Trump’s Press Secretary Once Opposed Election Denialism

Karoline Leavitt, who Donald Trump has chosen as his White House press secretary, once criticized the Capitol insurrection and reposted praise for then–Vice President Mike Pence certifying the 2020 presidential election, before later deleting the social media posts.

CNN reports that Leavitt made two posts on X (formerly Twitter) after the January 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol: one video of Pence calling the attacks “a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol” as he presided over the election’s certification in Congress, and another post calling a Capitol police officer who led rioters away from members of Congress “a hero.”

At the time, Leavitt, then 23, had just left Trump’s White House press office and accepted a job working for Representative Elise Stefanik. Later, despite her criticism of the January 6 riots, she unsuccessfully ran for Congress in New Hampshire in 2022, denying that Trump lost the presidential election.

In two separate interviews in 2021, one with OANN and one with New Hampshire talk radio, Leavitt denied that Trump lost the 2020 election.

“I do believe that if we were to audit all 50 states in this country, there is absolutely no way we would find Joe Biden legitimately won 81 million votes,” Leavitt told New Hampshire’s WKXL. “I fundamentally do not believe that, and I will tell you the majority of voters on the Republican side do not believe that either. We feel as though this election was taken away from us.”

After her 2022 loss, Leavitt went on to work for Trump’s PAC and later his presidential campaign, becoming its national press secretary. At 27, she’ll be the youngest White House press secretary ever, but far from the only Republican (and Trump staffer) to go from criticizing the Capitol insurrection to denying that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. But that won’t matter to Trump, who sees immediate loyalty as the most important thing. As long as Leavitt does what Trump wants in her new role, she will have his approval.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, Donald Trump’s pick to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, could face many different and serious conflicts with his business interests if he is confirmed to run the agency.

The Washington Post reports that Oz, who has a long history of promoting questionable medical cures and diet solutions, also has business ties to pharmaceutical companies such as Novo Nordisk, the manufacturer of Ozempic. If Oz is confirmed to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, his decisions would have considerable effects on these businesses.

Oz founded Sharecare, a digital health and media company, with Oprah Winfrey and WebMD founder Jeff Arnold in 2009. Novo Nordisk was a client of Sharecare. Being in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, two taxpayer-funded health care programs, would call into question whether he’d be affected by lobbying efforts from Big Pharma, particularly over weight-loss drugs like Ozempic.

Oz has repeatedly touted the benefits of Ozempic on his TV show as well as his website. He has also promoted Wegovy, another similar drug. Both are manufactured by Novo Nordisk, and the company has been lobbying the federal government to cover the drugs through Medicare and Medicaid.

The Biden administration proposed covering the weight-loss drugs last week, which raises the question of whether the incoming Trump administration will do the same. Such a move would raise a conflict within the administration between Oz and Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has attacked pharmaceutical companies for selling drugs like Ozempic.

“They’re counting on selling it to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs,” Kennedy told Fox News in October.

There’s also Oz’s long history of touting questionable medical cures and diet solutions, which undercuts his medical credibility and even resulted in a congressional hearing. Will Oz’s quackery, as well as his business interests, affect his confirmation? In the Trump administration, after all, conflicts of interest are routinely ignored when money is involved.

It seems that Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s pick to transform the FBI into the president’s billy club, hasn’t quite won over all of the president-elect’s allies, according to MSNBC.

Patel, who held intelligence and defense roles during Trump’s first term, is considered one of his most dangerous picks yet—and not everyone is happy about the president-elect’s choice.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Jonathan Lemire discussed reports Monday of unease in Trump’s inner circle around Patel’s nomination.

“Kash Patel is not just controversial among media outlets or Democrats, he is not just controversial among Republican senators,” Scarborough said. “He is controversial inside Trump’s own orbit.

“You go inside Trump’s own orbit and it is split down the middle with half the people thinking he is going to be a disaster for any Donald Trump administration, and they never wanted this nomination to see the light of day because—again—that divide goes straight through MAGAworld for those around Donald Trump.”

Lemire explained that Patel, with his penchant for “deep state” conspiracy theories and threatening journalists, is a pick designed to please far-right extremists.

“People I talked to say this pick was a nod to the extreme right-wing portions of Trump base, the Steve Bannon, ultra-MAGA sector here who had been disappointed by Trump’s picks like treasury secretary and secretary of state,” Lemire explained, referring to billionaire money manager Scott Bessent and Republican Senator Marco Rubio, respectively.

“This is Trump throwing them red meat because he knows he needs to keep them happy, but other people in Trumpworld are deeply worried about this pick; that Patel is not only not qualified but dangerous, that he will not think twice or hesitate in carrying out whatever Trump wants, people say, even for people breaking the law.”

It’s hard to believe Trump hasn’t already satisfied the more extreme among his base with his slate of far-right conspiracy theorists, autocrat apologists, and alleged sexual predators. At a certain point, so many “nods” to the far right aren’t really just nods anymore, as Trump’s loyalist picks for intelligence and law enforcement constitute the makings of an increasingly accelerating authoritarian takeover.

An unelected federal bureaucrat spent his weekend complaining about how much he hates unelected federal bureaucrats.  

Former presidential candidate and Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy offered a pretty oblivious take on X on Sunday. Chiming in on a discussion between Elon Musk and Stephen Miller about the deep state, Ramaswamy responded, “The real ‘threat to our democracy’ is the unelected federal bureaucracy.” 

This stunning lack of self-awareness—or unabashed hypocrisy—was quickly ridiculed. 

“You have already launched and are reportedly staffing a department of the United States government that has never actually been created or authorized by any statute enacted by the democratically elected Congress of the United States,” former Bernie Sanders adviser David Sirota wrote.

“Vivek is literally an unelected federal bureaucrat,” said MSNBC contributor Brian Tyler Cohen.

“That’s you, IDIOT,” said talk show host Roland Martin.

Even still, Ramaswamy and Musk are set to be equipped with power to radically change the federal government apparatus, or “deep state” as they like to call it—especially after their recent victory in the Loper Bright v. Raimondo Supreme Court case.

Donald Trump’s next term will benefit from a Republican trifecta at the upper echelons of government—but the party’s inner divisions and its tiny, two-seat majority in the House might stand in the way of some of his bigger policy goals.

With Congress winding down its 118th session, it’s clear that the divisions flaming both parties in both chambers have disrupted the legislature’s typical productivity. For scale: The branch’s last session, which also faced criticism for its lack of productivity, enacted 362 public laws. The 118th, by contrast, has passed just 136 laws, according to legislative data from LegiScan.

That’s partially thanks to rampant chaos in the House, which wasted months of the first half of its session unable to pick a leader, whether it was via Kevin McCarthy falling to the caucus’s far-right members last year or Speaker Mike Johnson, a relative unknown, almost accidentally acquiring the House’s highest position.

Meanwhile, Republicans, divided between traditional party values and Trump’s MAGA infusion, have continued to torpedo their own initiatives. Up next on the docket for the confused party is advancing Trump’s tax goals, which include extending his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and delaying the end of $3.3 trillion in tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy (they’re currently set to expire in 2025).

Senior Republicans had hoped that the extension would give the president-elect the tools to expand border enforcement and begin his “mass deportations,” but even the party’s political advantages aren’t enough for a clear path forward on the issue.

“It’ll be super challenging. And the reason for that is you have razors at margins, and we’re obviously not going to get any Democrat votes. The key is going to be addressing all these coalitions that are likely going to threaten an insufficient number of votes unless they get their priorities,” Senator Thom Tillis told NBC News Sunday. “It’s infinitely more complex to get a reconciliation outcome in this cycle out of the House than the Senate.”

But the extreme nativist effort has doubly spelled out to Democrats that conservatives aren’t looking to bipartisanship to advance their policies.

“Republicans are trying to take actions that will benefit the most fortunate and grow the debt for future generations,” Representative Brad Schneider, the newly elected chair of the moderate New Democrat Coalition, told NBC. “They’ve made it very clear they’re not going to look to find any compromise. They’re going to have to work within their own caucus, this very narrow majority.”

The nominated co-chairs of the soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, have pinpointed a standard that will allow them to completely remake the federal government—and it’s all thanks to the Supreme Court.

Earlier this year, the nation’s highest court ruled on Loper Bright v. Raimondo, overturning a 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council and killing a long-standing mandate that federal courts should defer to executive branch agencies’ interpretation of the laws they administered (so long as that interpretation was deemed reasonable).

In a lengthy statement Monday morning, Ramaswamy highlighted that Loper Bright will allow their department to enact the sweeping budget cuts they envision for the executive branch—which includes shrinking the federal deficit and slashing $2 trillion in spending by July 4, 2026.

“Under the old standard, federal courts deferred to agency interpretations of law when a statute was deemed ambiguous,” Ramaswamy wrote on X. “Overturning Chevron deference, combined with the Major Questions Doctrine codified in West Virginia vs EPA, paves the way for not a slight but a *drastic* reduction in the scope of the federal regulatory state. It’s coming.”

Musk quote-tweeted Ramaswamy’s lengthy post, simply replying, “Yes.”

The biotech billionaire pointed to several legal studies to back his perspective, including a 2017 study that found that Chevron had become something of a standard for determining agency interpretation, being applied to close to three-quarters of relevant cases between 2003 and 2013.

An op-ed by the duo published in The Wall Street Journal last month highlighted some specific and immediate targets for their cuts. They include slashing more than $500 million a year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which funds NPR and PBS), nearly $300 million from Planned Parenthood, and “$1.5 billion for grants to international organizations.” Musk and Ramaswamy also suggested, in vague terms, that “entitlement programs” such as Medicare and Medicaid are on the line, though they refused to acknowledge how much they intend to burn from the critical health care programs.

Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative filmmaker behind the election denialist fable 2,000 Mules, revealed that the data that underpinned his supposedly incontrovertible claims of fraudulent voting was actually a complete sham.

In the 2022 film, a Texas-based “election integrity” organization called True the Vote claimed to have reviewed cell phone geotracking data from five 2020 battleground states that traced the movements of ballot “mules” who had been paid by liberal nonprofits to stuff ballot boxes. D’Souza’s film purported that hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots had been cast, tipping the scales for Joe Biden. The movie has been widely debunked by pretty much everyone, now including its own filmmaker.

A statement from D’Souza, quietly posted to D’Souza Media’s website early Monday, revealed that the geolocation data that he called “the premise of the film” wasn’t actually real.

“During the production of this film, as a supplement to the geolocation data, True the Vote provided my team with ballot drop box surveillance footage that had been obtained through open records requests. We were assured that the surveillance videos had been linked to geolocation cell phone data, such that each video depicted an individual who had made at least 10 visits to drop boxes. Indeed, it is clear from the interviews within the film itself that True the Vote was correlating the videos to geolocation data,” D’Souza wrote.

“We recently learned that surveillance videos used in the film may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data,” the statement read.

D’Souza downplayed this particular revelation’s impact on the integrity of True the Vote, and the film altogether.

“We operated in good faith and in reliance on True the Vote. We continue to have confidence in their work and also in the basic message of ‘2000 Mules,’” he wrote, adding that he would “continue to have faith” in the “underlying geolocation data and analysis.”

It seems the statement’s main purpose was to apologize to one individual: Mark Andrews, a Georgia voter who sued D’Souza after he was falsely depicted as one of the “mules.”

“I now understand that the surveillance videos used in the film were characterized on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team. If I had known then that the videos were not linked to geolocation data, I would have clarified this and produced and edited the film differently,” D’Souza said.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation determined in 2022 that Andrews had been dropping off ballots for members of his own family, and Andrews filed a defamation lawsuit against D’Souza, True the Vote, and the movie’s publisher, Salem Media Group Inc. The publisher issued an apology to Andrews and ultimately retracted the movie from its platforms.

“Again, I apologize to Mr. Andrews. I make this apology not under the terms of a settlement agreement or other duress, but because it is the right thing to do, given what we have now learned,” D’Souza wrote. “While I do not believe Mr. Andrews was ever identified by the film or book, I am sorry for any harm he believes he and his family has suffered as a result of ‘2000 Mules.’”

Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, was forced to leave two veterans’ advocacy groups he ran due to serious allegations against him.

The New Yorker reports that Hegseth was forced to step down from Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America over allegations of sexual impropriety, personal misconduct, and financial mismanagement.

According to a seven-page whistleblower report from Hegseth’s time as president of the CVA from 2013 to 2016, the former Fox News host was repeatedly intoxicated while working in his official capacity, even needing to be carried out of organizational events. At one point, a heavily intoxicated Hegseth had to be physically restrained from joining dancers onstage at a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team.

“A Fox News contributor, with the rank of captain (at the time) in the National Guard, and the CEO of a veterans’ organization … was in a strip club trying to dance with strippers,” the whistleblower wrote.

The report also stated that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and the rest of his management team sexually pursued women who worked for the CVA and even divided them into “party girls” and “not party girls.” According to the report, the organization ignored accusations of impropriety from staff members, including one of sexual assault.

In one letter of complaint sent to the CVA in 2015, a former CVA employee said that Hegseth was drunk in a Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio bar, early in the morning of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour, chanting, “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

The author of the letter told The New Yorker, “If you print that, I will deny I wrote it.” When told that it came from the same personal email account that he still uses, he said, “I don’t care. I’ll just say it never happened.” Hegseth was pressured into resigning from the organization in January 2016.

During Hegseth’s time in charge, Veterans for Freedom also ran up serious debts. Only one year later, VFF couldn’t afford to pay its creditors, with the group’s donors, Republican billionaires Bernard Marcus, Jerry Perenchio, and Harold Simmons, concerned over what their money was being spent on.

That concern was more than justified, as their money was apparently being spent on wild parties rife with sexual impropriety. The three donors hired a forensic accountant, and Hegseth admitted in January 2008 that the organization had $434,833 in unpaid bills, less than $1,000 in the bank, and credit card debts of as much as $75,000. The donors eventually arranged a merger with another veterans’ organization and drastically reduced Hegseth’s role.

These new revelations raise significant questions about whether Hegseth is fit to run the world’s most powerful military, particularly in light of the sexual assault allegations against him and his extreme personal views. While Trump’s team is already compiling a list of alternative nominees, it’s unknown whether Trump will double down on supporting Hegseth.

Donald Trump has tapped his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to serve as his adviser for Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.

The selection is a totally unqualified one, save for one known example in which Boulos, a Lebanese billionaire, acted as a foreign intermediary for Trump with the Palestinian Authority, meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the U.N. General Assembly while the leader of the devastated nation attempted to appeal to the pro-Israel president-elect.

Boulos also aided Trump’s 2024 campaign, helping the MAGA leader canvas for support among disillusioned Arab Americans in key swing states such as Michigan.

“Massad is an accomplished lawyer and a highly respected leader in the business world, with extensive experience on the International scene,” Trump wrote in a statement Sunday. “He has been a longtime proponent of Republican and Conservative values, an asset to my Campaign, and was instrumental in building tremendous new coalitions with the Arab American Community.”

“Massad is a dealmaker, and an unwavering supporter of PEACE in the Middle East. He will be a strong advocate for the United States, and its interests, and I am pleased to have him on our team!” Trump added.

Boulos comes from a long line of political figures in Lebanon, and his father-in-law co-founded the country’s Free Patriotic Movement, a Christian political movement connected to Hezbollah. He’s the first selection in Trump’s Cabinet who holds critical views of Israel’s conduct in its assault on Palestine, reported Haaretz.

But Boulos is at least the second recent, thoroughly unqualified pick for such an influential position. On Saturday, Trump tapped another family member—his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner—to serve as U.S. ambassador to France.

Over the course of the last month, Trump has made several jaw-dropping nominations to fill his Cabinet, including tapping former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard to serve as the director of national intelligence, despite the fact that she has regularly amplified Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories. The Republican also selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist with a wild history that includes propping up dead bear cubs in New York City’s Central Park for fun—to run the Department of Health and Human Services, a decision that has led authoritarianism scholars to describe Trump’s nominees as purposefully “anti-qualified.”

But beyond the obvious lack of credentials on his recent selections, Trump’s decision to lean into his family to staff the executive branch is an alarming choice by a politician who banged pots and pans claiming that investigations into his misconduct constituted a banana republic.

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, is essential to the president-elect’s takeover, and will allow him to use the full force of the U.S. government against anyone Trump decides is an enemy.

On Saturday, Trump nominated Patel, a former chief of staff at the U.S. Defense Department, to replace the FBI’s current director, Christopher Wray, who still has more than two years left in his 10-year term. Trump appointed Wray in 2017 after unceremoniously firing James Comey.

During an interview on MSNBC Saturday, The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols voiced his concerns about Trump’s “incredibly dangerous” prospective Cabinet of sycophants, including Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, Pam Bondi, and now Patel—a champion of the president-elect, with his penchant for “deep state” conspiracy theories and making threats against the press.

To Nichols, Patel’s nomination demonstrates not only a direction for Trump’s second administration, but also an accelerating velocity.

“You have the makings of, you know, a not-so-slow-motion authoritarian takeover of the United States government,” Nichols said.

In a subsequent piece published Saturday in The Atlantic, Nichols wrote that Patel’s appointment was part of Trump’s plan to transform the FBI into an “excellent instrument of revenge against anyone Trump or Patel identifies as an internal enemy—which, in Trump’s world, is anyone who criticizes Donald Trump.”

Trump, having nominated loyalists to serve as the heads of his intelligence, legal, and law enforcement agencies, “eliminates important obstacles to his frequently expressed desires to use the armed forces, federal law-enforcement agents, intelligence professionals, and government lawyers as he chooses, unbounded by the law or the Constitution,” Nichols wrote.

By nominating Patel, and the rest of his motley crew of conspiracy theorists and alleged sexual predators, Trump is removing the guardrails on his second administration.