for evil, God will use for good,” Rhodes told the podcast. “I came out stronger after it, and so my goal is to rebuild the organization stronger than ever because it’s an essential mission. Absolutely.”

Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison for helping to orchestrate an insurrection designed to keep Joe Biden from taking office after he won the 2020 presidential election. Rhodes was also the first individual that Donald Trump pardoned when he returned to office on January 20, 2025.

The 60-year-old also signaled to Trump that the Oath Keepers were still “ready to serve” as his personal militia, just as they had done during the insurrection, encouraging the president to “order us all to come together in our counties under his command.”

“And one other thing I want to say is that President Trump, as commander in chief, always has absolute authority to call all of us up as the militia because every one of us—in federal statues defining the militia, it’s every able-bodied male from age 17-45. And for us veterans, it goes up to age 64 because of our prior training and experience,” Rhodes said.

The National Guard is part of that militia, according to the far-right leader, justifying Trump’s decision to send troops to U.S. cities.

Referring to the Insurrection Act, Rhodes argued that Trump can call upon a citizens’ militia for any one of three reasons: “to repel invasions, to suppress insurrections, and to execute the laws of the union.”

“And right now, we see all three of those in play,” Rhodes said.

This new chapter of the Oath Keepers will maintain the original organization’s mission—to “protect people against radical antifa and other leftist violence in the streets,” according to Rhodes—but will be built to outlast its creator.

“So we want to make sure it’s got resilience and redundancy built in that it can drive on strong,” Rhodes told the podcast. “I mean, I have to make sure that if I’m ever taken out again or if I’m or when I’m taken out again, that the organization can drive on without me. That’s not what happened last time.”