Trump Threatens “Very Serious Retaliation” After Syria Attack

President Donald Trump raged against ISIS and said the U.S. would retaliate after an attack in Syria on Saturday, possibly laying the groundwork for more American military involvement in another country in the Middle East.

Earlier in the day, a lone gunman shot and killed two U.S. Army soldiers and a civilian interpreter while they were conducting counterterrorism operations in Palmyra, a city in the central part of the country, various outlets reported. The shooter was killed, and three other members of the U.S. military and two Syrians were injured.

U.S. Central Command called the attack the “result of an ambush by a lone ISIS gunman,” though no group has claimed responsibility for the attack as of yet. More details are still emerging, but Trump took to Truth Social to declare there would be a response.

“This was an ISIS attack against the U.S., and Syria, in a very dangerous part of Syria, that is not fully controlled by them. The President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is extremely angry and disturbed by this attack,” he wrote. “There will be very serious retaliation.”

What, exactly, that response might look like is unclear. This is reportedly the first case of U.S. deaths in Syria since Bashar Al-Assad’s regime fell, and the attack is under investigation.

Defense Secretery Pete Hegseth, who has come under intense pressure and criticism for his role in carrying out questionably legal boat strikes in the Caribbean that have killed more than 80 people, also weighed in.

In a Saturday tweet, Hegseth wrote: “If you target Americans—anywhere in the world—you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you.”

Though it’s not well publicized, the U.S. military has had an ongoing presence at American bases in different parts of Syria since 2014.

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is reportedly trying to come up with a way to bring federal charges against Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter. One solution? Declare Kirk’s murder an anti-Christian hate crime.

Tyler Robinson, the suspect, is already facing state charges for aggravated murder, and may even face the death penalty. But that’s not enough for the Trump administration, which seems to be trying to get the case taken to the federal level, according to a new report from NBC News.

Some prosecutors are pushing back. They say the crime doesn’t really fall under any federal statutes: Murder, generally, is under state jurisdiction, unless the suspect crossed state lines, or killed an elected official.

As a result, apparently, the DOJ is exploring the option to charge Robinson with an anti-Christian hate crime, three people who are familiar with the investigation told NBC.

It would be an unusual “hate crime” to prosecute, to say the least: The federal case would have to equate anti-trans views with Christianity, in order for the legal logic to work, according to NBC’s sources.

“They are trying to shove a square peg into a round hole,” one said.

In case anyone is unclear what constitutes a federal hate crime: the Hitler-loving white supremacist who killed Heather Heyer at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was charged with a hate crime, as was the white man who gunned down 10 Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo, NY.

Hate crime charges are generally used when someone attacks or discriminates against someone else based on their race, gender, sexuality, or religion.

Robinson, in texts to his trans partner that were released by the FBI, allegedly said that he wanted to kill Kirk because he had “enough of his hatred.” In order to charge Robinson with a hate crime, prosecutors would have to argue that being Christian and being hateful—at least towards trans people—are one and the same.

It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last—President Donald Trump was a little too eager to claim he had ended an international conflict.

On Friday, the U.S. president said that the countries of Thailand and Cambodia, which have been involved in clashes that have left at least 20 people dead and displaced hundreds of thousands over the past week, had agreed to a truce.

The president wrote on Truth Social that he had a “very good conversation” with the prime ministers of both countries, and they had achieved a breakthrough. “Both Countries are ready for PEACE and continued Trade with the United States of America. It is my Honor to work with Anutin and Hun in resolving what could have evolved into a major War between two otherwise wonderful and prosperous Countries!” Trump wrote.

The ceasefire was supposed to begin yesterday, per Trump’s announcement, and the White House shared the president’s post on Facebook as well.

But on Saturday, Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul definitively refuted Trump’s claim, The New York Times reported.

“Thailand will continue to perform military actions until we feel no more harm and threats to our land and people,” he wrote on Facebook. “I want to make it clear.”

Thai Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow also said that Trump’s comments didn’t “reflect an accurate understanding of the situation,” per CBS News.

Cambodia’s prime minister has not directly refuted the claim, but made no mention of a new ceasefire agreement.

On Saturday, the violence continued, as Thailand carried out airstrikes along the border between the two countries. The fighting is the latest iteration of a border conflict that’s been simmering for some time.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to repeat the claim that he’s ended a dizzying number of conflicts as part of his endless quest for the Nobel Peace Prize. This time, though, facts intervened.

Chuob Chhouk, a vegetable seller in Cambodia who had been displaced from her home, told the Times, “I want a real ceasefire, not just words.”

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.