Mike Johnson Caught in Obvious Lie About Trump and the Shutdown

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson was caught lying while trying to explain why President Trump rejected bipartisan plans to reopen the government and get TSA workers paid.

“Mr. Speaker, it seems as if the Republicans and Democrats are talking past one another right now. Is the only person who can solve this the President of the United States, and why isn’t he involved?” Fox News’s Chad Pergram asked Johnson during a Wednesday press conference.

“Well, I think he is involved,” Johnson replied. “I mean, I know he had a group of—”

“He shot down the plan yesterday,” Pergram said.

“Well, that’s what’s been reported, OK,” Johnson replied.

“He said that in the Oval Office that he was not pleased.”

“Well I actually have his exact quote somewhere … to paraphrase him, I think he said that he’s a little skeptical or cynical that a deal’s gonna come together,” Johnson said. “What we’re hearing in our chamber is that there’s discussions going on. Democrats are demanding to break off parts of Homeland [Security] and fund it separately.”

Johnson’s long answer was actually less accurate than the “reporting” he dismissed. Earlier this week, GOP Senator Joe Kennedy stated plainly that they were prepared to work with Democrats to reopen the government by the end of this week, but Trump “said no. No deals with the Democrats.” The president himself doubled down on that, stating that he would be unhappy with virtually “any deal they make.”

That sounds like the president is not involved, and does not want to be—regardless of what Johnson spews. Meanwhile, hundreds of TSA agents continue to go unpaid, and the lines at airports keep getting longer.

Nobody is safe from airport chaos as President Donald Trump refuses to fund the Transportation Security Administration.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr was one of thousands of travelers stuck in a three-hour security line at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston Wednesday morning.

The 75-year-old Republican, whom many describe as the worst attorney general in history, served under Trump from 2019 to 2020. Though he’s since turned on the president, Barr’s tenure was marked by his absurd manipulation of the Department of Justice in favor of Trump, including his bogus handling of the Mueller report, covering up evidence of the Trump campaign’s cooperation with Russia, and dropping the case against Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Some might consider his airport experience on Wednesday karma, if it wasn’t for the fact that most of the nation is also subject to the same horrid conditions.

As the partial government shutdown enters its sixth week and TSA workers continue to not be paid, airport lines have reached disastrous highs across the country. Nowhere has the mayhem been worse than at Houston’s George Bush Airport, where 36 percent of TSA officers have quit. On Tuesday, more than 40 percent of the airport’s security staff did not show up to work, The New York Times reported.

Though Trump has repeatedly blamed Democrats for the long lines at airports, the president rejected a deal from Senate Majority Leader John Thune last week that would fund the Transportation Security Administration.

In a Truth Social post Sunday, Trump wrote he wouldn’t make a deal with Democrats unless they vote with Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, which would have catastrophic impacts on voting rights. “It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate, and that includes giving these same terrible people, the Dems (who are to blame for this mess!), a Five Billion Dollar cut in ICE funding,” the president wrote.

Trump instead deployed ICE agents to airports across the country, including Houston, to help manage lines. But, as Barr, experienced Wednesday, sending untrained, armed federal agents to airports isn’t doing much.

U.S. fertilizer prices have skyrocketed ahead of a crucial spring growing season for farmers as Iran continues its retaliatory blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. But instead of admitting that Trump’s war has farmers at home suffering, White House officials are blaming former President Joe Biden and poaching fertilizer from other countries.

“What are you doing in your department to ensure that the farmers, in this very important spring growing season, are not getting impacted harshly by the spike in the price of fertilizer?” Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo asked Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Wednesday morning.

“Obviously the farm economy that we inherited, the farmers have struggled. They have only made money a few years out of every ten years. We’re working to bring the price of inputs down. The president has signed 18 new trade deals in the last year. Corn is up almost 30 percent, exporting dairy is up. The infrastructure’s being built, it is being put in place,” Rollins replied, avoiding the question initially. She then shared that the U.S. would be snatching fertilizer from Venezuela to make up the difference.

“But in this temporary time with the fertilizer.… The president has opened up lines from Venezuela, the Jones Act Waiver, we’re looking at other places for fertilizer to bring in. But again, it shouldn’t be too disruptive, it’s just a smaller segment of our farmers,” Rollins added.

Fertilizer—like oil—is expensive because President Trump bombed Iran and tried to tariff the entire world, not because of Biden. About one-third of the world’s shipping trade in fertilizer goes through the Strait of Hormuz. Rollins’s admission that they’ll be seizing fertilizer from Venezuela and begging it from others only makes it seem like the Iran war will continue indefinitely, no matter how often Trump signals that it will end soon.

President Donald Trump’s behemoth spending bill is forcing Republican lawmakers to consider dramatic budget cuts in many states.

Lost tax revenue from Trump’s tax cuts and added costs for new requirements for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are costing Republican-led states as much as $450 million per year, Politico reported Wednesday.

Many Republican-led states were already working with budgets that were stretched thin. But H.R. 1, Trump’s signature “Big Beautiful Bill,” required states to pay a larger share of SNAP and expand resources to handle new Medicaid work requirements, costing states as much as $50 million per year, according to Politico.

In Idaho, Trump’s federal tax cuts will cost the state an estimated $155 million in 2026, and $175 million in 2027, according to the governor’s office.

“We’re stealing from Peter to pay Paul,” Idaho State Representative Jordan Redman said. “It’s put us in a predicament where now we’re trying to figure out, ‘Ok, what programs do we keep? What programs do we cut?’”

Idaho State Senator Jim Guthrie told Politico that his constituents weren’t convinced that the short-term benefits of Trump’s tax cuts outweighed the cost of services stripped by shrinking budgets.

“The feedback I’m hearing from citizens is that extra few bucks on their [return] at the end of the year, because of the taxes they didn’t have to pay, comes secondary to wanting us to take care of the things that government needs to be invested in,” Guthrie said. “Which is your infrastructure and your roads and bridges and schools and also your Medicaid population.”

In Iowa, Trump’s tax cuts have gutted an additional $350 million from a state that was already facing a $1 billion hole in its budget, the Iowa Legislative Services Agency told Politico.

In Indiana, federal tax cuts on tips and overtime will cost the state an estimated $251 million in tax revenue in 2026. In Arizona, taking on the full federal tax code could cost an estimated $381 million in 2026. In Missouri, Republican House Budget Committee Chair Dirk Deaton proposed an approximately $51.5 million reduction to childcare subsidies. “We’re faced with hard decisions,” he said during a hearing earlier this month. “It is what it is.”

Trump’s federal spending bill is sapping state services’ budgets at the same time as the president’s disastrous, and increasingly expensive, war in Iran has driven prices up where they will likely stay.

Donald Trump announced his “President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology” on Wednesday, in what can only be described as a nightmare blunt rotation.

The group, chaired by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios, consists of 13 individuals, most notably:

Marc Andreessen, the egghead, Twitter-obsessed co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. His net worth is estimated at $1.9 billion. Interestingly, Andreessen generally voted Democrat until 2024, when he concluded that Joe Biden’s administration “flat-out tried to kill us”—by which he meant they were attempting to regulate crypto and AI. Andreessen promptly donated $2.5 million to one of Trump’s super PACs. He has since criticized diversity initiatives and immigration, and fought against the construction of multifamily housing near his secluded California mansion, despite previously advocating for an increased supply of housing in California. The hypocrisy makes some sense when one considers that Andreessen hates introspection and apparently never tries to consider his own thoughts.

Larry Ellison, the billionaire of the moment. Worth roughly $191.6 billion, the Oracle co-founder was briefly the richest man in the world back in 2025. Ellison funded the merger between Skydance Media and Paramount (owned by his son David), which involved Paramount essentially handing Trump a $16 million bribe in July to ensure the FCC would approve the deal. Ellison participated in a 2020 conference call in which a cabal of powerful figures brainstormed ways to overturn the election results, has personal ties with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and sports some of the most disgusting facial hair around.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook (sorry, Meta) and original tech bro. Net worth: $205.8 billion, even more than Ellison. Once a dewy-eyed darling of Silicon Valley, Zuck took a turn around 2024 and became, if not full MAGA, at least more tolerant of Trumpian politics. He has reportedly discouraged his employees from political activism, and even donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. But Zuckerberg’s true sin is aiding the surveillance state through Facebook’s incessant, sometimes unauthorized data collection. Happily, he also has made some terrible business decisions that have come back to bite his beloved Meta in recent weeks.

Others on the council will include:

• Sergey Brin
• Safra Catz
• Michael Dell
• Jacob DeWitte
• Fred Ehrsam
• David Friedberg
• Jensen Huang
• John Martinis
• Bob Mumgaard
• Lisa Su

This story has been updated.

Every day for the last 25 days, President Donald Trump has sat comfortably in his office and watched a glorified highlight reel of his destruction in Iran.

The daily video compilation is about two minutes long and shows the largest and most pulverizing strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, NBC reported Wednesday.

Three U.S. officials and one former official told NBC the video update—which one described as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up”—is raising alarms among the president’s allies that he’s  not receiving a “full scope” of what’s happening in Iran, distorting his view of the nearly month-long conflict that’s wreaked havoc across the globe. 

Though he does receive other verbal updates from officials, the daily sizzle reel of bombs has also made Trump even more furious with the media’s negative coverage of the war, which, in his eyes, has apparently been a success. He’s questioned why the public narrative isn’t reflecting the highly curated, crowning moments of U.S. military power he’s seeing on-screen, the officials and former official told NBC.

That’s because what’s happening in Iran over the last month has been disastrous. More than 1,500 Iranians and 13 U.S. soldiers have been killed, gas prices have skyrocketed, Trump’s goal of reopening the Strait of Hormuz is looking increasingly fantastical, and public opinion of his handling of the war is at an all-time low. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that the president doesn’t have a total picture of the war. 

“That’s an absolutely false assertion coming from someone who has not been present in the room,” she said in a statement to NBC. “Anyone who has been present for conversations with President Trump knows he actively seeks and solicits the opinions of everyone in the room and expects full throated honesty from all of his top advisors.” 

Full-throated honesty apparently means showing the president an edited montage of bombing another country over and over again.

When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022 and found that the former president had stolen hundreds of classified documents from the White House, stashing them in the club’s closets and showers, one question stood out: Why? Was Trump coordinating with Russian intelligence? Hiding proof of aliens?

As it turns out, the answer was more self-serving: Former special counsel Jack Smith concluded that Trump took the documents to help advance his business interests, according to case records obtained by Democrats and reviewed by MS NOW.

“Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests—establishing a motive for retaining them,” one memo from Smith’s office read. “We must have those documents.”

The documents Trump kept included a classified map he showed to passengers on his plane, and one document so sensitive that only six people were allowed to view it.

Following the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago, Judge Aileen Cannon, who has a history of ruling in Trump’s favor, dismissed the federal lawsuit against him by arguing that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Cannon slapped a gag order on Smith and most of the documents related to the investigation. The special counsel resigned after Trump was reelected in 2024.

The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, sent Attorney General Pam Bondi a letter Tuesday pressing her to investigate the president for his corruption and release all files relating to the case.

“These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests,” Raskin wrote. “This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”

Of course, it will be a cold day in hell before Bondi does anything that hurts Trump. The White House sent a typically petulant response in a message to MS NOW: “It’s pathetic that Democrats with zero credibility like Jamie Raskin are still clinging to deranged Jack Smith and his lies in 2026. President Trump did nothing wrong.”

President Donald Trump has sent a peace plan to Iran—but is anyone actually reading it?

The United States transmitted a 15-point peace plan to Iran through Pakistan, betraying the president’s eagerness to build an off-ramp from the spiraling conflict he helped launch in the Middle East, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

But it wasn’t clear that the deal would be accepted, or even entertained, by Iran.

Iranian representatives have submitted their own conditions for a ceasefire deal, including demands for the closure of all American bases in the Gulf, lifting sanctions, and reparations for the war, according to The Wall Street Journal. The officials also demanded that Tehran be permitted to keep its missile program and be allowed to collect fees from ships that pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

While the exact details of Trump’s plan are unknown, it addressed Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs, the targets of much of Israel and America’s bombing campaign, as well as maritime routes, the officials told the Times.

Iranian officials have struggled to safely communicate or meet amid threats against their lives, U.S. officials told the Times. Iranian officials have previously flat-out ignored requests to negotiate with the United States, and denied having entered talks.

It also wasn’t clear whether Israel was on board with the proposal. The Israeli military announced Wednesday morning that it had launched a new series of strikes against Tehran. Israel said that it had fired more than 15,000 since the war started. Iran continued its retaliatory strikes against Israel. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps demanded assurances that the war would not restart, and requested that Israel stop strikes against Hezbollah, the Iran-aligned Lebanese militia.

Despite Trump’s claim that U.S. officials have held productive conversations with Iran, the Pentagon is planning to deploy some 2,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division to the Persian Gulf.

Democrats have successfully flipped a Florida state House seat blue in the same district where President Trump’s sprawling Mar-a-Lago estate lies.

First-time candidate Emily Gregory defeated Trump-backed Jon Maples—a former council member and self-described “conservative outsider,” by just over two percentage points in a special election for Florida’s 87th district House seat on Tuesday. The victory is a significant development in the deep-red district that Trump seems to spend half of his time in.

“I think it demonstrates where the Florida voter is,” Gregory said to Politico after the victory. “They want someone who is focused on solutions and the issues and not focused on the noise.”

Gregory’s campaign focused more on affordability, housing, and health care, and less on Trump, her most famous constituent, telling MS NOW she doesn’t “think all of that much about it.” She’ll likely run again in the general election in November.

“He’s one of 115,000 registered voters in District 87,” Gregory said. “My opponent made, you know, him forefront in his campaign, and I focused more on the voters in district 87.”

“Floridians are tired of the chaos, corruption, and sky-high prices on everything from groceries to gas and health care,” Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said in a statement. “They are voting for trusted leaders like Emily to steady the ship and return commonsense, people-centered solutions back to our communities.”

With Gregory’s win, Democrats have now flipped over two dozen seats in either fully red or purple states—and are gaining momentum for what will likely be a very successful midterm election in November.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just perfectly summed up Donald Trump’s reckless military campaign in Iran.

Speaking in the Oval Office alongside Trump Tuesday, Hegseth insisted that the Pentagon had established its own role in ongoing negotiations.

“The air campaign that we’ve conducted, that Israel’s conducted alongside us, was one for the history books, truly. And it’s because we have a president of the United States that, when he sends his warfighters out to fight, he unties their hands to actually go out and close with and destroy the enemy as viciously as possible from moment one,” Hegseth said.

“And that’s why we see ourselves as part of this negotiation as well. We negotiate with bombs.”

How exactly is that working out for Hegseth? Not so great.

The Pentagon is reportedly planning to deploy 3,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East, despite Trump’s claim that U.S. officials have held productive conversations with Iran. Iranian officials have flat-out ignored requests to negotiate with the United States, and denied having entered talks. Some have speculated Trump’s surprise announcement was merely an attempt at market manipulation.

As Iran sent another wave of attacks across the Middle East Tuesday, Trump insisted they wanted to “make a deal.” Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed under threat of attack from Iran, halting global trade and sending energy prices soaring.

Still, Hegseth suggested that the U.S. keeping its finger on the big red button is helping things. “You have a choice as we loiter over the top of Tehran, as the president talked about, about your future. [The] president has made it clear that you will not have a nuclear weapon, the war department agrees. Our job is to ensure that.”