Trump Derails His Christmas Speech to Ramble About Snakes

Guests at the White House Christmas reception fell silent Sunday as President Donald Trump veered way off topic to deliver a cozy holiday tale about … poisonous snakes?

“Tale” is probably giving him too much credit. During his address, 79-year-old Trump turned his attention to Peru, which he said “is known to be a rather rough place in terms of physical creatures crawling around.”

“Twenty-eight thousand people die a year from a snake bite, a certain snake. It’s a viper. It’s said to be the most poisonous snake in the world,” Trump said. “But the venom rarely works, it’s so powerful, the snake. It’s said to be the most poisonous. That, the black mamba, the brown mamba, and the viper from Peru.”

Trump tried to explain that he was telling this “story” because his son Donald Jr. was sitting in the audience, but he didn’t end up telling any story at all.

“And so, he’s being read his rights and his—this is, they thought he was dead three times, three different times, they carried him out, feeding him the anti-venom, and over a period of months he was unconscious for a long time, many weeks, and he made it. I asked him, ‘How ya doing today?’ And he said, ‘Is it perfect?’” the president rambled incoherently.

Suddenly, Trump seemed to notice that he’d lost his audience.

“Look how quiet everybody is,” the president said. “You know, it’s funny when you talk about snakes and things like that, people find it interesting.”

Interesting? No. Deeply concerning? Yes.

The son of Representative Ilhan Omar was caught up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota.

In an interview with local TV station WCCO on Sunday, Omar said that federal agents pulled over her son on Saturday and demanded proof of citizenship.

“Yesterday, after he made a stop at Target, he did get pulled over by [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents, and once he was able to produce his passport ID, they did let him go,” Omar said, adding that her son always carries his passport. According to the Somali American congresswoman, it’s not her son’s first brush with ICE: In the past, agents entered a mosque where he and others were praying but left without incident.

After ICE had visited that mosque, she said she “had to remind him just how worried I am, because all of these areas that they are talking about are areas where he could possibly find himself in and they are racially profiling, they are looking for young men who look Somali that they think are undocumented.”

Earlier this month, President Trump launched an immigration crackdown targeting the local Somali American community in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, the largest in the country. The president said he did not “want them in our country,” calling Omar and the rest of the community garbage.

On Friday, Omar sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons accusing the government of “blatant racial profiling” and “an egregious level of unnecessary force” in Minnesota.

“It is clear to me that this surge came in direct response to Trump’s racist comments about Somali people, and about me in particular,” Omar wrote.

Kash Patel celebrated too early again.

On Sunday, the FBI director made a lengthy post boasting about the bureau’s efforts to detain a person of interest in the Brown University shooting on Saturday night that killed two and wounded nine.

“Early this morning, FBI Boston’s Safe Streets Task Force … detained a person of interest in a hotel room in Coventry, RI, based off a lead by the @ProvidenceRIPD. We have deployed local and national resources to process and reconstruct the shooting scene—providing HQ and Lab elements on scene,” Patel wrote, attaching pictures. “We set up a digital media intake portal to ingest images and video from the public related to this incident. And the FBI’s victim specialists are fully integrating with our partners to provide resources to victims and survivors of this horrific violence. This FBI will continue an all out 24/7 campaign until justice is fully served.”

Local authorities even confirmed that the person of interest was detained off of a tip obtained by Patel’s FBI.

The person of interest was released hours after Patel’s announcement.

This blunder from Patel reeks of the same overeagerness that led to this same outcome in the Charlie Kirk shooting.

In September, he drew the ire of the left and right for his premature social media post the day of the shooting, declaring that “the subject for the horrific shooting” was in custody—a claim almost immediately contradicted by local officials. Patel later backtracked, and the manhunt ensued for another 27-plus hours before the suspect, Tyler Robinson, was turned in by a family member.

“I’m grateful that Utah authorities have captured the suspect in the Charlie Kirk assassination, and think it is time for Republicans to assess whether Kash Patel is the right man to run the FBI,” right-wing culture warrior Chris Rufo posted then. “He performed terribly in the last few days, and it’s not clear whether he has the operational expertise to investigate, infiltrate, and disrupt the violent movements—of whatever ideology—that threaten the peace in the United States.”

It’s clear that these questions still apply—and that the FBI director is still more concerned with looking tough and being celebrated than he is with actually being good at his job.

At a White House Christmas reception on Sunday, President Donald Trump made clear what he wants from Santa this year.

“We’re building an arc, like the Arc de Triomphe,” he said during a rambling speech, after spending 10 minutes talking about golf. “And we’re building it by the Arlington Bridge … opposite the Lincoln Memorial.”

Trump’s “triumphal arc” (yes, “arc”) is the latest construction project on his list, which also includes the 90,000-square-foot, $250 million ballroom he’s tearing down the East Wing of the White House for, and his Rose Garden renovation, in which he paved paradise and put up a parking lot—sorry, a “club.”

“I put Vince in charge of the triumphal arc,” Trump said, referring to his former speechwriter and the current director of the Domestic Policy Council, Vince Haley. “Vince came in one day, and his eyes were teeming. He couldn’t believe how beautiful. He saw it, and he wanted to do that,” the president continued, intelligibly.

“It will be like the one in Paris, but to be honest, maybe it blows it away—it blows it away, in every way,” Trump said.

But the president wasn’t quite finished gushing about his plans. He called Memorial Circle, the site across from Lincoln Memorial right on the border with Virginia, “a circle that’s been waiting to have the arc built on it.” Apparently, Memorial Circle was asking for it.

Trump then asked Vince to show the plans to the National Trust. “I’ve always gotten really along well with the National Trust, so take a look, show it to them, maybe they’ve got some good ideas.” (The National Trust is currently suing the president to block construction of his ballroom.)

While Trump gilds the Oval Office and plans his next vanity project, Americans are struggling to pay for necessities like groceries and doctors’ visits. Trump’s legacy will be one of staggering economic inequality—but at least we’ll have an “arc” to remember him by.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday intended to stop states from regulating AI—an idea that had received a lot of pushback from members of his base.

The order didn’t emerge out of a vacuum, of course. MAGA Republicans and Silicon Valley leaders have been locked in a battle for influence over the White House on tech policy for some time, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.

Trump’s tech advisers seem to be winning.

Let’s back up a few months: over the summer, the Senate killed a bill that would have imposed a 10-year moratorium on AI laws from states. Then, when a draft version of the just-signed executive order leaked last month, many Republicans, who traditionally support states’ rights, tried to stop the president from going forward with it.

GOP members including Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene decried the idea, writing on X that “states must retain the right to regulate and make laws on AI and anything else for the benefit of their state. Federalism must be preserved.”

Conservative groups, members of Congress, and governors all reportedly reached out to the White House to raise the alarm about the draft as well.

The Post spoke to more than a dozen people familiar with the administration’s AI policies and White House officials and concluded that this moment was emblematic of a wider struggle between Trump’s base and his tech advisers and industry leaders who used their money and sway to help put him in office.

“It feels like millions of votes across the country just got traded for thousands of [venture capitalist] and tech rich votes in regions Republicans will never win,” one source said.

Compromises were made to the draft to bring Republicans on board, and silence critics, the Post reported, and Trump ended up signing the order this week.

The tension between what Big Tech and the president’s populist supporters want isn’t likely to disappear overnight, though. And as the midterm elections loom, more and more cracks are appearing among Trump’s MAGA base.