MAGA Straight Up Imploded This Weekend—And It’s Beyond Messy

The online MAGA-verse were at each other’s throats more than usual this weekend, as right-wing commentators Benny Johnson, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Tucker Carlson were all points of controversy.

The first tiff started on Saturday, when Yiannopoulos—who has made a name for himself as an openly gay far-right bigot—accused multiple conservative influencers like Johnson and Charlie Kirk of being closeted gay men on Tim Pool’s podcast with swindler and former MAGA Representative George Santos, who is also gay.

“One of the most distinctive things about the right-wing in this country is its homosexual overtones. Benny Johnson posts pictures of his children every two days—it’s weird. And everybody knows what went on with Benny Johnson in those lobbies and those hotel rooms at SAS. Everybody knows,” said Yiannopoulos.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Santos replied.

“Men, younger men. Not underage, at least I don’t know that. His wife was crying drunk in the lobby three SAS’s in a row about how her husband was upstairs with boys,” Yiannopoulos claimed. “Go ask her.”

“Come on, Milo, aren’t you ever scared of getting sued?” Santos asked.

Yiannopoulos insisted he was telling the truth, and that he’d never been sued.

On Sunday, Johnson threatened to sue him.

“I am duty bound to take action to protect my family against those who maliciously defame and attack us. More to come on that soon,” he wrote. “Pray for healing for some really sick and delusional people. Jesus is about redemption. The legal system is about justice. Happy Sunday.”

Yiannopoulos responded in a message addressed to Johnson and his wife, Kate:

“I know more about defamation than any lawyer you will hire. Benny is a public figure. Malice is a nonstarter. I have receipts, and the truth is a total defense against any claim of defamation or libel. Do you want to lose a defamation case to MILO YIANNOPOULOS OF ALL PEOPLE about whether or not you are gay? Do you want to even fight one? The people who have poured money into making you a big deal are about to lose their entire investment,” he ranted.

“I know more about your marriage than you think I do,” he continued, “and I have evidence, and I have witnesses. I know who to subpoena. I know what questions to ask. About nocturnal liaisons dangereuses with chaps in assless chaps and about being caught in flagrante delicto at conferences attended by students, some of whom may have been under 18 (I guess we’ll find out!).”

Yiannopoulos also claimed that Turning Point USA may have faked Charlie Kirk’s death.

Meanwhile, other far-righters—mostly Islamophobes and Zionists—were at pundit Tucker Carlson’s throat for his purchase of a property in Qatar.

“Speaking on stage at the Doha Forum in Qatar, Tucker Carlson told Qatar’s Prime Minister Al Thani that he is buying a place in Qatar this week because he’s an ‘American”; and he will live and go wherever he wants,” MAGA crank Laura Loomer posted on Sunday. “Qatar is the financier of the Muslim Brotherhood and they continue to allow HAMAS officials to live in Doha, where Tucker now wants to buy a place to live.”

“Let me explain the joke: Qatar is a bloodthirsty, terror-supporting slave state, and Tucker Carlson is rubbing it in your face that he’s an unregistered foreign agent for them,” another account wrote.

It’s clear that Trump’s base is fraying at the seams. From those questioning the validity of Trump’s “America First” and our fealty to Israel, like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, and Tucker Carlson, to those like Yiannopoulos spreading conspiracy theories only Candace Owens would touch, it’s clear that whatever base of hatred Trump still has is fractured.

Vice President JD Vance offered up a defense for his own racism so baffling that it makes you wonder: What in the world are they teaching at Yale Law School? 

Vance slammed an X account for paraphrasing one of his anti-immigrant tirades as “completely dishonest”—before confirming that he pretty much agreed with the sentiment anyway.

During an October interview with conservative podcaster Miranda Devine, Vance made a series of comments claiming Americans struggled living next door to immigrants. 

“‘Well, wait a second. What is going on here? I don’t know these people. They don’t speak the same language that I do.’ And because there are 20 in the house next door, it’s a little bit rowdier than it was when there was just a family of four or a family of five,” Vance said on the podcast.

“It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I wanna live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers,’” Vance said. 

Vance’s comments were old-school racist, as he proselytized about the invented struggles of not living in a homogeneous community made up of white, English-speaking, nuclear families. The inclusion of immigrant families meant noise and chaos for their well-meaning white neighbors. Vance, who has previously admitted to telling racist lies for attention, uses comments like these to justify the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and deportation efforts. 

On X, hedge fund manager and frequent anti-Trump poster Spencer Hakimian offered a summation of Vance’s comments: “It’s totally reasonable to not want neighbors who speak another language.” 

Vance hit back in a post of his own. “First of all, it’s just a made up quote. Completely dishonest,” he wrote, referring to Hakimian.  

“Second, what’s reasonable is to want to share a language with your neighbor. How do you borrow a cup of sugar? Resolve disagreements? Have a nice conversation? You need a common language, and in America, that language is English,” Vance wrote. “The far left became so deranged on immigration that they’re attacking people for wanting to be able to speak to their neighbors.”

In one fell swoop, Vance denied thinking it was reasonable to not want neighbors who don’t speak English, before clarifying that it was not unreasonable to want your neighbors to speak English. If your defense of racism is to offer up a brainteaser, you may be working too hard. 

Donald Trump threw a temper tantrum Monday, demanding an apology from Paramount after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene bashed him on their network—and it’ll probably work.

In an interview on 60 Minutes Sunday, Greene, a recent MAGA defector, exposed just how much Republican lawmakers hate Trump and slammed his second-term agenda.

In his meltdown, Trump continued to elaborate on his inane nickname for “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown” in a post on Truth Social, writing, “Green turns Brown under stress!” and “She sort of reminds me of a Rotten Apple!”

But Greene wasn’t the only recipient of the president’s ire.

“My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME!” Trump wrote.

Paramount has already bent over backward to build a pro-Trump media behemoth. Earlier this year, the organization paid $16 million to Trump to settle a lawsuit over an edited 60 Minutes interview of failed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, clearing the way for a merger with Skydance. (Months later, it chopped up an interview with the president to make him sound normal.)

Paramount later installed Bari Weiss, a boring center-right pundit, to lead CBS News and started to install editorial rules to benefit Trump’s administration. Hell, Paramount even agreed to revive the Rush Hour movies after Trump begged his billionaire buddy Larry Ellison, whose son David runs Paramount Skydance.

Why will the president’s childish outburst probably get him exactly what he wants? On Monday, Paramount launched a $104.8 billion hostile bid to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Warner Bros., after losing out to Netflix. Semafor reported that Paramount executives had initially been hopeful Trump would step in to block the sale to Netflix, but the president had demurred. Speaking to reporters Sunday, Trump said he would be “involved” in the Warner Bros. sale, positioning himself as a dealmaker for interested parties to suck up to.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene still isn’t willing to admit her contributions to the toxicity in American politics. 

The onetime MAGA loyalist who has become critical of President Trump in recent months was interviewed by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes Sunday. When Greene started speaking about how toxic the political culture in Washington is, Stahl pointed out her past. 

“It’s the most toxic political culture, and it’s not helping the American people,” Greene began, before Stahl jumped in. 

“But you contributed to that. You, you, you were out there pounding and insulting people,” Stahl said. Greene avoided taking responsibility, becoming her own combative self and calling Stahl toxic and accusatory. 

“You’re accusing me, but we don’t have to accuse one other,” Greene said with a big grin. Stahl replied that she wanted Greene to respond to her own record, but the congresswoman wouldn’t own up and instead kept claiming that Stahl’s accusations were part of the problem.  

After President Trump and other top Republicans reportedly objected to her running for Senate, Greene has seemingly turned on her own party, calling out Republicans and Donald Trump on everything from the Epstein files to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In her announcement that she will resign from Congress next year, Greene blasted the president, saying she would not be a “battered wife.” He responded with his usual insults.  

But Sunday’s interview shows that while Greene may be on the outs with MAGA, her reactionary politics and toxicity haven’t changed. Greene was clearly using 60 Minutes to establish her far-right credentials by using Stahl as a “liberal media” foil. Whatever is next for Greene, she’s not moving an inch from the right wing. 

At least one Republican is encouraging the Defense Department to blow up boats in the Carribbean—even if the ships have no apparent plans to enter U.S. waters.

New reports indicate that before the Pentagon double-tapped a boat on September 2, mercilessly killing a pair of survivors who clung to the flotsam, officials knew that the small watercraft was headed to Suriname and then to Europe or Africa—not the United States.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton told NBC News’s Kristin Welker Sunday that he wasn’t just “comfortable” that the military had bombed a ship in international waters that had no intention of arriving in the U.S., but that he would actually like the government to “continue” the practice.

“Is there any hard evidence that shows this particular boat was headed to the United States?” asked Welker.

“That didn’t come up in my briefing,” Cotton said. “But again, there’s very reliable, multiple sources of intelligence that tells us this boat had drugs on it, that everyone on this boat is associated with these designated foreign terrorist organizations that are trying to kill American children.”

“Are you comfortable having the United States target a boat in which you have not seen evidence that it’s actually heading to the United States?” Welker pressed.

“I’m not just comfortable with it, I want to continue it,” Cotton said.

Since early September, the U.S. has conducted at least 22 strikes on small boats traversing the Caribbean that Trump administration officials have deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 86 people have been killed in the attacks.

The White House has defended the violence, chalking it up to allegedly necessary efforts to thwart the pipeline of fentanyl into the country. But Donald Trump has simultaneously leveraged the aggression to try to shove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power, something that he tried and failed to do in 2019.

“How is a boat that’s not heading to the United States an imminent threat to this country, senator?” Welker said at another point in the interview.

“Well, that’s one possibility,” Cotton said, explaining that he’s heard reports that some smaller watercraft “link up” with larger boats to pass drugs into the country. “I didn’t hear that specifically from Admiral [Frank “Mitch”] Bradley in my briefing, but what we know is that these drug cartels … are trafficking drugs to our shores.”

Other lawmakers that were briefed on the September 2 double tap left the meeting appalled by the country’s actions, relaying to members of the media that they were “deeply disturbed” by the barbarity of the killings.

“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Thursday. “You have two individuals [in] clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, [who] were killed by the United States.”

President and former slumlord Donald Trump appears to have spent years committing the same kind of mortgage fraud that he’s been accusing his political enemies of.

ProPublica has reported that in 1993, Trump signed mortgages for two lavish homes right next to his Mar-a-Lago estate—one for $525,000 and one for $1,200,000. Like any standard mortgage, the agreement (ushered by Merril Lynch) required Trump to reside in those homes within 60 days and actually live there for at least 365 days.  

Yet ProPublica’s investigation confirmed that Trump never lived in either of those residences for enough time, maintaining his actual personal address as Trump Tower in Manhattan. He bragged to Vanity Fair in 1994 about splitting time between Manhattan and Mar-a-Lago proper, but not either of the other two large properties. 

In reality, Trump wasn’t completely truthful about his plans to reside in the residences and instead rented them out to people.

This is absurdly ironic if true. Trump has baselessly accused New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook, Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell, and Senator Adam Schiff—all enemies of his in one way or another—of mortgage fraud. 

The White House profusely defended Trump. 

“President Trump’s two mortgages you are referencing are from the same lender. There was no defraudation. It is illogical to believe that the same lender would agree to defraud itself,” a spokesperson told ProPublica. “This is yet another desperate attempt by the Left wing media to disparage President Trump with false allegations,” they said, adding, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”

While Trump’s decision to obtain multiple mortgages for more than one primary residence goes unprosecuted, it certainly meets the paltry standards of fraud that his administration has set for anyone Trump wants to get revenge on. 

“Given Trump’s position on situations like this, he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice,” Suffolk University law professor and mortgage finance expert Kathleen Engel told ProPublica. “Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.”

President Donald Trump’s attempt to pay tribute to the honorees at the Kennedy Center Sunday night was marred by the president’s verbal diarrhea.

While discussing the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors, Trump made a strange verbal detour into gushing about a round of golf he’d played with Gary Player.

“They have talent. They have talent. The great Gary Player, he hits shots. He’s 90 years old. He still plays good. Shot a 70 with me the other day. He’s 90. We’re playing pretty far back too. He’s incredible. You think [Joe] Biden could do that? I don’t think so. Can’t, can’t lift the club,” Trump said.

Trump, who has a tendency to repeat his own jokes and stories, previously bragged about Player shooting a 70 in late October. This time, the president claimed they’d been playing with another person who kept getting stuck in sand traps.

“It was sad to watch. And, and Gary says, ‘You don’t understand. Just—’ And he dropped five balls, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping!” Trump said, employing one of his time-honored verbal gaffes.

So, what exactly was the point of Trump’s story? A truly inspirational message for us all.

“[Player] said, ‘Well, here’s the problem. I’ve got talent and you don’t.’ And that’s, and that’s what that’s true about you. You have talent,” Trump said, adding his own thoughts: “If you don’t have talent, there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

Throughout Trump’s speech Sunday, the president repeatedly struggled to stay on topic, bragging about renovations he’d made to the supposedly crumbling Kennedy Center, lying about young women thanking him for lowering the crime rate in D.C., and weirdly ranking the Supreme Court, Senate, and NFL owners committee as having the “hottest boards.”

Republicans had zero respect for Donald Trump until they realized he was about to reenter power.

In a sit-down interview with 60 Minutes Sunday, outbound Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene explained that the conservative caucus speaks very differently about the president behind closed doors, telling host Lesley Stahl that the reality of the GOP’s opinion on Trump would “shock people.”

“I watched many of my colleagues go from making fun of him, making fun of how he talks, making fun of me constantly for supporting him, to when he won the primary in 2024 they all started to—excuse my language, Lesley—kissing his ass and decided to put on a MAGA hat for the first time,” Greene said.

“I think they’re terrified to step out of line and get a nasty Truth Social post on them,” she added.

Greene went on to chastise Trump for focusing his second-term agenda on crypto billionaires, aiding and abetting Israel’s war crimes, and assisting Big Pharma.

“He didn’t take away the Covid vaccines that we want to see taken away,” Greene told the news magazine show. “So those are the areas that are still getting everything they want while the people—we’re still out here saying, ‘We want to see action on areas for the American people, not for the major industries and the big donors.’”

Greene announced last month that her time in Congress would abruptly come to a close in January, preemptively ending her term. In a statement, Greene wrote that she had “too much self respect and dignity” to “have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms.”

After many loyal years spent sycophantically supporting the president, Greene publicly broke favor with him after he attempted to undermine the release of the Epstein files.

“I am withdrawing my support and Endorsement of ‘Congresswoman’ Marjorie Taylor Greene, of the Great State of Georgia,” Trump posted on Truth Social in November. “All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!”

Greene, who won her district in 2020 without the president’s endorsement, has differed from her once “favorite president” on a range of issues. She has openly split from Trump and the rest of her party on artificial intelligence and the government shutdown, was one of the few Republicans to describe Israel’s actions in Palestine as a “genocide,” and has sparred with the White House over its handling of the Russia-Ukraine war.

The White House this weekend gloated about the Kennedy Center Honors medals—historically designed by a local business in Washington, D.C.—being redesigned by a multinational luxury brand.

Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump has sought to use the power of the presidency to mold American culture to his will, including at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where he was elected chairman in February after purging the board of trustees.

On Sunday evening, Trump will host the center’s annual honors gala, becoming the first president to do so. He claims to have been “very involved” in selecting the honorees, who were recognized at a medallion ceremony on Saturday.

Since 1978, those medallions were crafted by local artisan James Baturin, who, along with his wife and children, have made more than 250 awards—large, multicolored ribbons with gold name plates—as a family business over the years, according to WUSA9.

That is, until this year.  

On Tuesday, the Kennedy Center unveiled new medallions, created by Tiffany & Co. Somewhat less distinctive than the previous design, the new one features a gold disc hanging from a navy-blue ribbon.

Prior to Saturday’s ceremony, the White House fired off a tweet slighting the mom-and-pop operation that was jilted for a luxury-goods giant. The post celebrated the “new, far more classy design” as a “MASSIVE upgrade from the tacky rainbow sash design of medallions past.”

When a reporter pointed out the storied history of the awards described so sneeringly by Trump’s White House, one social media user quipped: “Taking work from a small family business and outsourcing it to a large corporation? That adds up, yep.”

Donald Trump Jr. weighed in on the Russia-Ukraine war this weekend with this ominous message: No one should bet on his father, the president of the United States, to stand by Ukraine.

As Politico reported Sunday, the president’s eldest son made several comments at the Doha Forum, a gathering of politicians and international figures, that cast Ukraine in a negative light, and President Donald Trump’s position as a changeable, unpredictable thing.

In response to a question about whether his father might walk away from the embattled country, Trump Jr. said, “I think he may.”

The president’s son also shared thoughts about corruption in Ukraine, and criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, calling him “one of the great marketers of all times.” He said that Zelenskiy had become “a borderline deity, especially to the left, where he could do no wrong, he was beyond reproach.”

Trump Jr. remarked that his father’s mercurial nature was actually a positive trait, and one of the things that made him unique. “The fact that he’s not predictable … forces everyone to actually deal in an intellectually honest capacity,” he said, per Politico.

Trump Jr.’s comments in Qatar about his father’s shiftiness and lack of predictability come at a particularly fraught time. The U.S. president has been pressuring Russia and Ukraine to sign a peace deal, but negotiations have dragged on, with no clear end in sight. Many people have also criticized the plan that Trump recently put forth, saying it favors Russia.

Meanwhile, Moscow warmly welcomed President Trump’s newly issued “National Security Strategy” this weekend, saying that it coincides with its political view of the world.

And against a backdrop of ongoing peace talks, Russia is ramping up the aggression.

The country carried out a huge aerial attack on Ukraine this weekend, targeting the country’s infrastructure and energy facilities, and wounding at least eight people.