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-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. 

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have leaked three email exchanges from disgraced sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that allege that President Donald Trump was fully aware of his pedophilia and abuse, stating that his former close friend “knew about the girls.” 

“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 in 2011 to his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, allegedly referring to one of his sex-trafficking victims. 

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

In another email to author Michael Wolff, Epstein implies that Trump knew Maxwell was trafficking young women who worked at Mar-a-Lago.

“trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever.  .  of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,” he wrote.

Yet another email from December 15, 2015, shows Wolff informing Epstein that CNN was going to ask Trump about their relationship at the next presidential debate.

“if we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?” Epstein asked.

“If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency,” Wolff replied, insinuating that Epstein’s word could sink candidate Trump’s reputation. “You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.” Trump was not asked about Epstein at the debate. 

This issue just won’t go away no matter how hard the president tries. From Attorney General Pam Bondi’s botched “client list” reveal to the rushed cover-up and closing of the case, each step the Trump administration has taken to absolve the president—who was close friends with the sex predator—has only led to more startling evidence and more scrutiny. From the birthday book to these emails, it seems highly likely that Trump has not been completely truthful about his relationship with Epstein and knowledge of his heinous activity. And while Trump has shrugged the case off as “stupid” and a “Democrat hoax” in the past, recent developments only indicate that this saga is nowhere near a conclusion.   

The president has yet to respond to the email leaks.

Read the full emails here.

In spite of the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigration agenda, the president actually believes that the United States doesn’t have the homegrown talent to excel on its own.

Donald Trump made that much clear during an interview with Fox News Tuesday, ardently defending the H-1B visa, a costly program that allows skilled foreign workers a chance to temporarily work within the U.S., while boasting about America’s AI prowess in comparison to China.

“And does that mean the H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration? Because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers,” said host Laura Ingraham.

But that’s where the president disagreed, arguing that the country needs foreigners to fill American jobs in order to Make America Great Again.

“You also do have to bring in talent,” Trump said.

“We have plenty of talented people here,” pressed Ingraham.

“No you don’t, no you don’t,” Trump said. “No, you don’t have certain talents. And you have to—people have to learn.”

“You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory and we’re going to make missiles’—”, Trump continued before Ingraham interjected.

“How did we ever do it before?” she said, likely referring to the mass mobilization of American factory workers during World War II.

MAGA blasted the interview, furious at the president’s waffling nationalism and his apparent doubt in American excellence.

“I’m sorry but what the fuck is this?” wrote The Blaze’s Logan Hall. “American talent split the atom and went to the moon. American talent built everything the modern world takes for granted now. Give me a break. This is insanity.”

Republican politician and Lake County, Florida, commissioner Anthony Sabatini warned that Trump’s rhetoric could make the GOP lose the midterms.

“We’ve never seen an administration crash & burn in its first year so badly—for no reason other than to appease donors & special interests,” Sabatini posted on X. “Trump has surrounded himself with the worst people.”

Other conservative commentators felt that Trump’s message was remarkably simple.

“Trump hates America and Americans,” tweeted the New York Post’s Kevin Bass. “This is the only explanation I can come up with for this pattern of behavior.… He wants to import the third world to take Americans’ jobs.”

It’s a philosophy that Trump could have picked up from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who vehemently fought to keep the program when it came under fire from MAGA acolytes earlier this year. At the time, Musk argued that there is a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in the U.S.

Early-term opposition to the work visa temporarily married some figures on the left and the right, combining the likes of Laura Loomer with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the latter of whom called out Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires for over-leveraging the work visa program to dump good-paying American jobs in favor of absurdly underpaid foreign labor. (Loomer went a more xenophobic route.)

Sanders’s office noted that in 2022 and 2023, “the top 30 corporations using this program laid off at least 85,000 American workers while they hired over 34,000 new H-1B guest workers.”

President Donald Trump’s extrajudicial military strikes have cost the United States yet another intelligence ally.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that Bogota would also stop sharing intelligence with the U.S., following a report that the United Kingdom had stopped sharing some intelligence tracking vessels in the Caribbean.

“Issue the order to all levels of the public security forces’ intelligence to suspend the sending of communications and other dealings with U.S. security agencies. Such a measure will be maintained as long as the missile attack on boats in the Caribbean persists,” Petro wrote on X Tuesday. “The fight against drugs must be subordinated to the human rights of the Caribbean people.”

Historically, the U.S. would use intelligence from its foreign allies to identify vessels that could be involved in drug trafficking. Those boats would be stopped by U.S. officials, boarded, and searched. But recently, Trump has opted to just blow them up, killing dozens of crew members and violating international law.

This isn’t the first time Petro has weighed in on this issue. Last month, Petro took to social media to accuse Trump of murder after a military strike on a Colombian vessel, claiming that the September attack had killed a lifelong fisherman. “U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” Petro wrote.

Petro has emerged as an outspoken critic of Trump and his administration, as the U.S. president has called him “an illegal drug leader” and cut off foreign aid to Colombia. At the United Nations earlier this year, Petro compared Trump to Hitler. Last week, during the COP30 climate talks in Belém, Brazil, Petro joined other world leaders in rebuking the absent Trump, saying: “Mr. Trump is against humankind.”

Democrats had previously warned that Trump’s boat strikes and escalating rhetoric against Petro could cost the U.S. one of its main allies in the Western hemisphere.

About a dozen Fannie Mae watchdogs were fired right as they were investigating whether Trump official Bill Pulte illegally obtained the mortgage records of indicted New York Attorney General and Trump administration target Letitia James.

At the time, Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, or FHFA, attributed the firings to the team focusing too much on diversity, equity, and inclusion. But new information revealed by The Wall Street Journal Tuesday suggests the removals were both cover for Pulte and punishment for the watchdogs simply doing their jobs.

The ethics and investigations group had gotten internal complaints asserting that senior Fannie Mae officials had improperly ordered staff to access the mortgage records of James and other prominent Democrats. The group sent their findings to the FHFA’s Office of the Inspector General, which then gave it to the U.S. attorney’s office in eastern Virginia. That office is under the leadership of former Trump defense attorney Lindsey Halligan, who received a bar complaint on Tuesday.

Once Halligan got her hands on it, the watchdog staffers were fired, including Chief Ethics Officer Suzanne Libby. General Counsel Danielle McCoy resigned after being forced out by leadership.

The weak fraud indictment against James accuses her of committing mortgage fraud in order to get a better loan rate when she bought a home in Virginia in 2023. Prosecutors claimed that James violated that loan agreement by renting the property out. James had called the indictment baseless, and the evidence is backing her up.

This would be a massive scandal in any other administration if true. But this is President Trump, so it’s just a normal Tuesday.

National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett was optimistic about inflation under the Trump administration—even after he was fact-checked live.

“We’re comfortable that inflation has come way down, the 5 percent on average for Joe Biden, it’s probably a little less than half of that right now, and the trajectory is really, really, really good if you look at it. And inflation is one of those things that has a lot of momentum … and the momentum right now is headed towards the Fed’s target,” Hassett said in a CNBC interview Tuesday with Carl Quintanilla.

Then Quintanilla brought him back down to earth: “Even though it’s been increasing for five months, as of September?”

Hassett tried to explain away the fluctuation. “I guess if you look at it from January, there’s ups and downs, and seasonals.”

The NEC director is technically right that inflation is lower than it was, on average, under Biden—though comparing a four-year average that included the Covid-19 pandemic with less than a year of Trump’s presidency doesn’t seem incredibly illustrative.

As Quintanilla said, inflation increased every month from May to September. (We don’t yet have data for the month of October, thanks to the government shutdown.) It is currently around 3 percent, the same as it was in January before Trump assumed office.

It might be excusable that Hassett is choosing to see the situation through rose-colored glasses if Trump hadn’t been lying about the economy nonstop, from saying that grocery prices are down (they’re not), to saying that inflation is at only 2 percent (it’s not), to saying that he inherited the “highest inflation rate in the history of our country” (he didn’t).