Trump Slashes Resources for NATO as He Throws Tantrum Over Iran

The Trump administration is planning to drastically reduce military provisions to NATO allies.

An envoy of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Alexander Velez-Green, shared details of the forthcoming recissions with senior officials of NATO member states during a meeting in Brussels last week, reported German news outlet Der Spiegel.

The proposed plan is much more drastic than European diplomats had predicted: it involves decreasing the number of U.S. fighter jets, warships, drones, and aerial refueling tankers available to the alliance, according to the briefing. The number of available fighter jets, for instance, could be diminished by a third, and the number of strategic bombers halved.

All submarines will be pulled out, and the number of available destroyers will also be cut.

Washington also intends to substantially scale back its previous commitments to NATO’s “Force Model,” which was agreed upon in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The model stipulates which units the Supreme Allied Commander Europe is allowed to directly access from NATO member states in defensive strategies. 

European countries are expected to fill the resulting gaps in themselves, Der Spiegel reported.

Donald Trump has been threatening such an action for weeks, specifically since the European continent refused to support his invasion of Iran and the subsequent blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.

Last month, Trump claimed he was open to the idea of pulling troops from Italy, Spain, and Germany, accusing NATO members of being “cowards” and “terrible” for refusing to assist in his Middle East war.

At the time, the sudden Oval Office announcement stunned the Pentagon as much as it did America’s allies.

The Defense Department “was not expecting it and has not been planning any kind of drawdown,” a congressional aide familiar with the situation told Politico. “But we have to take him seriously because he was serious about it during his first administration.” 

In July 2020, Trump proposed pulling 12,000 troops out of Germany in order to punish Berlin for its low defense spending. That order was never implemented.

But the president has been on the offensive against NATO since the early days of his first term in office. He regularly baselessly insists that other members have failed to pay their dues and argues that the U.S. has been shortchanged by other NATO countries, even though that’s not how the alliance operates.

It is unclear who in the Western world benefits from the dissolution of NATO. John Bolton,  Trump’s first-term national security adviser and a policy hawk who also served under Ronald Reagan’s administration, has said that the consequences of exiting the alliance could be dire. America’s withdrawal from the pact could effectively be the death of NATO, leaving behind a fractured and significantly weakened European alliance, while devastating the U.S.’s international credibility as an ally.

President Trump is publicly fuming after former President Joe Biden sued the Justice Department in an attempt to block the release of audio and transcripts from his interviews with his memoir ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer in 2016 and 2017. The president called his predecessor a “Crooked Politician!!!” Wednesday on Truth Social.

The interviews in question were used in the 2023 special counsel investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents. That investigation concluded there was no criminal wrongdoing, but that Biden was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden’s attorneys argue that the interviews were private conversations that should not be released retroactively by the Trump DOJ.

“Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home,” Biden’s attorneys wrote. “And when the U.S. Department of Justice obtains that private information through a criminal investigation, the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure.”

They also noted that the DOJ spent two years properly protecting these transcripts in accordance with FOIA, until they switched up in February, telling Biden they’d be releasing them “without any formal explanation.”

Texas attorney general and MAGA rabblerouser Ken Paxton won the Republican Senate primary on Tuesday over incumbent John Cornyn. Paxton now advances to the November general election, where he will face Democrat James Talarico.

While the idea of Senator Paxton is terrifying to Democrats, establishment Republicans were perhaps even more upset. Conservative groups who backed the slightly less extreme Cornyn were forced to scrub their social media of statements attacking Paxton, presumably while a kind of metaphysical angst washed over them.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee deleted at least eight critiques of Paxton, including a July 2025 statement released after Paxton’s wife, Angela Paxton, filed for divorce on “biblical grounds.”

“What Ken Paxton has put his family through is truly repulsive and disgusting. No one should have to endure what Angela Paxton has, and we pray for her as she chooses to stand up for herself and her family during this difficult time,” read the statement.

Another deleted post bore the headline “Ken Paxton’s Lies and Incompetence Keep Piling Up.” This statement cited an Associated Press article that found that Paxton and his then wife were listing three different homes as “primary residences” so they could take advantage of lower interest rates.

Paxton’s primary win was aided by a late endorsement by President Donald Trump. Some expected that Trump might back the more electable Cornyn, but fealty matters more than anything with our president, and Paxton has given the president lavish, consistent support over the years.

Paxton was “very loyal to your favorite President, ME,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. “Ken’s opponent was VERY disloyal to me.”

Paxton is also an outsider with a long history of scandal. He was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives on corruption charges in 2023. That, plus the adultery, may be why Trump saw himself in him and blessed him with an endorsement.

The official financial fund set up for Donald Trump’s Board of Peace has received exactly zero dollars—but that doesn’t necessarily mean that cash isn’t flowing into the president’s slush fund run by war criminals.

Four months after Trump launched his preposterous pet project for Gaza, the group’s official fund set up by the World Bank and approved by the United Nations has yet to see a drop of the billions promised to the board, four people familiar with the matter told the Financial Times Wednesday.

“Zero dollars have been deposited,” one person told the FT.

Rather than rely on the official fund, Trump’s Board of Peace has decided to receive donations through its JPMorgan account, which has no transparency or reporting requirements.

A Board of Peace official told the FT that contributors were offered a number of options for paying, and had at this point “opted to use other options.” The board would report its financials to its executive board—which includes classic Trump cronies such as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff—“at a time deemed appropriate,” the official said.

Ten countries pledged billions of dollars to carry out Kushner’s master plan to turn Gaza into a strip of luxury hotels, but so far, barely any of that money has materialized.

Morocco has contributed $20 million to fund the office of Nickolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian diplomat serving as the “high representative” for Gaza, plus salaries for the slate of technocrats who will oversee the enclave. The United Arab Emirates also provided $100 million to train new police in Gaza, but the program has yet to begin and the funds are frozen, two people told the FT.

Trump has previously pledged $10 billion in taxpayer money to his slush fund. The State Department has offered $50 million to keep the board running, which has yet to be allocated. The State Department has also promised to reallocate $1.2 billion in aid spending to the Board of Peace’s myriad projects, but apparently that money isn’t headed for the board at all.

“None of that money [has gone to the board]. None of that money is being managed by the Board of Peace. And State tells us there’s no intent to have any of that money managed by the Board of Peace,” one congressional aide told the FT.

GOP Representative Mike Flood had yet another disastrous town hall in Norfolk, Nebraska, on Tuesday, as his constituents drowned him out with grievances regarding the war on Iran, the White House ballroom, Jeffrey Epstein, and President Trump’s “anti-weaponization” slush fund.

“Iran war, White House ballroom, security for the White House ballroom, immigration enforcement, Trump arch … the reflecting pool renovation, slush fund for crooks, and the farm bill. How do we pay for all this?” said one Nebraskan, according to CNN.

“I know you’re a lawyer. You’ve taken an oath as a congressman to support the laws of this land. A million Epstein files have still not been released, and … the Epstein Transparency Act you signed, the Senate signed, Trump signed, yet we still have millions of files that still have not been released,” Fremont resident Kim Stabbe asked Flood. “We know that Trump is in them tons of times; why do you continue to protect the pedophiles and Trump’s DOJ as they continue to break the law?”

“We have passed a law to release the Epstein files,” Flood replied. “Do you think that under President Joe Biden’s four years in the White House, if President Trump was in the Epstein files, it would have been released?” He was met with boos and jeers. Flood toed a hawkish line on Iran, conceding that “everything costs too much,” while in the same breath maintaining support for the war that is making everything cost so much, stating, “I also don’t want Iran with a nuclear weapon.”

The only thing Flood seemed to fully agree with the crowd on was Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund—a shameless plan to direct billions of taxpayer dollars to Trump’s supporters who felt wronged or targeted by the Biden administration—even those who attacked Capitol Police on January 6.

“I do not think we should be creating a fund for people that commit physical violence against law enforcement,” he said. “The Senate is opening an oversight effort. And we in the House have to determine whether we do the same in the Judiciary Committee or in the Oversight Committee. I clearly think Congress needs to have an oversight role in this before I can sign off or support this.”

The hostilities Flood was met with aren’t just local to Norfolk. Americans nationwide are fed up with blatant corruption, another pointless and expensive war in the Middle East, and worrying about how much it’ll cost to fill their tank.

Watch the full town hall here.

The FBI is bleeding agents over the Trump administration’s purity tests.

Deputy Assistant Director Emily Morales was terminated from the bureau last week, in what insiders are claiming is the latest in a string of partisan firings at the hands of FBI Director Kash Patel, reported MS NOW Tuesday.

Morales received a letter from the director Friday and was subsequently walked out of the building with her belongings (as is standard procedure). It was not immediately clear what was in the letter, or why Morales was given the pink slip, but the top intelligence analyst did play a role in a tactical report that angered the GOP—nearly a decade ago.

A shooter opened fire on House Republicans’ baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, in 2017. Representative Steve Scalise sustained life-threatening injuries from the attack, which struck his hip and shattered his bones. A week later, the FBI determined that the attack was not domestic terrorism but “suicide by cop.”

The matter has since been complicated by what former FBI Director Christopher Wray described as an evolving definition of domestic terrorism. In 2021, the FBI provided a statement to the House Appropriations Committee that read, “The shooter was motivated by a desire to commit an attack on Members of Congress.”

“This conduct is something that we would today characterize as a domestic terrorism event,” the statement continued.

Earlier this month, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued another report on the attack, accusing the FBI of utilizing “false statements and manipulation of known facts” in order to reach its original conclusion in the 2017 shooting assessment.

But other ousted FBI staffers with experience working on intelligence reports claim that there was nothing atypical about the bureau’s original report. “Tactical reports give an understanding of information as it’s known at the time. Anyone with crisis response experience knows that information can change, and usually does,” Tonya Ugoretz, the former assistant director of the FBI’s Intelligence Directorate, told MS NOW.

Ugoretz was fired several months ago after she contributed to a decision to withdraw a “thinly sourced intelligence report” that alleged “China tried to flood the United States with fake driver’s licenses in order to promote fraud in the 2020 election,” according to MS NOW.

“The FBI’s actions are choking the capabilities that help it stop criminals, spies, hackers, and terrorists before they act,” Ugoretz said. “I don’t know if they’re doing it intentionally or out of ignorance, and I don’t know which is worse.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin doubled down on his idiotic threat to stop processing international flights at airports in sanctuary cities.

Speaking on Fox News’s Hannity Tuesday, Mullin complained that local law enforcement had allowed a chaotic protest outside of New Jersey’s Delaney Hall, a privately operated immigration detention facility under federal jurisdiction. The secretary warned that he’d met with the White House to plot his petty revenge on any city that doesn’t get behind Donald Trump’s sweeping mass deportations.

“We’re currently drawing up plans to say, ‘Listen, in these sanctuary cities, where the local radical left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either,’” Mullin said. “Because they don’t want us to enforce immigration, but they want us to process immigration at their facilities, nothing about that makes sense to me.”

But Mullin’s plan lacks support from, well, everyone.

The U.S. Travel Association, a nonprofit lobbying group for all aspects of travel, has warned that such an unprecedented action would have “devastating consequences for the travel industry and communities that depend on international visitation.”

Airlines for America, the largest trade association for the industry in the country, also urged against the idea. “Reducing CBP staffing at major airports would have a devastating effect on the airline and tourism industries, causing a significant operational disruption to carriers, travelers and the flow of international cargo,” the group said in a statement.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also opposed Mullin’s plan while appearing at a House Budget Committee hearing last week. “We have people from around the world and around the country that need to be able to fly into all different kinds of places,” he said. “We shouldn’t shut down air travel in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics.”

President Trump is raising the U.S. refugee admission limit by 10,000 people—but only for white South Africans.

A signed presidential determination from May 21 obtained by Reuters declared that the U.S. will be giving white South Africans, who are mostly still benefiting from the afterlife of the apartheid system, special treatment so that they can escape the “incitement of racially motivated violence.” The determination refers to “new disruptions” in the region. In a Tuesday announcement in the Federal Register, the president confirmed the news, calling it “an unforeseen emergency refugee situation.”

In reality, this is simply a reaffirmation of his Elon Musk–influenced reshaping of the refugee program, which under Trump, has bent over backward to get Afrikaners in, while denying just about everyone else.

“Farmers are being killed,” Trump said while welcoming white South Africans to the U.S. last May. “They happen to be white. Whether they are white or Black makes no difference to me.” Trump has complained about a “genocide of white people in South Africa,” and even called Afrikaners a “long-persecuted minority group.”

Those claims have been widely debunked for years, and as of 2025, white South Africans own nearly 75 percent of all farmland in the country despite making up just 7 percent of the population.

Even still, the Trump administration has doubled down on this unsuccessful program as direr refugee situations exist elsewhere in the world, and as problems at home worsen by the day.

Construction has begun on the ring for the “UFC Freedom 250” mixed martial arts event, on June 14 at the White House.

Pieces of the blue and white ring could be seen dwarfing the building Tuesday. The structure, according to what President Trump told reporters last month, will be able to hold 4,500 fans for the event, which coincides with Flag Day and Trump’s 80th birthday. An additional 75,000 to 100,000 people will be able to view the contests for free on “massive screens” set up at the Ellipse park south of the White House.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship has released renderings of the octagonal cage on the White House lawn, as well as the massive screen setup on the Ellipse. An arch covered with stars is visible in front of the White House, soaring high above the building, with the cage in front of it.

Staging such an event has attracted criticism for multiple reasons, not least among them the fact that it’s a cash grab for Trump and UFC CEO Dana White. Sponsorship packages for the fights including ringside seats are going for as much as $1.5 million, and neither the White House nor the UFC has said where the money is going.

While tickets are technically free, the president and the fight organizations are choosing who gets in, and that could include anyone from business executives to foreign leaders. White told The New Yorker this month that he has 200 tickets to give out, while Trump has 1,000. The CEO of UFC’s parent company, TKO Group Holdings, Ari Emanuel, has 200 tickets to distribute, according to White, and the rest of the tickets will allegedly go to members of the U.S. military. But the whole process is extremely opaque.

The event will include weigh-ins held at the Lincoln Memorial, various fan events on the National Mall, fireworks, and a light show, and will supposedly cost $60 million. While the UFC is paying for the White House ring’s construction, it’s not paying for the gargantuan security costs, which will be covered by taxpayers. Making America Great Again, indeed.

The “Broadview Six,” the anti-ICE protesters whom the federal government tried to slap with felony conspiracy charges carrying a maximum sentence of six years in prison, had their case thrown out last week after District Judge April Perry determined top federal prosecutor Andrew Boutros botched the case.

Things are now getting even worse for Boutros and his team.

Christopher Parente, an attorney for one of the six defendants, suggested on Tuesday that Boutros had improper personal contact with the grand jury. After the allegation came to light, Perry summoned the lawyers present to discuss the matter privately in her chamber.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur said her fellow prosecutors would likely accept the release of grand jury transcripts, subject to redactions, so the public may be able to see what kind of personal contact Boutros had with the jurors in the future.

The “Broadview Six” were arrested after surrounding an ICE agent’s SUV outside a detention center in Broadview, Illinois, in September in an attempt to slow it down. The crowd “pushed and scratched and otherwise damaged,” the vehicle, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Like many charges made against anti-ICE protesters, the government’s over-the-top prosecution failed to hold up. The government first gave up on charging two of the six. Then they threw out conspiracy charges against the other four—Brian Straw, Michael Rabbitt, Andre Martin, and then–congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh—and instead tried to convict them of a far less serious crime: one misdemeanor count each for impeding a federal agent.

In the end, Boutros couldn’t even do that. He dropped the charges with prejudice—meaning they cannot be refiled—after being criticized by Perry for more grand jury misconduct. Boutros’s assistants took transcripts of themselves explaining conspiracy law to the jury pool, then reportedly redacted some of the transcripts when Perry asked for them.

According to the Sun-Times, these transcripts included proof of one prosecutor staking her personal credibility in order to support the charges, another communicating with jurors outside the assigned jury room, and a third excusing jurors who didn’t agree with the prosecution’s argument.