Trump Asks Syrian President How Many Wives He Has in Bizarre Exchange

Donald Trump welcomed Syrian President Ahmad Al Sharaa to the White House Monday, but couldn’t help making the meeting awkward.

In their meeting, Trump gifted his own Trump-brand fragrances to Al Sharaa, spraying them on the Syrian president and Foreign Minister Asaad Al Shaibani, bragging that they were “the very best,” and saying one was for Al Sharaa and one was for his wife.

“How many wives? One?” Trump asked, chuckling, to which Al Sharaa said yes. “With you guys I never know!”

It’s a weird question to ask of an Arab and Muslim head of state, even with Trump having met polygamous Arab kings and emirs. Al Sharaa turned the question around, though, asking Trump how many wives he has.

“Right now, one,” Trump replied, to laughs.

Sharaa’s White House visit was the first for any Syrian president since 1946. He came bearing gifts of his own for Trump: replicas of ancient artifacts from Syria, including the first alphabet in history, the first seal, a musical note, and even the world’s first customs tariff.

The visit wasn’t just made to exchange presents, though. Al Sharaa announced that Syria had joined the coalition of countries fighting ISIS and is trying to convince Trump and Congress to repeal sanctions against Syria. This doesn’t excuse Trump’s weird attempt at humor, which has a tinge of bigotry attached to it. Someone should tell the president that the first lady is his third wife.

Newly released emails from disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein reveal that his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell flat-out lied to Donald Trump’s Justice Department when she claimed she had never seen Trump at Epstein’s house. 

“I think [Trump and Epstein] were friendly like people are in social settings. I don’t—I don’t think they were close friends or I certainly never witnessed the president in any of—I don’t recall ever seeing him in [Epstein’s] house, for instance,” Maxwell told Deputy Attorney General Blanche during their July interview. “I actually never saw the president in any type of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody.”  

She then goes on to say that she hasn’t seen Trump in person since the early 2000s. However, the emails released by the House Oversight Committee Democrats on Wednesday tell a different story. 

“i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump [sic]. [Redacted] spent hours at my house with him ,, [sic] he has never once been mentioned. police chief etc.,” Epstein wrote to Maxwell in 2011, allegedly referring to one of his sex-trafficking victims. 

“I have been thinking about that …” Maxwell responded. 

One can only suspect that Maxwell—the convicted sex offender—chose to lie for or about Trump to improve her chances of getting a pardon from him. Maxwell’s intimate knowledge of Trump and Epstein’s activities could also explain why she’s been kept in such cushy, low-security conditions. She knows that the president of the United States spent “hours” at Epstein’s house with one of his victims. And he has the power to make her a free woman. Unless she truly has memory issues, that lie to Blanche was absolutely strategic. 

The Trump White House has yet to respond to the Oversight Committee leaks. 

Republicans have stripped health insurance coverage from millions of Americans, with a little help from eight liberal senators who voted to end the government shutdown earlier this week.

Republicans voted against extending the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced premium tax credits late Tuesday night, effectively ensuring that health insurance premiums for more than 20 million Americans will more than double.

“With this simple amendment, Republicans could join us in protecting access to doctors and the ability to afford prescription drugs,” Democratic Representative Jim McGovern told the House Rules Committee prior to the vote.

But the motion was immediately shot down with a resounding “no” from every Republican on the committee, including Representatives Michelle Fischbach, Ralph Norman, Chip Roy, Erin Houchin, Nicholas Langworthy, Austin Scott, H. Morgan Griffith, Brian Jack, and Chairwoman Virginia Foxx.

The result, according to policy experts, will be a mass exodus from Obamacare plans altogether, leaving roughly four million Americans uninsured. The spike in uninsured Americans will spur a public health problem that has historically made premiums more expensive for the insured as hospitals look to recoup the lost cash.

But not one lawmaker who voted against the measure will have to go without their own health insurance, thanks to money coming in from the very electorate that they just stripped of care: U.S. taxpayers pay for 72 percent of Congress’s health insurance premiums.

Seven Senate Democrats and one independent caved on the government shutdown Sunday, leaving the party empty-handed after a grueling 40-day deadlock with Republicans.

Those senators included Dick Durbin, Catherine Cortez Masto, Jacky Rosen, Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, John Fetterman, and Tim Kaine, as well as independent Angus King. Each and every one of them had little reason to buckle: All eight are either retiring or won’t face another election for several years. Instead, it seems that they became mouthpieces for a contingent of Democratic lawmakers and strategists who mind-bogglingly believed that losing health care access for millions of Americans could be a winning component of their midterm election strategy.

Democratic voters, however, were left remarkably unimpressed by the meaningless conclusion, with some vocal critics flaming the backstabbing centrist cohort as “SPINELESS, MEALY MOUTHED, BLOOD SUCKING, TWO FACED BOTTOM FEEDERS.”

The Department of Justice is teeing up a sprawling conspiracy investigation into Donald Trump’s perceived political enemies, which will be sent to the same judge who got the president his get-out-of-jail-free card.

During an appearance on MSNBC Tuesday, legal analyst Barbara McQuade discussed this “noteworthy” aspect of the efforts by prosecutors in South Florida to investigate individuals linked to the previous Democratic administrations for allegedly working to undermine Trump’s candidacies and presidencies.

“The grand jury to be impaneled is going to be in Fort Pierce, Florida,” McQuade said. “That of course is the district, the portion of the district, the Southern District of Florida, that has one and only one judge, and that judge is Aileen Cannon.”

Cannon made the unprecedented decision in July 2024 to toss out the felony classified documents case against Trump by ruling special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Her move has been criticized by legal scholars but repeatedly celebrated by Trump.

“I don’t know that we should be suspicious of everything Aileen Cannon does, but we do know that her track record in the Mar-a-Lago case with the documents was first to impose some really extraordinary hoops for the prosecutors to go through at the time of the search, and then of course the dismissal of the case finding the special counsel regulations to be unconstitutional, contrary to every other court that has looked at it,” McQuade continued.

“So, I think that there’s reason to be very concerned about the irregularities that are occurring in this office,” she added.

On Friday, the U.S. attorney’s office in Southern Florida issued 30 subpoenas to individuals such former CIA director John Brennan, and other former intelligence officials. Shortly before Executive Assistant United States Attorney Manolo Reboso signed off on the subpoenas, two career U.S. attorneys resigned because they “felt like there was something they could not take part in because it would violate their ethical responsibilities,” according to MSNBC.

McQuade said it was abnormal for Reboso to sign the subpoenas, as he was the third-highest ranking official in the office. She suggested that Reboso could be leading the investigation as a special project.

“I do think it’s noteworthy that this is not being handled the way a routine case would be handled, for violation of the law, instead it is being handled as a special case with a high level executive member of the team handling this,” McQuade said.

A source told MSNBC that prosecutors were concerned about being asked to work on a case that could lead to the arrest of figures like Brennan or former President Barack Obama, who Trump has suggested could be a target. “Everyone is on pins and needles,” the source said.

Kash Patel’s tenure as FBI director is not winning him friends in the Trump administration.

His firing of at least 30 bureau agents for being hostile to conservatism or President Trump has drawn the ire of the FBI’s rank-and-file personnel, for one. And he irked the Justice Department with his announcement that the “FBI thwarted a potential terrorist attack” on Halloween, despite the fact that no charges had been filed and local police didn’t have details. 

Officials at the DOJ told the White House that Patel’s early announcement had hurt the investigation, The Wall Street Journal reports, and led two friends of the suspects to move up plans to leave the country. His firings have also drawn the ire of the FBI Agents Association, which said in a statement that Patel had “launched a campaign of erratic and arbitrary retribution.”

“FBI Agents deal in facts, and we urge Director Patel to do the same,” the statement said.

Plus, Patel used a private FBI jet to see his girlfriend, singer Alexis Wilkins, perform at a wrestling event in Pennsylvania, and later travel to her Nashville home in the midst of a government shutdown. Patel continued to use the jet after that to travel to the Boondoggle Ranch, a hunting resort in Texas owned by the family of a Republican donor, C.R. “Bubba” Saulsbury Jr., according to the Journal, and also visited Scotland in August. 

Ironically, before becoming FBI director, Patel derided the use of a private jet by previous FBI directors. “Chris Wray, hey, you don’t need a government-funded G5 jet so you can fly off to the Adirondacks for vacation,” Patel said on a podcast in 2023.  

The newspaper reports that Trump has expressed his displeasure with Patel in private, although he continues to lend his support to the director. Trump was reportedly upset that Patel hadn’t fired disloyal FBI agents fast enough, and didn’t like how Patel handled the review of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. If the negative press continues, Patel might find his job in jeopardy.