MAGA Isn’t Buying White House Defense of Trump’s Chief of Staff

MAGA isn’t buying White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s excuses for humiliating Donald Trump’s team.

Wiles tried Tuesday to explain away revealing her unfiltered opinions about several Trumpworld figures in an interview with Vanity Fair. She claimed the article was a “disingenuously framed hit piece” that “disregarded” context to “paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative.”

While members of Trumpworld leaped to Wiles’s defense, MAGA wasn’t quite as forgiving. Lara Logan, a discredited former CBS correspondent and prominent figure in far-right media, slammed Wiles’s apparent naïveté.

“It is too late in the game for this to be a defense. Anyone close to the President should know that Vanity Fair leads the way in the information war for Trump’s most powerful & despicable enemies,” she wrote on X.

“If you do not know this, you are not qualified to be in a junior role let alone a senior one,” Logan added.

Joel Pollak, the opinion editor at the conservative tabloid California Post, also questioned Wiles’s decision to speak with Vanity Fair in the first place. “I don’t know why Republicans continue to give privileged access to mainstream media or center-left publications determined to destroy them,” he wrote on X, calling publications such as Vanity Fair and The New York Times “Democrat agenda-driven outlets.”

Mike Cernovich, a right-wing commentator with more than 1.4 million followers on X, accused Wiles of doing “glam interviews with Bolshevik media.”

In another post, Cernovich offered Wiles some advice: “You don’t have to do the media interview. You don’t have to talk to anyone. They will say, ‘We are going to write about you whether you cooperate or not.’ Who cares. Far worse than some hit piece (which don’t even work anymore) is hanging yourself with your own words.”

ICE agents violently restrained a woman in Minneapolis on Monday, dragging her through the snow and pinning her face down as onlookers shouted that the woman was pregnant.

During what was supposed to be a “targeted vehicle stop,” according to ICE officials, protesters swarmed the agents. Esme Murphy, a WCCO reporter, was on the scene, where she saw ICE holding a woman on the ground.

“Please let her go! She’s pregnant!” one onlooker shouted.

“Get her off of her fucking stomach,” another said.

In response to this, one agent fired a Taser into the crowd. “Who wants more?” he taunted, according to WCCO.

“We kept yelling, ‘She is pregnant, she’s pregnant,’” resident Tonika Deutch told Murphy. “They put their knees on her. We kept telling them, ‘She can’t breathe, let her up, let her up.’”

The woman was then dragged by one arm, as the crowd continued to yell and plead with the ICE agents. Bystanders threw snowballs, and ICE agents fired pepper spray into the crowd—hitting Murphy, the reporter, as well as her photographer.

ICE called the Minneapolis Police Department for backup. Once they arrived, the officers determined there was “no violence occurring” against the agents. “We have been training our officers for the last five years very, very intensely on de-escalation, but unfortunately that is … often not what we are seeing from other agencies in the city,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told WCCO.

According to ICE, they succeeded in arresting the targets of their operation: a young Ecuadorian couple who were abducted from their car, its windows shattered by agents. The woman is currently in custody in Illinois, and it’s not known where her husband is being held. Two U.S. citizens were also arrested for assaulting federal officers, according to CBS.

Four House Republicans have rejected the party line to give Obamacare more juice.

In a major act of defiance against House Speaker Mike Johnson, GOP Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Lawler, Robert Bresnahan, and Ryan Mackenzie signed Democrats’ Affordable Care Act discharge petition Wednesday morning.

They join every House Democrat in doing so, bringing the overall tally on the petition to the 218 signatures required to force a vote on whether to extend enhanced ACA subsidies for another three years.

Last week, Johnson granted Fitzpatrick and Representative Jen Kiggans an opportunity to vote on an amendment to extend the subsidies. But differing opinions over the amendment’s text had blocked efforts to make a deal.

Kiggans is not expected to sign the petition, people close to her told The Hill.

The successful effort does not translate into immediate action, however. Signatories on the petition will have to wait at least seven legislative days to recognize it, according to House rules, after which House leadership will have two days to respond. That would likely put the ACA vote on the agenda sometime around New Year’s Eve, but Johnson could voluntarily speed up the process if he wanted to.

Johnson did not respond when asked by CNN as to whether he would permit a vote before the year’s end.

The Obamacare subsidies that were enacted under the previous administration are slated to expire on December 31. Without them, health insurance premiums for more than 20 million Americans are expected to double.

If the subsidies completely lapse or expire—as most Republicans seemingly want them to do—practically everyone will feel the pain: Policy analysts expect a mass exodus from Obamacare plans altogether that could leave roughly four million Americans completely uninsured. The spike in uninsured Americans will spur a nationwide public health problem that has historically made premiums more expensive for the insured as hospitals look to recoup the lost cash.

But Johnson apparently doesn’t see that forthcoming domino effect.

“Here’s the false narrative: Democrats are pretending as though this affects everybody in the country,” Johnson told CNBC two hours before the Republican defection. “It affects 7 percent of Americans, this extended subsidy.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump got excited on Tuesday describing his bombing campaign against suspected drug boats, at a Hanukkah reception at the White House.

“The only time anybody could see those planes was when those bomb chutes open up, because it becomes totally un-stealth,” Trump began, making hand gestures to describe the airstrikes. “You’re going in, you go like this. And as soon as it goes like this, for some reason, the plane is totally visible, not good. And I watched it happening.”

Trump continued on, getting more animated, to scattered laughter in the crowd.

“And I watched it happening, it’s like I’m sitting home watching it, you know, it’s amazing, the situation room is an amazing place. But I watched ’em go bing, bing, it went bing, bing, and two massive hundred-thousand-pound bombs come pouring out, and the job they did was incredible,” Trump added, going on to call a particular strike “the single greatest military attack that anyone’s ever seen.”

Trump turns 80 next year, and is beginning to face more questions about whether he is physically and mentally up to the job of being president. Even though this is his second term in office, it’s evident that he has trouble understanding and explaining certain concepts. Trump won’t admit to any issues, though, lashing out reports of his cognitive decline.

It’s not good that Trump gets excited about dropping bombs and killing people, especially when the bombings are likely illegal and seem to be a prelude to regime change and war with Venezuela. And the fact that Trump seems to be experiencing early-stage dementia probably means that national security is in danger.

The price tag on the White House ballroom just keeps climbing.

Speaking at a Hanukkah reception at the White House Tuesday night, Donald Trump nonchalantly dropped that the cost of building the 90,000-square-foot dance pad had grown to $400 million.

“I think it’ll be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world,” Trump said. “Who else but in our country would sue to stop a $400 million beautiful ballroom that people have been after for the White House?

“The White House has wanted a ballroom for 150 years,” he added.

But exactly who has been clamoring for the facility—which will dwarf the 55,000-square-foot mansion—is not clear. Even the architect of the project, James McCrery II, disagreed with the size and scope of Trump’s ginormous ballroom, claiming that its construction would violate basic architectural principles. But McCrery’s opinion eventually got him fired.

The project’s price tag has seemingly grown by 100 percent since Trump first pitched it in July. The original $200 million cost became $300 million in October, as soon as Trump started tearing into the White House East Wing. The historic wing has been completely razed in the process, despite the president’s initial promises to build the addition “near but not touching” the actual White House.

Since Trump’s other promises have fallen flat, there seems to be no guarantee that the cost of the development will actually be funded “100 percent” by Trump and “some friends” of his.

The White House suggested that the project would be paid for, in part, by some of the country’s wealthiest families and biggest corporations, including the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.

Some major players in the defense industry with massive federal contracts have also pledged significant cash to develop the ballroom, including Lockheed Martin and Palantir.