Steve Bannon Turns on Trump Over His Threat to Iran

The president is apparently taking foreign policy lessons from one of his political nemeses, Hillary Clinton—at least, that’s what one of his biggest first-term acolytes seems to believe.

Trump’s former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon accused his old boss of rifling through Hillary Clinton’s playbook, during a Friday episode of his War Room podcast. Bannon claimed that the president’s recent threats of violence against Iran were practically identical to State Department operations during the Obama administration.

“Aren’t people teasing right now that Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton must’ve somehow gotten invited to the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve celebration, because the president coming out today saying, ‘We’re locked and loaded’—isn’t that straight from the Samantha Powers and Hillary Clinton playbook?” said Bannon.

Trump warned Iranian officials Friday morning that the United States was ready to defend locals protesting the country’s economic conditions, posting on Truth Social that if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue.”

At least three people have been reported dead and 17 injured as Iranian security forces clashed with crowds of protesters in the western province of Lorestan. Still more deaths have been reported in several other cities around the country.

“We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” Trump added.

It was not clear if Trump actually intended to follow through on the warning or had any plans in place to do so, but Iran—which backs forces in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen—did not take the specter of confrontation lightly.

Responding to Trump’s comments on X, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, wrote that “Trump should know that U.S. interference in this internal matter would mean destabilizing the entire region and destroying America’s interests.

“The American people should know—Trump started this adventurism,” Larijani noted. “They should be mindful of their soldiers’ safety.”

But Trump is no stranger to attacking Iran. In June, the White House joined Israel in striking three of the country’s nuclear facilities. That attack, conducted without the express approval of Congress, damaged facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan.

The powers that be at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are planning on a massive recruitment drive in 2026—but the people they’re hoping to attract aren’t your typical feds.

The deportation agency has earmarked $100 million for online advertisements over the next year, hoping to draw gun rights advocates and military enthusiasts into its ranks, according to an internal document obtained by The Washington Post.

The agency’s so-called “wartime recruitment” strategy involves a massive hiring spree that aims to take on as many as 10,000 new officers across the country. To do so, ICE is coordinating a sprawling social media campaign to target people who have “attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear,” reported the Post.

Some of that cash will be directed toward advertisements on Snapchat and the conservative YouTube dupe Rumble, while other portions of the budget will be dosed out for live marketing via livestreamers and right-wing influencers.

The recruitment blitz will also utilize contemporary software such as geofencing in order to beam ICE advertisements directly to devices in certain areas, such as those near military bases, Nascar races, college campuses, or gun and trade shows, according to the 30-page document.

The plan is a far cry from ICE’s typical recruitment methods, which have historically depended on recruitment from local police offices and sheriff departments to locate experienced talent with potential to grow at the federal level. Former ICE director Sarah Saldaña, who spearheaded the department during Barack Obama’s presidency, warned Newsmax that ICE’s latest recruitment tactics could invite applicants who bring “a certain aggressiveness that may not be necessary in 85 percent” of the job.

It’s unclear just how much of the $100 million allotment ICE has already spent, but the Department of Homeland Security has awarded nearly $40 million to a couple of marketing firms to support the public affairs office, according to federal awards data reviewed by the Post.

Regardless, ICE still has plenty of dough to play around with: Congress virtually tripled the agency’s budget this summer when it passed Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, jumping its appropriations from roughly $9.6 billion to $30 billion. (Meanwhile, the legislature also took a hatchet to Medicaid, gutting billions of dollars from the critical public health care program.)

Just one day after a bombshell Wall Street Journal story on the president’s growing signs of aging, Donald Trump went on a bizarre posting spree about dead birds and wind turbines.

Throughout Friday, Trump posted several different photos on Truth Social of dead birds near turbines.

In one photo captioned “Eagles going down!,” he confused a red kite, a bird of prey, for America’s national bird.

Two days earlier, Trump mixed up a falcon and an eagle in another post complaining about windmills.

Trump’s hatred of wind turbines goes back at least a decade, but the incessant photos of dead birds this week are on another level. Perhaps they can be explained by the Journal’s recent story documenting his rapid physical and mental decline. The story, which Trump is already fuming over, highlighted things like Trump’s requests for shorter and fewer meetings, his belief that a high dosage of aspirin will give him “nice, thin blood,” his difficulty hearing, and how easy is it for him to get cuts on his hand due to his thin skin.

“The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED’ (Meaning, was correct on 100 percent of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take,” Trump wrote Friday morning, before he went on to post about the dead birds.

Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot admitted on Friday that it has been posting sexualized images of children on X, blaming “lapses in safeguard” for the content.

“We’ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them—[child sexual abuse material] is illegal and prohibited,” the chatbot posted, adding that “a company could face criminal or civil penalties if it knowingly facilitates or fails to prevent AI-generated CSAM after being alerted.”

Grok estimated that the victims in the explicit content it generated could have been as young as 1 to 2 years old.

In addition to endangering children, the chatbot has also been posting hundreds of sexually explicit photos of women without their consent. French authorities, who are already leading a criminal investigation of X, have said they investigate the sexually explicit deepfakes, as well.

The Department of Defense has begun using Grok, which has in the past also spread conspiracy theories about “white genocide,” posted antisemitic screeds, and called itself “MechaHitler.”

Musk, for his part, doesn’t seem to have much to say on his chatbot’s recent content, instead posting rants about the “end of Western civilization” and the “Somalification of America” as outrage grew.

Conservatives are already fuming about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plans to bring the Big Apple together.

Right-wing commentators blasted Mamdani’s inaugural pledge to bring the “warmth of collectivism” to city residents Thursday, claiming that the mayor’s seemingly garden-variety optimism was tantamount to communism.

“The quiet part is no longer said out loud. New York City embraces communism,” posted Steve Guest, a former staffer for Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

New York Post correspondent Lydia Moynihan snarked that Mamdani’s idea sounded “rather chilling,” while Trump nominee Mark Walker claimed that Mamdani’s comments were “right out of Joseph Stalin’s 1928 play book.”

But communism and collectivism are far from the same thing. Whereas communism is a specific political ideology rooted in Marxism, collectivism is more of a broad principle that elevates the well-being of a society over that of a few individuals. Exactly why MAGA world would be opposed to that isn’t exactly clear—especially since their own leader seems to be just as charmed by Mamdani as New York City is.

The populist politicos were remarkably buddy-buddy during their first encounter in November, despite Trump’s repeated browbeating of the 34-year-old political underdog. Over many moons, Trump accused the local lawmaker of being a “communist” and living in the country “illegally,” threatened Mamdani’s arrest, and even pledged to send the National Guard to New York City if and when Mamdani entered Gracie Mansion.

However, a quick Oval Office encounter at the tail end of November seemed to completely change Trump’s opinion of the democratic socialist, and Trump effusively lauded Mamdani’s stances on crime and affordability. What buttered him up, Trump said at the time, was the fact that Mamdani was “different than your average candidate.”

“I think you really have a chance to make it,” Trump said.

Trump’s confidence in Mamdani has not spread throughout his party. Hours before Mamdani was sworn in at midnight on New Year’s Day, the New York Post reported he would swear in on two family Qurans—the first mayor to use the religious text in the city’s history.

Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville responded by proclaiming, “The enemy is inside the gates.”

Donald Trump’s motorcade stopped at a random strip mall in Florida Friday morning so that the president could purchase marble and onyx for his increasingly expensive White House ballroom.

According to White House pool reports, “The motorcade arrived at a shopping center in Lake Worth, Florida at 9:46 AM.... The pool is told that POTUS is shopping at Arc Stone & Tile.” A White House official said that the president “is purchasing lake and onyx, at his own expense, for the White House ballroom.”

It’s perhaps no surprise that Trump wants marble in his White House ballroom. Trump first estimated the ballroom would cost only $200 million, but the president now claims the cost has skyrocketed to double that.

Trump has brought his longtime obsession with marble to his second term, pushing for it to appear just about everywhere. He urged the Federal Reserve building to be renovated with a marble facade, even as the architects wanted glass walls to indicate the agency’s transparency—and has since tried to use the renovation’s high cost as grounds to remove Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

More recently, he redid the bathroom in the White House Lincoln Suite entirely in marble, and he has proposed marble armrests for the Kennedy Center, claiming it would be “unlike anything ever done or seen before!” (Perhaps there’s a reason no one wants marble armrests.)

It remains to be seen whether Trump will indeed pay for the marble himself—or if he’ll add it to the taxpayers’ bill.

A new year, a new lie: The White House is apparently banking that the American public won’t remember what Donald Trump said about his own health just three months ago.

Trump admitted several times on camera to receiving an MRI in October—as did his physician, who released a report in December officially declaring that Trump’s MRI came back “perfectly normal.” Despite that, Trump now claims that he didn’t get an MRI after all, and that the medical assessment instead amounted to a CT scan.

“It wasn’t an MRI,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal in a story published Thursday. “It was less than that. It was a scan.”

The White House has never offered a reason as to why Trump received scans to begin with, but there are some key differences between the two medical assessments. An MRI utilizes magnetic fields to assess tumors, joint injuries, or heart conditions. A CT scan, in comparison, is much faster as it uses X-rays to detect illness and injuries such as cancer, bone fractures, internal bleeding, or lung problems.

The president was remarkably cagey at the time about the scans he received at Walter Reed National Military Medical in early October. At first, he claimed his visit was little more than a “routine yearly checkup,” even though he already received his annual physical just six months prior.

There are also some unexplained discrepancies in the timeline of Trump’s visit to the military hospital. Former White House physician Jeffrey Kuhlman, who served under former President Barack Obama, suggested that Trump could have gotten more work done than was initially revealed, pointing to just how much time he was spending at Walter Reed.

Trump is the oldest person to be elected president. In an interview with The Hill in November, Kuhlman noted that while it wouldn’t be unusual for a 79-year-old to require a second checkup, it was odd that Trump’s supposedly routine tests and reported scans amounted to a four-hour visit at the hospital, according to his schedule.

Trump’s health has been a topic of concern since he was on the campaign trail, when reports circulated that he couldn’t remember the contents of the cognitive exams he claimed to ace. Since then, the president has been spotted with odd discolorations on his hand, routinely appears discombobulated and lethargic during critical meetings with world leaders, and had a drooping expression during 9/11 ceremonies in September that onlookers suggested could be a sign of a stroke.

President Donald Trump has rung in 2026 by threatening war on two fronts—and picking a bizarre fight with American actor George Clooney and his wife, Amal.

Trump on New Year’s Eve trashed the actor’s decision to leave the United States and obtain French citizenship with his wife and two children. Calling the couple “two of the worst political prognosticators of all time,” Trump went on a long Truth Social rant attacking their move.

“Good News! George and Amal Clooney, two of the worst political prognosticators of all time, have officially become citizens of France which is, sadly, in the midst of a major crime problem because of their absolutely horrendous handling of immigration, much like we had under Sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump wrote. “Remember when Clooney, after the now infamous debate, dumped Joe during a fundraiser, only to go onto the side of another stellar candidate, Jamala(K!), who is now fighting it out with the worst governor in the Country, including Tim Waltz, Gavin Newscum, for who is going to lead the Democrats to their future defeat. Clooney got more publicity for politics than he did for his very few, and totally mediocre, movies. He wasn’t a movie star at all, he was just an average guy who complained, constantly, about common sense in politics.”

In a statement later Thursday to The Hollywood Reporter, Clooney hit back: “I totally agree with the current president. We have to make America great again. We’ll start in November.”

Trump’s Truth Social rant appears to have been a reaction to Clooney’s Tuesday cover story with Variety magazine, in which the actor expressed alarm over Trump’s America and the way news outlets like CBS have caved to the president’s MAGA agenda.

But if picking an inane fight with a popular American actor wasn’t enough for Trump, he has also spent his initial days of the new year threatening more intervention in two different countries.

In a 3 a.m. post on Friday, Trump threatened to intervene in Iran if the regime injured or killed any protesters, warning that the United States is “locked and loaded and ready to go.”

And Trump’s standoff with Venezuela continues. On New Year’s Eve, the U.S. military announced five more strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats. According to the Trump administration’s own numbers, this week’s attacks bring the total of publicly known strikes to 35, with at least 115 people killed.

A damning new report on Donald Trump’s health has stirred the American public, and even roused the president himself.

Practically nothing irks Trump more than stories about his age and his natural deterioration. But a Wall Street Journal article published Thursday—which includes an interview with Trump—revealed several new details about the president’s routine, depicting a 79-year-old man who has little well-informed consideration for the longevity of his body.

The piece received immediate backlash from Trump, who insisted on Truth Social shortly after its publication that he’s in “perfect health.”

“The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED’ (Meaning, was correct on 100 percent of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take,” Trump posted.

Trump has an oddball history with reportedly “acing” cognitive exams. During the 2024 presidential election, Trump took several—but his recollections of the tests, which sometimes included fabricating questions that the tests’ authors claimed were never on the exams, called into question whether he had actually taken them at all.

“P.S., I strongly believe that anyone running for President, or Vice President, should be mandatorily forced to take a strong, meaningful, and proven Cognitive Examination,” he continued. “Our great Country cannot be run by ‘STUPID’ or INCOMPETENT PEOPLE! President DJT.”

But for all his blather, Trump does not appear to be in pristine condition. According to the Journal report, Trump is taking more aspirin than his doctors recommend, apparently under the belief that “nice, thin blood” is better than “thick blood.”

He also brushed off concerns that the odd discolorations that routinely appear on his hands were anything to be alarmed by, though his explanation for the spots only added more intrigue, as he claimed that they were the results of getting “whacked again by someone.” (CNN’s medical analyst noted that Trump’s outsize aspirin use could actually be behind the bruising, since too much aspirin intake can cause a person to bleed excessively.)

Trump denied the fact that he has repeatedly fallen asleep during critical public appearances—something that practically became a fixture of his first year back in office as he was caught dozing off roughly a dozen times. It’s happened during Cabinet meetings, in the middle of bombastic military parades, while meeting leaders of critical allies, and even during the pope’s funeral.

“Sometimes they’ll take a picture of me blinking, blinking, and they’ll catch me with the blink,” Trump told the Journal.

But a final depiction of the president—from one of his supposed allies, RNC Chair Joe Gruters—really hammered home that the 79-year-old has been anything but delicate with his body, despite ongoing public concerns over his health.

Gruters claimed that he was “shocked” to see the scale at which Trump wolfs down McDonalds, including one instance in which he saw Trump consume “french fries, a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburger, a Big Mac and a Filet-O-Fish” in one sitting.

President Donald Trump threatened to intervene in Iran if the regime hurts protesters, warning the United States is “locked and loaded.”

“If Iran shots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at 2:58 a.m. on Friday morning. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Iran entered its sixth day of consecutive protests on Friday, as the people are fed up with the regime, soaring inflation, and the collapse of the Iranian rial. At least seven people have been killed so far, according to the AP.

Iranian officials have already responded to Trump’s threats by implying that the protests in recent days have been fomented by the United States—despite the protests’ widespread support—and warning the Trump administration about next steps.

“With the statements by Israeli officials and @realDonaldTrump, what has been going on behind the scenes is now clear,” Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, wrote on X. “Trump should know that U.S. interference in this internal matter would mean destabilizing the entire region and destroying America’s interests. The American people should know—Trump started this adventurism. They should be mindful of their soldiers’ safety.”

Iran’s foreign minister, meanwhile, called Trump’s statement a “flagrant violation” of international law.

It’s impossible to root for anyone in this standoff, other than the people of Iran, but Trump threatening another international conflict—while we also appear to be walking into war with Venezuela—is certainly at least some cause for concern.