Trump Sneaks Project 2025 Stooge Into Crucial Investigative Office

If President Trump’s disastrous renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool gets investigated, a Project 2025 operative will be overseeing it.

Trump nominated Dennis Kirk, an author of the conservative manifesto and former adviser to Tulsi Gabbard, as the Department of the Interior’s inspector general. Kirk, who worked in the Office of Personnel Management in Trump’s first term, would oversee any probes into alleged malfeasance or corruption within the Cabinet department.

Kirk created a training video for Project 2025 and wrote an essay warning against “progressive ideology” in the federal workforce. As inspector general, he’d be in charge of ethics investigations in the Interior Department, as well as closer looks at Trump’s pet building projects in Washington, D.C., including the $16 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool.

The move immediately drew backlash from Democrats. Representative Jared Huffman, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, called Kirk a “fake and fraudulent watchdog” in a statement last week.

“[The inspector general’s office] is weighing serious ethics investigations into senior officials in this administration. It’s no surprise the White House suddenly wants its own man inside the one place that Trump’s cronies still have reason to fear,” Huffman said.

The Reflecting Pool project is a disaster, with a peeling and tattered “American flag blue” paint job ruined by hydrogen peroxide that was added to kill algae. Trump pushed an unfounded vandalism allegation and had the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro try to prosecute people who simply got close to or touched the pool and its peeling paint. Those charges all fell through.

David Hearn, an ex-Olympian who faced spurious vandalism charges that were later dropped, is exploring legal options against the federal government, and Democrats are looking to investigate the project and botched prosecutions by seeking documents from the Interior and Justice Departments. That effort could run into Kirk, a conservative operative and Trump loyalist.

A previous Interior Department inspector general, Mark Lee Greenblatt, doesn’t have confidence in Kirk’s ability to carry out the job, saying to The Hill last week that “the chilling effect on whistleblowers is real.”

“Who would jeopardize their careers by submitting a complaint about an administration official to an I.G. who is avowedly aligned with the administration?” Greenblatt said.

The Trump administration is targeting military spouses and their families for deportation. Now congressional Democrats are launching an investigation.

In a letter sent Sunday, a group of more than 60 Democrats accused the Department of Defense of collaborating with the Department of Homeland Security to detain and remove hundreds U.S. servicemembers, veterans, and their families. The letter writers noted that military recruiters are still promising immigration protections, even as the federal government pulls back those policies.

“These efforts imperil military readiness, weaken service members’ morale, and betray America’s promises to the people who put their lives on the line for our nation,” the letter said. The effort was led by Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

Last week, the Associated Press reported that the Trump administration had detained more than 50 military members’ spouses and parents. The report followed the president’s evidently hollow gesture to form a Military Spouse Commission.

In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement rescinded its long-standing policy that treated military service as a “significant mitigating factor” when deciding whether to pursue immigration enforcement, and issued a rule stating that military service alone “does not automatically exempt” non-citizens from being swept up in enforcement actions.

A few months earlier, amid sweeping immigration enforcement operations across the country, recruiters for the U.S. military and National Guard urged high school students to join their ranks in order to protect their immigrant families.

In response to queries from lawmakers, the DOD has continued to insist there have been no recent policy changes. Democrats claim the Trump administration is misleading the public and U.S. servicemembers and luring them and their families into a trap.

“Donald Trump is breaking our country’s promises to servicemembers by tearing apart dozens of military families who were promised immigration protections,” Warren said. “That’s just plain cruel, and it’s hurting our military readiness and morale.”

The Democrats warned that if the DOD was involved in the immigration enforcement actions, that would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using the U.S. military to enforce domestic laws. They also warned that if U.S. military servicemembers were detained, it could violate the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which provides protections to all active duty military members, including non-citizens, from immigration proceedings and other civil actions that interfere with their military duties.

The coalition of lawmakers demanded that the DHS, DOD, and the Department of Veterans Affairs provide answers to a range of questions about protections for U.S. military servicemembers by August 23.

Outgoing Senator Bill Cassidy—an on-again, off-again thorn in President Trump’s side—is now lambasting the president for his Monday executive order to divide the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, childhood vaccine schedule into three separate shots instead of one, falsely linking the previous protocol to autism.

“We want three separate vaccinations given at separate times. Together there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal, and separately it looks like they are not at all lethal,” Trump said at the signing event, baselessly suggesting that the shots kids have been receiving for years were killing them.

“I’m a doctor. This executive order is wrong. The President does not have the expertise to make these changes. Vaccines are overwhelmingly safe. Vaccines are effective. Vaccines DO NOT cause autism,” Cassidy wrote Monday on X. “Breaking up vaccines will mean children have to get more shots to get the same protection, not fewer shots. It will increase hesitancy and make children less safe. Parents should listen to their child’s pediatrician about vaccines rather than listening to an inaccurate executive order. This is so wrong.”

Cassidy is right. This policy is nonsensical and likely be a hard threshold to meet for many families, leading in turn to sicker kids and adults. But hearing it from him is especially rich given that he cast the decisive vote to confirm Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also lacks the expertise to make massively consequential health decisions like this.

Cassidy also recently backed Kennedy’s pick for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head, Erica Schwartz—even though she gave no guarantees on vaccination scheduling. For what it’s worth, the CDC officially states that there’s “no published scientific evidence [that] shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots.”

President Donald Trump secretly switched planes following assassination threats from Iran—leaving some staff and members of the press as decoys aboard the old Air Force One.

When Trump departed the NATO summit in Turkey last month, he told the press he would skip a ride on his newly renovated Qatari-gifted Air Force One, opting for the original “for old time’s sake.” In reality, top administration officials had hatched an elaborate ruse in the face of a credible assasination threat from Iran, The Washington Post reported Monday night.

After boarding on camera, Trump was quietly rolled off in a catering cart that pulled up to the plane, two U.S. officials told The New York Times. The president made his escape to England in a third military plane, and secretly returned to the original Air Force One after he landed.

Meanwhile, members of the press and some staff members remained on the plane, none the wiser—and evidently vulnerable to attack. While it is standard for the Secret Service to use a decoy in response to threats, in this case, the White House purposefully misled the press to report that Trump was aboard Air Force One, endangering their safety.

Only a few top administration officials were briefed on the plan, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, an official with knowledge of the plan told the Times.

Following a report last month detailing security concerns regarding the new Air Force One, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, hinted that the administration might use subterfuge to aid in the president’s departure from Turkey.

“As the president has said recently, there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him, and we use every tool at our disposal—including distraction and misdirection—to address those threats,” he said at the time. When the Times asked for new comments about the president’s latest farce, the White House reissued Cheung’s statement without the line on “distraction and misdirection.”

On the ride home from England, reporters asked Trump why they had flown there on the old Air Force One. Trump claimed he wanted soldiers stationed there to see his new plane. When they asked Trump why they’d been asked to keep their window blinds shut, Trump ranted about his dangerous life as the president.

“I’m number one on their list, before you,” the president told the reporters. “But if I go, you go. Right?”

It seems that Trump and his team were sort of hoping it would be the other way around.

President Donald Trump reportedly shut down attempts to get Representative Max Miller, who is accused of abusing his daughter and ex-wife, to end his reelection campaign.

Politico reports that Trump’s team asked Ohio Republicans last week not to publicly pressure Miller to drop out of the race, because the White House believed he would refuse to do so. Before the president got involved, other Republicans and some White House officials were urging Miller to leave the race.

“They basically told us to back off,” one Ohio Republican told Politico, “and let the voters decide.”

White House officials told GOP leaders and other Ohio Republicans that Miller’s determination to continue his reelection campaign would nullify efforts to get him to drop out, and then those leaders would have to defend Miller and his campaign against Democratic attacks from his challenger Brian Poindexter.

The deadline for Miller to drop out was Monday at 4 p.m. State Republican Party leaders would have to have held a meeting two days before that to discuss his replacement. Republicans reportedly considered holding such a meeting in order to pressure Miller to drop out, but after hearing from the White House, they abandoned that effort.

Now they are stuck defending Miller, whose seat is supposed to be solidly Republican. His former father-in-law is Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, who has backed up his daughter’s abuse allegations and said Miller is unfit to serve. Ohio’s other senator, Republican Jon Husted, has called for Miller to resign and end his reelection bid. Miller has defiantly refused.

Miller is accused of beating and burning his ex-wife Emily Moreno, fracturing his young daughter’s collarbone, holding her beloved stuffed bunny hostage, and sharing an inappropriate photo of her, among other numerous allegations. Meanwhile, Poindexter, a union ironworker, is seeing a surge of interest in his campaign to oust Miller from a seat once considered out of reach for Democrats.