Trump Admits He Told Top Official to Ignore the Courts

An hour into his Thursday Cabinet meeting, Donald Trump made a remark that should infuriate every American who has been stuck paying high prices for foreign products.

Referring to Minnesota and California, Trump said: “I spoke with Russell Vought. I said, ‘Russell, don’t send them any money.’ He said, ‘But we have a court order that we have to.’ Can you believe it? … Justice Roberts doesn’t like when I say it, but the judges are really hurting this country.”

The “court order” mentioned by Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, refers to a ruling that the Trump administration must refund companies that were taxed for shipping foreign goods into the U.S.—plus interest.

The order was handed down by a judge with the Court of International Trade, and came after the Supreme Court ruled that the tariffs Trump imposed early in his second term were unconstitutional.

Trump has previously suggested the government would not refund the companies and instead try to litigate the decision. “We’ll end up being in court for the next five years,” he said.

The amount of taxpayer money the Trump administration owes these companies increases by $700 million every month. And when the companies aren’t getting their refunds, research shows they’re passing the tariff costs on to consumers.

Yet the Trump administration continues to stall, claiming it doesn’t have the technical capabilities to process the refunds and whining, as Trump did on Thursday, about the judges making it return what is owed.

President Trump wants to turn the White House Treaty Room—traditionally reserved for ambassadors and foreign dignitaries—into a spare suite bedroom with a bathroom attached.

The New York Times reported Thursday that Trump floated his latest home improvement project on February 6 while giving a White House tour to a small group of people from the Committee for the Preservation of the White House and the Commission of Fine Arts. He wants the room used by presidents from Ulysses S. Grant to George W. Bush to be a one-bed, one-bath. It’s unclear why exactly the White House would need another guest room.

“President Trump is the builder-in-chief with an extraordinary eye for detail and design, and his bold vision will be imprinted upon the fabric of America and be felt by generations to come,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Times. “His successes will continue to give the White House the glory it deserves.”

This would be the latest in the slew of White House renovation projects that Trump has unnecessarily undertaken. He turned the Rose Garden into a concrete patio and put tacky gold flourishings throughout the White House, including the Oval Office. And of course, he has already demolished the East Wing in preparation for his true pet project, a 90,000-square-foot grand ballroom. While Trump is quick to tout his prowess as a “builder,” it becomes more and more clear that he thinks the White House is just another one of his estates.

The State Department is reallocating $1.2 billion in foreign aid funding to President Donald Trump’s war criminal–filled Board of Peace, Semafor first reported Thursday.

Officials took $1 billion from international disaster assistance, $200 million from peacekeeping operations, and $50 million from international organizations, in order to finance the president’s slush fund posing as a peace plan for Gaza. In reality, the Board of Peace has not transferred any money to Gaza (despite saying it will), nor has it disclosed how it will spend any of its funding to promote international peace. The whole thing is seemingly a farce to carry out Jared Kushner’s master plan to turn Gaza into a strip of luxury hotels.

Trump previously announced the U.S. would give $10 billion in total to the board, which he assured taxpayers is “a very small number when you look at that compared to the cost of war.” Countries seeking permanent members on the Board of Peace are required to pay $1 billion for their spot.

On Thursday, Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto introduced a bill that would take $1 billion of the Board of Peace’s funding and redirect it to the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, amid skyrocketing gas prices from Trump’s war in Iran.

“Instead of giving President Trump a $1 billion blank check to fund a ‘Board of Peace’ that has offered no transparency about how it is investing its money, let’s focus on helping American families afford their monthly power bill,” Cortez Masto said in a statement.

Like many of Trump’s insane foreign policy stunts, the apparent transfer of funds was done without congressional approval. In a properly functioning government, the president actually wouldn’t be allowed to take billions of dollars in the midst of a partial government shutdown to fund an experimental pet project.

Donald Trump isn’t too happy with Vice President JD Vance’s attempts to distance himself from the president’s reckless war in Iran.

Trump has been making “snide, annoyed comments” about Vance’s and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for his wildly unpopular military campaign in the Middle East, two anonymous sources told Zeteo.

Those who heard Trump’s remarks about Vance were reportedly surprised to hear him talk that way, as the two have been generally simpatico since Trump entered the White House.

Vance has appeared desperate to create daylight between himself and the conflict after some leakers claimed he was skeptical about the president’s war, in an apparent effort to salvage his electability for 2028. And Gabbard refused to back up the White House’s claim that Iran presented an “imminent threat” when she appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month. Both figures have previously expressed a distaste for American intervention in the Middle East.

Now Vance may be headed to Islamabad this weekend to help negotiate the end to the war he supposedly never wanted to start. If those talks go ahead, they will likely fail, and Vance won’t be able to hide from his involvement.

The White House insisted that the president’s relationship with Vance was “as warm as ever.”

“President Trump’s Peace through Strength foreign policy is a tried-and-true approach that keeps America safe and deters global threats,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told Zeteo. “DNI Gabbard is an important member of the President’s team and her work continues to serve him and this country well.”

President Donald Trump was humiliated in a Cabinet meeting Thursday while trying to defend voting by mail in Florida’s special election earlier this week.

When asked by a reporter why he voted by mail—a process he previously referred to as “mail-in cheating” just days earlier—Trump had no coherent response.

“Because of the fact that I’m president of the United States, I did a mail-in ballot for elections that took place in Florida because I felt I should be here, instead of being in the beautiful sunshine,” he responded, claiming he was in Washington, D.C., leading up to the election and could not have voted in person.

That’s not true. The president was at his Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month, as the reporter pointed out.

“But you were in Palm Beach, sir, the last few weekends—could you have gone in person?” she responded, swiftly dismantling any justification Trump claimed to have for voting by mail.

The president has long blasted mail-in voting as a form of mass voter fraud and a threat to democracy. Last week, he rejected his own party’s bid to end the partial government shutdown, calling on the Senate to pass the SAVE Act before making a deal. The Jim Crow–era voter suppression law would make it significantly harder to vote by mail.

According to the Palm Beach County’s Supervisor of Elections website, Trump also voted by mail in 2020.

Following the lie about his whereabouts, Trump rambled aimlessly to defend himself in trademark style.

“We have exceptions for mail-in ballots, you do know that, right?” he said, fumbling his words as he pointed to exceptions like military service, illness, disability, and “being away.” Not one of those applied to him.

Donald Trump is pretty bad at keeping secrets.

The president said on Tuesday that Iran had given the U.S. “a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money,” but wouldn’t say what the present (read: bribe) was at the time. Two days later, the president was unable to keep silent any longer, and excitedly revealed the gift to a crew of reporters at a Cabinet meeting.

“Steve, can I reveal the present?” Trump asked U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff.

“You can do anything you want, sir,” Witkoff replied meekly.

“[Iran] said … ‘We are going to let you have eight boats of oil.’ Eight boats. Eight big boats of oil,” Trump said.

The president described not being sure whether Iran was serious, then switching on Fox News and seeing “eight boats that are going right up the middle of Hormuz Strait.… They were Pakistani-flagged. I said, ‘Well, I guess we’re dealing with the right people.’ And actually, they then apologized for something they said, and they said, ‘We’re gonna send two more boats.’”

If this bizarre story is true—Iran previously said it hasn’t been negotiating with the U.S. at all—Pakistan, which has been trying to mediate between the two countries, might not be happy that Trump has made its tactics public.

“I hope I haven’t screwed up your negotiations,” Trump joked to Witkoff.

While eight free oil tankers are nice, the global oil market has been crashing for nearly a month due to Trump’s ridiculous decision to go to war, so it’s not like the vessels are going to reduce gas prices for regular Americans. And despite Trump’s posturing, the conflict doesn’t look to be ending anytime soon.

Democratic Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick—who is accused of stealing $5 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to use for her 2021 campaign—allegedly asked President Trump for a presidential pardon at the White House Christmas party last December.

The allegations against the Florida congresswoman will be the topic of a House Ethics Committee meeting on Thursday, and Republican Representative Greg Steube, also from Florida, has filed a resolution to expel her from the House of Representatives after the committee completes its investigation.

That Christmas pardon request, reported anonymously to The Hill, raises legitimate questions regarding the allegations against Cherfilus-McCormick, who has framed them as a targeted attack on her by the Trump administration. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has publicly supported her, stating that she “is entitled to the presumption of innocence like every other American.” If she is truly innocent, why would she ask Trump for a pardon?

While some Democrats are allowing the hearing to play out, others are already squeamish about the contradictions of the allegations against Cherfilus-McCormick and their own anti-corruption agenda.

“How do you maintain your integrity and objectivity—you’re sitting as a judge now—so how do you maintain that credibility if you’re going to treat Democrats better than Republicans?” Democratic Representative Stephen Lynch told The Hill. “That’s tough to explain.”

Cherfilus-McCormick, her brother, and two others were indicted last November for allegedly stealing $5 million in FEMA disaster relief funds that were paid to her family’s business and her campaign, and were used to purchase a diamond ring for herself.

“My opponent is seeking pardons from Donald Trump while our district can’t afford to pay their rent,” said Elijah Manley, Cherfilus-McCormick’s Democratic primary opponent, on X Thursday. “It’s time to resign.”

Cherfilus-McCormick pleaded not guilty in February.

“While I am limited in what I can address due to an ongoing federal matter, I have cooperated fully within those constraints,” she said in a statement this week. “I welcome the opportunity to set the record straight and challenge these inaccuracies, when I am legally able to do so.”

President Donald Trump was spotted snoozing while his Cabinet members delivered their dismal defenses of his disastrous war in Iran.

As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth discussed military operations in Iran at a Cabinet meeting Thursday, Trump appeared to fight to stay conscious. His eyes fluttered shut, and his head drooped downward.

As Hegseth launched into a rant against the media, who he believes are making Trump’s war seem worse than it actually is, the president slumped over in his seat, keeping his eyes cast downward.

Trump appeared similarly deflated while listening to Secretary of State Marco Rubio deliver his own defense of the flailing military campaign in the Middle East.

“This has been an incredibly successful operation. Every day—it may not get covered because, unlike them, we’re not bombing embassies and hotels, we’re hitting military targets—but every day the Department of War lets the drummer get wicked over every portion of Iran that has these military capabilities, and the results are going to bear fruit for the world,” Rubio said.

To the contrary, Iran has rendered many of America’s military bases in the Gulf region uninhabitable, sending troops scrambling to hotels or office spaces to prosecute Trump’s war remotely.

Last week, Trump appeared to doze off while attending a task force Monday aimed at curbing crime in Memphis, Tennessee. Trump has repeatedly been spotted catching up on his sleep during major events and signings, and even admitted that he’d grabbed some shut-eye during Cabinet meetings because they were “boring as hell.”

After Democrats snagged a likely House seat in Salt Lake City County, Utah, in February, the GOP was furious. Republicans control all four House districts in Utah, and despite about 40 percent of residents voting Democrat in 2024, they considered losing even one unacceptable.

The new maps led to GOP lawmakers launching a petition to try to put the anti-gerrymandering law that had created the Democratic district back on the ballot, where it could be overturned.

We can now safely say the petition has flopped.

But it was close! The Republican group behind the petition spent $4.35 million on “professional signature gathering,” per Deseret News, and recruited powerful allies such as Turning Point Action, Donald Trump Jr., and the president himself.

The petition required valid signatures from 8 percent of voters across the state—141,000 at minimum. The GOP cleared this mark easily, attaining roughly 170,000.

But the petition also needed at least 8 percent of signatures in 26 out of Utah’s 29 state Senate districts, to show that voters across the state wanted the issue brought to the ballot. It was here that Republicans failed. After a nonprofit backing the new maps, Better Boundaries, convinced about 7,000 voters to remove their names from the petition, it fell just short of the 26-district threshold.

The redistricting wars were kicked off by President Trump’s call last June for state leaders to gerrymander their maps to benefit Republicans. It’s crucial that Democrats battle back through their own gerrymandering if they are to regain the House and Senate in the midterms. Since 2025, Republicans have redistricted in an attempt to add seats in Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri. Dems have countered through redistricting in California and now, officially, in Utah.

Trump may add an extra layer of complication to the midterms by suppressing the vote before them and attempting to overturn the results if his party loses. We can only hope the public’s general lack of support for the Trump administration will be strong enough that Democrats can pull through.

The White House is not only celebrating but taking credit for the International Olympic Committee’s decision to ban trans women from competing in the 2028 Olympic Games.

The IOC announced Thursday that eligibility for female category Olympic events will be “limited to biological females,” determined by genetic testing. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately took to X to celebrate the news. 

“You cannot change your sex,” she wrote. “President Trump’s Executive Order protecting women’s sports made this happen!”

In February 2025, Trump passed the executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which banned trans women from competing in women’s sports at all levels, and vowed to rescind  funds from any programs that refused to do so in the name of “safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.” The order also pressured professional sports associations to adopt similar bans. 

Though it’s an issue that affects very few Americans, trans women’s participation in sports has become a fixation for Republicans who claim to support women’s rights, all the while passing abortion bans and limiting access to health care.

In reality, trans people make up about 1 percent to 2 percent of the U.S. population, and just 0.0002 percent of college athletes. Just 0.001 percent of Olympic athletes identify as trans. The political preoccupation with trans athletes is nothing but a scapegoat to distract from the many real inequities women and LGBTQ people face on a daily basis. 

Amid volatile debate, the IOC’s stance was highly anticipated. IOC President and former Olympic swimmer Kristy Coventry said the decision is “based on science and has been led by medical experts.” Trans women with reduced testosterone levels were previously allowed to compete. 

“At the Olympic Games, even the smallest margins can be the difference between victory and defeat,” Coventry said in a statement. “It would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category.”

In the 20 years that trans women have been allowed to compete at the Olympics, there has been only one trans woman Olympian (New Zealand weightlifter Laura Hubbard in 2021), and she did not win a medal.