Trump Suggests Bonkers Plan for Venezuela

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-month 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. 

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.”

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.

Alabama Senator Katie Britt condemned Democrats for not funding the Transportation Security Administration just days after she voted against her Democratic colleagues’ attempt to fund the agency. 

“TSA officers have gone 74 days without a paycheck in FY26 because of Democrats’ two shutdowns. This is absolutely unacceptable,” Britt wrote on X Monday. “Democrats need to end their political posturing, stop using our TSA agents as political pawns, and fully fund DHS.”

But just last week, it was Britt who blocked the Democrats’ effort to fund TSA. 

The Department of Homeland Security is currently shut down, with Democrats demanding new policies to rein in federal immigration enforcement agencies. In an attempt at compromise, Washington Senator Patty Murray asked Wednesday for unanimous consent for a measure to fund TSA, FEMA, the U.S. Coast Guard, and other essential agencies under the Department of Homeland Security. But Britt objected. 

“We have political games being played by our Democratic colleagues instead of putting the people of this nation first,” Britt said at the time. “Mr. President, what we’ve just seen put forth by the senator from Washington would effectively defund our law enforcement officers that are charged with keeping Americans safe.”

But clearly, it is Britt who would like to keep TSA agents unpaid for political leverage. 

Senate Republicans have voted six separate times against Democrats’ attempts to fund essential agencies run by the Department of Homeland Security. That’s not stopping them from blaming the long airport lines on their Democratic counterparts. 

“For the third time in six months, TSA officers are working without pay because of Democrat shutdowns. American livelihoods aren’t a political game. Fund DHS now,” Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis wrote on X Monday. 

But just days prior, while debating against the measure to fund TSA officers, it appears the answer seemed less clear to her.  “We’re in a terrible conundrum here,” she said on the Senate floor.