Federal Court Rules Against Hegseth’s Transgender Military Ban

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday ruled against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s transgender military ban in a 2–1 decision, stating that the decision was motivated by animus.

The “Commander-in-Chief declared transgender people as categorically unfit for military service explicitly because of their gender identity. To add insult, the President labeled transgender persons as dishonorable, undisciplined, arrogant, selfish liars,” the court wrote in a 107-page opinion, which came on the first day of Pride Month.

The court ruled that Hegseth’s ban can remain in place for future service members, but not for any currently enlisted. However, the greater ban still remains in place as the Supreme Court weighs its merits.

“What has been clearly and repeatedly explained are the foundational premises of the Hegseth Policy: persons with a ‘false gender identity’ are unfit for the military, and persons with a history of gender dysphoria are also unfit because they lack ‘honesty, humility, … and integrity,’” the court wrote. “Those animus-filled reasons were expressly given to justify aspects of the Hegseth Policy. As a result, this is not a case where we are left to speculate why the government drafted such broad, undifferentiated classifications. Unless we are going to fall for the old Groucho Marx line—‘who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’—we have direct evidence in this case that animus motivated the classifications in the Hegseth Policy.”

The ban was announced via a Trump executive order in the president’s first week in office last year. It stated that “radical gender ideology” had infected the military, and that being transgender wasn’t an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.”

“A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member,” it read—equating gender dysphoria with mental illness or a deep moral deficiency.

This story has been updated.

Kash Patel’s girlfriend is suing MS NOW over a report that she abused federal resources as a result of her relationship with the FBI director.

Alexis Wilkins filed a defamation suit against the news network Friday, alleging that MS NOW had knowingly and recklessly published lies about her. The suit took particular issue with a December article that cited anonymous sources who claimed Patel had ordered an FBI detail to escort one of Wilkins’s inebriated friends back home after a night of debauchery in Nashville.

“This was hogwash and they knew it,” Wilkins’s attorneys wrote.

Over the span of 16 pages, Wilkins’s legal team claimed that the story was unfounded because Wilkins’s personal FBI security detail “did not even exist at the time” (she does concretely have one now—the first time in U.S. history the bureau’s director has extended such protection).

The attorneys further claimed the story was illegitimate because Patel’s 27-year-old beau “does not drink.” In reality, the article never suggested Wilkins herself was inebriated—but even Wilkins’s legal team seemed confused by the details. In their filing, her team contradicted themselves, later writing that Wilkins “very rarely drinks.”

The colorful lawsuit accuses MS NOW of fabricating the story “to self-promotingly advance their own agenda and notoriety,” at Wilkins’s expense, “in George Costanza fashion.” Much of the filing is spent defending Patel against various criticisms, even though Patel is not a listed defendant.

MS Now unequivocally defended its reporting. In a statement, MS Now President Rebecca Kutler told The New Republic that the company stands “firmly behind” its reporting, though it added that it doesn’t comment on ongoing legal matters.

The 46-year-old conspiracy podcaster turned agency chief is up to his neck in his own legal woes. In April, a federal judge threw out Patel’s defamation claims against a former FBI official, Frank Figliuzzi, who told MS NOW that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more” than he had been seen on the seventh floor of the bureau’s Washington headquarters.

Patel is also in the midst of suing The Atlantic after the magazine published a damning report on the director’s alleged drinking problem, which reportedly goes “far beyond the occasional beer” and may be contributing to Patel’s erratic, paranoid behavior.

Patel has already sparked several scandals in his position due to his wild habits. Over the last year, he has wantonly flown around the country in FBI jets on the taxpayer’s dime. His trips have included a jaunt to Las Vegas, a trip to Nashville, and at least one widely publicized instance in which he flew to Penn State to visit Wilkins, where she was singing at a wrestling event.

Patel also ruffled feathers when he appeared at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, where he was caught on video chugging beer and whooping it up with the U.S. Men’s hockey team. (He later insisted he was celebrating with his “friends.”)

Evidently furious at the several musical artists who canceled their performances at his “Great American State Fair,” President Donald Trump is floating yet another event that no one will want to attend.

“We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Saturday afternoon.

As of Friday, Martina McBride, Young MC, Milli Vanilli, The Commodores, Morris Day & the Time, and Bret Michaels had all withdrawn their names from the lineup, leaving only Flo Rida, Vanilla Ice, and a featured guest artist from the group C+C Music Factory.

It seems the remaining lineup isn’t quite star-studded enough to pad Trump’s fragile ego.

“Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center,” Trump wrote, before launching into a lengthy tirade against the federal judge who ordered that the president’s name be removed from the venue’s facade.

In another post, Trump claimed that the artists were merely getting “the yips,” and said he’d happily step in as the “Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar.”

It’ll be interesting to see how Trump plans to replace several days of concerts with one giant MAGA rally. It sure sounds like another great project for the brilliant party planners behind the president’s botched military parade.

Trump’s rant was part of another Truth Social bender, flush with the typical self-aggrandizing AI slop the president tends to take refuge in when things are going particularly bad.

Tina Peters—the Trump-supporting, election-denying former Colorado county election clerk found guilty of tampering with voting machines—is now free.

Peters was freed from prison on Monday after Democratic Colorado Governor Jared Polis granted her clemency and reduced her sentence just weeks earlier.

Peters was originally sentenced to nine years in prison for conspiring to publicize the voting machine records in Mesa County, turning all the cameras off while allowing fellow election denier Conan Hayes to copy, photograph, and download information in an effort to prove President Trump’s absurd claims of election fraud in 2020.

Polis’s decision to cut short her sentence angered his local party, even leading them to censure him. Now, he claims that he “concluded that her sentence was simply too long.” After the backlash, he appeared on a party Zoom call with black tape over his mouth. His fellow Colorado Democrats weren’t amused then, and certainly aren’t now.

“The Governor’s grant of clemency to Tina Peters is an affront to our democracy, the people of Colorado, and election officials across the country,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a statement. “It sends a dangerous message about accountability for those who would attack elections. Peters’ release also will embolden the election denial movement; since the grant of clemency, she has continued to spread election falsehoods and conspiracies.”

Peters has become something of a political prisoner for those on the MAGA right, especially those in the deepest depths of QAnon. Trump had been pressuring Polis to release Peters for months, and Vice President JD Vance recently suggested that Peters should get a taxpayer-funded payout from Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” for those who felt wronged or targeted by the Biden administration.

Meanwhile, the first thing Peters did upon her release on Monday was go on Steve Bannon’s podcast, double down on her claims of election fraud, and ask Trump for a job.

“I would like for President Trump—I’d like to be more involved in prison reform,” Peters said, if “that’s the way the Lord leads me.”

This story has been updated.

Iran on Monday suspended all peace talks with the U.S., just hours after President Trump claimed Iran “really wants to make a deal.”

Tehran placed the blame on Israel, which it said violated the trifold ceasefire agreement when Israeli troops captured Beaufort Castle, a twelfth-century Crusader fortress in southern Lebanon, over the weekend.

Israel previously used the castle, also known as Qalaat al-Shaqif, as a military base during its occupation of southern Lebanon between 1982 and 2000. The offensive marked Israel’s deepest incursion into Lebanon in more than 26 years. On Monday, Israel issued an evacuation order to residents in southern Beirut.

Iranian state media reported that “there will be no dialogue” regarding U.S.-Israel-Iran peace efforts until the “aggressive and brutal operations of the Zionist regime’s army in Gaza and Lebanon” is quelled.

Tehran said it would completely close the Strait of Hormuz, as well as another narrow trade route nestled between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula—the Bab el-Mandeb Strait—as a consequence.

Trump optimistically insisted on Truth Social late Sunday that Iran was eager to negotiate, and blamed his negotiating woes on Democrats and dissident Republicans. It is unclear what comes next: Trump casually revealed on Saturday that the U.S. would “finish it off militarily” if he did not reach a good deal with Tehran.

The president repeated that he’s in “no hurry” to negotiate, and that—despite the war’s monumental impact on global gas prices—he believes if he’s in a hurry he’s “not going to make a good deal.”

“And slowly but surely, we’re getting, I think, what we want. And if we don’t get what we want, we’re going to end it a different way,” Trump told his daughter-in-law on Fox News’s My View With Lara Trump.

In the same interview, Trump referred to Venezuela as a “one-day win” and said that the situation with Iran is “a win already,” as the U.S. has “essentially defeated their military.”

But it’s difficult to ascertain exactly what a “win” in the Middle East looks like when the aims of the war were never clear to begin with. While the Iranian regime has suffered major losses over the span of the conflict—including dozens of senior leaders—it has also become more extreme as a result.

Rajan Menon, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, argued in The Guardian late last month that Trump would—at this late stage—be “lucky” to strike a deal similar to former President Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which Trump ended during his first term.

The U.S. has so far been at war with Iran for more than 13 weeks and spent an estimated $98 billion in the process. The regional conflict has damaged strategic alliances, stalled global trade, and thrust the world into an energy crisis due to the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. It has also killed thousands of people.

This story has been updated.