Trump Campaigns Against Top Republican Behind Epstein Files Push

Donald Trump is pulling out all of the stops to get rid of one of his only Republican critics. 

The president is traveling to Kentucky Wednesday to campaign against Representative Thomas Massie, who not only voted against Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” but has also been a thorn in Trump’s side over the Jeffrey Epstein files and the Iran war. 

Trump is visiting Hebron, Kentucky, just outside of Cincinnati, ostensibly to talk about the economy, but it just happens to be in Massie’s district. Ahead of the visit, Trump doubled down on his endorsement of Massie’s primary opponent, farmer and former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein. Meanwhile, a super PAC aligned with the president has already spent $2.6 million on the race.  

In a Truth Social post Wednesday morning, Trump mocked Massie, making a prediction that “‘Representative’ Thomas Massie will go down as the WORST Republican Congressman in the long and fabled history of the United States Congress.” Massie responded on X with a sarcastic prediction of his own, noting how Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Trump’s feud with Massie goes back months, and he’s hoping that he can single-handedly convince the conservatives in Kentucky’s 4th congressional district, a safe Republican seat. But Massie has endured Trump’s threats and withstood a highly funded attempt by pro-Israel interests to unseat him in 2024. 

Those same interests have gotten involved in this race, with the Republican Jewish Committee Victory Fund producing an ad presenting the primary contest as a choice between “Gallrein and Trump or Massie, who stands with Iran.” The ad shows Massie alongside Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Democratic Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who happen to be Muslims. Will that plus Trump’s efforts be enough to unseat Massie? 

It appears that the Defense Department downplayed the severity of the retaliatory strike that killed six U.S. service members in Kuwait.

In addition to those killed two weeks ago, more than 30 military members were hospitalized by an Iranian drone strike on a makeshift tactical operations center in Kuwait, with dozens suffering from injuries, including burns, shrapnel wounds, and brain trauma, multiple sources told CBS News.

Of the 25 service members transported to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, 20 arrived on a C-17 military transport aircraft with injuries designated as “urgent” and requiring immediate evacuation. More than 100 medical personnel were dispatched to Landstuhl to assist in the surge of patients, one of the sources told CBS.

Additionally, 12 service members were hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and one was sent to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

Iran targeted the makeshift operations center in the early hours of the U.S. and Israel’s aerial bombing campaign. The U.S. military personnel stationed there reportedly received no counter-rocket, artillery, and mortar defense; didn’t get the drone defense systems they asked for; and didn’t hear the warning sirens in time.

The next day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the deadly strike in Kuwait “a squirter,” and later complained that reporting on the troops killed was a ploy to make the president look bad.

The Defense Department did not release information about how many were hurt in the strike. U.S. Central Command initially claimed that five had been seriously wounded. “Several others sustained minor shrapnel injuries and concussions—and are in the process of being returned to duty,” the post on social media read.

The Pentagon has a process by which it notifies families of wounded soldiers, and seeks to prevent them from learning about injuries in press releases.

The strike in Kuwait has presented an early flashpoint for the president’s illegal war in Iran, which seems to have no end date or clear objective. New revelations about the scale of injuries and destruction should raise questions about the Pentagon’s transparency—or lack thereof.

Just one day after The Wall Street Journal discovered that Donald Trump was urging everyone in his presidential Cabinet to wear the same style of Florsheim shoes, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was caught red-footed in a pair of Florsheims about two sizes too big.

The Oxfords cost $145 and became an obsession of Trump’s last year. The Journal reported that the president has personally ordered pairs for many of his advisers, including Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Commerce Secretary (and noted Epstein affiliate) Howard Lutnick. Sometimes, the shoes come in boxes adorned with Trump’s signature.

“All the boys have them,” said a female White House official.

“It’s hysterical, because everybody’s afraid not to wear them,” another official remarked.

Vance recalled that he and Rubio were given Florsheims after the president told them they were wearing “shitty shoes” at an Oval Office meeting in December. Trump proceeded to pull out a catalog and asked the men for their shoe sizes, Vance said.

But the vice president must be misremembering, because the Florsheims Rubio was photographed wearing Tuesday were clearly too big for him. The Journal also reported that Trump likes to guess people’s shoe sizes in front of them, so maybe that’s what actually happened.

As a few internet commenters noted, this begs the question of why Rubio just didn’t exchange the pair for the correct size of Florsheims, so he could have a shoe that fits while still showing respect to Dear Leader.

Maybe Rubio didn’t think that far ahead, or maybe Trump made him put the shoes on in front of him in some insanely sad show of fealty. In any case, Little Marco should invest in some blister cream.

Democrats pulled off a massive upset in a special election Tuesday for a New Hampshire state House seat, with Bobbi Boudman defeating Republican Dale Fincher 51 percent to 47 percent in Carroll County district 7—which Donald Trump won by nine points in 2024.

This was Boudman’s third attempt to win the seat, having lost the same election in 2024 by 13.6 points.

“Tuesdays are becoming a headache for state Republicans across the country as they suffer one stunning defeat after another,” Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee president Heather Williams said after the victory.

“Representative-elect Boudman ran a remarkable campaign focused on solutions to the problems that families in New Hampshire are facing, from the rising cost of electricity, utilities, and groceries to the health care crisis caused by Trump’s ‘Big Ugly Bill.’ This win is yet another warning sign to Republicans across the country, and a new reality is now sinking in: no Republican seat is safe,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement. “From now until November, Democrats are keeping our foot on the gas and organizing and competing everywhere, including to flip the New Hampshire House and take back power across the country.”

According to The Downballot, Democrats have now flipped a district in a special election for the tenth time since President Trump returned to office. If alarms weren’t already going off for the GOP ahead of this year’s midterms, they certainly are now.

Kansas Senator Roger Marshall dismissed rising gas prices as a “sacrifice” Americans needed to make for their freedom.

During an interview Tuesday night, Marshall became extremely defensive when CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins pressed back on his claim that soaring gas prices were simply “a little bit of a hiccup.”

“If they’re lifting sanctions on Russia, clearly they’re worried it could last longer than a brief period, don’t you think?” Collins asked.

“I don’t, Kaitlan, I think you’re really reaching here. I think just as quickly as we took those sanctions away, we could put them back on,” Marshall said.

“You live in this little, little ivory tower here, I don’t think that you’re dealing with the real world that the President Trump has. We don’t know when the war is gonna be over. We don’t know when these sanctions should go back on. But I think the president on a day-to-day basis—”

“But how is that an ivory tower?” Collins pressed. “I’m asking you about gas prices that Americans are paying that are extremely high, and having wild swings, in part because of the war with Iran that the president started.”

“Again, freedom is not free. Americans are gonna have to make some sacrifices,” he said, insisting that the U.S. was “operating from a point of strength.”

But Americans aren’t feeling that strength at the gas pump. While Marshall ranted about ivory towers, Americans were paying the highest gas prices since 2024 at about $3.54 per gallon, a 21 percent increase from just a month earlier.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced last week that the U.S. would issue 30-day waivers to allow Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil that was “already stranded at sea,” promising doing so would “not provide significant financial benefit” to the Kremlin. Experts have pushed back on that claim.

And it doesn’t appear that prices will change anytime soon. “Unfortunately, prices are going to be up for awhile,” Senator Rick Scott warned Wednesday.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported two 12-year-old American twin sisters to Guatemala, even after their mother—who was also deported—requested for them to stay in Florida with their grandmother. Now ICE has been ordered to bring them home.

Marly Carolina Morataya Zepeda was ordered to appear at an Orlando, Florida, ICE facility on March 9 with her “children and documents” to complete her deportation process. Her mother, Sonia Garcia Valles, waited outside the courthouse with the twins until an ICE officer told her to bring the twins into the detention center, where they were taken into custody.

The court filed a temporary restraining order against the twins’ deportation, only to learn hours later that they were already on a plane to Guatemala, even though their mother filled out the proper paperwork to have her children, who were born in Orlando, stay in the U.S.

The traumatic error is being remedied.

“Respondents are DIRECTED to coordinate with Petitioners and their counsel to facilitate, including by covering all associated costs, the IMMEDIATE AND SAFE RETURN of minor Petitioners A.E.T.M. and A.E.T.M. to the United States, specifically to the custody of their grandmother, Sonia Garcia Valles, in Orlando, Florida via the Orlando International Airport,” the court order read.

This massive mistake has become all too common during the Trump administration, even as it claims time and time again that it does not deport American citizens, much less middle schoolers.

“The Trump mass deportation push has led to ICE screwing up at levels we’ve never seen before,” American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote on Wednesday. “These kinds of errors have always happened on occasion in the past, but now they’re happening daily/weekly as basic accountability measures have been pushed aside in the rush to deport.”

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff is back showing just how clueless the Trump administration is when it comes to warmaking.

Asked Tuesday night by Fox News’s Sean Hannity to explain America’s negotiations with Iran last summer, Witkoff said the Iranians “opened up by telling us they had the unalienable right to enrich. To which we responded … that we had the unalienable right to stop them from enriching.”

Witkoff portrayed the Iranians as stubborn, alleging the country’s officials gloated about their enriched uranium. “It was a clear threat,” he said. “They were boasting about having it.”

Witkoff then added: “They said to us—and this was some challenge—‘You’re not going to get from us diplomatically what you could not achieve militarily.’ Now, yes, we had destroyed their three main enrichment and conversion centers … that was clear. They, of course, didn’t want to admit it.”

Setting aside the insinuation that Iranian officials were literally taunting the U.S. into going to war with them, Witkoff is somehow arguing that the Trump administration destroyed Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities with its June strikes but also that Iran was still actively enriching uranium, and bragging about its enrichment, after these facilities were destroyed.

Witkoff has a track record of being concerningly obtuse on Iran. Previously, experts questioned whether Iran’s nuclear reactors could even produce the type of uranium he claimed they could.

More recently, Witkoff was asked by CNBC’s Sarah Eisen how he thought the war in Iran would end. His response? “I don’t know, Sarah.”

Iran has declared that U.S. tech and banking companies are now legitimate targets.

An Iranian media outlet affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tasnim news agency, released a list of offices and infrastructure run by American companies, including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, and called them “Iran’s new targets,” Al Jazeera English reports.

“As the scope of the regional war expands to infrastructure war, the scope of Iran’s legitimate targets expands,” Tasnim said. The offices and infrastructure on the list are located in Persian Gulf countries and Israel.

On Wednesday, Iran’s state broadcaster said that “the enemy,” referring to the United States and Israel, had declared financial institutions as targets themselves due to an Israeli attack on a Tehran bank branch, which it called an “illegitimate and unusual act in war.”

A spokesperson for the Khatam Al Anbiya Headquarters, a group described as IRGC-owned by the United Nations, also said Wednesday that “the enemy left our hands open to targeting economic centres and banks belonging to the United States and the Zionist regime in the region.”

Iran has already attacked data centers in the Gulf, striking Amazon Web Services facilities in the UAE and Bahrain and causing outages for banking, payments, enterprise, and consumer services in the region. The move threatens to upend tech companies’ investments, as well as AI expansion in the Middle East.

OpenAI is building a 10-square-mile AI campus in the UAE called Stargate, which has involvement from Oracle, Nvidia, and Cisco. Microsoft is reportedly planning to invest $15 billion in the UAE in the next three years. But if Iran steps up its attacks on these companies’ Middle Eastern assets, all of this will be in limbo.

Many of these companies have also curried favor with the Trump administration, or have extensive U.S. government contracts. Oracle’s chairman and founder, Larry Ellison, as well as Palantir founder Peter Thiel, are both strong supporters of President Trump and may not be happy if their investments are literally blown up. Did anyone in the White House foresee the possibility of attacks on tech infrastructure? It appears not, providing more proof that there was little, if any, planning for this reckless war.

Whoever replaces Kristi Noem is going to have to deal with the mountain of paperwork she’s left behind, as multiple vendors await payments from the Department of Homeland Security, Axios reported Wednesday.

“There’s a mountain of backed-up contracts and invoices on her desk that the new guy will just have to deal with,” a source familiar with the situation at DHS told Axios.

The backlog on Noem’s desk predated the ongoing partial government shutdown, as the result of the outgoing secretary’s policy to personally approve all expenditures above $100,000. Those disruptions are now exacerbated by the shutdown.

Under Noem’s tenure, multiple contracts with immigration detention facilities across the country have lapsed, according to Axios. Camp East Montana, the country’s largest immigration detention facility, had a contract with DHS that expired at the end of February. A contract with a family detention center in Dilley, Texas—which holds dozens of immigrant children—expired at the beginning of March. New Jersey’s Delaney Hall is also operating without a contract, and many small county jails are similarly awaiting payments.

Noem has also delayed distribution of disaster relief funds through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

A source familiar with FEMA’s delays told Axios that DHS’s front office was a “giant shit-show.”

“The ramifications of her tenure are going to be felt for years and years and years and years,” the source said. “We’re not really going to know exactly how bad it is until we have a major hurricane that unfortunately impacts someplace in the United States.”

Another source familiar with the situation at DHS told Axios that even if Noem’s review policy was reversed and “everything goes back to the way it was … it’s going to take weeks, if not months, of constant work” to restore funding to DHS vendors.

DHS adviser Corey Lewandowski told Axios that the government shutdown limited certain spending, and he insisted that all possible funding had been distributed.

The Department of Homeland Security wants access to the Federal Parent Locator Service, which is considered to be the government’s largest, most detailed database, ProPublica reports.

The database, which Bethanne Barnes of the Administration for Children and Families called “the most powerful people-finder system that the U.S. government has,” exists so that the government can locate parents who owe child support if they move states or change their employment status. It holds the name, Social Security number, address, and pay of every single employed person in the country.

The Locator Service also holds the names of every single child involved in a child support case, along with their gender, birth date, Social Security number, and family members. It also notes if they or their mother have experienced domestic violence—something that potential abusers within law enforcement would be able to see if given access to the database.

Child support workers at the state level have expressed concern that employers will no longer report new hire information to them out of fear of DHS retribution, which in turn will bog down the child support system and hurt children and their parents in the process.

“And if we’re not learning from employers when a parent who owes child support gets a new job, who loses in that situation?” said Kate Cooper Richardson, Oregon’s former child support program lead. “The one in five U.S. children who rely on consistent and regular child support.”

It’s up to the Department of Health and Human Services to approve this access request. It has yet to comment.