Team Trump Reveals Most Important Quality in New White House Employees

Any future administration under Donald Trump will place a premium on one attribute in executive branch staffers over all others: total allegiance to the MAGA leader.

In an interview with the Financial Times published Monday, Trump transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick explained that incoming staffers would be given their positions based on their devotion to Trump’s vision for America—and to Trump himself.

While explaining how Trump’s last administration buckled under the weight of staff turnover due to disagreements in “vision,” Lutnick said that the new plan is to eradicate any internal hostility to the Republican’s plans.

“They’re all going to be on the same side, and they’re all going to understand the policies, and we’re going to give people the role based on their capacity—and their fidelity and loyalty to the policy, as well as to the man,” the Wall Street billionaire told the publication.

Lutnick joined Trump’s transition team in August, alongside former Small Business Administration head Linda McMahon.

In the same interview, Lutnick attempted to outright dismiss the influence of Project 2025 on Trump’s plans for government.

“Project 2025 is an absolute zero for the Trump-Vance transition,” Luntick told the Financial Times. “You can use another term—radioactive.”

But that total repudiation of the wildly unpopular, 920-page Christian Nationalist manifesto hasn’t been so clear from Trump’s platform. Trump’s proposal to dismantle the Department of Education wholesale is nearly identical to Project 2025, while other Project 2025 policy points aren’t terribly far removed from what Trump has claimed is his legitimate platform, Agenda 47.

Project 2025 has proposed revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, banning pornography nationwide, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and increasing funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

The longest tenured meteorologist in south Florida is sounding the alarm on Hurricane Milton, warning of the storm’s strength as it hits Category 5 status.

John Morales had trouble keeping his composure on Miami’s NBC 6 Monday morning, pointing out that the hurricane had maximum sustained winds of 160 miles per hour, and climate change is the reason for the stronger hurricane.

“It is just gaining strength in the Gulf of Mexico, where you can imagine, the seas are just so incredibly, incredibly hot, a record hot, as you might imagine,” Morales said. “You know what’s driving that, I don’t need to tell you: Global warming, climate change leading to this and becoming an increasing threat for the Yucatan, including Merida, and Progreso, and other areas there.”

Morales has seen many natural disasters in his nearly three decades of experience, but his voice was shaking as he was describing how the hurricane would affect viewers in south Florida. 

“Even though it is expected to weaken on approach, it is so incredibly strong right now that you’re going to find it very difficult for it to be nothing less than a major hurricane when it makes landfall in Florida,” Morales said.

Later, on X, Morales explained how “extreme weather driven by global warming has changed me. Frankly, YOU should be shaken too, and demand #ClimateActionNow,” and linked back to an article he wrote for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on how such hurricanes aren’t outliers anymore.

The center of Hurricane Milton is expected to make landfall on Wednesday in the Tampa Bay region, which hasn’t witnessed a storm of its nature in at least a century. Climate change is going to make these kinds of storms stronger, with no regard to which countries and communities get hit. It’s good to see a meteorologist taking the risk seriously and refusing to sugarcoat what causes extreme storms, but unfortunately, politicians have not been as forthright.  While Donald Trump proudly plans to dismantle critical hurricane infrastructure, Kamala Harris and the rest of the Democrats have not boldly made a case for climate action. Maybe they should look to Morales for inspiration.

Senator Marco Rubio posted on X Monday to warn users of the severity of Hurricane Milton, an explosively intensifying Category 5 storm that is expected to make landfall in Florida in the coming days.

“Several years ago I asked @NHC_Atlantic to show me what the worst case storm hitting Florida would look like,” Rubio wrote, tagging the National Hurricane Center. “What they showed me back then is almost identical to the #Milton forecast now.”

Rubio included an image of a map, showing the forecasted storm surge from Hurricane Milton across Florida’s western coast.

While Rubio’s post functioned as explicit evidence of worsening extreme weather, as journalist Aaron Rupar pointed out, the senator has been extremely dismissive of climate change in the past.

In 2022, Rubio wrote a snide post on X (then Twitter) about the Inflation Reduction Act, deriding it as a “climate change bill.”

“While working Americans are struggling with high prices, worried about the border and terrorized by crime the Senate is spending all night voting on a democrat climate change bill,” Rubio wrote.

Through the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration was able to provide more than $1 billion to help communities become more resilient to extreme weather, according to the White House. Rubio voted against the measure.

Rubio spent years downplaying the causes and effects of climate change, before eventually being forced to acknowledge its increasing effects along Florida’s coastline. Still, in a 2019 op-ed, Rubio wrote that pouring money into “reactionary” climate legislation would only hurt the U.S.

“Plans stemming from panic will constrain our economy and cripple our ability to invest future resources in solving longer-term issues,” Rubio wrote. “They would also neutralize our tenuous economic advantage over China, which is doing barely anything to reduce its emissions.”

The Inflation Reduction Act wasn’t the first time Rubio neglected to support legislation that would protect his constituents from the effects of worsening storms and natural disasters. In 2021, Rubio voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill that put $47 billion toward preparing communities for extreme fires, floods, and weather.

Elon Musk and his super PAC, America PAC, have taken over the @America handle on X to promote their mission to elect Donald Trump.

Musk appeared to acquire the handle over the weekend as he spoke on stage with Trump at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally. “Read @America to understand why I’m supporting Trump for President,” read Musk’s new bio that Saturday.

Following the acquisition, the pro-Trump super PAC made a big announcement: They’ll be paying for personal information of swing-state voters.

The American PAC is offering the public a $47 referral fee for each registered swing-state voter who signs an online petition in support of the First and Second Amendments. The petition requires signers to submit their personal contact information in the process. Presumably, they will be targeted by the PAC in its quest to elect Trump.

While it is a federal crime to pay someone to vote or to register to vote, Musk’s group is skirting the law given that it’s not illegal to pay voters to sign a petition (or to pay the third party referrers in this case). But earlier this year, the super PAC was under fire by multiple states for election interference for a different data-collection scheme.

Musk’s PAC says its goal “is to get 1 million registered voters in swing states to sign in support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms,” which means Musk may have to pay up to $47 million to Trump supporters.

X users were annoyed but not surprised over the billionaire’s recent moves.

As of Monday, it’s unclear how the PAC will deliver the cash.

On the one year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and the ensuing one year of Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza, Donald Trump took the opportunity to attack Jewish people for not supporting him enough, and to wonder aloud about developing Gaza’s real estate.

Trump called into the New York radio show Sid & Friends Monday morning, bragging that “nobody’s done more for the Jewish people than I have.”

“No person has ever been better to the Jewish people, probably no person, period, to the Jewish people and Israel,” Trump said.

The former president was on the same tack on conservative Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, talking about how much, in his eyes, he did for Israel during his four years as president.

“I think Israel has to do one thing: They have to get smart about Trump,” he said. “I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody. And it’s not a reciprocal, as they say. Not reciprocal.”

As one might expect, his comments didn’t go over well on social media.

Also on the podcast, Hewitt asked Trump if Gaza, which has been devastated by a brutal Israeli assault on the territory that has completely wiped out its infrastructure and claimed at least 41,000 Palestinian lives, could be “Monaco if it was rebuilt the right way.”

Trump answered the absurd question by claiming, “It could be better than Monaco, it has the best location in the Middle East, that best water, the best everything it’s got. It is the best.”

“They never took advantage of it as a developer. It could be the most beautiful place, the weather, the water, the whole thing, that climate. It could be so beautiful. It could be the best thing in the Middle East, but it could be one of the best places in the world,” Trump added.

Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has spoken openly about the redevelopment prospects of “waterfront property” in Gaza, so perhaps Trump has discussed the idea with him. However, it’s quite callous to minimize the conflict as a mere real estate issue, after a year in which 1.9 million Palestinians (nearly 90 percent of Gaza’s population) have been driven from their homes and 66 percent of the territory’s buildings have been destroyed.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s alleged pursuit of being apolitical has veered straight into the hyper political.

The Republican governor has reportedly been avoiding calls from Vice President Kamala Harris in the wake of Hurricane Helene on the basis that the emergency relief calls “seemed political,” according to an aide close to DeSantis that spoke with NBC News.

“Kamala was trying to reach out, and we didn’t answer,” the unidentified source told NBC News.

The same aide told the outlet that they were not aware of any direct communication between DeSantis and President Joe Biden. Instead, DeSantis has been in contact with Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, Director Deanne Criswell.

When asked whether the White House believed that politics were seeping into the storm response, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told NBC News that it was “for the governor to speak to,” adding that the executive office had invited DeSantis to survey the damage from Hurricane Helene alongside Biden last week.

“It was his decision … to not attend or not be there with the president.... It is up to him,” Jean-Pierre said. “We are doing our part, in the Biden-Harris administration, working—obviously FEMA is work—is on the ground, all hands on deck, whole of government. Robust approach here. And so, again, that’s for Governor DeSantis to speak to.”

Across the six states that the Category 4 storm hit, at least 231 people have been reported dead, making Helene one of the deadliest recorded storms in U.S. history. Overall, Helene has been described by weather forecast offices as “one of the most significant weather events” to hit the area “in the modern era.”

But in the aftermath of that storm, another potentially devastating hurricane looms on the horizon: Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 storm scheduled to hit the west coast of the Sunshine State by Wednesday evening. In light of the imminent catastrophe, DeSantis has taken another suspiciously politicized route, opting not to alter the state’s voting procedures, refusing to extend the deadline for voter registration and instead curtly offering that fleeing or bunkering denizens should spend their time applying to vote now.

Extreme weather is already wreaking havoc on voting ahead of the election. Hurricane Helene upended postal service in North Carolina, potentially delaying early and mail-in voting in the crucial swing state.

Meanwhile, Republicans across the country have elevated false claims launched by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, insisting that the Biden administration diverted emergency relief funds from FEMA to aid immigration efforts.

FEMA has roundly rejected those charges, stating that the MAGA-launched rumor is “frankly ridiculous and just plain false.”

“This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” Criswell said on Sunday. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people.”

In an unfortunate back and forth, the Georgia Supreme Court has reinstated a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. The ban will remain in place as the high court reviews the state’s appeal against a lower court ruling striking the law.

The Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act, or the LIFE Act, will take effect again at 5 p.m. Monday, making abortion illegal after six weeks of pregnancy, before many people know they are pregnant.

This decision comes just one week after a Fulton County Superior Judge overturned the Georgia law, arguing that it was unconstitutional and issuing a dire warning on how the ban could set up a dystopian world similar to the one portrayed in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Last week, Judge Robert McBurney wrote that: “It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could—or should—force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”

The lower judge’s ruling allowed abortion until 22 weeks, as was legal before the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, giving clinics a chance to expand their abortion options for the past week.

“We know that several providers in Georgia were able to resume abortion care really quickly,” Brittany Fonteno, the president and chief executive of the National Abortion Federation, told The New York Times. “It speaks to the resilience of the providers in Georgia. They were really overwhelmed by the amount of people who immediately came to them for care.”

The constant back and forth in the courts is sure to fuel confusion in the state about what is and isn’t legal.

Meanwhile, JD Vance is playing dumb about reproductive rights in Georgia, saying he doesn’t know which side he is on.

Donald Trump went beyond his usual racism and seemed to embrace eugenics Monday morning.

Speaking on conservative Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Trump ranted against Kamala Harris, claiming that “she wants to go into a Communist Party–type system.” He then attacked her for supposedly allowing serial murderers into America through open borders, “now happily living in the United States.” But Trump didn’t stop there.

“You know now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes, and we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” Trump told Hewitt.

Attaching genetics to crime is another way for Trump to make racist claims about immigrants to the United States, implying that some ethnicities are predisposed to killing. It fits into what he’s said about different populations in the past, such as in 2018, when he referred to immigrants from Haiti and African nations as “people from shithole countries.”

Trump began his political career by complaining that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And earlier this year, Trump complained to wealthy donors at a fundraiser in Florida that immigrants weren’t coming from “nice” countries “like Denmark,” in effect saying that he’d prefer only white immigrants in the United States.

The former president has spread racist lies against immigrants during his current campaign, in particular against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and Charleroi, Pennsylvania. He has said that he wants to institute “bloody” mass deportations of immigrants if he returns to the White House. But blaming their “genes” is new, and is a reminder that he doesn’t seem to think being compared to Adolf Hitler, the most infamous eugenicist, is a bad thing. Was his latest remark inspired by the long list of things he likes about Hitler?

Another massive hurricane is barrelling toward Florida’s coastline, but that doesn’t mean the state is shifting its standards to help its denizens prepare for Election Day.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will reportedly not be extending the Sunshine State’s deadline for registering to vote, according to the Orlando Sentinel’s Jeffrey Schweers, despite the fact that much of the state is preparing for or fleeing the imminent Category 5 storm due to hit its west coast this week.

“There is nothing inhibiting people from registering today,” DeSantis told the publication.

Last week, DeSantis issued an executive order allowing local election officials to change early voting sites and set up consolidated voting centers in areas ravaged by the last major weather event to rip through Florida, Hurricane Helene, which displaced thousands of voters and poll workers late last month. The executive order also loosened restrictions on mail-in ballot requests and allowed state employees to take paid leave to work as poll workers on Election Day, according to CBS News.

But DeSantis’s rigidity on the threat posed by the oncoming hurricane doesn’t come from a place of ignorance. So far, the Republican governor has issued a state of emergency for 51 of Florida’s 67 counties. “A major hurricane is the most likely outcome,” DeSantis said on Sunday while expanding the ordinance. “This is not a good track for the state of Florida.”

The brunt of Hurricane Milton is scheduled to slam the west side of the state by Wednesday evening, but the rain has already begun. Rainfall could reach totals of five to 10 inches, with localized totals adding up to 15 inches across regions of the Florida peninsula and the Florida Keys, threatening minor to moderate river flooding, hurricane center specialist Eric Blake told USA Today.

“Regardless of the details, there is increasing confidence that a powerful hurricane with life-threatening hazards will be affecting portions of the Florida west coast around the middle of this week,” the hurricane center said Sunday.

Extreme weather is already wreaking havoc on voting ahead of the election. Hurricane Helene has upended postal service in North Carolina, potentially delaying early and mail-in voting in the crucial swing state.

The Supreme Court refused Monday to hear an appeal from Elon Musk’s X Corp. on the company’s claim that special counsel Jack Smith took an unlawful deep dive into Donald Trump’s social media account without notifying the former president.

X Corp. begged the Supreme Court in July to determine under what circumstances a tech company can be compelled to turn over information on its users, while being prevented from alerting those users that they’re being investigated.

The court did not publish a comment Monday, and there were no dissents.

Last year, Smith’s team was able to use a “nondisclosure order” to prevent X Corp. from notifying Trump that prosecutors were using a search warrant to obtain private communications from Trump’s X (formerly Twitter) account, including direct messages, location data, and his drafts from the weeks leading up to the January 6 insurrection.

When X Corp. challenged the order, it was found in contempt and fined $350,000. Prosecutors argued that notifying Trump of the search would endanger the evidence.

Last week, an unsealed filing from Smith’s team showed precisely how the prosecution in Trump’s January 6 trial intended to use tweets from the Republican nominee’s personal X account to demonstrate his alleged election interference.

Trump’s tweets cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election results, spread false claims of voter fraud, attacked those trying to share accurate information about the election, cheered on those traveling to Washington for the rally that would become the riot, and helped the former president conduct a pressure campaign against Vice President Mike Pence.

At 2:24 p.m. on January 6, 2021, as rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

This tweet was then read out to the crowd at the Capitol, who later chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!” Moments after Trump tweeted, Pence had to be ushered to a secure location, according to the filing. When Trump heard that Pence had been taken to safety, he reportedly responded, “So what?”