Trump Throws JD Vance Under the Bus for 2028

Donald Trump thinks JD Vance is “terrific,” but he still isn’t ready to endorse his number two guy in the 2028 race.

Speaking with reporters on the tarmac of Shannon International Airport in Ireland Sunday, Trump claimed that it was “too early” to throw his weight behind Vance’s highly probable bid for president.

“I think he’s terrific, he’s got so many terrific people,” Trump said as the engines of Air Force One blared nearby. “I just think they’re all very good, but JD is fantastic.”

Vance is the early Republican front-runner in the 2028 race, though he has not yet formally announced his candidacy. Despite playing coy, the vice president received widespread support for his potential bid at the Republican midterm convention last week, where the attending crowd repeatedly chanted, “JD! 48!”

Vance has stressed that his decision hinges on the results of the midterm election cycle.

“We got to take care of business this November. Then we’ll worry about what comes next,” Vance said at the convention.

Other Republican presidential contenders include Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who last ran for America’s highest office against Trump in 2016) and former Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Some prediction sites—including City & State and Kalshi—are including Trump in the lineup as well, despite the fact that he is term-limited.

Vance, however, has an extra edge above his conservative competitors as the heir apparent to Trump’s MAGA movement.

A national polling average compiled by Race to the White House found that—as of September—Vance has a 40.6 percent chance of beating out the rest of the GOP field. Rubio is behind him, with a 21.9 percent chance, while Donald Trump Jr. is in third, with an 8.8 percent chance of winning.

Industry leaders in artificial intelligence are sounding the alarm over the catastrophic risks of unchecked progress—but President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance insist that everything is fine.

On Sunday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for the AI industry to reduce the speed of its work, following insiders’ concerns that the race to develop self-improving superintelligence could cause a mass extinction event. More than 1,000 employees of AI companies have called for increased government regulation.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has bet big on data centers to drive the president’s so-called “Golden Age” of industry. Plus, the president clearly gets a kick out of posting AI slop.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday morning. “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’—and we will continue to do so!”

Trump claimed there was a sick “conspiracy” against AI and data centers—even though the warnings were coming from within the industry itself—and implied that only China stood to benefit from a slowdown. “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!” he added.

Vance, whose rise to power was bankrolled by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel and his network of tech billionaires in Silicon Valley, also came out against the industry’s request for more guardrails.

“I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the company, and begging the government to regulate them,” Vance told reporters Monday. “It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse. So I think we just have to be careful about this.”

The vice president’s comment suggests he is concerned that large firms hope to extract favorable terms over their competitors.

President Trump’s allies claim the Kennedy Center for the Performing Center will collapse unless he gets to take it over and put his name on the building.

The Washington Post reports that Trump’s handpicked officials leading the center are claiming that “within a matter of weeks,” they won’t be able to pay employees or fulfill regular maintenance contracts, and that giving Trump the recognition he wants could secure the funds that would keep the center alive.

The center is in structural danger as well. A severe storm caused a four-by-five-foot section of ceiling plaster to fall in the building’s Grand Foyer, sending debris near the Concert Hall entrance, Trump’s handpicked executive director Matt Floca told trustees. Water damage is reportedly widespread throughout the building.

The officials recommend that the center close immediately, saying that keeping it open would put lives at risk. If the board approves the recommendations, which were laid out in a 57-page document distributed to the center’s board of trustees, the center could close on Tuesday, when the board meets next.

The document all but says that Trump’s support is contingent on receiving public credit. The financial resolution proposed to the board states that Trump has offered to “raise the necessary funds to keep the center from bankruptcy” while the building gets a major renovation, but he is unlikely to provide “fundamental oversight” to rescue the building without “appropriate recognition.”

Trustees are being given 10 different text options to put on the building’s exterior underneath its name. One of them is “Renovation Restoration and Endowment overseen by President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.” That’s very similar to another plan the board approved less than a month ago to inscribe “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” on the building’s facade, which is being challenged in federal court.

One of the trustees is Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty, who sued to remove Trump’s name from the building, and her lawyers blasted the proposal in a statement to the Post.

“This constant effort to add Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center facade is the definition of insanity,” attorneys Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky said. “This is now the third attempt to deface this sacred memorial and turn it into a vanity project for one man’s ego.

“Worse still, now Trump is taking the Center hostage and threatening to in effect kill it unless he gets his way,” Zelinsky and Eisen added. “This has to stop.”

Trump has threatened to demolish the Kennedy Center if he can’t have his name on it, and his attempted takeover has led to performers canceling their engagements at the center and ticket sales plummeting with fundraising drying up. He proposed closing the building earlier this year, but that was blocked by a court challenge. One wonders how much of this latest news is an attempt to force through his takeover.

President Donald Trump and his three sons are poised to receive a massive payout from their shady crypto scheme, The Washington Sun (formerly NOTUS) reported Monday.  

In May, four digital wallets moved more than 20 billion in $WLFI tokens—launched by the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm—into a vesting contract, which would allow the owners to sell their shares after a two-year waiting period. The wallets precisely matched the initial amounts of crypto awarded to Trump and his sons Donald Jr., Eric, and Barron, all listed as founders of World Liberty Financial. 

Eric Hagerman, a spokesperson for World Liberty Financial, told the Sun that new governance rules required the owners to shed 10 percent of their holdings, and the only way to do so was to place them in a vesting account. But three experts that reviewed the company’s governance documents found that doing so was strictly optional.

Zach Everson, the research director at Public Citizen, warned that the president’s family was headed for a massive payout. “It has never been clear what World Liberty Financial was supposed to do other than enrich the Trumps, and here we have them taking the first avenue they can to offload their coins,” he told the Sun. 

Trump’s total holding of 14.175 billion in $WFLI tokens is currently worth about $1 billion, while his sons each hold roughly 2.75 billion in tokens, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The value of these tokens would likely plummet if the president or his sons sold off their shares.

Trump has used his family’s business to rake in cash while in office. In 2025, he took in $526 million in token sales from World Liberty Financial and $635 million from a license agreement with a company connected with his $TRUMP meme coin. The president’s crypto scheme has long been a source of corruption concerns; shady players who bought large amounts of coins have received favors from the White House. 

Meanwhile, investors are already losing money. Nearly one million people who bought the president’s meme coin lost a total of $3.81 billion through the end of June.

The Environmental Protection Agency no longer intends to protect any environment from the interests of America’s power plants.

Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator and Donald Trump’s former impeachment defense attorney, will announce plans Monday to walk back several critical national regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from plants that burn coal and gas, reported The New York Times.

By the EPA’s own analysis, the power sector is the second-largest contributor of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the U.S., accounting for a quarter of all emissions in the country.

Zeldin is expected to announce the change while meeting with international energy ministers from the G20 countries. He intends to make the case that greenhouse gases from power plants do not endanger human health or the rest of the world, delegitimizing the legal grounds used to develop the 1963 Clean Air Act.

If U.S. courts agree with the EPA’s new parameters, it could restrict future administrations from enacting similar regulations.

Environmentalists and climate scientists that spoke with the Times argued that, if the U.S. power sector were its own nation, it would be the fifth-largest global polluter behind China, the U.S.’s various other industries, India, and Russia.

“This is another nail in the coffin for this administration’s commitment to protecting people and tackling the climate crisis,” Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Times. Bapna added that Zeldin is ending the EPA’s “legal and moral responsibility to end climate pollution.”

It’s the latest of many efforts by Trump and his allies to diminish or completely rewrite the destructive realities of climate change and global warming. Yet evidence abounds proving the catastrophic forecast: Summer 2026 was the hottest season in U.S. history (surpassing the national average temperature during the infamous 1936 Dust Bowl heatwave), the California coast—from Malibu to the San Francisco bay area—is falling into the sea due to land erosion caused by rising sea levels, and intense, sudden rainfalls in the Grand Canyon caused by a spike in temperature killed two people last month.

The changes have been even more harrowing on a global scale. Last month, a glacier several times the size of the Empire State Building melted away from its perch atop the Himalayas, which have experienced climate change at a disproportionately higher pace than the rest of the world—sometimes warming as much as twice the global rate.

The glacial chunk crashed into a valley along the Nepal-Tibet border nearly 7,000 feet below, carving into the land and reshaping the earth before landing in the Lhende Khola River, where the enormous quantity of rock and ice displaced enough water to trigger a nine-meter flash flood. The entire event killed at least 1,300 people, and more than 5,300 are still missing in the region.