Trump’s Defense Pick Refuses to Back Down Despite Utter Humiliation

Ex–Fox News star Pete Hegseth won’t let go of his nomination to be Donald Trump’s next defense secretary.

In a post on Wednesday, the accused rapist claimed that he would continue his ascent to the president-elect’s Cabinet despite his dwindling odds at passing a Senate confirmation hearing, branding himself as a “disruptor.”

“I’m doing this for the warfighters, not the warmongers,” Hegseth wrote alongside a photo of himself in combat gear. “The Left is afraid of disrupters and change agents. They are afraid of @realDonaldTrump—and me. So they smear w/ fake, anonymous sources & BS stories. They don’t want truth.

“Our warriors never back down, & neither will I,” he added.

Hegseth told reporters on Tuesday that he intended to meet with every senator, including those who were skeptical of his nomination.

“We’re going to meet with every senator that wants to meet with us, across the board,” Hegseth said on his second full day on Capitol Hill courting members of the upper chamber. “And we welcome their advice as we go through the advice and counsel process.”

That plan has already fallen apart, as The Washington Post’s Marianne Levine reported Wednesday that Hegseth had canceled an upcoming meeting with Senator Josh Hawley.

Conservatives have grown increasingly concerned about Hegseth’s ability to pass the Senate confirmation process in light of sexual assault allegations against the ex–Fox News host, including a detailed 2017 police report regarding Hegseth allegedly raping an attendee at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California.

Since those allegations surfaced, Hegseth has admitted to several other scandals, including five affairs that he had during his first marriage.

Even Hegseth’s own mother couldn’t defend the white nationalist–connected conservative, accusing her son in a scathing 2018 email following his separation from his second wife of “using women for his own power.”

“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” Penelope Hegseth wrote in the email, obtained by The New York Times Friday.

“I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego,” she wrote. “You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”

Hegseth’s mother has since publicly changed her tune—on Wednesday morning, she appeared on Fox News to beg people to support her son for defense secretary.

But that’s not the only issue blocking Hegseth’s tenure at the top of the Pentagon: Reports of the Fox News anchor’s rampant drinking have prompted some GOP lawmakers to put their foot down on his nomination barring a promise of sobriety.

“One of the things I’d love to hear is that he’s committed to not drinking,” Republican Senator Kevin Cramer told CNN on Wednesday. “Being familiar with the problems of alcoholism and the dumb things we do when we drink too much, it’d be really nice if he could set that one aside for good, if not at least through his term as secretary.”

Democratic candidate Adam Gray defeated incumbent Republican Representative John Duarte in the final 2024 House race to be called. Gray’s victory, flipping California’s 13th congressional district, means the House Republican majority will be even more razor-thin than before.

With Gray’s win, called early Wednesday morning by the Associated Press, House Republicans will have just a 220–215 majority in the 119th Congress, as the Democrats have netted one more House seat. As CNN reporter Harry Enten noted last week while results were still pending, a party’s majority in the House has not been this slim since the Herbert Hoover administration, following elections for the 72nd Congress.

The House Republican majority is poised to be further deflated, temporarily, to 217–215 in early 2025 with the expected vacancies of three Republican seats.

Representative Matt Gaetz resigned from his seat last month, after he was tapped to be Trump’s attorney general but before he withdrew from consideration in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations. Two other Republican representatives, Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz, are expected to resign to join the Trump administration. Until these three vacancies are filled, a single Republican defector in a party-line vote would dash a piece of legislation.

The scantiness of the House majority—on top of internal strife among Republican representatives—could significantly hamper the party’s ability to enact its legislative agenda early on in the coming Trump administration.

Kash Patel, Trump’s pick for FBI director, has a fake Covid-19 vaccine “detox” supplement side hustle.

According to a report from NBC News Wednesday, Patel has helped push “Warrior Essentials,” a right-wing faux “wellness” company that sells three different types of supplements claiming to “undo the damage from the spike protein” (essentially the Covid vaccine).

He first advertised them in February on his Truth Social, writing, “Spike the Vax, order this homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax. Huge discount now by ordering via link below,” above an image that read, “If the Covid vaccines were actually ‘safe’ we wouldn’t be essential.”

He shouted Warrior Essentials out again in April, this time writing, “Mrna detox, reverse the vaxx n get healthy with @warrioressentials,” above an image stating, “You were immune to the propaganda, but are you immune to the shedders?”

“Since the mRNA covid vaccines were rolled out we’ve learned our DNA may have been infiltrated by the mRNA in the covid vaccines,” the Warrior Essentials website states. “Our DNA is already under stress from environmental pollutants and chemical additives in our foods. The spike could undermine it all. Not to worry. Warrior Essentials has your back with a support system to bring you back to peak health.”

Patel is a loyal MAGA disciple who wants to dismantle the very agency he is set to head. It only makes sense that he’s doing weird supplement grifting too—after all, he’s learned from one of the best.

Donald Trump has decided to appoint his former lawyer Peter Navarro to serve as senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.

Trump made the announcement in a Truth Social post Wednesday, claiming Navarro “was treated horribly by the Deep State, or whatever else you would like to call it,” but failing to mention that the one-time Trump lawyer served four months in prison for contempt of Congress after defying a subpoena from the House January 6 committee.

Even while in prison, Navarro maintained his steadfast loyalty to the president-elect, going so far as to discuss Trump’s first-term agenda from behind bars. After being released, he stayed in the Trump orbit but was critical of how team Trump ran their 2024 presidential campaign. Now, according to Trump, Navarro will be helping to “successfully advance and communicate the Trump Manufacturing, Tariff, and Trade Agendas.”

In 2022, Navarro was indicted for failing to testify or provide documents to the House committee. He spent years refusing to testify before the House, trying to claim executive privilege because he was acting on Trump’s instructions after the 2020 election, although Trump never told the January 6 committee this nor did he back up Navarro’s claim in any way.

After a federal judge rejected the executive privilege argument, Navarro made a last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court that Chief Justice John Roberts promptly threw out, making Navarro the first ever former White House official to go to prison for being in contempt of Congress.

Trump credited Navarro for renegotiating “unfair Trade Deals like NAFTA and the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS)” in his first term, and the new role he envisions for the economist appears to be on similar policy matters. With Trump’s proposed tariffs egging on a likely trade war this time around, the trade war hawk with staunch loyalty to the president-elect will have plenty to keep him busy the next four years.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump is leaning in to his joking suggestion that the United States annex Canada with a bizarre Truth Social meme.

Last week, Trump announced that he plans to impose a 25 percent, potentially trade war–inducing tariff on goods from top U.S. trading partners Mexico and Canada when he takes office in January.

On Friday, when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Trump of the damage this would cause, the president-elect reportedly joked that “if Canada can’t survive without ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion a year, then maybe Canada should become the fifty-first state and Trudeau should become its governor.”

The joke has proven an understandably controversial one, but Trump on Tuesday afternoon followed up on it by posting an apparently AI-generated image to Truth Social captioned “Oh Canada!” The image depicts the president-elect atop a mountain, beside a Canadian flag, gazing upon a pinnacle that users have noted closely resembles that of the Matterhorn in Switzerland.

The post recalls some of the more delirious moments of Trump’s first term, namely his half-joking posts about the administration purchasing Greenland. It also offers a foretaste of the presidential communications that await us in his second term, thanks to the wonders of AI image generation.

But in this instance, behind the post and original joke, there lies a serious threat against our top trading partners, which analysts say would have dire consequences if fulfilled—even barring retaliatory actions.

NPR reports that Trump’s proposed tariffs would likely raise the cost of groceries and gasoline for American consumers. The Brookings Institute notes that the tariffs could be even more ruinous considering “approximately 50% of U.S. trade with Canada and Mexico is driven by supply chains” in which products cross borders repeatedly during their production.

Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk may be on the same team now that Donald Trump has named them co-chairs of the still-in-the-works Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE, but behind closed doors, Ramaswamy has reportedly spent years bad-mouthing the Tesla CEO.

A new report by CNN’s K-File uncovered audio and video recordings in which Ramaswamy openly derided the SpaceX founder, routinely referring to Musk as a “circus monkey,” while accusing him of “bending the knee to Xi Jinping” when it came to international economics.

“I think Tesla is increasingly beholden to China,” Ramaswamy said in May 2023, while discussing Musk’s decision to build a battery plant in Shanghai. “I have no reason to think Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need.”

Ramaswamy’s more pointed critiques honed in on Musk’s comments about Taiwan, after the carmaker drew praise from Chinese officials in 2022 for claiming that the former Chinese colony should become a “special administrative zone.” That, according to Ramaswamy, was little more than a successful political ploy for Musk to obtain regulatory approvals and tax breaks from the Chinese Communist Party for his Shanghai factory, which singularly accounted for more than half of Tesla’s global sales in 2023.

Musk’s apparent aptitude for political games for the benefit of his own companies ultimately calls into question his appointment to a (still nonexistent) agency with high ambitions of cutting government spending, and whether he’ll follow through on those claims or simply restructure the government from the inside to line his own wallet.

“Both Tesla and SpaceX quite likely would not exist as successful businesses if it were not for the use of public funding, either through subsidies, through the electric car industry, or through actual government contracting in the case of SpaceX,” Ramaswamy said in 2022 on a Fox News podcast. “Elon Musk has, I think, demonstrated his willingness to change his political tunes based on the favors that he gets to be able to do business in China.”

In a lengthy 2023 post on X in which Ramaswamy openly targeted Musk, the biotech billionaire wrote that “the U.S. needs leaders who aren’t in China’s pocket.”

In a statement to CNN, Ramaswamy said that the pair had “aired some of these issues” the first time they spoke.

“I love him and respect the hell out of him, and I’m proud to call him a friend. The only country he puts first is the same one I do: the United States of America,” Ramaswamy told the network.

Tucker Carlson is back in Russia to gush over how much he loves the country under Vladimir Putin.

The former Fox News host posted a video on X Tuesday from Moscow’s Red Square announcing that he’s interviewing Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The purpose of this visit to Russia, Carlson said, is because U.S. support of Ukraine has “driven the U.S. ever closer to a nuclear conflict with Russia.”

“We are, unbeknownst to most Americans, in a hot war with Russia,” Carlson said. “An undeclared war, a war you did not vote for and that most Americans don’t want but that is ongoing.”

Carlson attacked President Biden for allowing Ukraine to strike Russian territory with American-made missiles and made the misleading implication that the U.S. military is directly involved in Ukraine’s war with Russia.

“And because of that war, because of the fact that the U.S. military is killing Russians in Russia right now, we are closer to nuclear war than at any time in history. Far closer than we were during the Cuban missile crisis,” Carlson said.

Carlson claimed that the State Department blocked him from interviewing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and attacked American media outlets for failing to offer “the Russian perspective” on the war. He also said he asked Lavrov whether Trump’s election meant that the war with Ukraine could be ending soon, echoing a promise from Trump that Putin has already thrown cold water on.

According to a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Carlson’s interview lasted about 90 minutes and will be released in a few days after being edited and translated. There was no word on whether the Russian government itself is doing the editing and translating, or whether Carlson’s interview would face government censorship.

That’s a legitimate question to ask, considering that the last time Carlson went to Russia, six months ago, his interview with Putin was so deferential to the Russian leader that even Putin mocked Carlson’s interview skills. At one point during that interview, Putin made fun of Carlson’s failed attempt to join the CIA.

Carlson’s show on X is so pro-Russian that it was aired on Russian state television at one point, although Carlson’s producer swore that it was without permission. When Carlson’s interview is posted within the next few days, we’ll all see how pro-Trump and pro-Putin he is now that Trump is returning to the White House.

Pete Hegseth called his mom to come do some damage control.

Penelope Hegseth appeared on her embattled son’s former show, Fox & Friends, on Wednesday and was asked about the email she sent him in 2018 in which she begged him to stop lying, cheating, sleeping around with, using, and abusing the women in his life. Instead of answering the question, she chose to point the finger back at the media in a public plea for her son’s nomination for defense secretary.

“We all believe in him, we really believe that he is not that man he was seven years ago; I’m not that mother.… I am here to tell the truth. To tell the truth to the American people, to the senators on the Hill, especially our female senators. I really hope that you will not listen to the media, and that you will listen to Pete.”

She then turned her scorn on the media, and on The New York Times, saying that they threatened her, and described them as “almost criminal” for reporting on the 2018 email she sent to her son, who could likely become the head of the Pentagon. “They are in it for the commission, for the money, and they don’t care who they hurt: families, children,” she claimed.

Pete Hegseth is on the Hill today trying to convince senators that he’s a changed man, as his nomination has been upended by troubling allegations of rape, sexual harassment, and financial mismanagement in previous workplaces. Beyond all that, he is an unabashed Christian nationalist who would bring a violent, incendiary energy to the Pentagon. The status of his nomination is yet to be determined.

With growing scrutiny mounting against Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump is reportedly looking at replacements for his defense secretary nominee—but the number two pick might be an even more dangerous selection to run the Pentagon.

The president-elect is having casual conversations at Mar-a-Lago about tapping Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for the highly coveted Cabinet position, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

Unlike the majority of Trump’s “anti-qualified” picks to run his government, DeSantis would, at least, have some level of experience for the role. The 46-year-old briefly served as a Navy lawyer in Iraq and was part of a legal team that advised the Guantánamo Bay detention center, where he backed torture methods such as force-feeding.

DeSantis was also one of Trump’s more outspoken primary challengers, sparking a bitter—if lopsided—rivalry that cast the Florida governor as disloyal to the MAGA cause. But the pair’s shared perspective on “woke” politics in the military might be enough to get him in the door.

But DeSantis isn’t the only option being floated. Also on the list of Hegseth replacements is former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby, a friend of Vice President–elect JD Vance, and Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, according to sources that spoke with the Journal.

Conservatives have grown increasingly concerned about Hegseth’s ability to pass the Senate confirmation process in light of sexual assault allegations against the ex–Fox News host. Even Hegseth’s own mother couldn’t defend the white nationalist–connected conservative, accusing her son of “using women for his own power.” (Hegseth’s mother has since changed her tune—on Tuesday, she told Fox News that her son was a “changed man” whom she hoped “our dear female senators” would get to know.)

Senator Mike Lee wrote out a blueprint for dismantling Social Security on X Monday night that Elon Musk amplified, hinting at disturbing GOP plans for the program.

In a thread now pinned to his X profile, the Utah Republican laid out a case for overhauling the program and amending the 1933 Social Security Act itself, claiming that the law allows for the government to steal taxpayer funds for its own purposes rather than safeguard Social Security itself.

Musk, along with Trump crony and business executive Vivek Ramaswamy, has been tasked by Trump to run the figurehead Department of Government Efficiency, where their mission will be to eliminate government waste. It’s no secret that their vision of waste includes Social Security, and they seem to have the backing of Trump and Vice President–elect JD Vance.

Lee is a leading Republican senator and, with Republicans controlling Congress, could be an architect for the GOP’s designs on the program. Lee would have plenty of allies in the House, with one congressman, Richard McCormick, alluding to overhauling the program along with Medicare and Medicaid, in a Tuesday interview. Earlier this year, House Speaker Mike Johnson promised to cut Social Security and increase defense spending, and the right-wing Project 2025 manifesto also includes drastic cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

With control of the Senate, the White House, and a very thin majority in the House, it seems quite clear that Republicans will take aim at the popular government program, despite the fact that most Americans oppose making any cuts to Social Security along with Medicare. Right now, Republicans are building a case for making dangerous changes. The question is whether they will follow through over popular opposition, and whether Democrats will put up a fight.