Trump’s USDA Fires Worker for Talking About Importance of Food Stamps

Ellen Mei, a program specialist at USDA, was one of the thousands of federal employees who were furloughed during the record 43-day pause. But her time at the agency will soon come to a permanent close, all because she discussed the reality of SNAP benefits on MSNBC, reported The Washington Post.

The Trump administration walked back a pledge it made to continue funding the food assistance program, allowing the benefits to partially expire for more than 42 million Americans earlier this month. It did this despite the fact that the USDA had available funds that were specifically earmarked to cover the cost of SNAP during the shutdown.

Mei’s interview was no different from the dozens of others that she had participated in during her tenure as a government employee. Mei, who is also president of the National Treasury Employees Union for the Northeast division, told MSNBC on October 2 that she was speaking on behalf of herself and her union rather than the agriculture agency. Every detail she discussed with regard to SNAP and the shutdown was already publicly available information, either by way of news coverage, advocacy groups, or think tanks.

But the next day, Mei was notified by a USDA human resources representative that her employment would be terminated by the end of the month, and was accused of discussing the agency “without prior approval.” Mei interpreted the letter as retaliation for voicing her opinion on the machinations of the Trump administration.

“As I was and have been speaking in my personal capacity and in my capacity as union representative, I am not required to ask for permission to speak on behalf of me or my co-workers,” Mei told the Post. “Especially speaking on behalf of my co-workers as the union president, that is a right that I am granted by the Federal Labor Management statute. So I do not need to ask for permission.”

In a follow-up interview with MSNBC, Mei said she was “honestly really confused” by the termination notice.

“The New York Times and NPR had already published everything that I had said about SNAP and WIC,” Mei told the network, adding that some of what she discussed was also on the public-facing USDA website.

If you thought sending horrific, racist texts was enough to get you shunned from political service, think again! President Donald Trump wants Paul Ingrassia to take his “Nazi streak” to the General Services Administration.

In a Thursday email to his colleagues obtained by Politico, Ingrassia announced that the president had personally offered him a position as general counsel at the GSA. The conservative activist had previously been serving as White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.

Last month, Ingrassia withdrew his nomination for a position at the Office of Special Counsel, after his involvement in a racist text chain was discovered. His vile messages cost him critical support in the Senate, helping Trump set a record for having the most nominees withdrawn of any president.

In a normal world, this new job would be surprising considering the fact that Ingrassia revealed himself to be a deeply hateful and racist person. “No moulignon holidays.… From kwanza [sic] to mlk jr day to black history month to Juneteenth,” he wrote in one text, using an Italian slur for Black people in the beginning of the message. “Every single one needs to be eviscerated.”

“MLK Jr. was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs,” he said in January. He also said he had a “bit of a Nazi streak” and to “never trust a chinaman or Indian. NEVER.”

Additionally, Ingrassia has also been accused of sexually harassing a co-worker, and he has sued Politico for reporting on those allegations.

Still, the Trump administration had nothing but good things to say about Ingrassia while confirming his move. A White House official said Ingrassia was “a very helpful addition to GSA and will successfully execute President Trump’s America First policies.” A spokesperson for GSA said they “look forward to having Paul Ingrassia’s legal talents help advance the GSA mission and the President’s priorities.”

Steve Bannon was receiving advice from Jeffrey Epstein as Bannon defended President Trump in media appearances in 2018, text messages released by the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday show.

From August 17 to August 23 of that year, the billionaire child sex offender coached Bannon on his messaging and TV appearances. In the released documents, Epstein’s email address is shown on an Apple iMessage account, while the other correspondent is redacted.

Context clues such as Fox News appearances, Bannon’s firing from the White House in 2017, and Bannon’s work on a documentary reveal that he is the other party in the conversation. It’s not clear whether the released messages are part of a larger conversation between Bannon and Epstein. The Guardian reached out to Bannon multiple times for comment but did not receive a reply.

The pair discussed breaking scandals, such as the Michael Cohen case, as well as Bannon’s TV appearances on MSNBC. At one point, Epstein offered compliments on how Bannon looked on TV, saying, “You looked so clean cut next to him i thought i turned on the figure skating channel by accident.”

Bannon responded with “My ‘come hither’ look,” to which Epstein replied, “Better than the usual ‘come hitler’ look.”

Epstein also helped Bannon come up with talking points to use in media appearances, telling him how to handle critics of Trump tax cuts.

“We can discuss response to tax cut criticism. The 83 percent to rich is misleading by miles . Cash back. Pension funds up,” texted Epstein, adding, “Corporations are not people. Giving corp breaks , is perceived as giving it to someone else. wage inflation cant be the first focus, the additional money in the system. First goes to hiring new people, only afterwards can wages rise.”

Other revealed messages show that Epstein advised Bannon during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing on what questions Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault, should be asked to undermine her credibility. Epstein suggested that Ford could be accused of taking medications that cause memory loss.

While Bannon doesn’t work directly for Trump, the pair still communicate and the president often reaches out to Bannon for advice, as was the case this past February before Trump’s disastrous meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The release of these texts suggests that Bannon had a close relationship with Epstein, just like the president, and raises the question if all three collaborated on political business—or worse.

The Trump administration tried to deport a Native American woman.

Leticia Jacobo, a 24-year-old member of the Arizona Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, was booked into the Polk County Jail in Des Moines, Iowa, in September for allegedly driving on a suspended license. She was supposed to be released on November 11, but was issued a random ICE detainer that day—which forced her to stay in place for 48 hours while Immigration and Customs Enforcement prepared to deport her.

“My sister said, ‘How is she going to get deported if she’s a Native American?’ and ‘We have proof,’” Jacobo’s sister Maria Nunez told the Arizona Mirror. “They said, ‘Well, we don’t know because we’re not immigration and we can’t answer those questions. We’re just holding her for them. So, when they pick her up tonight they’re going to go ahead and deport her to wherever they’re going to take her, but we have no information on that.’”

Jacobo’s family scrambled to prove that she was unjustly detained, posting on Facebook, contacting tribal leaders, and even bringing her birth certificate to the jail. Her Social Security number was also on file. Polk County Sheriff Office Spokesman Lt. Mark Chance eventually admitted that the jail had made a massive mistake and the detainer was meant for someone else.

“It was human error, but I’m sure as soon as the command staff find out about it, they’re going to have some meetings with their supervisors internally and be like, ‘Hey, guys, we gotta keep our thumb on this, this is silly,’” he said.

“Silly” is putting it mildly. Nearly deporting a woman with more right to be in this country than most is a product of the racial profiling inherent in President Trump’s immigration crackdown. ICE has previously stated that “ethnicity can be a factor supporting reasonable suspicion in appropriate circumstances,” and that “officers might reasonably rely on the fact that someone exclusively speaks Spanish to support reasonable suspicion that the person is here illegally.”

Back in January, during Trump’s first week in office, the Navajo Nation announced that ICE had harassed at least 15 Indigenous Americans at their homes and workplaces simply because they looked Latino. That strategy (and the cruel processes it produces) has only persisted since.

Even Donald Trump’s right-hand man thinks that the economy is messed up.

In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity Thursday, Vice President JD Vance acknowledged the reality for millions of Americans: that life has gotten more “expensive,” and that people are “suffering.”

But the person at fault for the rattled economy was still, according to Vance, former President Joe Biden, whose tenure saw historic gains in the job market.

“We need a good job to pay good wages, we need people to be able to go to the grocery store and be able to actually buy what they need for their family. That takes a little bit of time,” Vance said.

“I know there are a lot of people out there, Sean, who are saying that things are expensive,” Vance continued. “But we have to remember that we inherited this terrible inflation crisis from the Biden administration.”

Vance touted the progress of the president’s economic agenda, arguing that in the last 11 months, Trump had managed “trillions upon trillions” of dollars in new investments to rebuild America’s manufacturing class.

“Of course, I’m mindful that people are suffering because those factories do not get built overnight,” Vance said, again emphasizing that the American public would need to be patient to see the ultimate payoff of Trump’s policies. “These things actually take a little bit of time.”

Vance’s comments were a remarkable departure from the administration’s talking points, which have insisted on the country’s economic success despite myriad cost-of-living indicators suggesting otherwise. Trump has prattled on about “making America affordable again,” but the economic strain has become more severe since he entered office.

Practically everything has become more expensive, in large part because of Trump’s tariff plan: Beef prices are reaching new highs, coffee prices are up by 20 percent (and the price hike is likely here to stay), and the average price of gasoline—at $3.09 per gallon—is slightly higher than this time last year.

Beyond that, homeownership has become a pipe dream for millions, the job market is in historic decline, and the unstable economy has stopped business owners from making large-scale investments.

It took eight months, but it seems that the Trump administration has finally figured out that you can’t really grow bananas in the United States.

After his party suffered sweeping losses in a series of elections earlier this month that hinged on the issue of affordability, and then publicly spiraled when pressed on the rising price of groceries, President Donald Trump is reportedly gearing up to undermine his own key economic policy, three sources told The New York Times Thursday.

The Trump administration was preparing broad exemptions for certain tariffs—including on products from countries that have yet to strike a deal with the U.S. government—stalling a key negotiation lever in Trump’s economic policy that has been sparking financial strain for consumers.

While the decisions about what to exempt have yet to be finalized, the sources told the Times that they expect it will include citrus and beef—a concerning sign for U.S. cattle ranchers, who have already pushed back on the president’s offer to buy beef from Argentina. Trump has claimed that ranchers who felt betrayed just didn’t “understand” his brilliant economic machinations.

But Trump’s sweeping tariffs on U.S. beef suppliers, such as Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and Uruguay, as well as tariffs on feed and farming equipment, have only driven the consumer price of beef higher and higher, according to NBC News.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent teased Wednesday that the president would make “substantial” tariff exemptions on products such as coffee, bananas, and other fruit—namely products whose domestic production couldn’t possibly be boosted through tariffs on foreign imports.

The Trump administration announced Thursday that it had struck new trade deal frameworks with Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guatemala, with senior officials suggesting that could help alleviate rising prices on agricultural products from Latin America, such as coffee and bananas.

The British Broadcasting Corporation has apologized to President Donald Trump for editing his speech on an episode of Panorama, but will not fork over the $1 billion he threatened to sue for.

Earlier this week, the president’s legal team sent a letter to the BBC claiming that the British news outlet attempted to “interfere in the presidential election” by editing one of his January 6, 2021, speeches in a broadcast one day before the 2024 vote.

Panorama edited together two sections of Trump’s 2021 speech, including his line calling on supporters to “fight like hell,” while leaving out a section in which he told them to peacefully protest. Controversy ensued, causing Director General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness both to resign on Sunday, which Trump celebrated on Truth Social.

He also sent a letter to the BBC threatening a $1 billion defamation lawsuit unless the BBC did a “full and fair” retraction of the Panorama episode and “appropriately compensated” him for harm done. The deadline for the BBC to respond was Friday.

“We accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” the BBC wrote in its Corrections and Clarifications section on Thursday.

While the BBC “sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited,” it still “strongly disagree[s] there is a basis for a defamation claim,” a spokesperson said. The letter to Trump’s team notes that the news agency did not distribute the Panorama episode in the United States, the clip was only edited for the sake of time, and the episode did not cause Trump any harm given that he won the election.

Trump has already made other large media corporations fold financially, getting a $16 million settlement from CBS News over edits to an interview with Kamala Harris prior to the 2024 election, and another $16 million settlement with ABC News after host George Stephanopolous used the phrase “liable for rape” to describe Trump’s E. Jean Carroll case verdict.

Right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly is trying to downplay the latest Jeffrey Epstein emails by questioning if the billionaire child sex offender was really a pedophile. 

On her Sirius XM radio show Wednesday, Kelly highlighted the ages of Epstein’s victims, declaring that there is a “difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old.”

“Yeah, so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say I was under 10, I was under 14 when I first came within his purview. You can say that’s a distinction without a difference. I think there is a difference,” Kelly said to her guest Batya Ungar-Sargon.  

It’s a roundabout and indirect way of trying to soften the allegations against President Trump by downplaying Epstein’s offenses, and even casting a little doubt. It’s one of many attempts by Trump allies and people on the right to try and protect the president, who has been heavily implicated in this week’s email releases.

Among the many revelations are that Epstein bragged about “giving” his 20-year-old girlfriend to Trump and that he may have spent Thanksgiving with him in 2017, during his first term as president. House Republicans and the White House attempted to claim that one of the victims Epstein said Trump spent a lot of time with, per one email, was Virginia Giuffre, who died earlier this year and claimed she never witnessed Trump commit any wrongdoing. 

In doing so, however, Republicans confirmed that the emails are real, taking away the ability of Trump or any of his allies to deny their substance and forcing them into pathetic defenses like Kelly’s. To her credit, Kelly still expressed contempt for Epstein in the exchange, saying, “Every time we start talking about Epstein, it makes your skin crawl.” Well, so do the many defenses for Trump’s behavior. 

The man President Trump wanted to be attorney general was allegedly paying for sex with a 17-year old girl who was working at a McDonald’s, saving up for braces, and partly living at a homeless shelter.

Last year, a House Ethics Committee report found “substantial evidence” that former representative and former attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him,” and that he “engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl” in 2017. The report also mentioned that Gaetz possessed and used cocaine and ecstasy while in office. Last month, newly unsealed court documents further detailed just how dire a situation the girl was living in before she was connected with Gaetz.

As The New York Times reported, the girl was in and out of homeless shelters, where one of her parents lived after a divorce. In an attempt to save up for braces, she joined a sugar dating website, saying she was 18 instead of 17 to join.

The girl met Gaetz’s friend Joel Greenberg through the website in April 2017. He invited her on his boat and paid her $400 without having sex with her. They then had sex seven times for money after that. In July, she went to a party thrown by Republican lobbyist Chris Dorworth and had sex with then-Representative Gaetz twice.

“The vulnerable circumstances most crime victims face are rarely known to the public,” the victim’s lawyer Laura B. Wolf told The New York Times. “Although my client’s circumstances were revealed outside of her control, I hope it helps for the public to see a fuller and more human picture of her than the press has reported on to date.… Power imbalances can be age, but they can also be financial. My client had little economic security, which allowed for financial leverage over her.”

Gaetz has denied everything.

“I never had sex with this person.… This person threatened me with a lawsuit if I didn’t pay her $2.3 million,” he said in a text to the Times. “She never sued me because her story is fiction.”

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.