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Former Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera tore into President Donald Trump over his treatment of immigrants, saying that he was wrecking the fabric of longstanding communities and ruining the lives of innocent people.

This came during a discussion on MSNBC of podcaster Joe Rogan, who previously backed Trump, now criticizing him sharply over his use of immigration laws to detain students who protested against the Israeli occupation of Gaza.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday admitted that a provision in Republicans' "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" is a mechanism for privatizing Social Security—something President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he won't do.

Speaking at a policy event hosted by the far-right news site Breitbart, Bessent touted the so-called "Trump accounts" available to all U.S. citizen children starting next July under the OBBBA signed by the president earlier this month.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper threw some shade at a GOP leader on Wednesday for his flip-flop over releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told MAGA podcast host Benny Johnson earlier this month that his party should "put everything out there" and let the public draw their own conclusions about the Epstein files. Johnson backtracked a week later when he said there is "no daylight" between House Republicans and the White House, which wants only "credible" Epstein files to be released.

Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is alleged to have had an adult film on behind him during a state meeting.

Walters is the far-right Republican who attempted to mandate that every classroom have a Trump Bible in the state.

The Department of Justice may have unintentionally created a weapon that could take down the president, according to an analyst.

In mid-July, the DOJ fired Maurene Comey from her role as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. Comey is the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, and she was the lead prosecutor on the Jeffrey Epstein case. According to former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner, firing Maurene Comey was a mistake that could come back to haunt President Donald Trump as he tries to distance himself from Epstein.

Longtime media analyst Angelo Carusone from Media Matters explained that Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino are making President Donald Trump's Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy worse.

Speaking to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday, Carusone noted that a key part of the Epstein conspiracy theorist community centers around the missing clip of the Bureau of Prisons video from the facility where he was being held. The video is not of Epstein's cell, however. But the way Bondi explained it just made things worse, Carusone said.

President Donald Trump's attacks on President Joe Biden for the economy are coming back to bite him as consumer confidence falls.

Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale University, said on Wednesday on MSNBC that the impact of tariffs is already hitting consumers as demand is increasing for items made overseas.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday he won't reduce interest rates largely due to President Donald Trump's trade war.

“Higher tariffs have begun to show through more clearly to prices of some goods, but their overall effects on economic activity and inflation remain to be seen,” Powell said.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump faced ridicule for his response to a question from a pro-MAGA reporter. The person claimed that FBI Director Kash Patel found "burn bags" used in the Russia investigation.

Trump didn't understand what he meant. The reporter tried to explain "bags full of ..." But Trump interrupted, saying, "Oh, I thought you said appointed a man named Burn Bag."

A confused President Donald Trump railed about Democrats and Russiagate before apparently veering off course and rambling about what appeared to be the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that's filled the headlines for more than a week.

During a White House bill signing event on Wednesday, a reporter noted that FBI Director Kash Patel claimed to have found "burn bags" with documents about the investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election.

Reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may already be looking for what comes next in his career after leaving his Fox News gig to become defense secretary, where he has become a constant source of controversy, likely has the White House aggravated with him, according to a former GOP lawmaker

During an appearance on MSNBC, former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) claimed he got the impression that Hegseth's possible plan to make a jump and run for office in Tennessee seems to have caught Donald Trump's White House by surprise.

Speaking with MSNBC host Anna Cabrera, Dent said that Hegseth has a history of making moves without notifying the administration.

"Given all the drama of his first six months in the current job, what do you make of this new reporting that he's thought about jumping out of the Pentagon into the political realm?" the ex-GOP lawmaker was asked.

"But he is in a job that is expressly nonpartisan and the fact that there's discussions about him running for office really suggests that he's behaving in a partisan manner," Dent first suggested.

"So this is not a story he wants out there and, frankly, I would have to think that the White House can't be too thrilled about this either, given all the drama, you know, from Signalgate, to his challenge with some of the promotions at the Pentagon to losing a lot of his key staff," he added.

"He's got all sorts of problems over there and now that this story is out, I'm wondering if the White House is blindsided by this, just as they were blindsided by his decision to withhold funding to Ukraine, only to be overruled by the White House," he suggested.

Asked by the host if this is an "off-ramp" for the White House to rid itself of the problematic defense secretary, he said, "Absolutely.

A Democrat lawmaker shamed President Donald Trump over remarks about one of his former employees who was abused by Jeffrey Epstein — and he said the comments revealed that he knows more about the convicted sex abuser than he has admitted.

Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) appeared Wednesday morning on "CNN News Central," where host Kate Bolduan asked him about Trump's "evolving explanation" for his falling out with the disgraced financier. On Tuesday, Trump claimed that Epstein "stole" then-teenage Mar-a-Lago employee Virginia Giuffre from him .