Turning Point USA Conference Devolves Into MAGA War

Right-wing commentators Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson used their speeches at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest to take shots at each other, only further emphasizing the right’s growing divide on Israel, conspiracy theories, and Jeffrey Epstein.

In his speech Thursday, Shapiro called out Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and Steve Bannon for being “frauds and grifters.”

“The conservative movement is in serious danger,” he said, claiming it was rife with “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”

“When Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign policy opponents of loyalty to a foreign country, he’s not actually making an argument based in evidence,” Shapiro continued. “He’s simply maligning people that he disagrees with. Which is indeed par for the course, for a man who was once a PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein.”

The TPUSA crowd reacted with an “oooh.”

This attack on Bannon—the right-wing provocateur instrumental in getting Trump elected to his first term—elicited mixed reactions.

“Shapiro constantly defames Jews who hold liberal politics or who oppose Israel’s policies as not really Jewish,” Zaid Jilani wrote. “Good for the goose good for the gander.”

“Shapiro is slamming Bannon for his ties to Epstein, but is SILENT about Trump having ties to Epstein. The irony …” wrote another.

Shapiro moved on to attacking Tucker for his platforming of Candace Owens—who has pushed the theory that Charlie Kirk was murdered for his rejection of Israel and AIPAC—and Nick Fuentes, who is a Nazi.

“The people who refused to condemn Candace’s truly vicious attacks—and some of them are speaking here tonight—are guilty of cowardice,” Shapiro said, obviously referring to Carlson. “If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes … you ought to own it.”

Carlson was apparently laughing backstage during this.

“That guy is pompous,” he said, according to Politico. “Calls to deplatform at a Charlie Kirk event? That’s hilarious.”

Carlson addressed the crowd afterward, attacking the rampant Islamaphobia present in Shapiro’s pro-Israel wing of the movement. (Carlson has recently been accused of being anti-American for his ties to Qatar, his criticism of Israel, and his acknowledgment of its genocide in Palestine. He has also faced criticism for his platforming of neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.)

“Most Americans have more in common with each other than they disagree on … and almost everyone is willing to tolerate a good-faith argument about how to get there,” he said. “Except a few. And they’re the ones running around calling everyone an antisemite.”

“Attacking millions of Americans because they’re Muslims? It’s disgusting. And I’m a Christian!” he continued. “I’m not a Muslim, I know there’s a lot of effort to claim I’m a secret jihadi, I’m not.… What the hell are you doing? What you’re doing is trying to divide the country. All these fake race wars that they’re always promoting?”

Regardless of where you fall on this rift, it’s clear that there is no unified MAGA front right now, at least at the punditry level. People like Carlson are tired of Trump governing as a neocon while campaigning as a populist, continuing to fund endless wars for Israel, trying to do regime change in Venezuela, and spewing racism. Those like Shapiro have a more traditional view of the situation. Only time will tell whose voice is the loudest by 2028.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem thinks that the diversity immigrant visa program, commonly known as the green card lottery, was responsible for the Brown University shooting and is pausing the program.

Noem announced on X Thursday night, “At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”

The suspect of the Brown University and MIT shootings was identified Thursday as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente. According to Noem, Valente, 48, was a Portuguese national and former Brown University student who entered the country through the program in 2017. He was found dead Thursday at a storage facility in New Hampshire, apparently having committed suicide.

Targeting the entire visa program because of one crime is excessive, but fits into a Trump administration pattern of finding pretexts for drastic immigration restrictions. Much of it is based on racism, and comes from executive actions seeking to circumvent laws passed by Congress. Afghan immigrants, for example, are facing increased difficulty because of the shooting of two National Guard members last month.

It seems the Trump administration is going to make the Brown University shooting all about immigration instead of focusing on the crime itself, showing that xenophobia is paramount in its concerns.

The White House has finally been called out for fabricating its pharmaceutical savings—and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick did not handle it well.

For months, Donald Trump has seemingly grabbed numbers out of thin air to impress an ignorant public—or his sycophantic followers—on his allegedly great pharmaceutical deals, boasting that he has “cut drug prices by 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500 percent.”

The lie continued on Wednesday night, when Trump said during his national address he had negotiated to cut drug prices by “400, 500, and even 600 percent.”

But Fox News host John Roberts saw through the numerical gibberish, excoriating Lutnick during an interview Thursday and stressing that the math was simply “not possible.”

“Well, if you cut something by 100 percent the cost goes down to zero,” Roberts said. “If you cut it by 4-, 5-, 600 percent, the drug companies are actually paying you to take their product.

“So tell me, how much of last night’s speech was hyperbole and how much was fact?” the host asked.

But Lutnick’s reply didn’t make much sense, either.

“No, what he’s saying is—bringing—if a drug was $100 and you bring the drug down to $13, right? If you’re looking at it from $13, it’s down seven times,” Lutnick said.

“No, it’s not—” Roberts interjected.

“Well, but it’s 700 percent higher price before. It’s down 700 percent now. So, $13 would have to go up 700 percent to get back to the old one. You could say, it’s down 87 percent, or you could say it would have to go up 700 percent to be the same one. So it just depends on the way you look at it,” Lutnick said, before insisting that the American public “all know what he’s saying.”

“We are hammering the price of drugs down,” Lutnick emphasized.

But the president has not tangibly lowered drug costs. In May, Trump penned an executive order that set a 30-day deadline for drugmakers to negotiate lower prices. If there was no deal, the U.S. would tie its drug prices to the costs set by other countries. But despite that threat, there hasn’t been any noticeable movement in either direction.

In November, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced that it had negotiated new prices for 15 expensive drugs covered by Medicare’s prescription drug program, Part D. The negotiations were conducted in the second round of Medicare’s Drug Price Negotiation Program, which was enacted by the previous administration under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Still, the cost of those drugs—which include Ozempic and Wegovy—isn’t expected to decrease until 2027.

Instead, evidence exists that drug prices have actually gone up for some 700 medications during Trump’s second term, according to a September report by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

Trump has previously posited that the affordable price tags on pharmaceuticals in other countries was due to American federal subsidies, which he claimed were financially offsetting their prices. But that’s not reality: The U.S. pays more for drugs because it’s an outlier among high-income, first-world countries, which predominantly support universal public health coverage.

Potential solutions that researchers argue could meaningfully address high drug prices in the U.S. include restricting pharmaceutical monopolies within the country, reworking insurance benefits to hamper out-of-pocket expenses, and recentralizing price negotiations through the leverage of a single-payer system (such as Australia, Germany, the U.K., or any number of other wealthy nations), according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private American foundation focused on health care reform.

While signing an executive order to reclassify the status of marijuana Thursday, Donald Trump struggled to stay awake in the Oval Office. 

The anti-woke president, seated at the Resolute Desk, was surrounded by medical professionals and military veterans, among others, but his neck still drooped with his eyes closing before he jerked awake. 

Even as doctors extolled the benefits from having more research opportunities and medical applications for cannabis, Trump had difficulty keeping his eyes open, having to shift in his seat in order to stay awake.  

Not even the dulcet tones of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could keep Trump from dozing, as he had to shift and look up while Kennedy was speaking to interrupt his drifts in and out of consciousness. 

Trump has been caught snoozing at his military parade, Cabinet meetings, a tennis match, meeting the Saudi Crown Prince, during Pope Francis’s funeral, and even during the signing of a peace agreement. But don’t tell Dozy Don that his age, cognitive ability, or health may be an issue: The president gets very upset when the media points out the obvious. Maybe retirement and sleeping to his heart’s content is what he needs. 

Attacking Venezuela was not the original game plan. Instead, internal reports suggest that the White House’s violent boat-smashing operation in the Caribbean was merely a backup plan when a potential war on Mexico fell through.

The Trump administration—namely, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller—had planned to spark a new war on drugs in the early stages of Donald Trump’s second term. That effort would have targeted Mexican cartels and alleged drug traffickers.

But as the administration geared up for the fight, sending troops to the southern border, Mexico did the same. By the end of August, Mexico had effectively cracked down on the cartels.

Still hungry for a fight, Miller pivoted, shifting his gaze toward Venezuela, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

“When you hope and wait for something to develop that doesn’t, you start looking at countries south of Mexico,” a current U.S. official told the Post on the condition of anonymity.

So far, at least 95 people have been killed since the attacks began in early September. The White House has defended the violence, chalking it up to allegedly necessary efforts to thwart the pipeline of fentanyl into the country. To further justify the brutality, the president designated fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction” earlier this week, ostensibly legitimizing the militaristic response. Trump has simultaneously leveraged the aggression to try to shove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power, something that he attempted and failed to do in 2019.

Current and former officials that spoke with the Post argued that Miller was the primary driving force behind the operation, leading the charge on a July 25 classified directive that authorized the use of military force against criminal groups.

“The president’s memo is the original sin of the whole operation,” a former official told the Post.

But the White House is not on board with the leaking details that Miller masterminded Trump’s merciless foreign policy.

“President Trump’s counternarcotics policies come from President Trump himself,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “All senior administration officials work closely together to carry out the agenda President Trump was elected to implement, including eliminating the scourge of narco-terrorism that takes tens of thousands of American lives every year.”

But lawmakers have remained skeptical as to whether the boats even qualify as a narcoterrorist threat, considering the White House has been dropping bombs without investigating or interdicting the watercraft.

Their skepticism was rewarded Wednesday, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio revealed during a classified meeting that there was no intelligence indicating that fentanyl was coming out of Venezuela. Instead, the administration had learned the boats were carrying cocaine—bound for Europe, rather than America.

“That is a massive waste of national security resources and your taxpayer dollars,” said Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who attended the meeting.