Four Republicans Break Ranks to Finally Rein Trump In on Iran

Four Republican lawmakers broke party lines Wednesday to pass a resolution curbing Donald Trump’s war powers in his military campaign in Iran.

The four Republicans who joined Democrats were Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Tom Barrett of Michigan, and Warren Davidson of Ohio.

The measure to remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities with Iran passed in the House 215–208.

As a concurrent resolution, the measure must be passed by both chambers of Congress. Democratic Senator John Fetterman, a staunch supporter of Israel, has single-handedly prevented previous versions of the measure from passing in the Senate, despite defections from three Republican senators.

House Speaker Mike Johnson warned Wednesday that passing the measure could be “very dangerous” in light of the stalemate in negotiations. But if the Trump administration is to be believed, the war is over—so why should it matter?

This story has been updated.

If you thought Donald Trump was obsessed with size before, you’ve got to see his latest chart comparing the freshly renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with other, more phallic structures. 

Trump announced Wednesday that the final coat of protective seal on the Reflecting Pool would be applied that afternoon. “The water will start flowing, shortly, thereafter,” the president posted on Truth Social. Only time will tell if that actually happens. 

Speaking from the Oval Office shortly afterward, Trump whipped out a celebratory chart, which he’d previously posted on social media, to demonstrate just how big the Reflecting Pool is.

The chart sized up the 2,030-foot-long pool against the 1,451-foot-high Sears Tower in Chicago, New York City’s 1,454-foot Empire State Building, and the 1,776-foot One World Trade Center, arguably completely incomparable structures to the president’s preposterous pet project. The chart was titled “Our Pool is Bigger Than Skyscrapers.”

Crucially, Trump didn’t have anything to do with the actual construction of the pool, and he did nothing to increase its size. It seems he’s just trying to celebrate getting his hands on something so big and bringing it to completion.  

But Trump’s wet and wild foray on the National Mall has left Americans high and dry. 

The company contracted for renovations, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, fleeced the federal government to the tune of $13.1 million, seven times the price Trump initially presented for the projects.

President Trump loves the UFC ring on the White House South Lawn so much that he thinks it could stay there permanently.

On his official TikTok account Tuesday, Trump posted a video titled “MAYBE WE’LL NEVER TAKE IT DOWN,” comparing the arena to France’s Eiffel Tower, which was originally supposed to be temporary but stayed up. Like the tower, Trump said, the arena is “quite attractive to a lot of people” so “maybe we’ll never ever take it down.”

“People don’t know that in Paris, France, the Eiffel Tower, 1889 it was built. It was supposed to be taken down immediately after the world’s fair, and then they said … ‘Leave it up a little bit longer, and then they said, ‘Let’s leave it up longer and longer and longer,’” Trump said.

“Well, they never took it down, and you know we’re building something in front of the White House that’s quite attractive to a lot of people. Really, it’s going to have the big UFC fight on June 14, and I’m looking at i,t and maybe we’ll never ever take it down,” the president added.

The UFC arena is being built for a June 14 fight scheduled as part of Trump’s Freedom 250 festivities, coinciding with Flag Day and Trump’s 80th birthday. Paid for by the UFC’s parent company, TKO Sports, the $60 million arena dwarfs the surrounding landscape and the White House behind it.

Is Trump trying to avoid paying for the arena to be taken down? Taxpayers are already expected to foot the bill for security for the fight, which the White House hasn’t said anything about and will probably be quite high. While the Eiffel Tower was only supposed to stay up for 20 years after its construction in 1889, it remains open to the public and is a major tourist attraction.

A UFC arena on the White House grounds would be closed to anyone who isn’t authorized by the president to be there. Trump has already turned part of Pennsylvania Avenue into a (ostensibly temporary) parking lot for America 250 events and bulldozed the White House’s East Wing to make room for an unpopular ballroom. What’s another permanent eyesore on what used to be considered the “People’s House”?

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner want to plop down a luxury resort off the coast of Albania, and the locals aren’t too happy about it.

Trump’s daughter said she and her sleazy husband fell in love with an uninhabited island called Sazan while on a sailing trip.

“We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim—effectively, that’s how we found it,” Ivanka gushed on David Senra’s podcast. “We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.”

And what do you do when awestruck by the beauty of untouched nature? Bulldoze it for a luxury resort, of course!

To be fair, the island isn’t totally empty of infrastructure; it’s actually a designated military exclusion zone, with a few bases and bunkers still lying around. A grand total of two soldiers were apparently deployed there as of 2017—one wonders what they think of all this.

Sazan contains lots of plant and animal life, as does a part of Albania’s southern coast where the Kushners want to literally cut through a wildlife reserve to build hotels, apartments, and a marina.

“Since late May, excavators and other heavy machinery have entered the area,” reports the Associated Press, “opening access routes, digging into the sand, clearing land among pine trees and installing fencing.”

While Albania has an extensive and largely underutilized coastline, a MAGA luxury resort doesn’t seem like the best solution, especially in one of the country’s most important ecological areas.

Pink flamingos and other migratory birds could be threatened by the projects, which have inspired groups of demonstrators to hold up cardboard flamingos at rallies in Albania’s capital, Tirana. One local environmental group told the AP that the coastal habitats are being “irreversibly destroyed.”

For now, Kushner’s investment firm has been given the go-ahead by national authorities, including Prime Minister Edi Rama, who has been in office for over 12 years and expressed public support for the project. But the development may still face roadblocks; the country’s anti-corruption agency launched an investigation into it on Monday.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent became so engrossed Wednesday in providing nonanswers about the president’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that he accidentally dodged a question about his own employment.

Bessent’s appearance before the Senate Finance Committee was nothing short of contentious. It was his first time speaking before the committee since Trump settled his fragile $10 billion lawsuit over the 2019–2020 leak of his tax returns with his own administration, and created an enormous DOJ-backed slush fund out of its ashes. Yet the secretary was not so keen to provide answers regarding the honeypot, or the myriad legal allowances—such as future audit immunity—that have been afforded to Trump as a result.

Instead, Bessent spent a significant chunk of his time before the committee skirting and dodging critical questions about the fund, claiming that he could not comment on any component of the proposal due to “ongoing litigation” while deferring questions to the Justice Department.

But in one particularly heated exchange with Texas Senator Ben Ray Luján, Bessent’s default answer became so routine that he failed to notice when he was asked a question about his own job that he very much could answer.

“Are you the secretary of Treasury?” asked Luján.

But Bessent was silent.

“Yes, is the answer,” Luján responded, incredulous.

“Mr. Secretary, Scott—are you the secretary of Treasury for the United States government?” asked Luján again.

“Yes,” Bessent said.

“Appreciate that. The Department of Justice represents the IRS and the Department of Treasury in this lawsuit. Correct?” continued Luján.

“Correct,” said Bessent.

“You’re telling me that the DOJ gave the president this—without you knowing about it?” Luján asked, raising a piece of paper that assumedly related to the Treasury’s joint agreement with the DOJ over the settled suit. “That’s not how the law works.”

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, the committee’s ranking member, derided the DOJ agreement as “an abuse of the IRS that goes way beyond anything we’ve seen in the past.”

Whether or not the slush fund is still alive is currently in doubt. Bessent told the Senate Finance Committee earlier Wednesday that the federal financial department intended to comply with a DOJ directive to shutter the fund. The evening before, during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the fund was dead in the water and that his agency would not “ever” move forward with the payments.

But Trump has since defied both of them, standing by the far-right reparations effort while speaking with the New York Post Wednesday morning.