Trump Brags About Ballroom Renovations During Epstein Firestorm

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain: Donald Trump would rather Americans focus on his glorious new ballroom than ask another question about his connection to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaking with reporters Thursday on the advent of a House vote to release the Epstein files, Trump took a pause to celebrate his $300 million project, claiming that his pricey renovation had become “very popular.”

“And right behind me by the way, in about two years from now, we’ll use a much bigger room because we had to turn away a lot of people,” Trump said during an executive order–signing ceremony, waving at the wall behind him. “And it’ll be right here. This will be the entrance. That’s a knockout panel. It’s called a knockout.”

“It looks pretty nice right now but it’ll look a lot better in a little while, and we’re going to go from this room into a room that seats a few more people, and it’s going to be beautiful,” Trump continued. “But uh, I just noticed I happened to be standing here and I thought I might as well get your shot right now, a nice beautiful shot, at the future entrance to something that’s really become very popular, the ballroom.

“They’ve wanted it for 150 years, and they’re getting it, and they’re getting the best—it’ll be the best anywhere in the world,” he added.

After promising Americans in July that his ballroom proposal would “be near but not touching” the White House East Wing, Trump completely razed the FDR-era extension, plowing forward without prerequisite approval from the National Capital Planning Commission (which was closed due to the government shutdown) and without the express permission of Congress.

The Trump administration said in July that the forthcoming 90,000-square-foot event space will be capable of hosting 650 people, a 200-person bump from maximum seatage at the White House East Wing. But real estate experts have since pointed out that the possibilities of that square footage should be much broader, considering the event space will be roughly equivalent to two football fields.

The project’s price tag also inexplicably grew by 50 percent after Trump began demolition. What Trump had originally pitched as a $200 million project was instead referred to in late October as a $300 million development plan. The White House suggested that the project would be funded, in part, by some of the country’s wealthiest families and biggest corporations, including the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.

Some major players in the defense industry with massive federal contracts have also forked over significant cash to develop the ballroom, including Lockheed Martin and Palantir, though it’s unclear what they might get out of a venue meant for dancing.

The real estate mogul has reportedly become so fixated on his renovation project that he has literally wandered away from his presidential duties in order to admire the progress.

Meanwhile, conservative lawmakers are turning on Trump. Senior Republicans privately expect dozens of their party members—“possibly 100 or more”—to vote in favor of a bill that would make the federal government’s trove of Epstein files publicly available, reported Politico. A handful have already voiced their intention to back the forthcoming bill, including Representatives Eli Crane, Don Bacon, and Warren Davidson.

It seems that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s kind offer to personally “ratify” interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan’s actions did not impress the federal judge charged with determining whether her appointment was lawful in the first place.

During a hearing Thursday, U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie, who is based in South Carolina, pushed back on the government’s claim that after reviewing the grand jury materials in the case against former FBI Director James Comey, Bondi had agreed to retroactively “ratify” Halligan’s actions, even if Halligan’s initial appointment was deemed invalid.

Currie greeted Bondi’s offer with some skepticism, according to Lawfare’s Roger Parloff. “The implication was: Why do you need that if the original appointment was proper,” Parloff wrote on X.

Currie also pointed out that there was still a missing component of the grand jury transcript, Politico reported. Halligan had previously failed to turn over documents that recorded her own remarks before and after the sole witness’s testimony. Halligan had not provided records of her presentation of the three-count indictment, either.

“It became obvious to me that the attorney general could not have reviewed those portions of the transcript presented by Ms. Halligan,” Currie said, adding that they “did not exist.”

Justice Department attorney Henry Whitaker claimed that Bondi had reviewed the “material facts” of Halligan’s jury presentation, which showed “the grand jury made a decision based on the facts and the law.”

These missing documents could include jury instructions that are crucial to the Comey case. In order to secure the indictment against the ex-FBI director, Halligan needed to clearly explain the criteria for finding a defendant guilty of making a false statement. But there appears to be no record of Halligan, a first-time prosecutor who acted alone in making a presentation to the grand jury, giving these instructions. Should there be an issue with Halligan’s jury instructions, the entire case could be dismissed.

Donald Trump appears to be targeting his next political adversary: Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell.

Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has referred Swalwell to the Department of Justice for a criminal probe, alleging mortgage and tax fraud on his Washington, D.C. home, NBC News reports. It’s the fourth time the administration has tried to use mortgage fraud against Democratic opponents, with New York Attorney General Letita James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and Senator Adam Schiff also facing similar allegations.

Pulte wrote in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi Wednesday that Swalwell may have made false or misleading statements in loan applications, claiming that the congressman took out several million dollars in loans and refinancing based on the Washington home being his primary residence. The letter calls for an investigation into insurance fraud, mortgage fraud, and tax fraud allegations, and any other related crimes.

Swalwell, who was involved in both of Trump’s impeachments, didn’t seem surprised by the attack.

“As the most vocal critic of Donald Trump over the last decade and as the only person who still has a surviving lawsuit against him, the only thing I am surprised about is that it took him this long to come after me,” Swalwell said in a statement.

In September, Swalwell said he fully expected to be prosecuted by the Trump administration, based on the fact that he was named on FBI Director Kash Patel’s enemies list in his 2022 book Government Gangsters.

“Adam Schiff is under investigation now, so I’m ready for it. I expect it, but I’m not going to flinch. I’m not hiding under the bed. I’m not going to shrink because that’s the aim. That’s why they do this, is they hope that dissent and oversight goes away,” Swalwell said at the time.

Senator John Fetterman was hospitalized Thursday “out of an abundance of caution” after taking a fall near his home in Braddock, Pennsylvania. 

“Upon evaluation, it was established he had a ventricular fibrillation flare-up that led to Senator Fetterman feeling light-headed, falling to the ground and hitting his face with minor injuries,” the spokesperson said in a statement.  

Ventricular fibrillation is an irregular heart rhythm that can prevent blood flow to other parts of the body. Doctors consider it a form of cardiac arrest. This condition can be caused by a previous heart injury or issue, drug misuse, or a severe imbalance of potassium or magnesium. 

In the statement, the spokesperson said Fetterman was doing well but opted to remain in hospital while doctors fine-tuned his medication. 

“If you thought my face looked bad before, wait until you see it now!” Fetterman joked in the statement.

Fetterman’s former chief of staff shared his concerns in May that the Democrat, who suffered a stroke in 2022 one month before being elected to the Senate, had stopped taking his medications, was skipping doctors appointments, and had engaged in reckless behavior. 

Earlier this week, Fetterman voted with Republicans on a reworked funding deal to end the government shutdown, which was then signed into law by President Donald Trump on Wednesday. Fetterman had long broken with the rest of the Democrats over the shutdown, voting more than a dozen times to reopen the government.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche seemed to acknowledge on Thursday that thousands of recently released email exchanges from disgraced sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein contradict the information Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell gave Blanche during their interviews this summer. 

When Blanche first spoke to Maxwell, she told him that she had never seen President Trump at Epstein’s house, and that the two were just casual friends. 

“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 said, according to interview transcripts. “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.”  

The emails she sent in 2011 tell a very different story.

“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [Redacted] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief etc.,” Epstein wrote to Maxwell in 2011, allegedly referring to one of his sex-trafficking victims. These emails were released Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee. 

“I have been thinking about that …” Maxwell responded. While Maxwell’s email doesn’t directly contradict her assertion that she never saw the president at Epstein’s house, they certainly suggest she knew that he’d spent time there.

Now the public is turning back to Blanche, scrutinizing his questioning of Maxwell given that there is motivation for her to lie for or about Trump to improve her chances of getting a pardon from him.

“An important side note about today’s Epstein/Trump revelations. They show that Todd Blanche’s questioning of Ghislaine Maxwell was either (a) completely incompetent; or (b) intentionally crafted not to elicit facts incriminating Trump,” George Conway wrote on X. “Either way, he is not fit to serve as Deputy Attorney General of the United States.”

“George, you’ve never been confused for a trial lawyer, and these kinds of posts explain why. When I interviewed Maxwell, law enforcement didn’t have the materials Epstein’s estate hid for years and only just provided to Congress,” Blanche responded, not seeming to deny that these emails suggest Maxwell misled him. “Stop talking. It’s unbecoming.”

Blanche’s excuse was widely deemed insufficient.

“Todd Blanche would have had these emails before interviewing Maxwell. Why didn’t he question her directly about her exchanges? Why did he not follow up when she said things that were obviously a lie??” former FBI lawyer Asha Rangappa mused. “This shows that was a performance intended to dupe the public and benefit her (and Trump).”

Either Blanche was deceived by the sexual predator he moved into a cushier prison or he is being untruthful about when he found out about Maxwell’s emails to Epstein, and what he actually interviewed her about. Either way, this saga is nowhere close to ending.

Donald Trump apparently thinks the time is right to throw a lavish party for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The president has been sending out invitations for a November 18 dinner to business leaders, members of the Trump administration, and some members of Congress. Since MBS, as he’s colloquially known, is not an official head of state, it wouldn’t be an official state dinner, but it will be a “formal dinner with a lot of pomp,” reports Jake Sherman of PunchbowlDC.

The dinner will be part of MBS’s visit to the United States, where the crown prince will be meeting with Trump at the White House earlier in the day, and will host a U.S.-Saudi investment summit at the Kennedy Center the next day. In May, Trump signed a $142 billion weapons deal with Saudi Arabia, following a pledge from MBS to invest $600 billion in the U.S. in January.

The president and his family also have extensive business ties to Saudi Arabia. The Trump Organization is currently working on Trump Tower Jeddah and also has plans for a Trump property in Riyadh. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has received billions from foreign sources including Saudi Arabia for his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, and speaks regularly with MBS.

Earlier this month, Trump was criticized for holding a lavish “Great Gatsby” dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate while SNAP benefits were expiring. He hosted another fancy meal at the Florida country club last week. Given the Saudis’ close financial ties, Trump’s all-out attempts to impress MBS probably won’t help his administration’s reputation for corruption and excess.

A growing percentage of young women no longer see a future in the United States.

Roughly 40 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 44 said that they would permanently move abroad if they were able to, according to a 2025 Gallup Poll. That included 45 percent of single women, and 41 percent of married women.

It’s a stark difference from how young women felt when they were asked the same question a decade ago. In 2014, just 10 percent of that demographic said they wanted to leave the country, matching responses from all other queried gender and age groups.

That began to change when Donald Trump entered office, but it wasn’t always a partisan issue. Interest in leaving the country was relatively stable before 2017, rarely fluctuating regardless of the country’s leadership.

Young men, meanwhile, don’t currently feel the same level of pressure to exit the country. Just 19 percent of the same male-focused age group expressed the same desire to leave America.

The current differential in national satisfaction between young women and their male counterparts is the highest since Gallup began asking the question in 2007—but that’s not the only remarkable component to the data. “Few countries have shown gender gaps this wide in the desire to migrate,” Gallup noted.

American women’s desire to move abroad corresponds to their lagging faith in the country’s institutions: Young women have lost more faith in America and its government over the last decade than any other group.

That could be, in part, because of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion. Young women have reported a “steep decline in their confidence in the judicial system” in the years since, according to Gallup, reporting that confidence levels fell from 55 percent in 2015 to just 32 percent in 2025. This is more than any other age group, Gallup noted.

Women’s overall happiness has dropped since 1972, “both relative to where they were forty years ago, and relative to men,” author Marcus Buckingham wrote for HuffPost last year. That’s regardless of whether those women have children; how many children they might have; whether they’re married, rich, educated, young, or old.

The potential dreamy future of a woman in the early 1970s stands in stark contrast to the grim horizon beyond 2025. The headlines of that decade abounded with significant legal achievements for the supposedly “weaker sex”: Roe v. Wade opened up a woman’s right to choose, Title IX sex discrimination laws were enacted to protect girls’ educational opportunities, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and legalized in vitro fertilization, and the Supreme Court extended contraceptive access to unmarried individuals (in Eisenstadt v. Baird).

Meanwhile, women were able to sincerely compete with men in the workplace, and for the first time, in 1974, women were able to apply for bank loans and credit cards in their own name. By all means, the future seemed bright for the young women of the country.

But that rapid pace of female advancement has since fallen to the wayside. Contemporary stressors for young people span from climate change to economic barriers such as the high cost of living, a national housing shortage, astronomical health care costs, and limited financial freedom, all reasons that have been cited as rationales for delaying the prospect of childbirth.

The country’s leadership has decided not to meaningfully focus on any of those problems in its flailing efforts to offset the country’s declining birth rates, however. Instead, the Trump administration has pitched a $5,000 “baby bonus” (that definitely doesn’t smell of socialism) to convince young couples to have more children. The president—who has dubbed himself the “king of IVF”—also promised in October to expand access to the procedure by “making it legal” for American companies to offer health coverage for IVF (something that was already legal and widely available). It is still unclear how Trump intends to enforce the program.

Pronatalist Republicans have also pushed for a slew of reforms that they claim would boost childbirth, but otherwise seem so inadequate at addressing the concerns of young people that those reforms would be insultingly meaningless. Some conservative family advocates have pressed the White House to deregulate childcare facilities and child car seats, which they argue would reduce the cost of living and result in more babies. Others have suggested that the Trump administration should bestow a “National Medal of Motherhood” on women with six or more children as a method to incentivize bigger families.

A newly released email from Jeffrey Epstein claimed former President Bill Clinton never visited his infamous private estate in the Virgin Islands.

Buried in a batch of thousands of documents released Wednesday by the GOP-led House Committee on Oversight and Reform was a revelatory email from Epstein to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor sent on March 6, 2011.

It appeared that Epstein was trying to comfort Mountbatten-Windsor, saying the stories about him “are utter fantasy,” following an initial report in the Daily Mail containing Virgina Giuffre’s claims she’d been sexually exploited by the (now former) prince.

“I don’t know and have never met Al Gore. CLinton was never on the island.. The telephone book was not mine, it was stolen by my houseman who is currently in prison for doing so,” Epstein wrote.

That wasn’t the only email that mentioned Clinton.

In a 2015 email exchange with now-former New York Times reporter Landon Thomas Jr., Epstein claimed that “Clinton was NEVER EVER there, never.” In another email sent in 2015, Epstein told author Michael Wolff that one of his former girlfriends could corroborate that Clinton had never been to the island estate. While Giuffre had initially said Clinton had been flown to the island via helicopter for dinner, she later testified in 2016 that she had been repeating a “fantastical” claim from Maxwell. (Giuffre did not deny meeting Clinton on the island.)

After years of widespread speculation about Clinton’s involvement with the alleged sex trafficker, this revelation is particularly notable.

Clinton reportedly traveled multiple times on Epstein’s plane for humanitarian trips to Africa, according to court documents. The former president also reportedly penned a birthday note to the convicted sex criminal. But unlike Donald Trump, Clinton’s letter made no mention of “enigmas” who never age, and was not written inside the silhouette of a naked woman.

In August, Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator, told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that Clinton had never visited Jeffrey Epstein’s home in the Virgin Islands, where one of Epstein’s victims claimed the disgraced financier and guests had used girls for “instant sexual entertainment.”

“President Clinton was my friend, not Epstein’s friend,” Maxwell said. “President Clinton liked me, and we got along terribly well. But I never saw that warmth with Mr. Epstein.”

Still, last month, in a misguided attempt to defend Trump, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comey claimed that “public reporting, survivor testimony, and official documents show that Bill Clinton had far closer ties to Epstein.”

FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino tore into Representative Thomas Massie for suggesting the government was attempting to weed out a whistleblower.

The spat started when Massie shared a “troubling” letter on X Wednesday from an attorney representing an FBI whistleblower. According to the letter, a whistleblower had made a protected disclosure related to the FBI’s ongoing investigation into pipe bombs that were placed at the Democratic and Republican national headquarters on January 5, 2021, ahead of the deadly riot at the Capitol.

The letter stated that the FBI’s Washington field office said it would hold a meeting the next day—raising alarms for the attorney, who claimed it was “obvious” the meeting was “an attempt to identify the FBI whistleblower.”

“Just a reminder to @FBIDirectorKash, in case this letter is warranted, federal law prevents retaliation against whistleblowers,” Massie wrote on X.

In his more than 2,000-character response, Bongino provided a laundry list of efforts the FBI had made in its investigation into the pipe bomb, before turning his attention to Massie.

“When I spoke with you yesterday a little after 8am ET (screenshots attached), I offered you an in-person brief on our work. We spoke for ten minutes,” he wrote, referring to two screenshots he’d sent showing his calls made to Massie. “I called you back a bit after 7:30pm ET to again make that offer. You didn’t answer and have yet to call me back.

“Despite this, you continue to imply that the Director and I are targeting investigators in the case,” Bongino wrote. “This is disgusting, even by the low standards many have for politicians. You know my number, and you’re free to call me anytime. But it’s easier to tweet and throw BS bombs.”

Massie hasn’t exactly been on the Trump administration’s good side recently, ever since putting his weight behind a petition that would force a House vote on a bill to release the government’s full files on Jeffrey Epstein. Massie claimed Wednesday that the White House’s attempts to pressure Republican lawmakers away from supporting the bill had been an effort to prevent Massie from winning.

Last month, the FBI released new footage of a suspect placing an explosive device at the DNC, inviting widespread speculation from citizen-sleuths and conspiracy theorists about who the suspect might be.

Senator Chuck Schumer reached out to leading Democratic presidential contenders to try and mute criticism of the deal to end the government shutdown.

The Senate minority leader called Governors Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, and JB Pritzker of Illinois and asked them not to attack or criticize the deal eight Democratic senators made with Senate Republicans, Puck reports. His efforts had mixed results, with Pritzker still disparaging the deal, along with California Governor Gavin Newsom.

The final deal didn’t include the key demand by Democrats: for Affordable Care Act subsidies, which are expiring this year, to be extended. Instead, Republicans promised to hold a future vote on extending those subsidies, leading to backlash within the Democratic Party against the deal.

While Schumer voted against it, the eight Democrats who voted in support said that the minority leader was aware of their plan the whole time. Some Democrats thought that extending the subsidies would help Republicans in the midterms, and opted to put electoral prospects over their own constituents.

Several Democratic organizations, political candidates, and members of the House have called for Schumer’s resignation since the deal was announced Sunday. House Speaker Mike Johnson has not committed to a vote on the subsidies, and a Democratic attempt to raise the issue was voted down Tuesday by House Republicans. It seems that Schumer knew that the deal was bad, but instead of scrapping it and negotiating a better one, sought to minimize dissent.