Trump’s U.S. Attorney Sparks MAGA Backlash After 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. Some elite schools have agreed 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.”

This article has been updated.

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.”