MAGA in Uproar After Jeanine Pirro’s Threat to Gun Owners

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro’s anti–Second Amendment declaration has left the Trump administration’s own base outraged.

“You bring a gun into the District [of Columbia], you mark my words: You’re going to jail. I don’t care if you have a license in another district, and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else,” Pirro said on Monday, flying in the face of years of gun rights activism from Republicans and organizations like the NRA. “You bring a gun into this district, count on going to jail and hope you get your gun back. And that makes all the difference.”

Pirro’s statement caused a flurry of backlash from the right, as registered gun owners in America are over two times as likely to vote for Republicans.

“I bring a gun into the district every week, @USAttyPirro. I have a license in Florida and DC to carry. And I will continue to carry to protect myself and others,” GOP Representative Greg Steube wrote on X. “Come and Take it!”

“Jeanine Pirro threatening to arrest people for carrying in DC, even if they are law-abiding and licensed, shows how broken and out of touch these gun laws are. Unacceptable and intolerable comments by a sitting US attorney,” the National Association for Gun Rights wrote on X. “This is why we need Real Constitutional Carry nationwide. Bureaucrats act like the 2A does not exist and brag about jailing people for exercising their rights.”

The blowback continued.

“Concealed Carry Permit holders are statistically some of the most law abiding citizens in society—even more law abiding than police,” Gun Owners of America commented. “We ARE NOT the problem.”

Pirro’s comments are particularly confusing due to her recent support for less restrictive gun laws in the district. Just last summer, the Trump administration attempted to loosen concealed carry laws. And in December, the DOJ sued the D.C. government on the grounds that its gun restrictions violated the very Second Amendment Pirro is now attacking.

“The GOP Leadership is doing everything it can to keep second amendment voters from showing up in November,” said conservative commentator Erick Erickson.

Donald Trump is now demanding $1 billion from Harvard after The New York Times reported he’d backed down from a request for the university to pay his administration off.

For a moment, it appeared that Trump’s extortion scheme had failed at Harvard. Six other elite schools agreed last year to settle civil rights investigations and regain federal funding by adopting Trump’s authoritarian “compact” on school policy and by signing checks that amounted to millions of dollars to the U.S. Treasury. Harvard, however, refused to settle, though it has faced a whopping 13 investigations by 10 federal agencies in the past year alone. 

Just hours after the Times reported that anonymous Trump officials and Harvard officials had both quietly accepted that the Ivy League institution wouldn’t pay the president’s ransom, Trump attacked Harvard and the Times—and issued a furious new demand. 

“Strongly Antisemitic Harvard University has been feeding a lot of ‘nonsense’ to The Failing New York Times,” Trump wrote in a lengthy post late Monday night. “Harvard has been, for a long time, behaving very badly!

“This should be a Criminal, not Civil, event, and Harvard will have to live with the consequences of their wrongdoings,” Trump wrote, adding: “We are now seeking One Billion Dollars in damages, and want nothing further to do, into the future, with Harvard University.”

In a second post, Trump tried to dictate corrections to the original Times story.

“The Failing New York Times story was completely wrong concerning Harvard University. I hereby demand that the morons that run (into the ground!) the Times’  change their story, immediately,” he wrote. 

He posted yet again Tuesday morning, clearly frustrated that his changes had not been immediately adopted. 

“Why hasn’t the Fake News New York Times adjusted its phony article on the corruption and antisemitism which has taken place at Harvard,” he wrote. “They never call for facts, or factchecks, because the Times’ is a corrupt, unprincipled, and pathetic vehicle of the Left.”

The Trump administration is running out of excuses to explain away the president’s relationship with deceased child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News Monday evening that pretty much everyone who partied with the “pedophile island” operator was off the hook. But in a pitiful attempt to brush off public backlash to the thousands of times that Donald Trump’s name was mentioned in the Justice Department’s latest release of the Epstein files, Blanche practically resorted to gaslighting.

“Is there any chance that any of these individuals who partied with Epstein and engaged with relations with minors will be prosecuted?” asked host Laura Ingraham.

“I’ll never say no,” Blanche said. “And we will always investigate evidence of misconduct.

“But as you know, it is not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein. It’s not a crime to email with Mr. Epstein. Some of these men may have done horrible things, and if we have evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will. But it’s also the kind of thing that the American people need to understand, that it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.”

“It didn’t look like that was all that was going on in some of those photos,” pressed Ingraham. “I mean, if the photos could speak, some of them look pretty bad.”

“That’s right, and unfortunately photos can’t speak, and so we need witnesses,” Blanche responded.

Trump was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the latest batch of Epstein files, according to a New York Times review of the DOJ’s Friday document dump, which consisted of some three million previously unseen pages.

All in all, Trump was flagged in more than 5,300 files in the document cache, according to the Times.

On Sunday, Blanche told CNN’s State of the Union that the DOJ reviewed the files last summer but did not find credible evidence against the president warranting further investigation.

New hires at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are complaining that they haven’t yet received the massive bonuses promised to them for agreeing to brutally arrest immigrants.

In multiple Reddit posts reviewed by the International Business Times UK, federal immigration agents complained that they’d yet to see their signing bonuses materialize. Others complained that when their bonus arrived, it was only a few thousand dollars after taxes. One person claimed that they were unable to cover medical costs for their sick child due to an insurance coverage gap.

The Trump administration had promised a payout of up to $50,000 for anyone who joined the ranks of so-called homeland defenders.

Following a massive recruitment push, the Department of Homeland Security has boasted an incoming class of 12,000 new ICE agents, putting a clear strain on the agency, which received more than 220,000 applications. One administration official previously said DHS’s hiring influx had caused a “shit show” at ICE.

Meanwhile, morale among ICE agents is already plummeting after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse attending a protest in Minnesota. In addition to being roundly hated by the public they spend their work days terrorizing, ICE agents are also complaining of long working hours and high arrest quotas.

Americans continue to denounce their local representatives over their support of ICE.

After residents of Casper, Wyoming, booed Representative Harriet Hageman off stage last week, two protesters were removed from Representative Mike Lawler’s town hall on Sunday after demanding the congressman answer a question about ICE.

Lawler, a Republican representing New York’s 17th district, held the town hall at a local community college in Suffern, New York.

While discussing clashes between protesters and immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, members of the audience began chanting: “What’s your line?”

The chant was a callback to a viral clash at another of Lawler’s town halls in May, when a 64-year-old woman named Emily Feiner was literally carried out of one of Lawler’s assemblies after demanding he answer a question about where his “line” was in regard to standing up to Donald Trump.

On Sunday, as Lawler was serenaded with the “What’s your line?” chant, a man called out: “Answer the f—ing question!” Lawler had this man and one other ejected, according to The Journal News.

“Hey, bro, you can leave now,” Lawler told the first man. “Goodbye, goodbye.”

Video of the incident shows members of the crowd yelling “Shame!” and “Let him stay!” as the man is escorted out.

Feiner, who was also in attendance at Sunday’s town hall, said both men ejected were veterans.

“Tonight [Lawler] had two U.S. veterans removed for demanding that he actually answer constituents’ questions rather than grandstanding and gaslighting us,” she said. “As a retired VA social worker, this is shocking to me.”

On Monday, Lawler said the two individuals were ejected for rowdy behavior.

“The folks were removed for their conduct, not their questions,” he said. “In each instance, they were removed for continually disrupting, screaming, and using profane language.”

An ICE family detention center in Texas is halting “all movement” after finding two cases of measles.

The cases were detected Friday, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement, confirming that two detainees had “active measles infections.” The facility in Dilley, Texas, located about an hour away from San Antonio, holds parents suspected of immigration violations alongside their children.

Some detainees have been quarantined, McLaughlin said, adding that everyone is “being provided with proper medical care.”

The Dilley facility is where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, whose picture went viral after he was detained in Minneapolis, last month by ICE agents, was held, along with his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, before being released Sunday. During his time in the detention center, Conejo Ramos reportedly felt feverish, complained about being tired, vomited at least once, and was not eating well, but was not reported to have measles. When Conejo Arias asked for medication from staff, they said they didn’t have any.

Measles cases have skyrocketed under the second Trump administration, with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denigrating vaccination and failing to take the rising number of cases seriously, while promoting policies that will encourage future outbreaks. A new measles outbreak in South Carolina, for example, just became the largest in the United States since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000.

As the level of measles vaccination drops, the number of outbreaks is only going to go up, spreading the disease among vulnerable populations in crowded areas like ICE detention centers and prisons, which are already known to have inhumane living conditions. Measles spreading to an ICE detention facility seems to be an unholy by-product of MAGA immigration cruelty and MAHA’s anti-vaccine agenda.

The Trump administration’s chief priority for 2026: persecuting the president’s political nemeses.

Despite efforts by the judiciary to limit Donald Trump’s revenge quest, Justice Department officials are expected to meet as early as Monday to reignite efforts to investigate and punish government officials who played a role in investigating him prior to his return to the White House.

The DOJ staffers will meet under the banner of the “Weaponization Working Group,” an entity that Attorney General Pam Bondi invented mere days after she entered office, reported CNN. The group was designed to challenge former special counsel Jack Smith and his staff, as well as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The initiative would also target any officials who attempted to hold Trump accountable in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack.

Some of those efforts may already be a dud, however, thanks to the loud mouths of some of Trump’s own staff: In December, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles fessed to Vanity Fair that the president’s flimsy charges against James were his “one retribution,” an admission that would give James’s legal defense plenty of reason to toss his cases against her for eternity.

One official familiar with the administration’s new plan told CNN that the Weaponization Working Group is expected to start meeting “daily,” with the intent of producing results within the next two months.

Back in October, Bondi told lawmakers that ending the “weaponization of justice” would be a chief priority for the agency under her stewardship.

Justice Department officials declined to provide specifics on the daily meetings but told CNN that the “efforts of the Weaponization Working Group continue.”

“The Justice Department is actively looking into the areas outlined in Attorney General Bondi’s Day One memo,” the spokesperson said. “The Weaponization Working Group is diligently working to restore integrity to the Department of Justice and is utilizing resources across the entire agency to fulfill this effort.”

Donald Trump has said his immigration crackdown is targeting the “worst of the worst.” It’s finally clear who he means by that: Canadian professional hockey players.

Hockey journalist Luc Gélinas reported that the Montreal Canadiens, who play the Minnesota Wild on Monday night, have been told by management to stay inside their Minneapolis hotel at all times, take the team bus rather than walk to the stadium, and carry passports with them.

The cautiousness of the team comes as a result of the Trump administration’s violent immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. Operation Metro Surge has killed two residents and sparked nationwide protests.

The Canadiens traveled across the border on Sunday rather than Saturday in order to spend one less night in the United States. They will also wait until Tuesday morning to leave Minneapolis so they can avoid any nighttime disturbances in the city.

“Perhaps we shouldn’t be hosting the World Cup and the Olympics,” one Bluesky commenter wryly noted.

Hopefully, the Canadiens can forget about ICE when they get on the ice tonight.

If you believe the president’s word, then fear not: The White House is not planning to demolish the Kennedy Center during its summer renovation.

But if you tend to trust the evidence of history, you might have cause to be suspicious of whether the famed cultural institution will still be in one piece by the time Donald Trump is done with it.

A White House official told ABC News’s Hannah Demissie Monday that the administration has no intention of tearing down the Kennedy Center during its two-year remodeling project. Starting July 4, the performing arts space will close for two years in order to undergo “construction, revitalization, and complete rebuilding,” Trump announced Sunday evening.

The sudden decision to reinvent the world-class arts institution comes just a month after Trump potentially broke the law in renaming the center to include his name, and after more than a year of canceled performances by a litany of artists who opposed the Trump administration’s agenda.

Meanwhile, Trump’s other government renovation projects have been constructed out of a web of lies. Back when his White House ballroom was first announced in July, Trump pledged that the development would “be near but not touching” the White House East Wing.

Months later, his construction teams completely razed the FDR-era extension, plowing forward without prerequisite approval from the National Capital Planning Commission or the express permission of Congress, both of which were conveniently unavailable at the time, due to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

Trump also renovated Jackie Kennedy’s famous Rose Garden, mowing down flowers in order to literally pave paradise; gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transforming it from Lyndon B. Johnson’s favorite office into a marble-slathered eyesore; and swapped the historic Palm Room’s lush green tones and tall ferns for white paint and framed photos of plants.

Meanwhile, his administration is doing some demolition of its own, reportedly planning to destroy some 13 historic buildings on the grounds of former psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths in order to expand facilities for the Department of Homeland Security.

Alex Pretti’s death was ruled a homicide Monday by the Hennepin County medical examiner.

In the medical examiner’s report, Pretti’s cause of death was listed as multiple gunshot wounds, and how the injury occurred was due to being “shot by law enforcement officer(s).” His manner of death was listed as “homicide.”

The 37-year-old ICU nurse was shot and killed by two Customs and Border Protection officers during a violent confrontation at a protest in Minneapolis last month.

Footage from the confrontation showed that Pretti was tackled to the ground by several federal agents, after he approached another protester who’d been sprayed with a chemical irritant. While beating Pretti, agents realized he was armed and took his firearm. Once they’d pinned Pretti to the ground, two federal officers shot him at least 10 times.

The medical examiner’s determination comes shortly after ProPublica uncovered the names of the officers who shot and killed Pretti: Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.

CBP Commander Greg Bovino, who was recently removed from overseeing the Minnesota crackdown, refused to identify the officers. He told reporters they were still working the streets, just in another city. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security has since confirmed that the two had been placed on administrative leave, according to ProPublica.

Pretti’s senseless killing has sparked national outrage as Donald Trump’s federal immigration forces have killed a total of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota in broad daylight. The Trump administration has blocked Minnesota officials from investigating residents’ killings by federal agents, hampering the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and opposed a federal judge’s order preventing them from tampering with evidence related to Pretti’s death.

This story has been updated.