Trump’s Minions Are Reuniting for a Turning Point Conference

Turning Point USA’s AmeriFest returns this December, and the speaker lineup is once again a proper who’s who of the MAGA-verse.

The event, which takes place in Phoenix, Arizona, from December 17 to 20, will again be headlined by Vice President JD Vance. Former press secretary Karoline Leavitt, former White House adviser and far-right activist Steve Bannon, former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines, former presidential candidate Ben Carson, right-wing provocateur Nick Shirley, former Representative Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump Jr., Erika Kirk, and a host of other prominent voices on the right will also be speaking.

Notably absent from the list of esteemed speakers is Tucker Carlson, as he was a large part of the reason last year’s AmeriFest—the first since TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk’s assassination—was largely unsuccessful. Carlson got into a back-and-forth with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro in 2025 after Shapiro called him and Candace Owens “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”

Carlson responded by attacking Shapiro’s fealty to Israel, and the entire event became a stark representation of the serious rifts within the conservative movement. This year will follow what will likely be an unsuccessful midterm election performance by the Republican Party, which may in turn impact the nature of the event.

The United States issued sanctions on the International Criminal Court Friday, just hours after President Donald Trump lost the Nobel Peace Prize to one of the institution’s former judges. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions cutting the court off from any U.S.-based financial services, technology companies, and U.S. currency. The Trump administration set a six-month timeline for U.S. companies to wind down their business with the war crimes tribunal. 

“We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate against us,” Rubio said in a video statement on social media. “The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC.”

Rubio has previously argued the court has become “radical and extreme,” though Trump has outright admitted Rubio’s campaign against the ICC is meant to protect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  

U.S. officials maintained that these sanctions had been in the works for months, and the timing so close to the Nobel Prize award ceremony was merely coincidental, according to the Associated Press. But these sanctions are exactly the kind of petty behavior we’ve come to expect from a president who’s spent years begging for the prestigious award.

Instead, the award went to Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer with a decades-long career. Last year, Pillay led a United Nations commission that found the Israeli government had committed a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The Nobel committee said Thursday that Pillay had been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”

Pillay took an immediate shot at Trump after she learned she had won the award Friday. “Thank you very much. If you clap a little bit more I may share this prize with Trump,” she said, causing the room to erupt into laughter. 

Trump attacked the ICC after it issued arrest warrants against Israeli government leaders, including Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Since then, the U.S. has sanctioned court officials and prosecutors, as well as other international leaders who document and speak out about Israel’s crimes, including U.N. Special Rapporteur for Palestine Francesca Albanese.

The White House has chosen its new press secretary: MAGA communications adviser Katie Zacharia.

The 42-year-old was previously the senior communications adviser at Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, a frequent commentator on Fox News, Newsmax, and CNN, and a former employee of Fix California, a nonprofit founded by former acting Director of National Intelligence and longtime Trump ally Ric Grenell.

The news of Zacharia’s ascension to the White House inner ring was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by CBS News.

As a media commentator, Zacharia has shared her most extreme takes, including that the abortion pill mifepristone came straight from Nazi Germany.

“The abortion pill, Mifepristone … is connected to the manufacturer of the deadly gas Zyklon B, used in the World War II concentration camps,” she wrote on X last fall. “Zyklon-B was originally used as a pesticide and marketed by the German Corporation for Pest Control, now known as Detia Degesch GmbH. Degesch, in which German chemical company I.G. Farben had a 42.5% interest and on whose board of 11 it had five seats, was the sole producer of the gas. According to the New York Times, ‘I.G. Farben played so important a role in Hitler’s war machine and in the Holocaust that it came to be called “the devil’s chemist.’ It manufactured Zyklon B, the gas-chamber poison, among many other products, and its factories exploited more than 35,000 slave labourers, many from Auschwitz. It even built a concentration camp of its own to improve efficiency.”

It’s not clear where she came up with this deranged conspiracy, as mifepristone was actually developed by a French scientist and not approved for sale in France until the 1980s. The corporate history Zacharia hinted at is much more complicated: The company that developed Zyklon B was eventually, after decades of mergers and spin-offs, taken over by the multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi. Sanofi also acquired the company that manufactured mifepristone, Roussel Uclaf, in the late 90s.

Aside from her paid media gigs, Zacharia also had a brief stint working under ex-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, working as a spokesperson for the agency between February and March, according to her LinkedIn.

In that time, Zacharia attacked Senator Richard Blumenthal on social media, accusing the Connecticut Democrat of spreading “fear-mongering lies” about ICE’s takeover at airports. In the same post, she lauded the agency’s arrest record, claiming that they were “heroic” for removing “violent criminal illegal alien predators.”

But she wasn’t always so opposed to immigrants. From August 2012 to June 2013—shortly after she obtained her JD from Pepperdine Caruso Law—Zacharia worked as the manager of fundraising and communications at Compassion for Migrant Children, a nonprofit dedicated to helping the children of immigrant workers.

Zacharia will replace Karoline Leavitt, who exited the role in August to join Fox News as an on-air contributor.

The comms expert certainly has her work cut out for her. Zacharia will walk into a Trump administration that is already drowning in an ocean of scandals, battered by recent tidal waves that include reports of Trump officials assisting pro-Russia governments, the president’s repeat invitations for Iran to strike American cities, taxpayer-funded propaganda, and the White House’s decision to cancel $810 million in congressionally-appropriated funds, which critics have argued violates federal law.

Only time will tell if she is capable of straightening up the mess.

This story has been updated.

Even Republican lawmakers are disgusted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream a federal execution.

Hegseth confirmed Thursday that the Pentagon plans to livestream the military firing squad execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Obviously Democrats were outraged by the plan, but even a few Republicans weren’t on board with turning state-sponsored murder into a spectacle.

North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis said that Hegseth’s decision was “beyond disgusting.”

“Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America,” he wrote in a post on X. In his new book, Tillis wrote that confirming Hegseth was the “biggest regret” of his career.

Georgia Representative Austin Scott also opposed the decision. “I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that,” he wrote on X, referring to the violent Islamist ideology.

In a response to Hegseth on X, former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger put it more bluntly: “There will be a day, and soon, when nobody will acknowledge even knowing you.”

Meanwhile, Laura Loomer, the self-proclaimed Islamophobe who advises the president, voiced her support for the plan straight out of an extremist’s playbook.

“[Hegeseth] is amazing. Truly amazing. I can’t wait to watch Nidal Hasan’s live-streamed execution for his act of Islamic terrorism. We are very lucky to have [Hegseth] ! I voted for more dead jihadists!” she wrote on X. In reality, she voted to make our country more like the violent regimes she claims to hate.

Internationally, public executions are rare, but they still occur in Afghanistan and Iran, according to The Guardian. In 2025, the Taliban carried out six public executions, and the Islamic Republic carried out 11.

Senate candidate Ken Paxton took nearly 1,000 business trips during his tenure as Texas Attorney General, costing taxpayers millions of dollars along the way. Only one in six of them actually had to do with work.

A new report from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune shows that Paxton has taken almost 1,000 trips out of state since 2015, accompanied by Texas police each time at a cost of $3.3 million to his constituents. His security detail alone cost $24,000 a month, while his predecessor Greg Abbott’s cost $7,400 a month. Of those 1,000 trips, research only linked 138 of them to actual business. In fact, Paxton didn’t even record them as such.

Paxton took 53 trips to Florida, 24 trips to Utah—where his family trust owns properties—and 19 trips out of the country, all on the taxpayer’s dime. Paxton did not offer any specific explanation for his lack of business records for the trips.

“Throughout his career, Ken Paxton has faced numerous security threats stemming from his courageous work as Attorney General fighting on behalf of the people of Texas,” said his office in a statement. “Those threats are a direct result of him taking on the cartels terrorizing Texans and some of the nation’s most dangerous violent criminals.”

Beyond being a blatant misuse of public funds, especially given how many trips he took to his properties, this is a sign that Paxton cares more about his political office and its perks than he does about his actual constituents, who are paying for those perks.

“If you’ve got all these extra trips, it becomes ethically and morally problematic,” former National Association of Attorneys General executive director Chris Toth told ProPublica. “The ethical question is whether a legitimate security function has effectively become a taxpayer-funded subsidy.”

Paxton has been followed by crises of his own making for the entirety of his time as attorney general, as well as his candidacy for Senate. From his indictment and suspension to his alleged affair and subsequent divorce, and then his controversial, leak-filled Senate campaign, the GOP couldn’t have chosen a weaker candidate to field against James Talarico in Texas to defend its Senate majority.