Trump Sets His Sights on a New 51st State

Donald Trump is joking about making a new fifty-first state.

The president took to Truth Social Monday night to celebrate—and take credit for—Venezuela’s victory in the semifinal round of the World Baseball Classic.

“Wow! Venezuela defeated Italy tonight, 4-2, in the WBC (Baseball!) Semifinal. They are looking really great. Good things are happening to Venezuela lately! I wonder what this magic is all about? STATEHOOD, #51, ANYONE?” he wrote.

It was a particularly dark joke from the leader who abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. Afterward, Trump claimed that the United States would “run the country now” and would likely keep its hands in Venezuela for years. While the new regime Trump has installed looks a lot like the old one—it’s run by Maduro’s former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—it’s friendlier to U.S. oil interests. Now Trump’s trying a similar gambit in Iran—but with much more disastrous results.

Trump has previously warned that Cuba could be next for annexation.

Trump continually made gestures last year at annexing both Canada and Greenland, but thankfully hasn’t launched an all-out coup.

The president’s allies once believed that Donald Trump had the ability to end the Iran war whenever he saw fit. That is no longer the case.

The people surrounding the president have interpreted a shift in power in the war, as the possibility of a quick and decisive victory moves out of reach, Politico reported Tuesday. Iran’s chokehold on the global oil supply has put the U.S. in a situation that could result in a boots-on-the-ground solution if the White House wants to amend the economic consequences of the war.

“We clearly just kicked [Iran’s] ass in the field, but, to a large extent, they hold the cards now,” one person close to the White House told Politico. “They decide how long we’re involved—and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.”

At issue is whether the U.S. can obtain control over the Strait of Hormuz, the water channel situated between Iran and the United Arab Emirates. The strait is the single most important energy transit point in the world, funneling approximately one-fifth of all crude oil shipments. Iran began laying mines across the passageway last week, effectively sealing the only sea passage from the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the rest of the open ocean.

Ensuring the free flow of oil through the strait would likely require seizing control of portions of Iran’s shoreline, a warplan that would almost certainly require the physical presence of U.S. troops in Iran. But doing so could put America in yet another open-ended Middle East conflict—exactly the kind that Trump has railed against for more than a decade.

“The terms have changed,” a second person familiar with the U.S. operation in Iran told Politico. “The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”

In 2024, the U.S. imported roughly 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day through the strait, accounting for roughly 7 percent of total U.S. crude imports, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The diminished access to the strait has rattled American markets. Oil prices have skyrocketed since the U.S. and Israel jointly attacked Iran on February 28, jumping from less than $70 per barrel to approximately $100 per barrel. The national cost of gasoline has also grown by roughly 25 percent from February.

“For the White House, now the only easy day was yesterday,” the second source told Politico. “They need to worry about an unraveling.”

So far, 13 U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. More than 1,300 Iranian civilians have been killed, including dozens of children at a girls’ school in the country’s south. Some 3.2 million people have been displaced, as the U.S.-Israeli strikes have damaged more than 42,000 civilian sites—such as homes, hospitals, and schools—across Iran, according to Iranian government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani.

The founder of the far-right Oath Keepers said Monday that he is no longer part of the MAGA movement because of President Trump’s war in Iran.

While guest-hosting for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s show, Stewart Rhodes lamented “the obvious role of the influence of Zionism in our government, of the Israeli people, intelligence services, Mossad, and others in our government.

“So that’s why I no longer call myself MAGA. I am an America-only patriot. I’m a Christian nationalist, an American Christian nationalist. I have to open my eyes to the reality in front of my face, and it’s caused a division inside of MAGA, and it’s caused a division on the political right. But so be it,” Rhodes said.

Rhodes’s 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy on January 6, 2021, was commuted, not pardoned by Trump last year, and he plans to visit Mar-a-Lago on Friday at the invitation of the Republican Party chair of Palm Beach in the hopes of getting a pardon from the president.*

“I can’t let that shut me up about calling out what I see happening in our country,” Rhodes said. “And so if I lose my pardon because of that, then so be it. That’s where my mind’s at. And I think I owe that to everybody who ever swore the oath like I did.”

It’s quite a revelation to see a January 6 insurrectionist break ranks with Trump. It goes to show that many of the president’s closest supporters believed his campaign pledge of no new wars, and aren’t willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt over Iran. Before Trump made the decision to bomb Iran, some on the right begged him to hold off, including commentators on Fox News. Now Rhodes and others on the right are abandoning MAGA.

* This article previously misstated the length of Rhodes’s sentence.

A trio of Oklahoma teenagers are suing Elon Musk’s xAI, accusing the company’s artificial intelligence program of stealing images of them off the internet to create child pornography.

The lawsuit, filed Monday, accuses a single perpetrator of compiling images and videos of at least 18 girls, and digitally altering their appearances with tools such as Grok to create nude images of underage girls.

The suit cites a police arrest that occurred in December, documenting an instance in which the individual used Grok to strip a blue bikini from a photo that a girl posted to her Instagram account in order to “depict her without any clothes.”

It is the first instance in which underage victims of such an act have taken legal action against the offender, reported The Washington Post.

The mother of one of the teens told the Post that the violating incident had “crushed” her daughter, who previously was an outgoing student-athlete.

“It definitely put her into a little bit of a shell, which we had never seen before,” the mother told the newspaper.

The proliferation of AI-generated media has conjured new legal quandaries in recent months, particularly as some of the major chatbot programs—especially Grok—have made their image-generating capabilities more accessible to the general public.

A December review by the content analysis firm Copyleaks found that Grok had—at the time—been generating “roughly one nonconsensual sexualized image per minute,” each of which was directly posted to X for public consumption. Some of the images circulated by the chatbot included sexually explicit deepfakes of children, reported The 19th.

Musk, nonetheless, vehemently defended his AI creation, writing on X in January that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok” at the time. “Literally zero,” he said.

There is little recourse available for those whose images and likeness have been stolen to fuel the nonconsensual AI recreations. The Senate passed the bipartisan DEFIANCE Act in January, in an attempt to create a pathway for civil action against those who produce, distribute, receive, or possess digitally generated porn that uses the face or likeness of an individual without their permission. That bill is still waiting for the House to take action on it, though it is unclear exactly when that could happen.

Tech experts argue that the production of deepfakes is doubling every six months, in part due to the widespread availability of AI. While much reporting has focused on the influence of deepfakes and artificially generated imagery on electoral integrity, coverage has practically glossed over the worst victims of the practice. The vast majority of deepfakes—some 90 percent—are nonconsensually generated porn of women, reported Context News in 2024.

“These young people—these children—are facing a lifetime of having these … sexualized images of what appears to be a child’s body out there on the internet,” the teens’ lawyer, Vanessa Baehr-Jones, told the Post. “It wouldn’t have been possible but for this tool that xAI released knowing full well that this material could be generated.”

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.”