Why the Hell Is Trump “Joking” About Canceling Elections?

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt snapped Thursday at a reporter who didn’t buy her attempt to dismiss President Donald Trump’s repeated mentions of canceling elections.

During a White House press briefing, a reporter asked Leavitt why the president kept mentioning canceling elections. Trump had pointed out while speaking to Reuters that presidents never do well in the midterm elections, and bragged that because his administration has already accomplished so much, maybe the democratic process wasn’t necessary at all.

“When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election,” Trump said. The president had made a similar remark while speaking to Republicans at the Kennedy Center last week.

“The president was simply joking,” Leavitt said. “He was saying, ‘We’re doing such a great job, we’re doing everything American people thought, maybe we should just keep rolling.’ But he was speaking facetiously.”

The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg posed a follow-up. “Are you saying the president finds the idea of cancelling elections funny?”

“Andrew, were you in the room? No you weren’t. I was in the room, I heard the conversation. And only someone like you would take that so seriously, and pose that in a question in that way,” Leavitt replied.

But Trump’s repeated threats to cancel essential democratic processes get more real all the time, as Democrats continue to gain momentum ahead of the midterm elections. Earlier Thursday, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which some have speculated he could use to seize control of the states—and even suspend elections.

NATO is rallying to protect Greenland from the United States.

Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden have all confirmed plans to deploy military personnel to Greenland, after diplomatic talks with the United States this week ended in disaster, CNBC reported Thursday.* 

French President Emmanuel Macron announced on X Wednesday that the French military would “participate in the joint exercises” organized by Denmark in Greenland called Operation Arctic Endurance. The BBC reported that senior French diplomat Olivier Poivre d’Arvor confirmed that initial deployment of  just 15 service members was intended to “show the U.S. that NATO is present.”

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson also announced Wednesday that “several officers” from the Swedish Armed Forces had been sent “at Denmark’s request.” The BBC reported two Norwegian soldiers, one British military officer, and a Dutch naval officer had also been sent. 

Following a meeting Wednesday with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, and other U.S. representatives, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke said that he “didn’t manage to change the American position.” And Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who did not attend the meeting, said there was still a “fundamental disagreement” about the “American ambition to take over Greenland.”

Ahead of talks Wednesday, Trump proclaimed again that the United States “needs” Greenland in order to build his “Golden Dome” security system. 

* An earlier version of this article named a country that was not part of these military plans.

President Trump wants to put U.S. boots on the ground in Mexico to fight drug cartels, once again reinforcing his complete disregard for the concept of state sovereignty.

According to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Trump has been pushing for “the participation of U.S. forces,” even though Mexico says it’s not necessary.

Nonetheless, The New York Times has reported that the Trump administration prefers to send either Special Forces (green berets) or CIA officers to join Mexican forces while they raid suspected fentanyl labs. Trump first made the request early last year but raised the idea again after the U.S. military abducted Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

The Mexican government remains staunchly opposed to the proposition.

“We have highly trained army units and special forces,” Mexico’s national security chief, Omar García Harfuch, said last month. “What would they be needed for? … What we need is information.” Harfuch has overseen what he says is a fourfold crackdown on labs and cartels since Sheinbaum came into power.

This has been a long time coming. Trump has floated bombing and invading Mexico repeatedly since returning to office, and has certainly been emboldened by the brazen kidnapping of Maduro. Now, as he sets his eyes on Mexico, the popularity and legitimacy of Sheinbaum and her administration hang in the balance.

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has stayed noticeably silent after one of the newspaper’s reporters, Hannah Natanson, had her home searched by federal agents Wednesday—and the Post’s staff isn’t happy.

Status.news reports that several of the publication’s employees aren’t happy with their owner’s muted reaction to the raid. One called it “nauseating and irresponsible to have our owner remain silent given this unprecedented event,” while another said they were “disappointed” but “not surprised.”

“If there was a moment to stand up for our journalistic values, this would be it,” a third staffer said.

The newspaper’s executive editor, Matt Murray, forcefully condemned the search, which resulted in a phone and a smartwatch being seized from Natanson’s home.

“This extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” Murray wrote in an internal memo. “The Washington Post has a long history of zealous support for robust press freedoms. The entire institution stands by those freedoms and our work.”

Bezos, though, hasn’t said anything, even as the Post’s own editorial board and other publications, such as The New York Times, have spoken out. That’s possibly due to Bezos’s efforts to cozy up to President Trump in his second term, donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and attending the inauguration in person.

Since then, Bezos has shifted the Post’s opinion section to the right, paid $40 million to first lady Melania Trump for the rights to a documentary, and has met privately with the president multiple times. All signs point to Bezos staying silent in order to keep Trump happy and protect his billions.

How are ICE agents picking where to commit their next act of wanton violence? Well, Palantir has an app for that!

According to a user guide obtained by 404 Media, the app provides ICE agents with a digital map populated by potential deportation targets, each of which has their own detailed dossier, including information such as their name, date of birth, Alien Registration Number (a unique identifier assigned by the U.S. government), and a photograph of the target. The dossier also includes a “confidence score” out of 100 as to how certain the app is of the target’s address.

“Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) is a targeting tool designed to improve capabilities for identifying and prioritizing high-value targets through advanced analytics,” the user guide states.

The information comes from a number of sources, including the Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and something called CLEAR, which could be an investigation software from Thomson Reuters, according to 404Media.

The app’s “Geospatial Lead Sourcing Tab” allows ICE agents to select targets based on a number of criteria, including “Bios & IDs,” “Criminality,” “Location,” and “Operations,” the user guide shows. Using the app, ICE agents can select individual targets or multiple targets at once by drawing a shape around a selected area. During a sworn deposition earlier this month about a “dragnet” raid in Woodburn, Oregon, an officer with ICE’s Fugitive Operations Unit said that agents used the app to find target-rich areas.

“You’re going to go to a more dense population rather than … like, if there’s one pin at a house and the likelihood of them actually living there is like 10 percent … you’re not going to go there,” said the agent, who was identified as “JB” in the court documents obtained by 404 Media.

While the user guide does not explicitly state what company created the app, the app’s full name appears in a $29.9 million supplemental agreement with Palantir that started in September and is planned to continue for at least a year, 404Media reported.

ICE previously signed an agreement with Palantir in July to develop an ImmigrationOS platform, which would use artificial intelligence to identify and track potential targets. ICE has also assembled a team to monitor social media 24/7, surveying platforms including Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit.