Ex-Trump Labor Secretary Went to Strip Club on Taxpayers’ Dime

A Thursday report from the Inspector General states that former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer went to a strip club while on the job, even forcing her driver to rain dollar bills on one of the dancers.

The report further details just how sloppy and reckless Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure as Labor secretary was until she stepped down in April.

“During Chavez-DeRemer’s April 15–20, 2025 personal travel to Oregon, she requested an off-the-record stop at an establishment that was determined upon entry to feature partially nude dancers,” the IG report reads, noting that Chavez-DeRemer made a point to bring her limousine driver inside with her.

“Chavez-DeRemer subsequently took money from her purse, gave the money to the driver, and directed him to give it to the performer. When the agent resisted and sought guidance from [Assistant Special Agent in Charge]1, ASAIC 1 instructed him to comply with Chavez-DeRemer’s requests,” the report continues. “Chavez-DeRemer then took additional money from her purse and asked the agent to drop the bills one by one onto the partially nude woman. The agent again hesitated and sought intervention from ASAIC 1, who told him to follow Chavez-DeRemer’s instructions. The agent complied against his wishes.”

This is the woman President Donald Trump handpicked—at the behest of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien—to lead the country’s Labor Department as part of a so-called “pro-labor” administration. And that strip club moment is just one of many ways in which she created what the IG report describes as a “toxic, intimidating, and humiliating” work environment.

The report also notes that while in Michigan, Chavez-DeRemer massaged ASAIC 1’s shoulders “while seated behind him in a vehicle after he completed a driving shift,” and asked if he was tired. ASAIC 1 told her he was “solid as a rock,” which witnesses interpreted as a sexual innuendo in reference to a massage-induced erection.

Chavez-DeRemer also reportedly discussed employees’ performance in front of them, including whether they had cried, and would drink during the workday. She and her aides would pressure other employees to join them and would mock them if they declined, witnesses said.

The dysfunction wasn’t just from Chavez-DeRemer. Her chief of staff Rebecca Wright screened Office of the Secretary applicants by race, weight, and sexual orientation—even moving someone’s desk because she didn’t want a “fat person” in her line of sight. She also told women in the office not to cut their hair too short to stop them from “turning into a lesbian.”

This is an update from the April allegations that led to Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation—that she had an affair with a member of her security detail, asked staffers to buy alcohol for her at various hours of the day, and used taxpayer funds to throw a birthday party for herself.

New details from Maria Bartiromo’s sudden firing from Fox News reveal internal upheaval that resulted in her being completely isolated at work, as her own staff was banned from speaking to her and her primary producer was fired alongside her. 

Puck News’s Dylan Byers reported that executive producer Patrick Ignozzi was fired from Bartiromo’s show on Thursday, following her out the door after she was sent packing for “betraying” Fox News by offering the Trump administration information on how the network was covering the president. 

On top of that, Fox News kept the Mornings with Maria host isolated from her colleagues for weeks, a move stemming from issues over the $787.5 million settlement Fox News was ordered to pay to Dominion Voting Systems in 2023 due to false claims of election fraud in 2020.  

“In order to talk to her, you had to go to management,” an anonymous source told Mediate. “[That’s how we] knew something was up.… Even her own staff had to go through management.… People were freaking out.” The source also noted that Bartiromo wasn’t even reachable over the phone, being completely iced out from the Fox News work environment. 

It’s unclear where Bartiromo will find herself next. 

Bartiromo’s lawyer, Michael Lawrence, contacted The New Republic claiming that reports of her departure from Fox News were “absolutely and unequivocally false”—even though the network itself had put out a statement announcing it on Thursday. 

“Make no mistake, we have the receipts and witnesses and they will come out whether through the courthouse or otherwise,” Lawrence said in a statement. “Those reporting her firing or the incredulous facts supporting that fiction have exhibited a complete and utter reckless disregard for the truth.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s administration has made a game of the president’s deadly crackdown on immigrants.

The White House launched a new arcade website Thursday that hosts a series of retro-style video games touting the administration’s policy priorities—including one where players can detain undocumented immigrants crossing the border.

In “Rio Run,” players are directed to “pick up every crosser in the lot.” An avatar of a balding white man dressed in a suit and tie collects stationary bodies, and adds them to a growing line of orange-jumpsuited figures floating behind him. The snake-style game evokes the horrific images of chained immigrants boarding planes to foreign countries.

If you thought that was callous and dehumanizing, just wait: In a Tetris-style game called “Build the Wall,” players are directed to stack bricks in order to stave off a “border zombie siege.” It has never felt more clear that the Trump administration is made up entirely of terminally online right-wing trolls desperate to appease deportation fanboys.

Other White House arcade games invite users to “sort the school lunch to Make America Healthy Again,” or use a net to catch cash and gold to “fill your kids’ Trump accounts.”

A White House official told CNN the arcade was “an effort to further contrast between a culture of fun and winning and the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America.”

It’s hard to get much darker than turning a mass detention policy into some kind of game—a legal front on which the Trump administration is definitely not winning. A total of eight federal appeals courts have ruled that the policy is unlawful.

Embattled Democratic Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman blew off meetings with disabled veterans, the families of slain police officers, children’s hospital officials, and countless constituents in his past two years in Congress—once again displaying his indifference and apathy to any cause that isn’t shamelessly lobbying for Israel.

New reporting from The Wall Street Journal showed that Fetterman couldn’t care less about the bare minimum presence and effort his Senate job requires, or the Pennsylvanians he’s supposed to be fighting for.

Text messages obtained by the Journal show Fetterman asking an aide why he had to meet with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) of all places in September.

“Why do I have to keep having to meet with chop,” he asked.

“Because they are worried about vaccines and Medicaid cuts,” the aide said. President Donald Trump’s cuts to Medicaid have negatively impacted children’s hospitals across the country.

“Well I’m not,” Fetterman responded. “I’m convinced they just want free trips to DC.”

Another exchange shows Fetterman calling a funeral for three slain police officers that same month a “nonstarter” because it was three hours long—a sensible length of time given it was three officers at once. And even if it wasn’t, any U.S. senator should be able to spend a few hours at a cop’s funeral.

The report also notes that Fetterman canceled a scheduled meeting with three paralyzed military veterans in June, telling them he had eaten something that upset his stomach. He arrived at his office an hour later, perfectly healthy, and got on Fox News to talk about how great Trump’s war on Iran was going.

And aside from these more recent developments, he is still skipping votes, still ghosting constituents, still sitting out of committee meetings, and still choosing to side with Republicans and the larger conservative landscape—all things that have become common for him, particularly after his 2023 stay in Walter Reed for clinical depression.

Fetterman has free health care, good pay and pension, and a job that is really not that hard in the grand scheme of things. And yet he can’t be bothered to cast votes, attend funerals, or look paralyzed veterans in the eyes.

President Donald Trump admitted that he’s just building monuments to himself.

In a sprawling dispatch Friday, New York Magazine’s Ben Terris asked Trump what he made of a viral barb from Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator from Georgia who suggested in June that the president had become obsessed with building monuments to himself because “no one will honor him when he’s gone.”

“That’s true,” Trump said. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

Monuments are typically something that great leaders earn by being, well, great. Trump’s comment suggests that the president is well aware that he’s going to walk away from his two terms with few great deeds worth remembering. It also indicates that Trump has no idea there are things you have to earn, not just buy.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced Thursday that construction would begin on the “Great Triumphal Arch” in a traffic roundabout between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. Trump has been raving about the project, nicknamed the “Arc de Trump” online, for almost a year. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ensured it was virtually impossible to challenge the illegal construction of a $600 million White House ballroom.

Trump has skipped work to oversee at least a dozen renovation projects around Washington, D.C.

The president gilded the Oval Office in the gaudy golden style of Mar-a-Lago, demolished the East Wing, paved over the Rose Garden, renovated columns and porticos, repaved the driveway with white granite, directed statues to receive a gold leaf makeover, built and rebuilt a helipad, re-lined the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and then had to scrape that off to re-line it again. And who can forget that he launched a monthslong legal campaign to tack his name onto another man’s memorial.

Previously, a prominent clinical psychologist signaled that the president’s tireless obsession with renovations could be a warning sign of cognitive decline.