Secretary of the Interior Has No Idea How Solar Power Works

The secretary of the interior should presumably know how solar power generation works. On Wednesday, Doug Burgum showed that he does not.

Burgum was testifying before the House Natural Resources Committee, and exposed himself under questioning from Democratic Representative Jared Huffman, who brought up energy projects in Nevada.

“All of these projects you’re describing in Nevada have one thing in common—when the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity,” Burgum said, going on to say that other forms of electricity generation would still be needed with solar power and that it is unreliable. Huffman then made a cheeky remark to the committee chair, Republican Representative Bruce Westerman.

“Mr. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter in the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of: It’s a battery. China’s figured it out. That’s why they’re cleaning our clock on clean energy. But I want to enter that into the record,” Huffman said, to a smirk from Westerman.

Burgum replied that China being the world’s largest emitter should be part of that submission, to which Huffman replied that China produced “far more clean energy.” Westerman then intervened to end the repartee.

Burgum, formerly the governor of North Dakota, has extensive ties to the oil and gas industry. He shares President Trump’s hostility to cleaner forms of energy, and doesn’t publicly object to Trump’s contention that climate change is a “con job.” But at the very least, Burgum should know that solar energy is aided considerably by battery storage.

The White House is planning to host a nine-hour Christian prayer festival at the National Mall on Sunday that pushes the view of the United States as a Christian nation.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, as well as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, are slated to speak at “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” which is partly funded by taxpayer dollars set aside for the country’s 250th birthday celebrations.

The other speakers are overwhelmingly Protestant Christian, with notable exceptions being Catholic leaders Bishop Robert Barron and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, as well as Rabbi Meir Soloveichik. The Reverend Paula White-Cain, President Trump’s spiritual adviser, said in a webinar about the event on April 28 that the festival “is about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.… This is really truly rededicating the country to God.”

White-Cain, who has compared Trump to Jesus, added that the celebration would not include leaders “praying to all these different Gods.”

“We are focusing on our heritage as a Judeo-Christian nation,” Brittany Baldwin, executive director of the White House’s 250 Task Force, also said in the webinar. “We worked very hard with the faith leaders we trust … to ensure that we hear their concerns and we have the right focus for our community of believers, across the country. So I think if you do see another religion represented, it would probably be in a modest way.”

The taxpayer-funded event seems to be at odds with the First Amendment to the Constitution’s establishment clause, which is supposed to guard against a state religion, and has senior members of the government participating. White-Cain’s involvement suggests that the festival will be full of reverence to Trump, even if he isn’t there. Considering that Trump just celebrated a golden statue of himself at his Florida estate that is definitely not an idol, the event seems a little hollow too.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents will be present at the 2026 FIFA tournament, casting an ominous shadow of violent authoritarianism over the beloved event.

Earlier this year, ICE head Todd Lyons announced that the agents would be present at the World Cup just for security, not enforcement. Now, Los Angeles’s World Cup hosting committee can’t even promise that—despite requests from FIFA President Gianni Infantino and strike threats from food and beverage workers, a group that is more likely to be subject to an ICE raid.

“We are working very closely with them to make sure they’re just focused on us, providing us a safe and secure event and nothing else,” committee head Kathryn Schloessman said. “But having said that, I am not the ultimate decision-maker on that.”

ICE’s presence and potential for raids may very well create an absolute nightmare for the U.S., host cities, international fans, and the countless migrant workers behind the scenes.

Even the president’s inner circle is tiring of his erratic, late-night social media binges—and the White House aide responsible for them.

Donald Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp is the woman behind his overnight Truth Social sprees, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Through twilight-hour shifts, Harp has created the impression that the president never sleeps and is instead spending his should-be bedtime obsessively retweeting baseless conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election and Fox News headlines about his purported popularity among the American public.

The 34-year-old aide supplies the president with stacks of printed-out drafts and awaits his approval before hitting post, sources told the Journal.

Her work has included posts that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, and an AI-generated image of Trump as Jesus Christ. Trump took down both posts after they spurred immense public backlash. In the former instance, Trump claimed he did not see the section of the video that racistly mocked the former president and first lady. A White House official blamed the mistake on an editing error.

The frustration lies partly in the perceived chain of command: Harp does not share her drafts with anyone else in the White House but the president, claiming that she works for him and only him, reported the Journal. That’s prompted tensions between Harp and some of the federal employees affected by her incendiary writing, such as the chief of staff’s office.

In a statement, White House communications director Steven Cheung affirmed the president’s reliance on Truth Social as his primary mode of communication with the American people, yet declined to comment on how the office crafts them.

“Truth Social has never been hotter, and it’s because President Trump offers his unfiltered and direct thoughts to the American people, without the biased media taking him out of context,” Cheung said. “We don’t discuss internal deliberations of how the process works, but no other social-media tool has been more effective than Truth.”

Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes have been named by a top White House official as potential targets for the Trump administration’s counterterrorism strategy.

During an interview with Breitbart editor in chief Alex Marlow last week, Sebastian Gorka, the pugnacious far-right influencer angling to be the next head of the National Counterterrorism Center, was asked whether he considered right-wing extremism a threat.

When Marlow asked if there was a threat of “right-wing terror,” Gorka claimed that there were not “comparable trendlines to violence on the right” as on the left (a favorite right-wing talking point). But he then name-dropped two of the highest-profile right-wing figures—who also happen to be MAGA defectors.

“We have to have an effective, accurate snapshot on who are part of the conservative movement today, because I would say to you I’m not sure that Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson are conservatives,” Gorka said.

“If you are lauding Sharia law, if you are saying that there are Muslim states that seem to be better qualitatively than America in terms of freedom and prosperity, I’m not sure that means you’re part of the conservative movement. So if you remove those individuals and you understand that they’re not conservatives, what’s left?”

To be clear, Carlson did not laud sharia law. Rather, he claimed that Western cities were degrading from “self-hatred,” while Eastern cities were fostering “stability” and “hospitality,” and were “tolerant of diversity.”

As independent journalist Ken Klippenstein pointed out Tuesday, none of this actually has to do with extremism at all: Carlson and Fuentes are being called out because they criticized Donald Trump over his reckless military campaign in Iran.

Carlson has been arguably more antiwar than many establishment Democrats, calling Trump’s Iran war “the single most foolish thing any American president has ever done.” Fuentes has urged against the strikes, and claimed the U.S. has “lost decisively,” having failed to achieve any of its objectives.

More to the point, both figures have been critical of Israel. Fuentes is a straight-up Hitler-loving neo-Nazi, while Carlson is an openly racist conspiracy theorist who also criticizes the U.S-Israel relationship and the ongoing atrocities in Gaza.

Both figures retain immense influence among the conservative population, but in diverging from MAGA’s full-throated support of Israel, Fuentes and Carlson have landed themselves among the ranks of people the Trump administration seeks to target. The two men definitely stand out: The administration has described other domestic terrorists as “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

This story has been updated.