Marco Rubio Stands by Cuts That Killed Hundreds of Thousands of People

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he’s proud of shuttering the U.S. Agency of International Development—but he really shouldn’t be.

During a press conference Friday, Rubio was asked whether he stood by his false claim earlier this year that the Trump administration’s massive cuts to the USAID haven’t killed anyone. Rather than fess up, he doubled down on his deadly decision.

“I’m very proud of the changes we’ve made on foreign aid,” Rubio said. The secretary claimed that the United States would enter into more than 50 “health compacts” with foreign countries by the end of 2025, in order to cut out the middleman nongovernmental organizations that took a share of the assistance.

Under these health compacts, foreign countries would not only receive assistance but would be “provided a plan to build up their own self-sustainment,” Rubio said.

The State Department has only recently begun to roll out its health compacts with foreign countries, deals that represent a major reduction in U.S. health spending in each of these nations. So far, only eight health compacts have been announced, all with the governments of sub-Saharan countries: Cameroon, Kenya, Lesotho, Uganda, Mozambique, Eswatini, Rwanda, and Liberia.

How the secretary plans to seal the deal on 42 more deals by December 31 is unclear.

But Rubio’s sweeping cuts have already taken a devastating toll on communities across the world. By November 2025, funding cuts to USAID assistance aimed at combating infectious diseases had already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children, according to Atul Gawande, a former assistant administrator for global health at USAID during the Biden administration.

The Center for Global Development calculated that the number of lives potentially lost from cutting current spending could be anywhere from 500,000 to one million. Cuts to future spending could potentially lead to between 670,000 and 1.6 million lives lost.

Representative Sarah McBride—the first out transgender member of Congress—had to lobby Republicans to strike down an anti-trans bill because she knew her Democratic colleagues would abandon her.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted 216–211 to pass MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s legislation to criminalize gender-affirming care like puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgical care for patients under 18, subjecting medical providers to up to 10 years in prison. The legislation would also give parents criminal liability. Three Democrats—Texas Representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, along with North Carolina Representative Don Davis—were expected to vote with Republicans on the bill (and did). So McBride reached out to her right.

“We’re most interested in the caucus, right?” Democratic Representative Becca Balint, co-chair of the Equality Caucus, told NOTUS. “But we also suspected we might lose some Democrats, which is why Sarah was like, ‘Look, I’ll pick up votes wherever I can.’ She will talk to anyone.”

Republican Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Lawler, Mike Kennedy, and Gabe Evans all voted with McBride and the rest of the Democratic Party against the bill.

While McBride did not detail her discussions with these representatives, this surprising moment of bipartisanship displays the rifts and inconsistencies within both parties on the issues of transgender rights and particularly gender-affirming care.

The president genuinely could not wait to plaster his name on the Kennedy Center.

The newly renamed Trump-Kennedy Center received some new signage Friday, hours after the national cultural center’s board voted to add “Donald Trump” to the institute’s title.

Workers were spotted hanging the large metal letters Friday morning, spelling out the Kennedy Center’s new name: “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office Thursday, Trump said he was “surprised” to hear that the board—which he handpicked and personally appointed earlier this year—had approved the name change.

“This was brought up by one of the very distinguished board members, and they voted on it, and there’s a lot of board members, and they voted unanimously. So I was very honored by it,” Trump said.

But he couldn’t have been too surprised: Trump pitched the idea himself, publicly, in August, writing on Truth Social that there were “GREAT Nominees for the TRUMP/KENNEDY CENTER, whoops, I mean, KENNEDY CENTER.”

But questions still abound as to the legality of the center’s sudden name change, as the original name was enshrined in law by the presidential administrations that oversaw the project’s construction and development.

“It can no sooner be renamed than can someone rename the Lincoln Memorial, no matter what anyone says,” said former Representative Joseph Kennedy III, the grandnephew of the deceased president.

Legal experts who spoke with NBC News earlier this year argued that, in order to change the name, Congress would need to pass a new law—none of which happened before Trump slapped his name on the side of the iconic institution.

A coalition of Democratic lawmakers serving as ex-officio members of the Kennedy Center board pledged to hold the White House accountable.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, however, was not so clear on the law, informing reporters Thursday that he would “look at” whether the name change legitimately required legislation.

“I’m not familiar with the process of how this is done,” Thune said. “There’s a question of whether or not it’s in law. Is it statutory? Do we have to change the law to do these sorts of things? And I’m sure we’ll get all the answers to that in due time.”

While Trump’s attention has been fixated on vanity projects, he’s dragged his feet on real problems that are genuinely plaguing the country: Unemployment has reached the highest levels since the pandemic, the agriculture industry is on the fritz thanks to Trump’s inconsistent tariff policies, and the cost of goods has continued to skyrocket.

An AP-NORC poll conducted earlier this month found that roughly half of polled Americans have cut back on nonessentials or big purchases in order to afford their needs.

Top Democrats in Congress are threatening to sue after the Justice Department announced that it would not meet the Friday deadline to release all Epstein files.

Representatives Robert Garcia and Jamie Raskin, the ranking members of the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees, respectively, said in a statement, “We are now examining all legal options in the face of this violation of federal law.”

“The survivors of this nightmare deserve justice, the co-conspirators must be held accountable, and the American people deserve complete transparency from DOJ,” their statement read.

The government is required to release the files in full Friday, but Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News in the morning that there would only be a partial release, with more coming in the following weeks.

“So today is the 30 days, when I expect that we’re going to release several hundred thousand documents today. And those documents will come in all different forms, photographs and other materials associated with all of the investigations into Mr. Epstein,” Blanche said, adding, “So I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks. So today several hundred thousand and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more.

“The most important thing that the attorney general has talked about, that [FBI] Director [Kash] Patel has talked about, is that we protect victims. So what we’re doing is we are looking at every single piece of paper that we are going to produce, making sure that every victim, their name, their identity, their story—to the extent it needs to be protected, is completely protected,” Blanche continued.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that “there will be serious legal and political consequences” to the DOJ’s decision. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden said, “Anything short of a full release today is a violation of the law and a continuation of this administration’s coverup on behalf of a bunch of pedophiles and sex traffickers.”

It’s not surprising that the Trump administration would drag its feet on the release, considering that what has already been made public has been so damaging to President Trump. But the government has supposedly spent more than $1 million supposedly redacting national security and victim-related information from the files over the last several months, undercutting the excuses officials are making.

FBI Director Kash Patel continues to come under fire as it appears that a Reddit user did a better job of getting leads on the Brown University shooter than the entire FBI. 

After being unable to find the shooter who killed two students and injured nine at Brown University, as well as the suspect in the killing of an MIT professor in his home on Monday, local police were directed to a post in the r/Providence subreddit, an embarrassing indictment of their own investigative skills. 

The poster, known just as “John,” used his encounter with the suspect—48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente—to “blow the case wide open,” according to Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha. 

“I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental. That was the car he was driving. It was parked in front of the little shack behind the Rhode Island Historical Society on the Cooke St side. I know because he used his key fob to open the car, approached it and then something prompted him to back away,” John posted on Reddit Wednesday night. “When he backed away he relocked the car. I found that odd so when he circled the block I approached the car and that is when I saw the Florida plates. He was parked in the section between the gate of the RIHS and the corner of Cooke and George St.”

John later told police that he ran into Neves-Valente in the bathroom about two hours before the first shots were heard. He said that he and Neves-Valente made eye contact, and that the suspect wasn’t wearing the right clothing for the Rhode Island cold. He asked him why he had been circling the block, to which Neves-Valente replied, “Why are you harassing me?” John then left him alone. Neves-Valente was later found dead in a New Hampshire storage unit with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. 

So Kash Patel’s mighty FBI couldn’t find someone who walked onto one of the country’s most prestigious universities in the middle of the day, and the primary reason local police were even able to find him was because of a witness who happened to post about it on Reddit. And they found him dead, leaving no room for further questioning or new information. This is pretty pitiful for an FBI director who talked such a big game all year. 

“It’s hilarious that a Reddit user cracked the Brown/MIT case before Kash Patel’s FBI and shows how incompetent they are,” one large X account posted. 

“While Kash Patel is making podcast appearances with his girlfriend, a campus custodian and Reddit users are doing his job,” said another, referring to one of the other witnesses. 

Patel celebrated apprehending a person of interest too soon, only to let them free, and then have the FBI wander around until local police found the suspect days later because the internet helped him—which is reminiscent of the failed manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter. That suspect was only apprehended because his own father turned him in. 

To continuously fail at your job while going on podcasts with your girlfriend, being generally angry and antagonistic with Congress and the media, and presenting as some warrior strongman is just par for the course for Patel and the FBI. Lots of bark, no bite. Just a few lucky breaks.  

A Trump-appointed judge was so upset with the living conditions in which ICE detained an immigrant in Long Island, New York, that he threatened to hold the government in contempt.

U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, issued a 24-page ruling Thursday vehemently castigating the Department of Homeland Security for refusing to provide photos of a holding room that illegally held a noncitizen for multiple nights, calling it “putrid and cramped.”

“ICE held them, day after day, without access to bunks, bedding, soap, showers, toothbrushes or clean clothes,” Brown stated in his ruling. “The space is unheated or poorly heated at night, while the outside temperature dropped to as low as 21 degrees.... To the extent they could sleep, they did so, crammed on the filthy floor, while the lights blared 24 hours a day.

“After nearly 35 years of experience with federal law enforcement in this judicial district, encompassing service as a prosecutor and a judge, I have never encountered anything like this,” Brown wrote.

Erron Anthony Clarke, the noncitizen in question, filed a habeas corpus petition with the court after being detained by ICE on December 5. Clarke had entered the U.S. legally on an H-2B work visa in 2018, but ended up overstaying the visa before marrying a U.S. citizen in 2023. He applied for permanent residency this year, but was detained earlier this month and thrown into a small cell with eight other men.

The cell, located in the federal courthouse in Central Islip, New York, had an open toilet and was only “designed to briefly detain a single individual,” Brown wrote, noting that Clarke was held in the crowded cell long beyond ICE’s own internal standards allow. Brown ruled on December 11 that Clarke’s detention violated due process and ordered him released.

Clarke’s ordeal exposed something bigger in Brown’s eyes, particularly “ICE’s horrendous detention practices.”

“This case implicates something more,” Brown said. “There is evidence that the conditions of the detention are substandard, abhorrent and likely unlawful.”

But when Brown asked ICE and DHS for a timeline of Clarke’s location during his detention, and for photos of his holding cell, the government gave “evasive and demonstrably false” information on Clarke’s whereabouts and refused to hand over photographs. The timeline Brown received, for example, claimed that the government moved Clarke between facilities in eight minutes, despite them being separated by about a 35-minute drive.

“These misstatements of fact serve to undermine the information presented and the reliability of the records maintained by ICE,” Brown wrote in his ruling, giving the government until December 30 to argue against being held in contempt.

It’s telling that the White House is going so far in its extreme, and probably unlawful, immigration enforcement that even a judge Trump chose is ruling against the administration. The story of DHS, ICE, Border Patrol, and other federal agencies in Trump’s second term is that of moral bankruptcy, violating laws and basic human rights to enact a racist immigration policy.

The political party that has historically pitched itself as a proponent of “states’ rights” is now advocating for a mass federal seizure of state land.

Speaking with Newsmax on Friday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested that the next course of action to curb immigration across the southern U.S. border should involve transferring “strips” of California to the federal government.

“We have an opportunity to take a strip of land right along the border, transfer it to the military for a three-year period. Which then, if someone crosses into our country and steps on that, they’re stepping on a military installation,” Burgum said. “That gives our troops that are down there working to secure that border more authorities about detaining people. If they step on that land, it helps to improve the security.”

It’s an escalation of a plan that the White House enacted earlier this year, when it took a  60-foot-wide strip of federal land across three states and turned the entire region into a “military installation.” Doing so effectively allowed Donald Trump to sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, circumventing Congress to wield the military for border control.

The military base designation was supposed to expand the troops’ authority, granting them the ability to “temporarily detain trespassers” and to “conduct cursory searches of trespassers … to ensure the safety of U.S. service members and Department of Defense (DoD) property.”

But even that effort was unsuccessful. In May, a federal judge dismissed charges against nearly 100 immigrants that the administration claimed had entered the “national defense” zone, determining that the government had failed to prove the immigrants were aware they were entering a restricted military area.

Seizing land in California could prove to be an even bigger catastrophe. In the same interview, Burgum—the former governor of North Dakota—suggested that the best location to usurp state land would be “near the Pacific,” on the basis that the region is “an area of high traffic.”

Not even Fox Business can pretend like President Donald Trump isn’t wrecking the economy.

Fox Business anchors Lauren Simonetti and Stuart Varney reported Friday that a University of Michigan survey found that an index of consumer sentiment had sunk even further since mid-December.

There had been a “surprise drop” in consumer sentiment to 52.9 percent confidence in the economy, Simonetti said. That’s down from 53.3 percent just slightly earlier this month, CNBC reported separately.

“Consumers are just worried about the price of things and long-run inflation expectations as well,” Simonetti added.

“But with rather these dull numbers, the market seems to like it. Perhaps implying that we’ll get more Fed rate cuts,” Varney noted.

“The weakness, I think, is attractive. Bad news is actually good news for the market, maybe.”

While it may be good for the market in the short term, consumer confidence is an accurate means of understanding the current economic situation and consumers’ willingness to spend, borrow, or invest. It can take several months before low consumer confidence is fully realized.

In December 2024, before Trump ever imposed his slate of disastrous economic policies, such as tariff wars and mass deportations, Michigan’s consumer sentiment index had been 74 percent, indicating a nearly 30 percent plummet year over year.

And it gets worse.

The survey’s rating of the “current economic conditions” was only 50.4 percent, down from 51.1 in November. CNBC reported that this was “a new all-time low” for the study going all the way back to the 1970s. In December, the rating had been 75.1, showing a nearly 33 percent drop year over year.

A livestream of a bearded man who goes by “Real Matt Money” inexplicably took over the White House home page on Thursday night, leading the public to ask if the page had been hacked or if the Trump administration was getting financial advice from a self-described “shepherd for individual investors.”

As Bloomberg reported, the livestream appeared and disappeared on the White House website in about an hour.

Real Money Matt seemed to be just as surprised as the rest of us.

“If I had known I would be live for the WORLD to see, I likely would have had a different message than personal finance,” he wrote Friday on X. “Let me meet the @POTUS.”

While Matt took it in stride, the randomness of his live appearance on the White House website does lend itself to questions regarding just how serious the Trump administration is about security, especially since it brought us the Signalgate scandal just one month in.

The White House has yet to publicly comment.

The more details that emerge about Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, the clearer it is that the two shared a wildly unconventional—and creepy—relationship.

Hours after The New York Times reported Thursday that Epstein and Trump bonded over “trophy hunting,” investigative reporter Nicholas Confessore told MS NOW that Epstein frequently allowed his friends and associates to listen in on private phone calls where he and Trump shared details of their “sexual conquests.”

“So we spoke to several former assistants and employees of Jeffrey Epstein’s,” Confessore said. “And he had a habit of putting Donald Trump and other famous friends on the phone. It was partly a power play and partly a way that he groomed people. ‘See how powerful I am. I can put this person on the phone. I can get them on the phone, I can put them on speaker. We’re friends. That’s how powerful I am.’

“It was a way that he groomed people and he would put Donald Trump on the phone. They would talk about sex,” he added.

Trump has vehemently denied this year that he had any sort of meaningful connection to the deceased child sex trafficker, but that wasn’t always the case. Over the last couple of decades, Trump has switched his tune on Epstein several times. In 2002, Trump told New York magazine that Epstein was a “terrific guy.” He wrote a repugnant and allusory letter to Epstein for the sex trafficker’s 50th birthday. They were spotted socializing together, with young women many times, and even ended up living in the same Florida neighborhood.

But since ascending to the forefront of American power, Trump has claimed that he had “no relationship” with Epstein, pitching—despite troves of evidence to the contrary—that he was “not a fan of his.”

People around the pair of socialites, however, were under the impression that Epstein and Trump were each other’s closest friends, and Epstein reportedly believed it too.

“I think that Jeffrey Epstein thought he was Donald Trump’s closest friend for a period,” Confessore said. “They spent a lot of time talking on the phone about women and sexual conquests. They spent time at Trump Tower or over at Jeffrey Epstein’s offices nearby on Madison Avenue. They flew on each other’s planes, and they partied together a lot. And a lot of parties with women, people who are younger than they are.”

The phone calls were an instance of Epstein using Trump, wielding the real estate magnate’s name to advance his own social standing and access, according to Confessore.

Trump has not been charged with any crimes related to Epstein or his longtime associate and sex-trafficking partner, Ghislaine Maxwell.

But the country is on the precipice of knowing just about everything there is to know about the pair’s scandalous relationship. The administration is preparing to release the totality of the Epstein files Friday, as required by a law passed by Congress last month.

So far, the administration has already attempted to waylay public expectations that the files will be exposed to the full breadth of the document load, with FBI Director Kash Patel claiming that his agency is doing everything it can to release the portions of the files that are “lawful,” despite the fact that Congress mandated their entire release.