Trump Uses Veto to Punish Tribe for Blocking Alligator Alcatraz

President Donald Trump has vetoed a bill that would expand the territory of a small Native American tribe in the Everglades because they didn’t support his “Alligator Alcatraz” plans.

“Despite seeking funding and special treatment from the Federal Government, the Miccosukee Tribe has actively sought to obstruct reasonable immigration policies that the American people decisively voted for when I was elected. My Administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding projects for special interests, especially those that are unaligned with my Administration’s policy of removing violent criminal illegal aliens from the country,” Trump wrote in a message to Congress Tuesday night.

“It is not the Federal Government’s responsibility to pay to fix problems in an area that the Tribe has never been authorized to occupy. For these reasons, I cannot support the Miccosukee Reserved Amendments Act.”

The Miccosukee Tribe was part of a lawsuit along with two environmental groups—Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity—that argued that the Trump administration and Florida state government hadn’t carried out the required environmental review for the construction of the detention center deep in the cherished Southern Florida wetlands.

Now, Trump is denying their effort to regain just a portion of the land that was taken from them in the First and Second Seminole Wars of the 19th century.

The Miccosukee weren’t the only ones hit with a spiteful veto from a most spiteful president. In Colorado, Trump shot down a massive clean water project that was years in the making because MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert refused to cave to his pressure to stay mum on the Epstein files. She voted for their release, and now 39 communities may have to go back to the drawing board for their clean water.

Border Patrol has been arresting U.S. citizens, according to the agency’s leader.

U.S. Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino told Fox News Tuesday that his underlings had in fact arrested American citizens, claiming that they had cuffed U.S. nationals for assaulting border patrol agents.

“As far as American citizens, the vast majority of American citizens, especially that the U.S. Border patrol has arrested, many of those citizens assaulted federal officers, assaulted border patrol agents, in the performance of our duties,” Bovino said. “Anyone that assaults a federal officer, you’re gonna go to jail.”

The Homeland Security Department released a memo in November claiming that assaults on DHS agents had risen by 1,150 percent since 2024. They blamed the supposed rise on the rhetoric of sanctuary city politicians, alleging that political opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda—such as condemning ICE and Border Patrol agents as “Nazis” and “slave patrols”—had inspired the unprecedented violence.

“Our law enforcement officers have had Molotov cocktails and rocks thrown at them, been shot at, had cars used as weapons against them, and been physically assaulted,” Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in the memo.

Meanwhile, the tactics utilized by ICE agents to arrest and detain the undocumented population have been nothing short of appalling. ICE agents have violently ripped families apart, beaten suspects, and even detained elected officials attempting to visit their facilities or escort immigrants to and from scheduled immigration court dates.

But the agents have also masked their faces and intentionally tried to hide their identities, making the government officials practically indiscernible from violent laypeople as they invade homes, hijack cars, or assault people on the street.

Bovino himself is no stranger to violent behavior. In late November, the Border Patrol chief was slammed by a U.S. district judge after he semantically dodged questions related to his and his agents’ excessive use of force against protesters in Chicago. At the time, Bovino split hairs about how many canisters of tear gas he threw into a crowd as well as other alleged misconduct by officers under his command during “Operation Midway Blitz.”

Colorado MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert is claiming that President Donald Trump killed a massive clean water project in her district as punishment for her voting to release the Epstein files, even after Trump pressed her not to. 

The Arkansas Valley Conduit was a project decades in the making that was supposed to grant safe drinking water to 39 communities across the region, and received bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress. Trump ended all of that on Tuesday. 

“My Administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding expensive and unreliable policies,” he said in a statement justifying his veto of the bill. “Ending the massive cost of taxpayer handouts and restoring fiscal sanity is vital to economic growth and the fiscal health of the Nation.”

Boebert was incensed. 

“President Trump decided to veto a completely non-controversial, bipartisan bill that passed both the House and Senate unanimously. Why? Because nothing says ‘America First’ like denying clean drinking water to 50,000 people in Southeast Colorado, many of whom enthusiastically voted for him in all three elections,” she wrote in a statement. “I thought the campaign was about lowering costs and cutting red tape. But hey, if this administration wants to make its legacy blocking projects that deliver water to rural Americans; that’s on them.”

“And I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability. Americans deserve leadership that puts people over politics,” she continued. 

Boebert is clearly alluding to Trump’s aforementioned phone call to demand that she remove her name from the petition to release the Epstein files.  

Boebert also argued that the veto would have been reasonable if it targeted more liberal voters in Colorado, but not people in her region who “overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in the last three elections.” 

“These are not the people that should be attacked,” she said in a video message. 

The bill’s unanimous passage—and the bipartisan disapproval around its veto—suggest that this fight may not be over. 

Three years after Virginia Giuffre left her job as Mar-a-Lago’s pool attendant to “work” for Jeffrey Epstein, another employee at the club spa issued an allegation that hampered the prodigious sex trafficker’s access to Donald Trump’s Palm Beach resort.

Epstein wasn’t actually a member, but Trump told his employees to treat him like one. The financier was a frequent client at the club’s spa, where his appointments were arranged by Ghislaine Maxwell, so much so that he was allowed house calls at his neighboring estate by the spa’s masseuses, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

That privilege came to a jarring end in 2003, when an 18-year-old beautician returned from one of the house visits complaining that Epstein had attempted to pressure her into sex.

Managers at the club spa then wrote a letter to Trump, urging him to ban Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. The letter was well received, and Trump told the spa management to “kick him out,” according to the Journal.

Prior to his death, pedophilic sex trafficker Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together on several occasions and were caught partying with underaged girls in New Jersey casinos. Epstein was invited to Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples in 1993, and in 2002, Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein was a “terrific guy.”

The same year that the beautician accused Epstein of coercing her, Trump participated in a 50th birthday book for Epstein, penning a letter in which he referred to the disgraced financier as his “pal” and waxed poetic about their shared “secret.”

Trump shocked the country in July when he admitted that he had thrown Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago when he became aware that Epstein was abducting the resort’s underage female employees, and that Trump knew Giuffre—one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers—was one of the “stolen” girls.

But it appears Trump’s “kick him out” directive only referred to the spa, as Epstein wasn’t formally banned from Mar-a-Lago until October 2007, after he reportedly acted inappropriately toward a club member’s daughter. That same month, Epstein’s account was listed as “closed” in Mar-a-Lago’s books.

Even still, a nixed membership did not mean that Epstein was totally absent from the club. Also in October 2007, an article from The New York Post reported that Epstein denied the Mar-a-Lago ban, claiming that he had been invited to an event that year.

Democrats have won big in Iowa, as they’ll send Renee Hardman to the state Senate with 71.5 percent of the vote, a whopping 27 points more than Kamala Harris won in the state by last year.

Hardman’s Tuesday night win also prevents Republicans from gaining a supermajority in the chamber. Hardman is the first Black woman elected to the Iowa state Senate.

A Democratic victory that large in a red state mirrors recent historic results elsewhere, and may indicate that voters may be fatigued or are just outright rejecting anything to do with President Donald Trump. Those results include Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill’s gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey. But a victory in a small, downballot race such as Hardman’s shows that disapproval of Trump and his administration may be hitting closer to home as the government fails to end endless wars and make the country more affordable.

Earlier this year, Democrats also won big in Erie County, Pennsylvania, which narrowly supported Trump in the 2024 election, and defeated a 36-year Republican incumbent in Virginia’s 66th state House district. Democrats in Georgia managed to win two statewide races for public service commissioner, their first nonfederal statewide wins since 2006.

And even in the deep Southern state of Mississippi, Democrats were able to break the supermajority in the state Senate by flipping three seats after 13 years, taking away Republicans’ ability to override the governor’s veto and easily propose constitutional amendments.

All that is to say that these results should have Trump very worried about how negatively Americans are feeling about his second term, even those who voted for him in 2024. If this holds, it could be a major issue for the GOP come 2026 midterms.

Detritus from one of the Caribbean boat strikes has washed up on the Colombian peninsula, and it’s not what the White House claimed.

The boats apparently wrecked in a November 6 strike arrived on Colombia’s Indigenous-governed Guajira Peninsula two days later with two mangled bodies and torched jerrycans. But at least one of the vessels also carried evidence of the drugs it was smuggling onboard, reported The New York Times: emptied packets of marijuana.

The Trump administration has justified its unfettered air strike campaign on the basis that small watercraft in the Caribbean were funnelling fentanyl into the U.S. To further legitimize the militaristic response—which so far has killed at least 107 people since early September—the president purported that the boats were run by “narcoterrorists” from Venezuela, and designated fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction.”

But marijuana, a drug synonymous with the “peace and love” movement of the 1960s, is about as far from a tool of war as you can get. The substance is already legal in the vast majority of the U.S.: 40 states permit its use for medicinal purposes, while 24 states allow residents to get high for any reason whatsoever.

Earlier this month, Trump himself signed an executive order to expedite the process of reclassifying weed from a Schedule I drug—which are considered to have high abuse rates with little to no medical application—to a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act.

Overall, there seems to be little evidence that the boats have been headed toward the United States. In a classified meeting with U.S. lawmakers two weeks ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio revealed that the Trump administration was aware the boats were bound for Europe rather than America. They also disclosed that the administration had no intelligence indicating that fentanyl was coming out of Venezuela, but rather that some of the boats were believed to be carrying cocaine.

Paul Ingrassia, the failed Trump nominee with a self-described “Nazi streak,” has been making enemies at the General Services Administration—where he crash landed after even Senate Republicans rejected his bid to head the Office of Special Counsel due to his leaked countless racist, bigoted messages.

“I don’t know what he is or is not, but no one cares for him,” one anonymous GSA staffer told Politico in a story published Tuesday, adding that Ingrassia hasn’t been given anything “meaningful” to do because “[GSA] leadership doesn’t really want him.”

“What are we? A halfway house for bigots who can’t find jobs anywhere else in this administration?” another staffer said, going on to mention how incredibly unqualified Ingrassia was compared to his predecessor, Russell “Rusty” McGranahan. “Rusty was well qualified and served the administration well. I just want the government to be staffed with experienced people who are taken seriously.”

The Trump administration, however, seems to think Ingrassia is just the man for the job.

“Paul Ingrassia is a well-regarded attorney who has provided outstanding service to President Trump and will continue to do so as GSA’s acting general counsel,” GSA spokesperson Marianne Copenhaver said. “The GSA has complete confidence in his ability to further both its mission and the president’s priorities.”

For the uninitiated: Ingrassia made headlines back in October for a series of deeply hateful statements he made in a group chat.

“No moulignon holidays.… From kwanza [sic] to mlk jr day to black history month to Juneteenth,” he wrote in one text, using an Italian slur for Black people in the beginning of the message. “Every single one needs to be eviscerated.”

“MLK Jr. was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs,” he said in another text. He also mentioned that he had a “bit of a Nazi streak” and to “never trust a chinaman or Indian. NEVER.”

Ingrassia was also accused of sexually harassing a coworker at the Department of Homeland Security.

This is the man the Trump administration deemed to be “well-regarded”—although it’s clear that his peers think otherwise.

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles might have revealed more than she ought to about the Epstein files.

The Vanity Fair profile on the president’s famed “ice maiden” has continued to haunt the administration weeks after its publication, in large part thanks to Wiles’s candid responses. Now, Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin have demanded answers regarding a particularly lurid detail that came out of the article: Wiles’s apparent familiarity with the contents of the Epstein files.

In a joint letter made public Tuesday, Whitehouse and Durbin questioned which components of the investigation she had reviewed, how she obtained the sensitive material, and “under what authority” she gained access to it.

The lawmakers asked Wiles a series of questions, requesting her responses by January 5.

“Had material in the file you reviewed been presented to a grand jury? When did you first gain access to ‘the Epstein file’ and what was the schedule of your review of it? For what purpose did you gain access to this information?” they inquired.

The duo also questioned if she had shared any of the information with Donald Trump, and asked her to explain what role she had in “any process related to the review, redaction, withholding, or release of material in the ‘Epstein file,’ including any processes involving the Department of Justice or Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

The wide-ranging profile on Wiles’s first year atop the Trump administration sent shockwaves through the political establishment earlier this month, and offered many Americans their first intimate glimpse into the inner machinations of Trump’s White House. Over the course of “many on-the-record conversations,” several of which took place after church on Sundays, documentary filmmaker and author Chris Whipple depicted a Cabinet structure that could not exist without Wiles and her unparalleled knack for translating the president’s agenda.

But her loose lips about her Cabinet coworkers have stirred up quite a bit of trouble in the workplace. Some of those comments include claiming that Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality,” and flagging that Vice President JD Vance’s shift into MAGAworld was opportunistic and “sort of political.”

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detained more than a hundred people in their Chicago “Midway Blitz” operation in September. But as it turns out, at least half of those people were kidnapped for no reason, as their charges were dropped. Only nine arrests resulted in pending felony charges.

The administration has claimed countless times that ICE agents were harassed, stalked, attacked, and abused by the various protesters—many of them American citizens—they detained during the Midway Blitz. But a Chicago Tribune story published found that these claims were flimsy at best, as was reflected in the numerous failed prosecutions.

Some citizens claimed they were mistreated in detainment, experiencing excessive force, facing false charges, and being driven around for hours in the back of a van or SUV before eventually getting dropped off at some random location such as a gas station with their charges dropped.

One man spent four days in jail before all charges against him were dropped. A Montessori school teaching assistant who survived several gunshots from Border Patrol agents had the felony case against her dismissed.

One detainee, 27-year-old accountant Ian Sampson, told the Tribune he was documenting a protest with his camera when he was detained for not listening to orders from agents to move back. He claimed the instructions were warbled and hard to hear.

During the protest Sampson was documenting, which took place at the ICE processing center in the Chicago suburb of Broadview, agents emerged to move the perimeter farther away from the west suburban facility. Their commands to the crowd to move back were unintelligible, several protesters allege.

“All of a sudden they were there, in your face,” Sampson said. “So I stepped back on the grass.… I tried to move out of the way and then they just grabbed me by my backpack, pulled me down and … I had four or five guys on top of me, putting a knee in my back, smashing my head into the ground.”

It’s apparent that the Trump administration sent militant immigration agents into one of the biggest cities in America to kidnap, beat, and abuse immigrants, citizens, or anyone expressing any kind of opposition to Donald Trump’s “blitz.” And it was almost all for nothing.

“The system isn’t designed to move at a speed like a blitz,” said Christopher Parente, a former federal prosecutor and current lawyer for one of the detained protesters. “The whole point of federal prosecutions, and why they win so many cases, is because they do all the work before they charge and then once they charge a case, it’s rock solid. Here, they sort of flipped that on its head and they charge first, and investigate later. And I think that’s why you’ve seen all the problems you’re seeing.”

Israel is about to break tradition for its highest civilian honor with the 2026, non-Israeli recipient: Donald Trump.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Monday that the award would be given to the U.S. president, marking the second time that the prize has gone to a non-citizen for the first time in its 72-year history.

Trump will receive the award under its newly invented peace category.

“President Trump has broken so many conventions to the surprise of people, and then they figure out, ‘Oh, well—maybe, you know, he was right after all,’” Netanyahu told reporters. “So we decided to break a convention too or create a new one, and that is to award the Israel Prize.”

Trump remarked that the award was “really surprising and very much appreciated.”

The last non-Israeli to receive the honor was Indian conductor Zubin Mehta, who was named in 1991 for his work directing the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra over the span of five decades.

It’s the second instance in which a foreign entity has attempted to cozy up to Trump with a shiny medal masquerading as a respectable peace prize after Trump begged, pleaded, and failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize in October. Earlier this month, FIFA—the global soccer organization—named Trump as the inaugural recipient of their own newly minted FIFA Peace Prize.

Trump has coveted the Nobel Peace Prize for years, going so far as to lie about solving nonexistent international conflicts and phoning Norwegian officials this past summer in lame efforts to snag the title. (Norway’s government has no influence on decisions made by the committee.)

Trump has complained for years that his name has not yet been added to the ranks of the prize’s highly lauded recipients, who span some of the greatest figures of the last century, including Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, and Malala Yousafzai.

Part of the reason for his desire could be that Trump’s supposed political nemesis, former President Barack Obama, received the award in 2009 for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Three other U.S. presidents have also won a Nobel Peace Prize.