Senate Leader Is Having None of Trump’s SAVE Act Pressure

Senate Majority Leader John Thune just dumped cold water all over President Donald Trump’s latest demands to pass his SAVE America Act.

“If somebody can show me how we get an outcome, how we get a result, how we get an answer to this, I’m all for it,” Thune told reporters Monday afternoon. “But if we are going to be sitting here in endless quorum calls, I don’t know if that’s in anybody’s best interest.”

Earlier Monday, Trump had directed Thune to keep the Senate in session in order to pass a “full and deep throated” SAVE America Act (whatever that means). But the majority leader has maintained that the president’s signature voter suppression bill just doesn’t have the support it needs. 

“We could stay here til Christmas, Democrats aren’t voting for this. I’m just telling you,” Thune said. “And Republicans are not getting rid of the legislative filibuster.”

Thune told reporters that the White House had already sat down with 20 Republican lawmakers to discuss scrapping the filibuster—and 15 of them said no. “So, I mean this is not an open question. It’s just a fact, and the facts don’t change,” he said. 

“Now, if [Trump] can change the facts and start moving some of those senators who are no’s into yeses, then we have a different conversation,” Thune added. 

This is the second time Thune has snapped back over Trump’s ham-fisted pressure. Last week, after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump’s patience with Thune was “running out,” the senator retorted, “Well maybe she or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes, right?”

Thune is currently attempting to pass his third budget reconciliation bill that would contain $10 billion for election-related reforms, but even Republicans remain divided on the president’s sweeping bill.  

President Trump’s speech at a rally in Michigan Monday afternoon was interrupted by a persistent heckler. 

Someone kept yelling “pedophile protector” while Trump was extolling the benefits of his tariffs on foreign automakers. Others in the crowd eventually tried to drown him out, and when the protester stopped, the crowd cheered before breaking into a “USA” chant.

“He’s a Communist!” Trump said, laughing and pointing into the crowd. “Thank you. He’s a Communist! We’re running against Communists now, this is crazy.”

Trump then went into a tangent against Communists, saying, “You see what they want to do? They want to take your houses, they want to do things that nobody’s ever even thought of before. They want to take your money, they want to raise your tax up to 80 percent.” 

“And I said this morning, I see this morning, they also want to fire the police. They don’t want police and they don’t want prisons anymore. I think that’s a great idea. Does everybody like that idea?” Trump asked sarcastically. 

In January, a worker in a Ford Motor Company factory in Dearborn, Michigan, yelled “pedophile protector” at Trump as he was touring the facility, prompting the president to mouth an expletive and give the worker the middle finger. Last month, a protester repeatedly shouted “pedophile” at Trump and gave him two middle fingers while he toured a Mack truck factory in Macungie, Pennsylvania.  

It’s highly doubtful that all the hecklers were Communists, and considering how unpopular Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files has been with his supporters, they could have even been disgruntled MAGA devotees. Trump is only going to hear more protesters and hecklers calling him a pedophile for the rest of his life. 

Donald Trump’s administration only has one person working in its office of pandemic preparedness, and—you guessed it—she’s a vaccine skeptic.

The Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy had been empty since last summer, after all the Biden-era employees left and its head resigned. Now the office charged with coordinating cross-agency responses to pandemic risks has only one employee: Sara Brenner, a vaccine skeptic and self-described “MAHA mom.”

“That is a start, but it is not nearly enough,” a former White House official told NOTUS Monday. “You can’t run an Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy as an army of one.”

Brenner joined the Food and Drug Administration in 2019 as a midlevel scientist and was promoted to deputy commissioner after Trump’s inauguration in 2025—where she fully embraced Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ridiculous Make America Healthy Again movement. Brenner was appointed to the OPPR in July amid mounting concerns about global disease outbreaks.

Brenner has a history of publicly airing her concerns about vaccines, The New York Times reported. Speaking at a Make America Healthy Again event last year, she said she chose not to receive the Covid-19 vaccine when she was pregnant during the pandemic because she was concerned about the vaccine’s “biodistribution patterns.”

In May 2025, she co-wrote a memo saying there was no “no clear evidence” that the benefits of Covid vaccines for children under 18 outweighed the risk of harm, overlooking the hundreds of studies that suggested the exact opposite. In March 2025, she intervened in the FDA’s review of the Novavax’s Covid vaccine.

Another health official, Rachel Idowu, was appointed to the National Security Council as its director of bioresponse. Together with Brenner, she will manage the country’s response to pandemic threats.

One health official who spoke to NOTUS praised Idowu’s work, saying she was “truly the right person to have in that office. She can do the work of two or three.” Still, they said Idowu and Brenner would have to be “very selective in terms of what they prioritize.”

Byron Cohen, a former adviser to OPPR, told NOTUS that Idowu and Brenner were two “very experienced, capable people,” but there was still a “tremendous amount of work to be done.”

“Those two individuals only have so much time in the day, and they deserve a full staff to help them carry out their mission,” Cohen told NOTUS.

Clearly, the Trump administration is not prioritizing pandemic preparedness even as the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is shaping up to be the worst on record.

The House Ethics Committee is investigating Texas Republican Representative Lance Gooden. The scope of the probe is unclear at this time.

The committee said it received a referral from the Office of Congressional Conduct last month.

“The Committee notes that the mere fact of a referral or an extension, and the mandatory disclosure of such an extension and the name of the subject of the matter, does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred, or reflect any judgment on behalf of the Committee,” the committee’s statement read.

Gooden has held office in Texas’s 5th district for seven years, and has been an ally to President Trump for all of them. In 2020, he joined 146 other Republicans in voting to overturn the presidential election results, and he voted against Trump’s impeachment after the January 6 insurrection.

“These are bogus spending allegations perpetrated by dishonest unelected OCC bureaucrats, and as the fifth Texas GOP ally of the President to endure one of these attacks,” Gooden told Fox News’s Liz Elkind. “I am confident the House Ethics Committee will confirm their baseless nature.”

A complaint against Gooden was filed to the Office of Congressional Ethics in 2021, alleging that he “purchased 12 assets with a total value ranging from approximately $60,019 and $376,000 without disclosing the transactions” in 2020. While notable, it may or may not be related to the current probe.

Gooden is the second Texas Republican to go under House Ethics investigation this year, following former Republican Representative Tony Gonzales, who was accused of having an affair with ex-staffer who set herself on fire after he ended it and hurt her career. Gonzales resigned in April.

This story has been updated.

The Senate GOP is offering new guidance to party lawmakers on how to rhetorically juggle Donald Trump’s second term agenda with the public furor it has caused.

Internal party messaging reviewed Monday by Politico indicates that Republican leadership is still trying to salvage public perception of the president, on issues ranging from the Iran war to the SAVE America Act.

“On Iran, directly connect the President’s negotiations and strikes to keeping the Strait open and keeping prices low,” one line item read, according to Politico reporter Jordain Carney.

The internal memo also warned Republicans that the “media will try to divide Republicans by asking your boss to pick a ‘side’ in any given question.”

“It’s crucial to reject these false choices. Reject the false choice between the President and Senate leaders: Express support for both,” the memo reads.

The memo advised Republicans on how to handle the ongoing drama between Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who last week snapped at White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for suggesting that the president was “running out” of patience with the conservative senator’s inability to force the SAVE Act through the upper chamber.

Offering potential responses to the press, the memo suggests that Republicans nonetheless claim that Trump and Thune are “united and doing an excellent job.” It also recommends that Republicans claim the duo have made American life “affordable,” and have worked together to make Americans “safer by closing our border, deporting violent criminals (Laken Riley Act), cracking down on fentanyl, and strengthening our military.”

“And we all agree that we have to defeat the radical Democrat socialists, who are threatening to undo our progress,” it added.

Meanwhile, the White House seems content with quietly advising midterm-bound Republicans to distance themselves from the president’s talking points as his popularity plummets.

“The understanding is pretty damn implicit: The president is going to say what the president is going to say,” a Republican operative working on the party’s midterm races told MS NOW Monday on the condition of anonymity. “You’re not going to have candidates or lawmakers running out to defend the president’s handling of the economy or the war—polling shows that most people don’t agree with his handling.”