ICE Barbie Kristi Noem Spirals Under Intense White House Pressure

Kristi Noem is scrambling to shift blame to her subordinates for not meeting deportation quotas as the Department of Homeland Security descends into an atmosphere of chaos and finger-pointing, according to a new report.

Noem and her right-hand man (and alleged boyfriend) Corey Lewandowski have been playing the blame game, two DHS officials with direct knowledge of the matter told NBC News, setting up acting ICE Director Todd Lyons and Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott to take the fall.

Scott had been excluded from strategic conversations as well as social gatherings, and that department leaders told him he may soon be out of a job, the sources said. Scott was reportedly even worried that Lewandowski was reading his emails.

He’s not the only one with reason to be afraid: The White House is reportedly growing tired with Noem’s brash leadership, especially her relationship with Lewandowski. DHS officials told The Bulwark in early December that she could be out “really soon.”

As the agency leading President Donald Trump’s hallmark deportation campaign, DHS is under a lot of scrutiny. And despite Noem’s efforts to boost numbers by cruelly grabbing people off the street at random, immigrants or not, she’s way behind where the president wants her to be.

Far from Stephen Miller’s brutal goal of 3,000 deportations per day, ICE is reportedly arresting fewer than 1,000 people each day on average. And unlike Noem and Trump promised, they are not just going after the “worst of the worst”: more than a third of the people arrested so far have no criminal history at all.

The Transportation Security Administration is now sharing passenger data with ICE to enable Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Before Trump, ICE didn’t get involved with domestic travel—and the TSA didn’t concern itself with immigration matters. But since March, according to a new report by The New York Times, the two agencies have quietly been working together to apprehend people at the airport at the command of the Trump administration.

According to the Times, it’s not clear how many arrests have been made so far. But the paper obtained documents that show the program led to the arrest of 19-year-old Any Lucía López Belloza, who was picked up at Boston Logan Airport when trying to visit her family in Texas for Thanksgiving. Two days later, López was deported to Honduras, where she had not been since she was 7 years old.

According to former ICE officials interviewed by the Times, the program can help the agency meet its high deportation quotas—plus, it allows agents to quickly deport those caught, like López.

“The administration has turned routine travel into a force multiplier for removals, potentially identifying thousands who thought they could evade the law simply by boarding a plane,” said former deputy head of ICE in New York City, Scott Mechkowski.

Since Trump took office in January, many in the U.S. have been living in fear. Trump’s deportation campaign has led to the arrest and detention of immigrants and citizens alike. People have been grabbed by ICE off the street, from their apartments, from their places of work. Now, the airport is another place that’s no longer safe.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, expressed no remorse for the position she’s put people in. “The message to those in the country illegally is clear: The only reason you should be flying is to self-deport home,” she said.

In the wee hours of Saturday morning, the president laid into Republicans who voted against his gerrymandering campaign in Indiana. Perhaps unable to sleep due to the crushing sting of defeat, Donald Trump took to Truth Social close to 1 a.m. to mock and threaten the state’s legislators.

“Republicans in the Indiana State Senate, who voted against a Majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, should be ashamed of themselves,” Trump wrote. “Headed by a total loser named Rod Bray, every one of these people should be “primaried,” and I will be there to help! Indiana, which I won big, is the only state in the Union to do this!”

On Thursday, Indiana lawmakers voted down Trump’s midcycle redistricting push, choosing to keep election maps the same rather than gerrymander them to Republicans’ advantage. For weeks leading up to the vote, the president had been bullying the Hoosier state’s lawmakers in an attempt to shore up support.

After the vote, Trump turned his fury on state Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray, the main opponent to redistricting. Bray believes the state should instead work on flipping a preexisting district rather than blowing up the whole map—a risky move that would narrow Republicans’ margins in the new districts, and could even result in a loss of seats, he told Politico.

Trump has made it clear that if a Republican is unwilling to follow his agenda to the letter, he’ll put his weight behind a primary challenger. Hours before the vote Thursday, he posted, “Rod Bray and his friends won’t be in Politics for long, and I will do everything within my power to make sure that they will not hurt the Republican Party, and our Country, again.”

The Justice Department is dredging up the 2020 presidential election conspiracy.

Attorney General Pam Bondi sued Fulton County officials in Georgia Friday to obtain ballots that were cast in the election. The suit demands that Fulton County turn over “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files.”

The suit was filed the same day as the DOJ announced legal action against four more states—Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Nevada—in a sweeping national effort to access sensitive voter data. So far this year, the Trump administration has targeted 18 states, most of them Democratic-led.

It’s the first such instance in which the Justice Department has requested physical ballots. A pro-voting group described the initiative to Democracy Docket as a “terrible overstep of power.”

Since Trump first planted the seeds of doubt about the results of the 2020 election, a litany of his allies have continued to tend and water the theory—so much so that within a handful of years, refusing to admit that Trump ever lost to Joe Biden had become a fealty test for MAGA membership.

But there is no doubt—Trump lost that election by a landslide, coming up short by 38 electoral votes. More evidence that Trump did not win includes the fact that he was not inaugurated in 2021, and did not serve a day as president until he succeeded in 2024.

But for anyone still in doubt, know that the theory has been thoroughly debunked by the president’s own appointees. Trump’s last attorney general, Bill Barr, announced in 2022 that despite an intensive, multi-agency investigation, no evidence of widespread fraud had been discovered that supported the president’s wild claims.

But the theory—and Trump’s innumerable cadre of yes-men—persist.

“At this Department of Justice, we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws,” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement. “If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”

Republicans are scrambling for a next move after President Donald Trump’s humiliating failure to bully Indiana lawmakers into bending to the president’s gerrymandering scheme.

On Thursday, Indiana lawmakers rejected the president’s push for midcycle redistricting in the Hoosier State to ensure Republican victory in the 2026 midterms. Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith claimed that the Trump administration had even threatened to withhold federal funding if they refused—but lawmakers wouldn’t budge.

With the midterms fast approaching and the Republican Party’s prospects looking increasingly grim, Trump’s allies have started to discuss where to turn up the heat next.

“Nebraska and Kansas are two top targets,” wrote Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of Charlie Kirk’s organization, in a post on X Friday.

But even he had to admit that Republicans faced some challenges in those states. “Nebraska did not help the President by passing winner-take-all last year. Not a great sign for redistricting. Kansas is controlled by the Koch HQ,” Bowyer wrote.

In Nebraska, the unicameral legislature requires the support of every Republican to advance redistricting, but 83-year-old state Senator Merv Riepe is not buying in. He previously blocked Trump’s 2024 effort to reshape the state’s split Electoral College vote into a winner-takes-all state, and seems similarly uninterested in supporting his gerrymandering this time around.

“I don’t think it’s a necessity for us,” Riepe said in October.

In Kansas, Republicans haven’t seemed all that anxious to get on board the president’s push for redistricting, either. Republicans will need a two-thirds majority to redraw the maps and override an expected veto from Governor Laura Kelly.

Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank behind Project 2025, this week published a report that listed ending ranked-choice voting as a policy priority in 2026. Michigan is currently the only state circulating a ranked-choice ballot petition, meaning that Republicans are likely to target efforts to impose a new voting system there.

The chair of the Republican National Committee is issuing a dire warning to Republicans: Anticipate losing next November.

The president’s handpicked RNC leader, Joe Gruters, has been preaching the caucus’s impending doom ahead of the 2026 midterms in a transparent attempt to lower expectations. Gruters joined several right-wing podcasts and Christian television networks to spread the word that the GOP is coming up against a “looming disaster.”

“The chances are Republicans will go down and will go down hard,” Gruters said.

“This is an absolute disaster. No matter what party is in power, they usually get crushed in the midterms,” Gruters told Salem News Channel, a new media entity co-owned by Trump’s son Don Jr.

Republicans have had a trifecta in Washington since Donald Trump returned to office, white-knuckling every branch of the federal government. If history is any indicator, that won’t bode well for the party come next year: In a typical midterm cycle, the presidential party loses grounds via midterms, a phenomenon known as the “presidential penalty.” Those are the basic odds, even before Trump’s devastating tariffs and wildly controversial immigration agenda are taken into account.

But early indicators—such as a healthy dose of special elections in the last year—suggest that the national backlash to Trump’s second-term agenda could be worse for the party than usual. Democrats have seen surprising gains in unexpected areas of the country, including in Tennessee, Georgia, New Jersey, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be on the verge of panic. Anxious about midterms, the White House has spent months trying to pressure red states to gerrymander their congressional lines to turn a handful of seats in Congress. But so far, the pressure campaign has backfired: On Thursday, Indiana state senators overwhelmingly voted against the effort, citing Trump’s open threats and his crass mouth as their rationale.

Gruters’s comments have similarly raised a stir. The Heritage Foundation’s news site, Townhall, blasted The Bulwark for first publishing Gruters’s opinion, claiming that the “story is FAKE” because the publication had edited out Gruters’s words to eliminate his alleged faith in the caucus. But in doing so, Townhall cut out Gruters’s conclusion: “We are facing almost certain defeat,” he said.

President Donald Trump just got hit with a lawsuit over his enormous $300 million ballroom that would dwarf the White House.

In a 65-page complaint filed Friday, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit organization working to save America’s historic places, argued that Trump did not have the constitutional authority to fast-track construction for a project of this scale, and has violated the Administrative Procedures Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

The lawsuit also notes that Congress is required to approve any construction on federal land, and the White House is located at the White House and President’s Park, a national park.

In October, Trump fired all six members of the Commission on Fine Arts, which is charged with advising the federal government on the art, design, and architectural development of Washington, seeming to clear the way for him to make any changes he likes to the nation’s monuments. A Trump official said the members would be replaced by those who were “more aligned with President Trump’s ‘America First’ policies,” but two months later, the seats still remain empty.

The legal challenge is just the latest issue to complicate Trump’s plans for a behemoth ballroom. Trump has reportedly had a falling-out with his architect, James McCrery II, who argued that the 90,000-square-foot blueprint would overshadow the 55,000-square-foot White House mansion, violating basic architectural principles.

Trump has repeatedly misled the public about the construction process, claiming that the original structure of the White House wouldn’t be touched—before razing the entire East Wing. He also claimed that the project would only cost $200 million, but that number has since ballooned to $300 million.

The privately funded ballroom has presented a golden opportunity for the country’s wealthiest families and biggest corporations to make good with the Trump administration—and a few defense companies like Lockheed Martin and Palantir have also tossed the president some cash for his vanity project.

Trump has repeatedly turned his attention away from actually governing to the destruction of American landmarks. Trump has redone the Oval Office in the gaudy gold style of Mar-a-Lago, added stupid signs and white marble bathrooms to the White House, paved over the Rose Garden, pitched an “Arc de Trump” monument, and the builder in chief recently declared his intention to “fix” the 100-year-old Reflecting Pool on the National Mall in Washington. Fix what, exactly? Your guess is as good as ours.

Unfortunately for Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, what he posts on the internet stays forever.

Beckwith deleted a Thursday post that confirmed the Trump administration had threatened to pull federal funding from Indiana if state legislators refused to bend to the president’s gerrymandering scheme.

“The Trump admin was VERY clear about this,” Beckwith wrote in the since-deleted post. “They told many lawmakers, cabinet members and the Gov and I that this would happen. The Indiana Senate made it clear to the Trump Admin today that they do not want to be partners with the WH. The WH made it clear to them that they’d oblige.”

He was responding to another post by the Heritage Foundation, which claimed that Trump would withhold national funding from Indiana if it refused to draw new congressional lines, just five years after approving the last batch of maps.

“Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame,” the official account for the Heritage Foundation wrote.

But Indiana’s Senate did reject the White House’s pressure campaign late Thursday, with 21 Republican senators voting against the scheme. Their rationale for doing so ranged from personal disgust with the president’s language to the personal, violent threats they endured for considering voting against the effort.

Why Beckwith would have felt pressured to delete his post—within hours of making it—is not clear.

Anxious about the 2026 midterms, Trump issued directives to several red states, including Indiana, to redraw their congressional maps in order to bolster Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House. In Indiana’s case, that unprecedented, long-shot effort would have won the GOP two more seats in the U.S. House.

But so far, bullying lawmakers and barking demands has not been a successful midterm strategy for the Republican leader. Redistricting efforts have crumbled in other red states where Trump issued gerrymandering directives, though not always due to the same ferocious local pushback.

President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and other prominent figures can be spotted in a new collection of photographs from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate released Friday by Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

At least three of the photographs showed Trump, who has come under immense scrutiny for his reported ties to Epstein and his efforts to prevent the release of the government’s files on the alleged sex trafficker.

One black-and-white photograph featuring Trump shows the president smiling as he posed with six women wearing leis, whose faces have all been redacted.

Another photograph showed Trump sitting on a plane next to a blonde woman whose face has been redacted.

Another photograph showed Trump listening to a glamorous-looking woman, as Epstein stood, smirking beside him.

Yet another photo showed a pile of Trump-branded condoms.

These photographs, plucked from a trove of 95,000 images and redacted at the discretion of members of the committee, are just the beginning. “Committee Democrats are reviewing the full set of photos and will continue to release photos to the public in the days and weeks ahead,” the release said. Representative Robert Garcia told reporters Friday that some of the photos that were not released were “incredibly disturbing.”

MAGA architect Steve Bannon also made multiple appearances in the photographs released Friday—including one that was particularly disturbing.

One photograph showed Epstein sitting behind a desk, while Bannon sat opposite him talking. On the desk between them sat a framed photograph that appeared to show an at least partially naked woman lying limp on a sofa or bed.

Bannon had reportedly assisted Epstein in navigating the political and legal quagmire that was the last year of his life, conducting a series of interviews with the alleged sex trafficker between 2018 and early 2019, totaling about 15 hours of unreleased footage.

Another photograph showed Epstein and Bannon taking a mirror selfie, and another photograph showed Bannon speaking with director Woody Allen, who has been accused of sexual abuse of a minor.

Former President Bill Clinton appeared to have signed one photograph, which showed him smiling beside Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

Other prominent figures who appeared in photos were Bill Gates and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

Three of the photographs showed sex toys, including a “jawbreaker gag.”

This story has been updated.

The White House’s propaganda is getting sketchier.

The official X account for the executive mansion released new figures about the economy Thursday, proclaiming that 91 percent of Americans noticed “gas prices were dropping.” The source of that information, however, was from a White House email survey.

Meanwhile, practically every American has felt the ramifications of Donald Trump’s rattling economic policies. The Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, topped its site Friday with the headline: “POLL: ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR INFLATION.”

The AP-NORC poll found that large shares of American shoppers are dipping into their savings to afford buying presents this holiday season, with half of polled Americans reporting that it’s harder than usual to afford the things they would typically try to buy.

Roughly the same percentage of U.S.-based shoppers said they were cutting back on nonessentials or big purchases in order to afford their needs, according to the poll.

The findings make sense: An analysis by the Groundwork Collective of popular holiday gifts found that prices skyrocketed by a whopping 26 percent this holiday season.

The disparity between the White House’s messaging and what’s actually happening boils down to the president, who has repeatedly insisted without evidence that there is “no” inflation, that the word “groceries” is an “old fashioned” term, and that the issue of affordability is a “con job” and a “fake narrative” invented by Democrats to trick the public into not supporting him.

“When will I get credit for having created, with No Inflation, perhaps the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country? When will people understand what is happening?” Trump whined Thursday on Truth Social. “When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America at this point in time, and how bad it was just one year ago?”

Inflation has been accelerating since April, when Trump first announced his “liberation day” tariffs. Eight months later, practically everything on the U.S. market is more expensive than it used to be, as companies pass off the cost of the president’s tariffs onto consumers. Food and energy costs are up compared to figures from last year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even American-made goods have taken a hit by the tariffs, since more often than not they are created with parts sourced from other areas of the world.

But the commander-in-chief seems to be completely out of touch with that reality. In an interview earlier this week with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump remarked that he would rate the current state of the economy “A+++++.”