MAGA Republican Announces Retirement, Giving Dems an Opportunity

Yet another Republican is calling it quits on his congressional career.

Montana Representative Ryan Zinke announced Monday that he will not seek reelection, ending his time in Washington.

In a letter to his constituents, Zinke said that the decision was predicated on recent health issues, writing that he had undergone “multiple surgeries” since 2023 to correct injuries he sustained while serving as a Navy SEAL.

“The injuries sustained from a career in Special Operations are not immediately life threatening, but the repair cannot be deferred any longer and recovery will require considerable time,” Zinke wrote. “My judgement and experience tell me it is better for Montana and America to have full-time representation in Congress than run the risk of uncertain absence and missed votes.”

The Whitefish native has represented Montana since 2014, when he garnered national attention on the campaign trail for referring to Hillary Clinton as the Antichrist. Between stints on Capitol Hill, Zinke was tapped by Donald Trump to serve as his first-term interior secretary. Zinke worked in that job for just two years, from 2017 to 2019, but nonetheless racked up 18 federal investigations into his behavior, ranging from probes into numerous alleged Hatch Act violations to misuse of public funds.

Zinke’s decision further imperils the Republican House majority, which currently has 218 Republicans to 214 Democrats. The lower chamber also has three vacancies due to the November resignation of Democratic Representative Mikie Sherrill, now New Jersey governor, as well as the January resignation of Representative Majorie Taylor Greene and the passing that same month of Representative Doug LaMalfa.

All 435 House seats will be contested in the upcoming midterm elections, a reality that has Republicans fretting, as preceding elections have suggested that the cycle could be overtaken by a tsunami-esque “Blue Wave.” At least three Republican districts are confidently expected to flip (they include two districts in California and another in Utah), while the Nebraska race to replace retiring Republican Representative Don Bacon is likely to go to Democrats as well, according to the Cook Political Report.

Four Democrats had already filed to run in their party’s primary to replace Zinke before he announced his retirement.

Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer is under investigation after having been caught using taxpayer funds for personal reasons, including to throw herself a birthday party.

Last year, shortly after Chavez-DeRemer was sworn in, she and her senior staff wanted to have a birthday party at the Department of Labor’s headquarters at the Frances Perkins Building, The New York Times reports. But when staff worried about using the department’s funding, DeRemer and her staff decided to call it a swearing-in celebration.

The party went ahead with dozens of political staffers as guests, who sang “Happy Birthday” to Chavez-DeRemer, who then blew out the candles on a birthday cake. After the party, her chief of staff, Jihun Han, sent a memo to the entire department threatening “serious legal consequences” against any staffers who spoke with the press.

Weeks afterward, Chavez-DeRemer told the House Appropriations Committee, “I did not have a birthday party.” Ultimately, though, the Times obtained a photo from a party guest showing Chavez-DeRemer blowing out the candles on her birthday cake.

The party is just one glaring example of alleged misconduct by Chavez-DeRemer. She is now under investigation by the department’s inspector general, former Republican Representative Anthony D’Esposito, for misusing department funds, including to travel around the country on personal trips, and other misconduct, such as an alleged affair with someone on her security team.

Thanks to her jet-setting, the secretary herself doesn’t spend much time at the office, with Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling running the department day-to-day. Han and her deputy chief of staff, Rebecca Wright, have been placed on leave during the investigation. On top of that, Chavez-DeRemer’s husband is barred from Labor Department headquarters for allegedly sexually harassing female staffers.

When Donald Trump nominated Chavez-DeRemer for the post, she was a controversial pick for Republicans, who saw her as too pro-labor for a GOP congresswoman from Oregon, and some Democrats were cautiously optimistic. But now, it seems she fits into the endemic corruption of Trump’s White House, and should consider herself lucky her own misdeeds went unnoticed until now.

The state of New Mexico attempted to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s state residence in 2019. Then the Trump administration got involved.

Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, located roughly 30 miles south of Santa Fe in the high desert, was rumored to be a hotbed of illicit activity. Some of the notorious child sex offender’s victims, including Virginia Giuffre, claimed they were trafficked at the New Mexico estate, and emails issued by ranch staffers allege that at least two girls were killed and buried under the building by Epstein’s order, according to documents made public by the Justice Department via the Epstein files. Epstein even contemplated turning the estate, which he purchased in 1993, into a headquarters for genetic engineering experiments.

Yet somehow, the property—dubbed “Playboy Ranch” among locals—has never properly been investigated, according to New Mexico officials.

A report by The New York Times, published Monday, revealed that state officials had every intention to do so—until the first Trump administration intervened in 2019. The government ordered New Mexico to turn over its probe to federal prosecutors, but then they closed the case, according to recently unsealed records obtained by the Times.

Last month, New Mexico lawmakers voted unanimously to pursue another investigation into Zorro Ranch, creating a bipartisan “truth commission” to examine the site’s history. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez also ordered his office to reopen the criminal investigation into Zorro Ranch, demanding “immediate access to the complete, unredacted federal case file.”

“We need to find out how he was able to operate without any accountability,” Andrea Romero, the leader of the truth commission, told the Times. “We have to understand what allowed this to happen.”

The sequence of events isn’t too dissimilar to what occurred between FBI agents and New York detectives in the immediate aftermath of Epstein’s death. Five days after the sex trafficker was arrested at a New Jersey airport in July 2019, the FBI “directed” New York law enforcement to cease its Epstein investigations, including the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the NYPD’s Special Victims Unit, according to FBI emails recently released by the Justice Department as part of the congressionally mandated disclosure of the federal government’s Epstein investigation.

That directive was allegedly an attempt to prevent “competing cases” and quell internal anxieties that the public—and the FBI’s international partners in the U.K.—would be mixed up by news reports of multiple investigations from different agencies. But as evidenced by New Mexico’s Zorro Ranch predicament, not every lead was fully inspected by Donald Trump’s first administration.

In contrast to President Donald Trump’s vacillating rationale, it appears the United States did not go to war with Iran to wipe out its nonexistent nuclear program, respond to a nonsensical threat to American elections, or implement a poorly conceived regime change.

We did it because Israel asked us to.

In retracing Trump’s unilateral (and illegal) decision to go to war, it’s clear that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent months lobbying the White House, and Trump’s aides did little to dissuade the president from joining in on the attack, The New York Times reported Monday.

Netanyahu knows a lot about illegal wars. The Israeli military’s American-backed genocide in Gaza has claimed the lives of more than 70,000 Palestinians. Now the two superpowers have launched a new campaign that has already killed more than 550 people in Iran, including dozens of school-age girls.

Discussion about a military strike on Iran began in December, when Netanyahu visited the president’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. Netanuyahu asked Trump’s permission to launch strikes on Iran’s missile sites in the coming months.

In January, Trump threatened to strike Iran in order to stop the government’s massacre of protesters, promising that help was “on the way!” But Netanyahu reached out to Trump asking him to delay the strike until the end of the month. He argued that the U.S. wasn’t ready to go to war, and Trump agreed.

As January crept on, Netanyahu kept regular contact with the White House, including Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and special envoy Steve Witkoff. Eventually, the U.S. military presented an expansive list of options for military action.

Netanyahu visited Trump again on February 11, as the U.S. was set to resume negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. But the prime minister was there to ensure the president was ready to go to war, the Times reported.

There was little pushback among White House officials.

During a meeting in the situation room on February 18, Vance—who had previously spoken against U.S. intervention—said that if the U.S. did launch a military campaign in Iran, it should “go big and go fast,” people familiar with his remarks told the Times. The same day, Israel raised its alert level, indicating that a joint attack was imminent.

In that same meeting, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that a larger effort to topple the regime could lead to significant American casualties, an argument that was widely circulated to the press. Trump claimed that reports of Caine’s reluctance were “100 percent incorrect.”

Diplomacy, it seems, was never really an option. Negotiations spearheaded by Witkoff and Jared Kushner presented a kind of ruse to give Trump time to oversee a massive military buildup in the Middle East.

Speaking to Times Sunday, Trump said, “Toward the end of the negotiation, I realized that these guys weren’t going to get there. I said, ‘Let’s just do it.’”

After the U.S. and Israel launched their initial volley of strikes that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, Netanyahu gushed that Trump had helped him realize his dream: “This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years,” he said.

The Justice Department filed an emergency motion to the 6th District Court that was rife with basic spelling errors, including spelling voters as “votors,” United States as “United Staes,” and emergency as “emeregency.”

The DOJ filed an emergency appeal Friday after a Michigan judge refused to force the state of Michigan to hand over access to sensitive voting records that includes each voter’s date of birth, address, and more. The DOJ has now sued 30 states seeking access to voter rolls.

This isn’t the first time the DOJ has displayed basic incompetence in court. Last April, DOJ lawyers misspelled United States  in their case against the wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia. In October, former prosecutor Lindsey Halligan listed New York Attorney General Letitia James’s address as “Brooklyn, New Jersey” instead of New York in a court filing. And just last week, the DOJ sued New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, but misspelled her name over and over again.

“These are the people who want access to your voting records and who my team fights in court every day,” Democracy Docket’s Marc E. Elias wrote.

President Donald Trump appeared to have a large red rash on the back of his neck Monday.

While speaking at the White House about his illegal war with Iran, Trump was spotted with a dark red patch of skin peeking out from under his collar. In a photograph taken by AFP photographer Saul Loeb, a large scab is visible.

It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the red mark. Possible causes of a red rash could include contact or atopic dermatitis—also known as eczema—psoriasis, or heat rash. It could also be caused by shingles.

A statement from Captain Sean Barbarella, a Navy emergency physician serving as the president’s doctor, claimed that Trump was using a “very common cream on the right side of his neck, which is a preventative skin treatment prescribed by the White House doctor.”

“The president is using this treatment for one week, and the redness is expected to last for a few weeks,” he said.

Trump’s right hand also appeared discolored in another photograph by Loeb.

Since July, Trump has been repeatedly spotted with a large bruise on the back of his right hand—except for a few instances when it inexplicably switched to his left hand. The president has gotten good at hiding it from the public—either with makeup or careful hand placement—but the 79-year-old president can’t hide everything, and cameras don’t lie.

The White House has claimed that his seemingly permanent injuries are the result of Trump shaking too many hands and taking too much aspirin. But doctors have theorized that the president’s discolored hands could be a sign of something much worse.

Now it seems the president is suffering from yet another physical ailment.

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump began raving about curtains and his new ballroom while talking about his war plans for Iran on Monday.

At a ceremony to award the Congressional Medal of Honor to three U.S. military service members, Trump discussed how his attacks on Iran are going, saying that he doesn’t “get bored.” But then the president quickly went off topic to talk about the curtains and his ballroom project in the White House, making it the second time in one day he’s pivoted from Iran to renovations.

“See that nice drape? When that comes down right now you see a very, very deep hole, but in about a year and half from now, you’re gonna see a very, very beautiful building. And there’s your entrance to it right there,” Trump said, pointing to gold curtains behind him. “In fact, I think I’ll even, I’ll save money on the doors because you can’t get more beautiful than that. I picked those drapes in my first term. I always liked gold, but I think we can save a lot of money. I just saved, I just saved curtains.

“It’ll be spectacular, it’ll be the most beautiful ballroom. I believe it’s because I’ve built many a ballroom. I believe it’s going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world,” Trump said, before going on to rant about how his wife, Melania, doesn’t like the construction.

It’s clear that Trump doesn’t take his job seriously, even after countless Iranian civilians and at least three U.S. service members have been killed in this war he decided to start, with many more likely to follow. Somehow, he still is devoting a ton of attention and energy to the pointless ballroom that he demolished the White House’s East Wing to build. Meanwhile, there appears to be no plan for what to do with Iran after killing its leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and no clear end to the war in sight. But hey, at least we’re getting a nice questionably funded ballroom, right?

Iran had to be attacked because the U.S. was “very nearly under threat” by its advanced weapons systems, according to the president.

Addressing the war for the first time during a Medal of Honor ceremony on Monday, Donald Trump claimed that Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons” posed an immediate threat to the American public—even though he declared last year that his June attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities had “completely and totally obliterated” the country’s nuclear program.

“The United States military continues to carry out large-scale combat operations in Iran to eliminate the grave threats posed to America by this terrible, terrorist regime,” Trump said Monday.

“In addition, the regime’s conventional ballistic missile program was growing rapidly and dramatically, and this posed a very clear, colossal threat to America and our forces stationed overseas. The regime already had missiles capable of hitting Europe and our bases, both local and overseas, and would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America.

“An Iranian regime armed with long-range missiles and nuclear weapons would be an intolerable threat to the Middle East, but also to the American people,” Trump continued. “Our country itself would be under threat, and it was very nearly under threat.”

So far, four American soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Trump has yet to formally speak to the American people about the war—a major departure from his predecessors, who almost universally recognized the need to justify the need for military intervention with an immediate speech to the public. Woodrow Wilson did so the same day he asked Congress to declare war against Germany during World War I, while Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a national address hours before the country declared war during World War II.

Even Harry Truman, who proceeded with the Korean War without the authorization of Congress—much like Trump—delivered a radio address to the American public shortly after he ordered U.S. air and naval forces to assist South Korea.

The current Middle East mobilization is the Trump administration’s second attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, which the White House has claimed is for weapons development. The first attack took place on June 22.

At the time, Trump celebrated that the strike had eviscerated Iran’s nuclear program, publicly rejecting a battle damage assessment by the Pentagon that determined that the impact of the missile barrage on the larger program was minimal and had only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months. The White House has thus far failed to explain the discrepancy, or why it needs to spend more taxpayer funds attacking a site that purportedly has already been demolished.

Before the June attack, Iran had argued that it was seeking uranium for peaceful purposes, such as expanding its nuclear energy program. The nation has undergone years of nuclear site inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and mere weeks before the U.S. bomb strike had allowed the agency’s inspectors to remain in the country, according to the U.N. entity.

Trump scrapped a potential nuclear deal with Iran during his first term, pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in May 2018.

President Donald Trump is warning that “the big one” is still coming for Iran.

CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday recounted a nine-minute phone call with Trump, including a chilling message from the president for the people of Iran.

“Right now we want everyone staying inside, it’s not safe out there,” Tapper quoted Trump as saying. “And then the president said, ‘It’s about to get even less safe.’”

“We haven’t even started hitting them hard. The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon,” Tapper quoted Trump as saying.

Trump’s statement indicates that he intends to escalate the conflict, not de-escalate, and suggests he intends to do so without congressional authorization, let alone any semblance of popular support.

Tapper’s reporting comes as U.S. officials announced that their illegal war in Iran was only in its nascent stage, having already claimed the lives of more than 550 people, including dozens of school-age girls.

U.S. Central Command confirmed Monday that a fourth U.S. service member died due to injuries sustained in the operation. In a prerecorded video posted Sunday about three U.S. soldiers killed in the attack, Trump said, “Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is.”

Speaking to Tapper, Trump reportedly posed yet another made-up timeline for the military campaign: four weeks. But the U.S. was already ahead of schedule, he claimed.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bragged Monday that the United States and Israel would not be bound by the rules of engagement, and did not comment on how long the campaign would last.

President Trump wants to use his kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as a template for his current plan for regime change in Iran.

Fox News’s Brett Baier reported this development after speaking with the president on Monday morning.

“He said there is a plan. He points to Venezuela as a template,” Baier said. “Which means to me that, going in, they had some sense on the ground of what was coming next.”

These situations are already quite different, with the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign in Iran having continued for more than 48 hours. And Venezuela didn’t strike back. Moreover, the only semblance of a plan in Venezuela has been a plug-and-play regime change, the success of which has yet to be determined. And what happened to “freeing” Iranians?

“This makes no sense. It is actually insane. Did we bomb Venezuela for days? Weeks? What parts of the Iranian dictatorship does he plan on keeping in control of Iran—as per the Venezuela template??? Let me repeat: Insane,” one X user commented.

Another massive difference here is that Maduro’s government was left largely intact in Venezuela, in the hands of second-in-command Delcy Rodríguez.

“So the plan is: Regime change, by keeping regime in place. Admin told Trump this won’t work in Iran given 3 pronged regime: religious, military & administrative. Killing Supreme Leader to just replace him with tougher hardliner won’t work,” wrote another X user. “One size fits all isn’t a policy. It leads to quagmires.”

“Begs the question: Who is the Delcy Rodríguez of Iran and are they still alive?” MSNOW’s Jesse Rodriguez posited. Probably not.

“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump said to ABC News’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”