Jared Kushner Drops His Trump Hotel Plans After Massive Backlash

Jared Kushner, private equity firm manager and son-in-law to President Trump, has ended his efforts to redevelop a Serbian historical monument into a luxury hotel complex after weeks of protest and controversy. 

“Because meaningful projects should unite rather than divide, and out of respect for the people of Serbia and the City of Belgrade, we are withdrawing our application and stepping aside at this time,” a spokesman for Kushner’s private-equity firm, Affinity Partners, said in a statement on Monday. 

The land in question is the site of the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. The attack by NATO was part of an effort to end then-President Slobodan Milosevic’s violent ethnic cleansing of Albanians living in Kosovo, which resulted in the death of 13,000 people (mostly ethnic Albanians). NATO bombed bridges, military buildings, and government buildings. 

Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 528 civilians were killed in the bombings, and many Serbians view the ruins as a point of cultural and architectural pride today. 

In May, Kushner’s company and the Serbian government signed a deal for a 99-year lease of the land under the bombed-out buildings, promising “revitalization”—meaning a high-rise hotel, office space, and stores. It was set to be a $500 million project, with Kushner’s company building a separate memorial for the bombing elsewhere.  

“The economic progress in Serbia over the past decade has been impressive,” Kushner said then. “This development will further elevate Belgrade into the premier international destination it is becoming.”

The decision was met with widespread protest, coupled with indictment of three Serbian government officials—including Minister of Culture Nikola Selaković—for abuse of power and falsifying documents related to Kushner’s redevelopment. Serbians who were against the plans accused their government of shirking public opinion and the law to streamline the effort for Kushner in an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration. 

“You call it an investment, we call it high treason,” Serbian Assemblymember Marinika Tepić told Parliament.

CBS News just wouldn’t stop posting content of Bari Weiss’s weird photo op with Erika Kirk amid a weekend full of high-profile stories of bloodshed around the world.

Kirk, who now leads Turning Point USA, her late husband’s conservative youth organization, appeared on a CBS News Town Hall Saturday moderated by Weiss. Shortly before the town hall was set to air, another story broke: There was an active shooter at Brown University, CBS News posted on X.

Over the course of Saturday evening, CBS News’s X account posted 12 times about its town hall with Kirk, but only posted four updates about the deadly shooting in Rhode Island that killed two students and injured eight others.

By Sunday morning, there was a tab at the top of CBS News’s website providing readers with a quick way to access crucial information about the shooting at Brown University—but right in front of it was another tab leading them to more content from Kirk’s town hall.

That same day, a deadly mass shooting at a Jewish gathering at Bondi Beach in Australia claimed 15 lives. After CBS News posted about Kirk’s interview three times in a row, users on X began to notice that a major news company wasn’t actually, well, covering the news.

While the CBS News account posted on X 12 times about the shooting at Bondi Beach, it also continued to post about Kirk’s town hall six more times: the same number of times it provided updates on the investigation into the shooting at Brown University.

So, over the course of the weekend, CBS News managed to publish a whopping 18 posts about Kirk, 12 posts about the Bondi Beach shooting, and only 10 posts about Brown University.

By Monday morning, yet another major story had broken: the apparent murder of Rob Reiner and his wife. As of 3:30 Monday afternoon, CBS News posted about Reiner’s death 11 times. The network only posted once, however, about President Donald Trump’s heinous reaction, where he claimed that Reiner had caused his own death because his hatred of Trump angered those around him. CBS News’s X account wrote the president had merely “disparage[d] the political views” of the famous director. CBS News has continued to post about the Kirk town hall throughout the day, as well.

In her first memo to CBS News employees when she took over in October, Weiss had proclaimed that she planned to report “on the world as it actually is.” But it seems that her rather boring tendency to gravitate toward right-wing commentators to help us understand our world will always come first.

Donald Trump stood firm Monday on his disturbing comments about Rob Reiner hours after the famed Hollywood filmmaker’s murder.

Only a handful of loyal MAGA-ites (such as George Santos) have defended Trump’s claim earlier Monday that Reiner would not have been murdered if he had supported the MAGA movement. Instead, people across the nation have condemned Trump’s remarks, including Republican lawmakers and powerful Christians.

But the public backlash hasn’t bothered Trump one bit. Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office Monday afternoon, Trump emphasized that he was “not a fan of Rob Reiner at all.”

“He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned,” Trump said, referring to himself in the third person. “He said, he liked, he knew it was false. In fact it’s the exact opposite, that I was a friend of Russia, controlled by Russia. You know, it was the Russia hoax. He was one of the people behind it.”

Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody on homicide charges early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail.

“I think he hurt himself in career-wise. He became like a deranged person. Trump derangement syndrome,” Trump said. “So I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all, in any way, shape, or form. I thought he was very bad for our country.”

Reiner’s vast and varied trove of work made him a cinematic legend, with each film standing as a template of its respective genre. Reiner enthralled children and adults alike with The Princess Bride, created the blueprint for romantic comedies with When Harry Met Sally…, and practically invented the mockumentary with This Is Spinal Tap.

He was a longtime critic of the president’s agenda.

Stephen Miller made an odious threat on X Monday against “the violent fifth column of domestic terrorists” after the Department of Justice announced it had stopped a bombing plot in California.

“Following the issuance of NSPM-7 vast government resources have been unleashed to find and dismantle the violent fifth column of domestic terrorists clandestinely operating inside the United States,” Miller’s post read.

NSPM-7 refers to a memo issued by the Trump administration titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” in September that directs federal agencies to focus on domestic extremism. The document defines extremism in terms of common liberal and left-wing beliefs, such as anti-capitalism, as well as vague and subjective positions, for instance “extremism” on race, migration, and gender.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said on X that the DOJ foiled a New Year’s Eve bombing plot against targets in Orange County and Los Angeles. The plot was reportedly hatched by “The Turtle Island Liberation Front—a far-left, pro-Palestine, anti-government, and anti-capitalist group.” The group also planned to attack ICE agents and their vehicles, Bondi said.

This matches up with NSPM-7’s definition of domestic terrorism, and judging from Miller’s post, discovering and foiling the supposed plot is a product of that memo. Miller’s use of “fifth column” refers to a group of people within a country seeking to undermine it from within. It has been used by right-wing groups and governments to attack Muslims and other groups they deem subversive.

In Miller’s hands, the use of such language evokes racism and bigotry, especially considering his known efforts to use his position in the Trump administration to advance his anti-immigrant, xenophobic ideology. That, coupled with Trump and conservatives’ attacks on any dissenting views, suggests that the full force of the government can now be directed at anyone who disagrees with the people in power.

North Carolina’s Randolph County chose to dissolve its entire library board rather than allow a book about a trans child to sit on the shelves. 

Last week, the county Board of Commissioners voted 3–2 to dismiss every single member of the library board, just weeks after they declined to reshelve or remove a picture book titled Call Me Max, a story about a transgender boy who wants to be called by his chosen name in class. 

Tami Fitzgerald, head of North Carolina Values Coalition, a conservative group that focuses on religious freedom and drew media attention to the library board’s decision, argued that the book “teaches children that their parents may be wrong about their gender, and that their gender is actually whatever they feel it is.” 

“Planting this lie in a child’s mind at a young age can lead them down a harmful path of social and medical transitioning,” she told The Washington Post. 

Kyle Lukoff, a trans man and the book’s author, thinks this is just another attempt from Trump’s GOP to muzzle his community. 

“Policies can be helpful, but this is ultimately a question of power,” he said. “If there are people in power who simply believe trans people don’t belong in their communities or the world at large, they will simply twist those policies to try and make it a reality.”

Randolph County went overwhelmingly for President Trump in the last election. This draconian reaction to a book about gender identity is par for the course in the petty culture war his base has been waging.  

Republicans in key swing states are peeling away from Donald Trump amid national backlash over his remarks about Rob Reiner’s murder.

Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody on homicide charges early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail.

But Trump chose to make the Hollywood icons’ tragic and untimely deaths all about himself, suggesting Monday that the When Harry Met Sally ... director wouldn’t have been killed if he had supported the MAGA agenda.

Doing so has seemingly come at a cost to critical support ahead of an already contentious midterm election cycle, as at least two conservative figures from swing states condemn the president’s comments.

“A father and mother were murdered at the hands of their troubled son,” wrote Oklahoma Representative Stephanie Bice, responding directly to a screenshot of Trump’s vicious Truth Social post. “We should be lifting the family up in prayer, not making this about politics.”

New York Representative Mike Lawler—who is a part of a coalition of House Republicans fighting party leadership to extend Affordable Care Act premium subsidies—felt similarly.

“This statement is wrong,” Lawler wrote, commenting on the same screenshot. “Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.”

The president’s remarks, in full, read:

“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.

“He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

FBI Director Kash Patel is reportedly crippling the FBI’s counterintelligence capabilities, former bureau agents have told The Bulwark.

On Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office in February, she terminated the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in order to “free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.” She also pared back the bureau’s enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, curbing investigations into alleged espionage. It’s probably not a coincidence that Patel failed to register under the FARA when he consulted for Qatar.

Under Patel’s leadership, 23 percent of the roughly 13,000 total FBI agents have been reassigned to work on immigration enforcement, which is not historically in the bureau’s purview. According to Democratic Senator Mark Warner, nearly 40 percent of agents in the FBI’s largest field offices have been made to work immigration cases. As a result, agents with expertise on foreign adversaries such as China, Iran, and Russia are now handling immigration cases on a rotating basis, according to former agents who left the bureau.

“It’s a disaster,” Robert Anderson, who ran FBI counterintelligence from 2012 to 2014, told The Bulwark. “I’m rooting for everybody because we’re all Americans, [but] Patel needs to wake up.”

As the FBI’s focus has shifted under Patel’s leadership, the House Intelligence Committee has put forth a bill that would place counterintelligence, including the FBI’s ranks of spy hunters, under the purview of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has previously been criticized as a “Russian asset.”

Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI special agent who also served as director of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, told The Bulwark that putting DNI in charge could be “really dangerous.”

“You could be creating a domestic spy agency with even less transparency to the American public,” he said.

To former FBI agents, that proposal undermines years of work developing a wide range of counterintelligence tactics and networks. “It’s tragic. All our work is being destroyed,” Montoya said.

Even though spy hunting isn’t historically in the DNI’s purview, Gabbard initially seemed anxious to take the reins, claiming the FBI had become too “politicized.” Meanwhile, the bureau pushed back on the intelligence committee’s bill, exposing a power struggle between Patel and Gabbard.

In a statement to The Bulwark, DNI said that Gabbard now “supports the administration’s position, which is in opposition to the legislation.”

As technology becomes more advanced, the threats of foreign adversaries are only growing—and experts are concerned that Patel isn’t doing enough. “Patel is only paying lip service to the Chinese threat,” Montoya said.

X users are experiencing an entirely different reality from the one that is actually happening.

Grok, Elon Musk’s generative AI program attached to X, is apparently running cover for the president over disturbing comments he made related to the murder of famed Hollywood filmmaker Rob Reiner.

Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday, alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail.

The motive for the gruesome killing is not clear. But in Donald Trump’s mind, the murder is all about him, and The Princess Bride director never would have died if he had shown support for the MAGA agenda.

“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS,” Trump wrote in a chilling post on Truth Social that is still on the site.

“He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before,” he continued. “May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

But Grok is either not capable of spotting the current events fiasco or has been programmed to deliberately muffle the president’s remarks. When X users initially probed Grok about the veracity of Trump’s recent post, the chatbot blatantly lied.

“Based on searches of X and Truth Social, no such post exists from @DonaldJTrump,” Grok responded to one user. “The screenshot seems fabricated. Rob Reiner and his wife were tragically killed, but Trump hasn’t commented publicly on it.”

In a separate post, Grok doubled down, informing users that it had “double-checked Trump’s accounts on X and Truth Social” and found that “no posts about Rob Reiner or his wife exist.”

“The screenshot is fabricated,” Grok wrote.

The chatbot eventually changed its mind—though only after Trump’s comments were widely reported by national media outlets.

Right-wing figures, including many supporters of the president, are condemning Donald Trump’s deranged Truth Social post attacking Rob Reiner following his and his wife’s tragic killing.

Trump claimed that Reiner and his wife’s deaths were “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS,” a comment that many conservatives are rightfully calling insensitive and disrespectful.

Some of the president’s supporters replied to his post calling out his insensitive comments and telling him now was not the time to settle a political score.

Right-wing commentators Raheem Kassam, Robby Starbuck, and Rod Dreher—all of whom have supported Trump—were also disappointed in his comments.

Other conservatives who have took a stand against Trump in recent months were equally outraged. Representative Thomas Massie, a libertarian critic of the president, called Trump’s post “inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered.”

One of Trump’s biggest supporters turned critics, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, pointed out Rob’s son Nick struggled with drug addiction, calling out Trump for making a “family tragedy” about politics and political enemies.

On Sunday night, Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet posted a video of Reiner’s comments following Charlie Kirk’s murder in September, in which Reiner said his gut reaction was “absolute horror.” Kolvet praised the Hollywood icon for responding “with grace and compassion to Charlie’s assassination.” Not even 12 hours later, Trump showed how much he is lacking in those two qualities.

President Trump’s inner circle is reportedly fuming at Republican Senator Josh Hawley for starting a new anti-abortion dark-money group with his wife in an effort to reignite political discourse on the issue—one the GOP expects to lose in the upcoming midterms.

Hawley hopes the group, called the Love Life Initiative, will be a “strong voice advocating for life.” Trump’s team begs to differ.

“Clearly, Senator Hawley and his political team learned nothing from the 2022 elections, when the SCOTUS abortion ruling [that reversed Roe v. Wade] resuscitated the Democrats in the midterms,” an anonymous adviser told Axios. They went on to argue that what they see as positive economic growth should be the theme for the midterms instead. “Picking a fight on an issue like abortion in a midterm is the height of asinine stupidity.”

This rift also comes amid monthslong rumors of Hawley’s potential presidential aspirations in 2028, as he could challenge Vice President JD Vance to rip the GOP away from the MAGA wing post-Trump.