Trump Admits JD Vance Will Target Blue States in Fraud Task Force

The Trump administration is rolling out a new task force, led by Vice President JD Vance, to go after claims of benefits fraud in majority-blue states.

Vance accompanied President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Monday as the latter signed an executive order to create an official benefits fraud task force. Before doing so, Trump admitted that the task force would focus mostly on Democratic states.

“It seems that it’s usually in blue states. If it’s in red states, we’re going there too, but it seems that it’s heavily, heavily Democrat,” Trump said, before taking time to disparage Somali American Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar.

“What we’ve found since President Trump came into office is that the Democrats have set up the system to funnel hundreds of billions and ultimately trillions of dollars to migrants that are in our country, oftentimes from places like Somalia,” White House adviser Stephen Miller added.

Trump had previously assigned Vance to investigate fraud in Minnesota. A document obtained by the New York Post says the order is necessary due to “similar vulnerabilities [in] California, Illinois, New York, Maine, and Colorado, where insufficient safeguards and weak oversight increase the risk of large-scale fraud.”

While talking on Monday about the war he started with Iran, President Trump claimed that he predicted 9/11 “a long time ago.”

“I knew about the Strait [of Hormuz], that it would be a weapon, which I predicted a long time ago, I predicted all of this stuff. You guys were very generous in that I predicted all of it,” he said, during a press conference at the Trump-Kennedy Center. “I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center, I made that prediction a year before he did it. I said ‘You better get him, he’s a bad guy.’ … One year before exactly, I wrote it in a book. You can even check. About a year before the World Trade Center came down. President Clinton actually had a shot at him, and he didn’t take it.”

Trump has made this claim countless times over the years. It is false. In his 2000 book, Trump wrote, “One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”

Recognizing bin Laden as a “shadowy figure” is nowhere close to predicting that he would order hijackers to fly planes into the Twin Towers.

Former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, who presided over the Trump administration’s violent operations in Chicago and Minneapolis, will retire at the end of March, two unnamed sources told CBS News.

Bovino was reassigned back to his home office in southern California in January after his disastrous tenure in Minnesota, which set off mass protests against ICE and Border Patrol agents and led to two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, being killed by federal agents. Afterward, Bovino had the audacity to claim that Pretti planned to “massacre” federal agents.

Before that, Bovino lied in court about using excessive force and tear gas against protesters in Chicago. The Trump administration also deployed Bovino to Los Angeles, Charlotte, and New Orleans, and he wore out his welcome with the locals each time. Agents under his command in each city were seen making arbitrary stops and profiling people based on their accents and race. 

Now Bovino’s time in the federal government is at an end, as is his role as the Trump administration’s  scapegoat for Minneapolis. But he may not escape accountability: Local Minnesota authorities are launching an investigation into “Operation Metro Surge.” Bovino and his underlings (and possibly superiors in the Trump administration) could face charges. 

Iranian officials are reportedly leaving Steve Witkoff’s messages on “read” as the hapless envoy attempts to restart negotiations he abandoned for Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East.

Witkoff has sent messages to officials in Tehran, including Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, urging them to come to the table for peace negotiations, two Iranian officials told Drop Site News. The Trump administration has even reached out through third-party countries. But Iran hasn’t replied.

“The message here is clear: Iran has once again closed the window for any direct negotiations,” a senior Iranian official told Drop Site, saying the decision was made by the country’s top authorities.

“The authority to declare a ceasefire rests solely with the country’s Supreme Leader. It’s not something the foreign minister, or any other official or organization in Iran, would send messages about to a foreign party,” the official said.

The White House responded to the report by claiming that Drop Site was “clearly carrying water for the Iranian terrorist regime” and that the report was “pure fiction” and “should be discarded immediately.”

The repeated requests to talk indicate that the Trump administration may have underestimated Iran’s resolve, as the U.S. president insists that the war is already won. Meanwhile, Trump claimed Monday that the United States didn’t need help from anyone after his government unsuccessfully urged reluctant allies in Europe to sail for the Strait of Hormuz.

Witkoff and Jared Kushner were originally tasked with negotiating a nuclear nonproliferation agreement with Tehran. But several nuclear experts have raised questions about the disastrous duo’s technical understanding of uranium enrichment after they presented an assessment of Iran’s Research Reactor that made no sense.

Witkoff and Kushner chose not to have nuclear technical experts present during negotiations in Geneva, and the United States then chose to skip out on technical talks. It’s not so much that Witkoff and Kushner are idiots, but that their incompetence has literally been weaponized. In the end, Trump’s decision to order airstrikes against Iran hinged on Witkoff and Kushner’s analysis of Iran’s nuclear capabilities—and they told him to strike.

The White House has taken the reins at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—which has so far included stripping nationwide access to important vaccines—is apparently not winning Americans over. Motivated by midterm anxieties, aides close to Donald Trump have reportedly stepped in to manage the Health Department in an attempt to sway public opinion of the president back into favorable waters, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Republicans in both chambers of Congress are concerned about losing their foothold. The GOP already has a razor-thin majority in the House, but last week, Politico noted that confident moods had turned sour for the caucus’s peers in the Senate, as well.

At issue at the ballot box: the price of food, the price of oil, the price of water, and the price of energy. Yet Republicans have failed to offer a resonant message to keep their party in power. Instead, the president has started an inexplicable war with Iran that has exacerbated the already astronomical cost of living, slashed taxes for the wealthy, and seeded chaos with the “Save America” Act, which even Trump administration officials have admitted will make it harder for married women to vote.

Enter: Kennedy.

Kennedy is running DHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—rather, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked, and his off-the-wall notions about health have thus far proved disastrous for the agency.

During a measles outbreak in Texas last year, Kennedy refused to endorse the tried and true measles vaccine, recommending instead that susceptible residents self-medicate with vitamins. (Since the start of 2026, 30 states have reported at least one confirmed case of measles. In 2025, that number reached 44 states.)

He has transformed DHS, replacing independent medical experts on the Centers for Disease Control’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He also overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, a decision that could potentially affect vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.

In the meantime, Kennedy has nabbed headlines for crafting viral moments that include chugging milk while wearing jeans in a pool with Kid Rock, and inventing a new version of the food pyramid that flipped the triangle upside down to feature butter, steak, and cheese in leading roles.

Some people close to Kennedy and the White House told the Journal that the secretary’s popularity within his own agency has hit a record low after multiple setbacks to his MAHA agenda, though that has apparently not affected his standing with Trump.

Americans, meanwhile, have unilaterally lost confidence in the nation’s public health agencies since Kennedy took over at HHS, according to a survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted last month.