So Many People Ditched Melania Premiere—Including Her Son

Nearly a dozen people close to the Trump administration skipped out on the world premiere of Melania Trump’s new documentary, Melania—even her own son. 

Multiple family members were no-shows at the first lady’s big night at the Kennedy Center Thursday, including Barron Trump, Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Tiffany Trump, and Ivanka Trump. Several Trump officials—including Vice President JD Vance—and high-profile conservative influencers who were invited to the premiere also skipped, as a hot mic on the black carpet captured a staff reaction to the absences. 

“Who didn’t show on the red carpet? Kari Lake, she didn’t show. Brett Baier, Kellyanne Conway, Riley Gaines, Benny Johnson … [Homeland Security Secretary Kristi] Noem didn’t show. Bondi didn’t show, weird,” staff said. They also noted that FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi weren’t there, although reports reveal they eventually showed up. 

So who actually showed up to watch this documentary? Nicki Minaj was there, as was Trump lawyer Alina Habba, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and second lady Usha Vance. Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Saudi royalty, and Mike Tyson stopped by a White House premiere of the documentary last weekend. 

The lack of enthusiasm from even the most loyal members of the Trump administration speaks to how useless and inopportune this documentary is. No one cares about Melania, not even the people who get paid to.  

Federal agents detained journalists Don Lemon and independent Minnesota journalist Georgia Fort on Thursday night.

Both journalists had covered an anti-ICE protest at a church in Minneapolis earlier this month. It is unclear what they will be charged with, and it appears they are being targeted for their coverage.

“Don Lemon was taken into custody by federal agents last night in Los Angeles, where he was covering the Grammy awards,” a statement from Lemon’s lawyer read. “Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis was no different than what he has always done.… Instead of investigating the federal agents who killed two peaceful Minnesota protesters, the Trump Justice Department is devoting its time, attention and resources to this arrest, and that is the real indictment of wrongdoing in this case. This unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration will not stand. Don will fight these charges vigorously and thoroughly in court.”

The Justice Department announced that it would “pursue charges” against Lemon just over a week ago.

“Don Lemon himself has come out and said he knew exactly what was going to happen inside that facility,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said on The Benny Show earlier this month. “He went into the facility, and then he began—quote, unquote—‘committing journalism,’ as if that’s sort of a shield from being a part, an embedded part, of a criminal conspiracy. It isn’t.”

Fort was detained in her home in St. Paul, Minnesota.

“I wanted to alert the public that agents are at my door right now, they’re saying that they were able to go before a grand jury … and that they have a warrant for my arrest,” Fort said, in a Facebook live video before being arrested.

“As a member of the press, I filmed the church protest a few weeks ago, and now I’m being arrested for that,” she added. “It’s hard to understand how we have a Constitution, constitutional rights, when we can just be arrested for being a member of the press.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve actually has a long history as an inflation hawk, not the most obvious choice for a president who keeps pushing for lower interest rates.

Trump announced on Truth Social Friday morning that Kevin Warsh, 55, will be his nominee to lead the central bank. “I am pleased to announce that I am nominating Kevin Warsh to be the CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM,” Trump wrote. “I have known Kevin for a long period of time, and have no doubt that he will go down as one of the GREAT Fed Chairmen, maybe the best. On top of everything else, he is ‘central casting,’ and he will never let you down.”

Warsh is a former Federal Reserve governor who worked as an economist for the White House during the George W. Bush administration. In April 2009, as unemployment skyrocketed during the Great Recession, Warsh was especially concerned about interest rates being lowered too much, seeing inflation as a greater risk.

“I continue to be more worried about upside risks to inflation than downside risks,” Warsh said during a Fed meeting at the time. During those years, he helped manage the financial crisis with then–Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, who was New York Fed president at the time and would later become treasury secretary under President Obama.

In recent months, Warsh has changed his tune and spoken favorably of lowering interest rates, which seems to have caught the eye of President Trump, who otherwise wouldn’t have made the seemingly conventional pick.

Trump has railed against Powell for not lowering interest rates enough, even pushing an unprecedented criminal investigation into the Fed. But amid that controversy, Warsh’s nomination will now go to the Senate Banking Committee, and after a public hearing, the Senate will vote on whether to confirm him.

Some Republican senators, such as Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis, have said they would hold up the president’s Fed nominations while the criminal investigation continues, echoed by leading Democrats.

“No Republican purporting to care about Fed independence should agree to move forward with this nomination until Trump drops his witch hunts of the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Governor Lisa Cook,” said Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, a member of the banking committee.

Federal prosecutors in Minnesota are floating the possibility of a mass resignation in protest of the Justice Department’s response to the recent ICE killings of two U.S. citizens.

Prosecutors expressed their frustration to U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, Donald Trump’s appointee to lead the Minneapolis office, irate over the Justice Department’s retroactive smear campaign to justify the deaths of ICU nurse Alex Pretti and award-winning poet Renee Nicole Good. In an act of defiance, federal prosecutors in the state have reportedly told Rosen that they might resign en masse, leaving the office to crumble under the weight of the unattended workload, officials told The Washington Post Thursday.

It’s not an empty threat: At least one prosecutor in the office’s criminal division has already resigned, reported the Post.

But ICE’s time pillaging Minnesota is almost up.

Border czar Tom Homan, who recently took the reins of ICE and its sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, told reporters Thursday that he is working on a “drawdown” plan to scale back the number of agents occupying the North Star State.

He noted, however, that he is “not surrendering the president’s mission in immigration enforcement.”

But the way that federal agencies have gone about enacting that agenda has been nothing short of illegal. The chief federal district judge in the state declared in a legal memo Wednesday that ICE had violated 96 court orders since Operation Metro Surge began last month.

“ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence,” Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz wrote.

In just a few short weeks, Operation Metro Surge has conducted militarized raids across Minnesota, terrorizing residents while carrying out what state officials have described as “unconstitutional stops and arrests, all under the guise of lawful immigration enforcement.”

The White House just gave a wild explanation for why Tulsi Gabbard was spotted lurking around a federal raid at the Fulton County, Georgia, election office on Wednesday.

Having been completely sidelined from the typical responsibilities of the director of national intelligence, Gabbard has spent months leading an investigation into President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the results of the 2020 presidential election, White House officials told The Wall Street Journal Thursday.

Gabbard has reportedly regularly briefed Trump and his chief of staff Susie Wiles, as well as other well-known election deniers Cleta Mitchell, a far-right activist with the ear of the president, and Kurt Olsen, a former lawyer for the Trump campaign who helped mount the “Stop the Steal” lawsuits.

Gabbard is expected to produce a report on her findings—but we wouldn’t advise election denialists to get their hopes up. Gabbard’s other so-called investigations haven’t gone too well. Last year, her attempt to prove that former President Barack Obama had committed treason fell hilariously flat.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Gabbard was tapped to look into the president’s favorite conspiracy theory, because she’s known to spread far-fetched conspiracy theories herself—specifically ones pushed by Moscow.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is leaping into action to protect American citizens by banning … something that is already illegal.

Speaking at a press briefing at the Capitol Thursday, Jeffries announced that, as a condition of supporting legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security as it continues its deadly immigration enforcement crackdown in Minneapolis, Democrats will demand a ban on deporting American citizens.

“In what country are we living in if it’s controversial to prohibit [the deportation] of American citizens?” Jeffries said. “That shouldn’t even be a discussion.”

It shouldn’t be up for discussion because it is already illegal. Deporting American citizens is not permitted under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which outlines the rules for deporting noncitizens. It also violates a 1958 Supreme Court ruling that found stripping a person of their American citizenship violated the Eighth Amendment protection against “cruel and unusual punishment.”

But the Trump administration is still doing it anyway, sweeping up American citizens as part of its dragnet immigration enforcement efforts.

Senate Democrats also pitched immigration reforms such as requiring federal agents to wear body cameras, banning the use of face masks, and enforcing a new code of conduct. But they’re missing the point.

It seems that Jeffries, along with his Senate colleagues, haven’t quite grasped the fact that the cruelties of Donald Trump’s lawless immigration crackdown are not subject to reform because they are already lawless. Instead, Democrats will continue to find ways to soothe their conscience while filling the coffers of federal agencies that allowed American citizens to be killed in the streets.

Even ICE’s enormous 2026 budget has its limits.

Landowners in Oklahoma City are backing out of a deal with the federal agency, nixing plans to develop a new ICE facility in the area after agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.

Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt announced the terminated contract on social media Thursday morning after meeting with the property owners at 2800 S. Council in the southwest portion of the city.

“The owners are not residents of Oklahoma and this is the only property they own in Oklahoma City,” Holt wrote. “The owners of the property at 2800 S. Council confirmed to me this morning that they are no longer engaged with the Department of Homeland Security about a potential acquisition or lease of this property.

“I commend the owners for their decision and thank them on behalf of the people of Oklahoma City,” Holt added. “As Mayor, I ask that every single property owner in Oklahoma City exhibit the same concern for our community in the days ahead.”

The property at 2800 S. Council road is a 26.8-acre warehouse. Its owners are listed as OKC Logistic Park LLC, a leasing company based out of Kansas, according to the Oklahoma County Assessor database.

The Homeland Security Department issued a letter to the city last month indicating that the agency intended to “purchase, occupy, and rehabilitate” the spacious depot with the intention of housing up to 1,500 people. The agency also noted the potential addition of “tentage and a guard shack,” fencing, and “holding and processing spaces” to the property.

In response, the city government recognized that it had little recourse to prevent DHS from creating a facility in the city due to the Constitution’s supremacy clause. But city leadership wrote that “decisions about land use are best made locally,” and implored DHS to listen to feedback from residents who might be affected by the center’s creation.

The mayor’s office also petitioned members of Congress, asking them to express support for the city as it attempted to negotiate with Homeland Security.

The property owners’ stark reversal comes in the immediate wake of a packed Oklahoma City Council meeting that took place Wednesday, in which droves of local residents filled City Hall in order to oppose the facility’s construction, reported KFOR, an NBC News affiliate in Oklahoma.

Republicans have proposed an “election reform” bill that would actually impose severe restrictions on voting across the country. 

The “Make Elections Great Again Act” would require photo identification, require mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day, require voters to opt-in to voting by mail, ban ranked-choice voting for federal elections, among many other restrictions. 

States like Oregon have had universal mail-in ballots for years, and many states allow mail-in ballots to be counted up to a certain date if they are postmarked by Election Day. Ranked-choice voting is used for some statewide elections in Maine and Alaska, and local elections around the country.  

Representative Bryan Steil, chairman of the House Administration Committee, introduced the bill, claiming it will “improve voter confidence, bolster election integrity, and make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat.” 

What he left out in his statement was perhaps one of the bill’s most troubling features. If passed into law, each state would also have to create a single digital voter database to serve as “the official voter registration list for the conduct of all elections for Federal office in the State.”

States would also have to provide documented proof of U.S. citizenship for anyone registered to vote in federal elections and re-check those voters’ eligibility “as are necessary on an ongoing basis, but in no case less frequently than once every 30 days.”

Under the bill, the U.S. attorney general would be able to sue states to force them to comply with the new restrictions, and private citizens would gain the power to sue election officials who register a voter without proof of citizenship. 

The bill faces a tall order to get through the House and Senate before the midterm elections, and if it does end up signed by President Trump, would more than likely face a flurry of lawsuits from states across the country. It’s very much designed to placate Republican conspiracy theories about voter fraud and Trump’s contention that all the elections he loses are fraudulent. 

On Wednesday, the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia. The county’s election commissioner says it was an act of political retribution from President Donald Trump.

Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts claimed Thursday his office was raided because he “stood up to Donald Trump’s big lie.”

“Fulton County has been targeted for years ... because I refused to bend to pressure,” Pitts said, referring to years of Trump-perpetuated claims that Democrats stole the 2020 general election. “Every audit, every recount, every court ruling has confirmed what we, the people of Fulton County, already knew.… Our elections were fair and accurate, and every legal vote was counted. These ongoing efforts are about intimidation and distraction, not facts.”

The Justice Department already sued the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections last month on grounds that the office didn’t comply with a subpoena demanding “used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”

The FBI reportedly took 700 boxes of ballots and records from the 2020 election during its Wednesday raid. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was also present, raising eyebrows and eliciting conspiracy theories from all ends of the political spectrum.

“Fulton County is now, has been and always will be committed to upholding the law,” Pitts said. “One of the strangest things about this case is that these records were the subject of active litigation and, quite frankly, were likely to be unsealed and turned over in a matter of weeks.… All he had to do was ask the judge to do so, but albeit in a much more orderly manner. We in Fulton County have nothing ... nothing ... nothing to hide.

“And finally, and most importantly, this is by no means over. This is by no means over.”

The Department of Justice lawyer behind the FBI raid on a Georgia county’s election operations center used to work under a state attorney general who sought to overturn the 2020 election results. 

The sealed search warrant that authorized a federal raid Wednesday at the Fulton County election office was proffered by Thomas Albus, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, and signed by Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas.

Albus previously worked at the Missouri attorney general’s office as the first assistant to then–Attorney General Eric Schmitt while Schmitt actively worked to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Schmitt was elected to the Senate in 2022.  

In December 2020, when Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit attempting to convince the Supreme Court to toss the election results from three Biden-won states, Schmitt’s office filed an amicus brief supporting his effort and drummed up support from 17 other Republican attorneys general. 

Years later, the second-in-command from that same office has allowed the federal government to play out President Donald Trump’s ultimate revenge fantasy on Georgia, where he has baselessly claimed the election was stolen from him. 

At a press conference Thursday, local officials said that they had not received a full copy of the search warrant, and were still not aware of where the seized records had been taken or why. Seven hundred boxes of election-related records were seized in the raid, according to Sherri Allen, chair of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections.