Trump Wants to Gut Another Room in the White House

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.