White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that President Donald Trump was "saving America's children" by dismantling the department responsible for their education at a federal level.
During a Thursday interview on Fox News, host Harris Faulkner claimed that Democrats were "more upset with the president" than they were poor test scores.
"President Trump is not failing America's children," Leavitt insisted. "He is saving America's children with this action that he will take later today, directing Linda McMahon, our great secretary of education, to dismantle this federal bureaucracy that has taken more than $3 trillion from the American taxpayer since its inception in 1979."
"The president is returning education back to the people, to those closest to our students in our classrooms, and that is teachers and educators and parents who know what is best for their children," she added. "The Department of Education has never educated a child. All it has ever done is stolen money from the taxpayers for more regulation that has hurt our children's education."
Lawyer Norm Eisen has been singled out by name by President Donald Trump, but he's not backing down.
Speaking to MSNBC on Thursday, Eisen fact-checked allegations by Trump allies and other conservatives who allege that activist, liberal judges are ruling against him in court for political reasons.
Attorney General Pam Bondi singled out U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered that the administration turn around a plane of migrants deported without due process.
According to Bondi, who spoke to Fox on Thursday morning, Boasberg is "attempting to meddle in national security and foreign affairs, and he can't do it. What he's done is an intrusion on the president's authority. You know, this one federal judge, again, thinks he can control foreign policy for the entire country, and he cannot. And right now, we're evaluating our options."
"Pam Bondi's comments, Ana, were part of a piece with what we've seen in the first two months of the Trump administration: an assault on the Constitution," said Eisen, speaking to MSNBC's Ana Cabrera.
Eisen continued, "Bondi is saying that Article III of the Constitution, which gives federal judges the power to do exactly what James Boasberg is doing to oversee whether laws like the Alien Enemies Act are being followed."
Cabrera shouted that Bondi is at the top of the Justice Department.
Eisen shouted back, "She's tearing up the Constitution! And that is why it's another example of the hundreds of cases I've been involved in bringing — or helping with a couple dozen of them — the hundreds of cases, over 100 cases that have gone to judges. And you know what? Democratic-appointed judges, about 80 over 80% of the time, have ruled against Trump [saying] yes, it's unconstitutional. It's illegal. Republican-appointed judges also over 80% of the time. And she's exemplifying it. That's the bad news. The good news is they're losing in court."
He predicted Boasberg would impose consequences for defying his order.
Eisen also responded to Trump's attacks on him by name last week. Trump alleged Eisen is "vicious and violent." According to Eisen, "It's a badge of honor."
MAGA influencer Steve Bannon complained this week that a "judicial coup" was challenging President Donald Trump's "virtually unlimited power."
During his Thursday War Room program, Bannon noted that Republicans were moving to impeach U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg after he temporarily stopped Trump from deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members with a little-used wartime law.
"They're saying Trump's a dictator," Bannon told his "posse" of viewers. "No, he's not. But as the President of the United States and the office of the President of the United States, he has sole authority over the executive branch. Full stop."
"He finally bangs the table and says, hey, I'm President of the United States," he continued. "I'm endowed with virtually unlimited power as President in the executive role, as Chief Executive Officer, the money and the people, as Commander-in-Chief."
"And you see this judge, which needs to be impeached, trying to get in the middle of sending back terrorist groups, terrorist criminal groups, and he's Chief Magistrate."
Bannon accused judges who block Trump of a "judicial coup."
"How did you foresee where this fight was when some of your colleagues were kind of looking the other way and didn't want to address what's happening now, and it's only going to get worse, because now this is a judicial coup?" he asked Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ). "This is a judicial coup d'etat, is what is happening, and that's why it has to be fought to the bitter end."
For his part, Crane said he was pushing to impeach Boasberg and other judges in the U.S. House of Representatives.
"I don't care at the end of the day which way we do this, Steve, but the bottom line is, and you've talked about it for a couple weeks now, this will not stop until we actually take action and show these judges that they are not more powerful than the president of the United States," he opined.
On Thursday morning, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough went on an extensive rant aimed at billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency whose gutting of government jobs and programs is having a devastating impact on American military veterans.
Using the deletion of a website page honoring baseball star Jackie Robinson's military service, which was caught up in the Donald Trump's administration's diversity program purge, as a leaping off point, the "Morning Joe" co-host pointed out it is just one small skirmish in a larger war on veterans.
"I actually made a mistake of going on Instagram for five minutes yesterday and somebody that I know, 'Oh, DOGE is using multilayered facets to scrape through it and it's going to reveal that, you know, all this corruption because it's so ruthlessly efficient," he told the panel before stating, "It's just the opposite."
" CNN reported yesterday they took down websites like on Holocaust remembrance, September 11th, suicide prevention for our vets -- again, what's with the war on vets?" he asked.
Continuing in that line of thought, he added, "Sexual assault: something that [Iowa Republican Senator] Joni Ernst used to be concerned about in the military; she claimed to be and then some people got upset at her, and because she wanted to raise questions about that with Pete Hegseth."
"This is a page that would be great for Joni Ernst to say, 'Hey, you know what? We probably need to get the pages up on ending sexual assault and suicide prevention,'" he suggested, "and other vets, people who care about the vets because there's a war on vets right now in DOGE. If you look at what they've done to the VA, if you look at all the firing of the vets at the Pentagon in other areas, it's really deeply concerning for our vets."
Former federal judge John Jones revealed that he believes President Donald Trump has already caused a constitutional crisis by defying U.S. District Judge James Boasberg's restraining order against using an 18th-century law for deportations. Trump has also called for the judge's impeachment.
"I think we are in a crisis," Jones told CBS News on Thursday. "If court orders are disregarded, then you're in a world where judges don't matter, and you don't have the checks against the executive branch."
"And that, my view, will lead to anarchy," he continued. "I fear for the safety of my former colleagues because this is the kind of thing that foments from people who possibly are unbalanced but think that they're doing the work of a benefactor, possibly foments violence against individual judges and their families."
Former Trump administration official Matt Mowers on Thursday got some pushback from Democratic strategist Maria Cardona when he suggested that Democrats were guilty of "xenophobia" after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz labeled Tesla CEO Elon Musk of being a "nepo baby" from South Africa.
Appearing on CNN, Mowers accused Walz and other Democrats of being bigoted against Musk, whose mass firings of federal workers have sparked anger nationwide.
"They're trying to use tropes right now to try disenfranchise, essentially, an individual who is an American citizen who's volunteering their time and is simply working at the request of the duly elected president of the United States to help enact his goal, which he was elected on the mandate he was elected on, which is to actually turn upside down the system and to break down the federal bureaucracy and return more and more of it into the hands of the people," he said.
"I think it's really rich of Matt to bring up two things: Number one, xenophobia," she shot back. "Xenophobia is at the heart of everything that this Trump administration is doing, getting rid of quote-unquote 'DEI' which means attacking every single community of color and every worker whose skin is not white. So that's rich... And number two, it's rich that you're complaining about a government who is working for the people, who supposedly has unelected bureaucrats, when the unelected bureaucrat who is taking a demolishing hammer to civil society and to a government who is trying to do good for the people, and frankly, we're seeing across the board Americans do not like it. So what I say to you, Matt, is by all means, bring it on."
In analyzing recent polls of Trump's approval rating, Enten said that the president is already underwater with voters, despite the fact that he's only been in office for two months.
"[There have been] Two, in U.S. history, presidents with negative net approval ratings at this point at term since 1937, going back to the second term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt," he said. "They are the same two men: Trump in 2017 and Trump in 2025. He only matches himself."
Enten said that if there was any good news for Trump, it's the fact that he's polling better now than he was polling in 2017, although that still leaves him historically unpopular. What's more, Trump's net popularity has declined from a +7 at the start of his term to a -2 now.
"Yes, he's doing slightly better than he was during the first term at this point," Enten explained. "But compared to everybody else, he's doing far worse. And the reason he's doing far worse is Donald Trump is not meeting the voters' expectations on the issues that matter to them, especially."
Attorney General Pam Bondi's claim that judges have no business interfering with anything Donald Trump chooses to do got a thorough beat-down on MSNBC on Thursday morning.
During an appearance on Fox News Wednesday night, the Trump appointee expressed outrage that U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, first appointed to the bench by Republican President George W. Bush, has demanded answers about 200 alleged gang members shipped off to El Salvadoran authorities despite his order forbidding the transfer.
According to Bondi, who previously defended Trump during his first impeachment hearings, "He's attempting to meddle in national security and foreign affairs and he can't do it. What he's done is an intrusion on the president's authority. You know this one federal judge, again thinks he can control foreign policy for the entire country and he cannot and right now we're evaluating our options."
That brought a rebuke and a fact check from MSNBC's Joe Scarborough who prefaced his comments with, "Again I'm going to say this again because they keep saying things that they just know aren't true."
"In 2007, one federal judge stopped George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, the NSA program," he started. "You can't get, like, any deeper into national security in the middle of a war on terror than telling the NSA you can't continue that program –– one judge did that. It got appealed and guess what? He got to continue the program."
"The same thing happened with Barack Obama," he continued. "A judge out of Texas on an immigration issue; one federal judge out of Texas stops the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program. One federal judge out of Texas stopped a Title IX program about gender identity in the Obama administration. One federal judge out of Texas stopped Joe Biden's vaccine mandates for federal contractors –– it happens."
"One federal judge stops president's programs and it is shocking to me, I will say it is shocking to me, they know this and you actually have people coming out every day saying things they know are wrong," he accused.
Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) got an earful at a town hall in Laramie on Wednesday night where she was booed throughout for her support of Elon Musk's DOGE and responded by smirking and sneering at her constituents' concerns.
In video shared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," the far-right lawmaker was showered with chants of "Deport Elon" during her 45-minute appearance.
At one point a woman in the audience told her, "I worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, helping Wyoming family farmers deal with drought until I was fired a month ago in the mass firings, and despite only having the highest marks in my in a state where so many farmers rely on government programs for drought and disaster relief."
"[Donald] Trump plans to cut these programs and the people who administer them and coupled with the tariffs, will decimate Wyoming farms and rural communities. What are you doing about that?" she asked.
"I disagree, I disagree," the GOP lawmaker replied dismissively. "I come from the AG community, I'm well aware of what kind of programs are out there," which led to another wave of boos, cursing and fist-shaking.
She then added with a smirk, "It's so bizarre to me how obsessed you are with the federal government."
At another point she admonished the crowd, "You guys are going to have a heart attack if you don't calm down. I'm sorry, your hysteria is just really over the top."
That led a "Morning Joe" co-host to joke, "For the uninitiated who don't know Wyoming politics, they weren't saying 'Booooo,' they were saying 'Haaaaageman,'" which led the entire panel to burst out laughing.
A professional veterinarian on Thursday dumped on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s plan to let bird flu rip through American farms.
Appearing on CNN, former Kansas State Veterinarian Dr. Gail Hansen explained why exposing every chicken in the United States to bird flu will not create a race of super chickens with broad immunity to diseases.
"Most of the birds that are laying eggs... are pretty much from the same kind of stock," she said. "So they're the same breed, they're the same type of bird. They're not quite clones, but they're pretty close. So if you've got disease that's going to kill them, which it does, it's going to kill all of them... and even if you have one in a million, you've got, you know, the rest of them that are going to die a horrible death."
She then suggested alternatives to letting flocks fall en masse to bird flu.
"If you look at what they do in a lot of Europe and what they do in Canada is the flocks are a little bit smaller, they're a little less dense," she said. "So the birds aren't quite connected so closely together. So you have a little less chance for them to get the disease. So doing that vaccination, which is we have a vaccine that's available, that's being used in some parts of the world just looking for other ways we can do they call biosecurity... making sure that the disease has less of a chance of getting into the flock."
A heated political debate on CNN devolved into shouting and accusations of hypocrisy on Wednesday night.
The debate began during a discussion over Ben & Jerry’s CEO David Stever, who was fired by the company's parent corporation due to his commitment to the brand's progressive social mission and political activism.
"I think it's remarkably unfair," Angela Rye, co-host of the "Native Land Pod." "Shout out to Ben & Jerry’s because they've taken some really incredible stances. We're talking about people who should be locked up and go to jail. It's the same party that's rooting for and seeking a pardon for Derek Chauvin."
Fellow panelist Shermichael Singelton, a Republican strategist, shook his head as Rye said, "It is so rich to me to see folks don't understand when folks use their platforms of privilege to ensure that the least of these among us have a voice in the process. I don't condone violence, but I wish that people would take a look in the mirror and see what is actually happening."
Rye blasted Tesla, which she said is "not an 'America First' company," repeating a campaign slogan for President Donald Trump. "It's a South African first company," she said, making a dig at tech billionaire Elon Musk before attacking Republicans for being the "same party that talks about America First and Making America Great Again."
"They're giving someone unfettered access who is an immigrant. And if you leave it to this party to talk about, there's no space for immigrants — " she began.
But Rye's comments led to fierce pushback from conservatives on the panel, including Singleton and "Shark Tank" investor Kevin O'Leary.
"We're all immigrants," O'Leary shouted back, as Singleton held up a finger and tried unsuccessfully to interject.
But Rye was undeterred.
"No, no, no, no! Some of us are here by force!" she shot back.
"Some of us are lesser immigrants?" questioned O'Leary. "Is that what you just said?"
"No, no — you're right! That's exactly what y'all think," Rye fired back.
"He's a lesser immigrant?" an indignant O'Leary asked.
"No, no, no. What I'm saying is —" she began, but O'Leary continued pushing back: "He's tainted because he's from South Africa, and he's really brilliant?"
"You know what is so funny about that? Y'all are also the party of the birthirism movement," she said, to which O'Leary shot back, "Wow! He's a tainted immigrant!"
"Where's the class on this? Where do I fit? I'm Irish-Lebanese. Am I like second class?" O'Leary returned.
"You tell me. Ask your party," Rye retorted.
Later in the clip, Rye said the "point is the hypocrisy inside the GOP."
"I'm not rooting for the demise of the company. I'm asking for there to be fairness across the aisle about how we see immigration," she said. "That we don't prefer South African refugees as they're now being called when their land was 'stolen' as some of your party are saying right now."
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Wednesday walked her audience through what she described as a “boring, scary story” – but one that she flagged as immensely important.
“It is unrelentingly boring and unrelentingly scary in equal measure, and I have thought about this story every day since it broke and it is developing now,” Maddow said as she teed up the tale for her viewers.
The MSNBC host went on to dissect in detail actions by Acting U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C. Ed Martin that led to the “shock resignation” of a top criminal division lawyer in the prosecutor’s office – an office which she referred to as “quite bananas.”
“When it comes to that particular story out of this office, the thing that has happened at this one prosecutor's office that I think about every day is a story about them freezing a bank account, freezing a bunch of money in a Citibank account,” Maddow said.
She added that Martin, who helped organize the "Stop The Steal" movement, appears to have ordered the prosecutor “to bring a criminal investigation when she said there was no evidence of a crime.” When that prosecutor and others refused, Martin did it himself, Maddow said.
“This seemingly boring thing is also the opening chapter of a very scary dystopian novel in which the government is seizing your phone records, obtaining all of your text messages and your emails and your iCloud, and maybe raiding your house and raiding your office,” the host said. “And they are taking or freezing the contents of your bank account when there is no probable cause that you have committed a crime because what there is, is a federal prosecutor's office that will do that stuff anyway, even when their own career prosecutors and a judge tell them there's no crime here, you can't do it."
Maddow concluded that while the story at first glance “seems like a boring story in terms of all the proper nouns involved,” it is “scary in terms of what this means.” She ended her show’s opening monologue Wednesday by delivering “two important developments” in the case.
“First of all, number one, they are in trouble in court now because of this case,” Maddow told viewers.
The second, she added, was that the prosecutor’s office has “been stopped from doing the one thing that they were trying to get away with that really does afford the possibility of Trump just opening the floodgates against Democrats, protesters, journalists, government officials, potentially judges."
“They have finally been stopped at least for the moment from doing something that I think, if they were able to do this, might reasonably result in a lot of people actually fleeing this country," Maddow said.
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued leaders of the Coppell Independent School District for allegedly flouting state restrictions on teaching “critical race theory” in public schools, based on an undercover video published by a conservative activist group.
In the lawsuit filed last week in Dallas County, Paxton’s office accused Coppell ISD administrators of violating a state law that, among other prescriptions, prohibits schools from teaching that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another” or requiring students to understand the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning report that examined U.S. history from the date when enslaved people first arrived to America.
The school district has about 13,000 students, according to state data, most of whom are Asian and Hispanic while about a quarter are white.
The two-minute-long video depicts an undercover representative of Accuracy in Media talking to Evan Whitfield, Coppell ISD’s director of curriculum and instruction.
“Our concern is more that they’re going to, and I don’t know where you are politically, but it’s like, learn a [Make America Great Again] version of history instead of an accurate depiction of real world events,” the undercover person told Whitfield.
“One thing that I love about this district is that despite what our state standards say and despite what, you know, is going on, we do what’s right for kids,” Whitfield responded in the video.
The remarks are among the ones cited by Paxton’s office in the lawsuit.
“Liberal administrators who want to ignore state law and unlawfully push divisive and racist CRT curriculum in classrooms will be held responsible for their actions,” Paxton said in a statement Wednesday that drew attention to the suit. “Texas children deserve to receive the best education in the world, not have woke ideology forced upon them.”
A request for comment sent to Coppell ISD spokespeople Wednesday returned an automatic response that the school system is closed this week for spring break.
Gov. Greg Abbottsigned in 2021 legislation that prescribes how teachers in Texas classrooms can talk about American racism history and current events. The state joined a short list of those across the nation that sought to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” in K-12 public school classrooms — an advanced academic concept that discusses systemic racism and is more often found in law school and college syllabi, according to scholars. The discipline is not taught in public schools but the term has become shorthand for some conservatives’ criticism of how children learn about race and racism.
As the 2021 measure was debated in the Legislature, proponents argued they were trying to rid public education of personal biases. Educators and education advocates expressed worries that politics were dictating instruction for the state’s 5.5 million public schoolchildren.
The video of the Coppell ISD administrator was first published by Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at Accuracy in Media and self-described “school choice evangelist.”
Accuracy in Media has drawn controversy in the past, most recently in August at Columbia University. The group’s Center for Investigative Journalism is directed by Cliff Kincaid, who the Southern Poverty Law Center said “is actually an unrepentant propagandist for extremist right-wing causes who knows few boundaries in his attempts to smear liberal foes.”
On Wednesday, Accuracy in Media touted its undercover video and celebrated Paxton’s office citing it in the suit.
“This lawsuit proves why investigative journalism matters,” the group said in a statement. “Accuracy in Media has repeatedly exposed how school districts violate state laws and mislead parents about what is being taught in classrooms. Now, thanks to our work, Texas is taking action.”
Disclosure: Southern Poverty Law Center and New York Times have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
