An author who has written four books about President Donald Trump revealed how the president plans to retain power over the White House once he leaves office.
Journalist Michael Wolff, author of the book "Fire and Fury" about the first Trump administration, argued during a new episode of "Inside Trump's Head," a podcast he co-hosts with Joanna Coles of The Daily Beast, that Trump could use his children to stay in power after his second administration. He singled out Trump's oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who seems to have been groomed for this very moment.
"He has spent his life as his father's lackey," Wolff noted. "He's spent his life in a business that is of very little consequence except to support his father, who gives me the shivers."
Wolff also noted that Don Jr. seems to be the likely heir as Trump's other children, like Ivanka and Tiffany, have effectively "taken themselves out of the running."
Lara Trump said on a new episode of Katie Miller's eponymous podcast that she would consider running for office again if the circumstances are right.
Wolff added that Trump will need to retain some influence over the White House when he retires. Otherwise, he may turn on the Republican Party.
"He really enjoyed that in his Mar-A-Lago interregnum," Wolff said. "So, he goes back to that still with the Republicans coming to kiss his rings, with his pronouncements being the leading Republican pronouncements, still being able to rag on whatever Democrat is in the White House and then, at some point, he dies a happy man," Wolff said. "However, he would be much less happy if someone in the Republican Party replaced him."
Former Fox News host Geraldo Rivera skewered a GOP pundit's defense of President Donald Trump's latest bailout idea during a segment on CNN's "NewsNight" with host Abby Phillip.
On Tuesday, Trump was asked about a recent statement made by officials in the United Arab Emirates who said they may seek a bailout from the U.S. because of the war in Iran's impact on their economy. Trump told reporters he was open to the idea during an interview on CNBC.
"They've been a good ally of ours, and these are unusual times," Trump said about the bailout idea. "They were more than anybody else."
GOP pundit Jason Rantz, who hosts the "Seattle Red" radio show, defended Trump's idea, saying that it might be a good move in the right context.
"Oh, come on!" Rivera said. "They walk in golden slippers."
The UAE's public comments about seeking a bailout from the Trump administration are the latest sign of how unpopular the war has become for U.S. global allies. NATO allies have largely stayed away from Trump's war in Iran, and told the president they will not offer help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
The "can of worms" that first lady Melania Trump opened up when she held a seemingly unprompted press conference about her ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein may be too much for President Donald Trump to survive, according to two analysts.
Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz discussed Melania Trump's recent press conference on a new episode of the podcast, "The Court of History." They speculated that Melania Trump must know something is about to be revealed about her ties to Epstein, otherwise she wouldn't have felt compelled to make some of the statements that she did.
Blumenthal described the address as a "can of worms" that the Trump administration has tried to avoid.
"Why is she so scared? That's the only question I have," Wilentz said. "Why would she do such a thing? The Epstein files have been off. He's blown up the Middle East in order to avoid the Epstein files. And here is Melania Trump coming out in the middle of nowhere saying, 'I had nothing to do with it in the way that you described.' Something's bugging her. She knows that something's coming. Obviously, something must be coming, or she wouldn't have done this."
Blumenthal compared the press conference to a scene in "The Godfather" where Frank Pentangeli denied the existence of the mafia.
"Instead of singing, she's clamming up," Blumenthal said.
Blumenthal also noted that Melania Trump's past dovetails with Donald Trump's attempt to purchase a modeling firm with Epstein and another business partner, and that the details of that relationship remain unknown.
US President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is costing nearly $2 billion per day, according to a Harvard analysis based on estimates from the Pentagon. The head of the United Nations’ humanitarian agency said the money could instead be used to save more than 87 million lives around the world.
Tom Fletcher, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), spoke at Chatham House on Monday about a “cataclysmic” funding crisis for the UN, in large part due to the terminationof billions of dollars in funding from the US and other major powers such as the UK. Fletcher said his agency has seen its budget cut by around 50%.
“We’re already overstretched, underresourced, and literally under attack,” Fletcher said, citing the more than 1,000 humanitarians who have been killed in conflicts around the world over the past three years.
The Iran war, launched at the end of February by the US and Israel, Fletcher said, has stretched UN budgets even further, both by causing chaos within Iran and Lebanon—where more than 5,000 people in total have been killed, including thousands of civilians, and more than 4 million displacedcollectively—but also by creating economic upheaval that has exacerbated crises elsewhere.
“You have the [Strait] of Hormuz—fuel prices up 20%, food prices up almost 20%, our humanitarian convoys blocked,” Fletcher said. “We’ve had to take those convoys by air and by land. And the impact, which I think we’ll be feeling for years, of those price rises on Sub-Saharan and East Africa, pushing way more people into poverty.”
Fletcher said that just a fraction of what the US has spent waging the war could have been used to provide a full year of funding for a plan he laid out in January to provide lifesaving food, water, medicine, and shelter to those in dozens of countries facing war and poverty.
“For every day of this conflict, $2 billion is being spent. My entire target for a hyper-prioritized plan to save 87 million lives is $23 billion,” he said. “We could have funded that in less than a fortnight of this reckless war. Now, of course, we cannot.”
Beyond the financial toll, he said, US actions may have done irreparable damage to the authority of international humanitarian law and to UN bodies tasked with enforcing it.
He noted the dramatic increase in the number of humanitarian workers killed around the world over the past three years. According to a UN report earlier this month, of the more than 1,010 of them who were killed in the line of duty, over half were killed during Israel’s genocide in Gaza and escalating attacks in the West Bank.
“A thousand dead humanitarians in three years,” Fletcher said. “When did that become normal?”
He called out the UN Security Council, where the US is one of the permanent members with veto power, for its weak responses to the killing of humanitarians and other flagrant violations of the laws of war.
“Don’t just give us a generic statement where you say humanitarian workers should be protected,” he said. “Make the phone call, call out the people killing us, stop arming those who are doing it.”
He said “big powers” view geopolitics in a highly “transactional” way and do not use the Security Council as a mechanism for defending international humanitarian law.
“I wouldn’t have thought I’d need to say that a couple of years ago, that the Security Council should be defending international humanitarian law, and yet here we are,” he said.
He said that Trump’s recent violent rhetoric toward Iran—which again verged into outright genocidal territory over the weekend when he pledged to “blow up the entire country” with overwhelming attacks on civilian infrastructure—has only further corroded international law.
But he said the aggression of the US and its allies has also made the world more warlike and less “generous,” leading countries to put more money into defense that could otherwise go toward alleviating global suffering.
“Whether you’re making the cuts [to UN funding] for ideological reasons or because you’re too busy bombing someone else or because now you feel more insecure at home and so you have to invest more of your money in defense and less in generosity,” he said, “all of that ultimately has an impact on the over 300 million people that we’re here to serve.”
Fresh off Democrats' victory in Tuesday night's referendum in Virginia to retaliate against Republican mid-decade gerrymanders by drawing out four Republicans, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) put out a statement warning Florida Republicans not to try following suit — or they would go all out to break them at the ballot box.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has pressed the legislature hard to redistrict, arguing that the Census did not properly capture the population of the state, and some GOP strategists hope they could squeeze at least three more Republican seats out of the current map, which is already an aggressive gerrymander. But others fear this would backfire, as the electorate shifts bluer than the 2024 voting patterns used to perform any redraws, and could flip several seats that are only slightly GOP-leaning.
Jeffries threatened that Democrats would make good on precisely this risk.
"Last July, Donald Trump demanded that Texas draw five new Republican seats in the middle of a decade, igniting a chain reaction of corrupt MAGA state legislators attempting to rig the midterm elections," wrote Jeffries in a statement published by Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman. "While many expected Democrats to roll over and play dead, we did the opposite. Democrats did not step back. We fought back. When they go low, we hit back hard. We won Prop 50 in California, reclaimed a seat in Utah, pushed back extremists in Ohio and halted toxic GOP efforts in Indiana, New Hampshire, Nebraska and Kansas."
"Tonight, thanks to the relentless work of Virginia Democrats, led by Governor Abigail Spanberger, Speaker Don Scott, State Majority Leader Scott Surovell and President Pro Tempore L. Louise Lucas, 'YES' won and Donald Trump lost," he continued. "Virginians spoke with a crystal-clear voice, voting to stop the MAGA power grab and protect the integrity of free and fair elections."
All eyes now move to Florida, he said — and what will happen if Republicans attempt a power grab there.
"Next week, Ron DeSantis is hauling the Florida legislature back into a special session to redraw maps because Republicans know they are on the verge of an epic defeat in November," said Jeffries. "DeSantis is clearly more interested in illegal gerrymandering than lowering the high cost of living or fixing our broken healthcare system."
"If Florida Republicans proceed with this illegal scheme, they will only create more prime pick- up opportunities for Democrats, just as they did with Trump's dummymander in Texas," vowed Jeffries. "We will aggressively target for defeat Mario Díaz- Balart, Maria Elvira Salazar, Carlos Giménez, Kat Cammack, Anna Paulina Luna, Laurel Lee, Cory Mills and Brian Mast. We are prepared to take them all on, and we are prepared to win. Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time."
Fans of President Donald Trump's MAGA movement melted down on Tuesday night after voters in Virginia approved a ballot measure to redraw the state's election map.
The new map will give Democrats four more seats in the House of Representatives, and was passed at a time when many in the Republican Party are expressing concern about their party's chances of retaining power in the upcoming midterm election. About 51% of voters, or more than 1.5 million people in all, supported the ballot measure, according to the election results.
Virginia is the latest state to enter the redistricting arena. Texas and California both passed new maps that effectively canceled each other out. Meanwhile, lawmakers in other states like Indiana, Florida, and Maryland have considered passing new maps.
Fans of Trump's MAGA movement expressed outrage on social media.
"Total travesty!!" Fox News host Laura Ingraham posted on X.
"No [expletive] way this is legit," MAGA political commentator Juanita Broaddrick posted on X.
"What a [expletive] joke," Phillip Buchanan, also known as "Catturd" online, posted on X.
"This is why the GOP must ALWAYS play hardball on redistricting. DON'T BACK DOWN FROM THIS!" MAGA media personality Eric Daugherty posted on X.
Youssef guest-starred on the children's classic last week as part of Arab American Heritage Month, spending a few minutes with Elmo learning basic Arabic greetings. The segment was not intended to be threatening, but that wasn't how it was received by the right-wing outrage machine, Variety noted Tuesday.
Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo took to The Ingraham Angle to sound the alarm and conjure a radically different future for Bert and Ernie.
“I wish ‘Sesame Street’ would stick to teaching kids about letters and numbers and leave the Arabic immersion to someone else. Next, Bert and Ernie will be praying five times a day on Sesame Street, facing east,” Arroyo said.
Appearing on The View, Youssef addressed MAGA backlash by noting that Trump himself signed off on an April 5 social media post about the Iran war with "Praise be to Allah," a detail that conflicts with the conservative case against Arabic words on a children's show.
“I feel for them, right? … I think they’re worried [about] Arabic immersion, and it’s got to be tough, because I think they’re supporters of the President. So imagine your president on Easter is tweeting ‘Praise be to Allah,’ and now Elmo saying ‘habibi’ feels threatening," Youssef said.
The comedian noted he has spent years wading into genuinely divisive political territory without drawing this level of fury.
“There’s been a lot of languages on ‘Sesame Street’ and there’s been no backlash to those. So, it actually really did surprise me,” Youssef said.
He noted he has been outspoken in the past about highly controversial issues, and yet “Elmo saying habibi has set them off in a way that has never happened to me before.”
A new poll spells disaster for President Donald Trump — with even much of his own party turning on him.
According to the poll, conducted for the Associated Press and NORC, voters disapprove of Trump's job performance 67-33, with near-unanimous Democratic disapproval at 97 percent and independents opposing Trump by a three-to-one margin.
The real warning sign, however, is the approval rating among just Republicans.
GOP voters still approve of Trump, but only by a margin of 68-31. Put another way, nearly one in three Republicans disapproves of the job Trump is doing.
The poll further broke down that Trump is trailing in approval on every issue voters were asked about, including immigration, the economy, cost of living, and the war in Iran.
The AP/NORC survey follows a number of other surveys from various analysts that all show similar trends, with Trump's numbers collapsing among independents and weakening among even the GOP.
In another blow to President Donald Trump, voters in Virginia on Tuesday night approved a Democratic-backed referendum to pass an aggressive mid-decade gerrymander in retaliation for Republican states engaging in the same.
The vote was called by Decision Desk and CNN, with the vote at about 50.3% to 49.7% in favor.
Under the map approved by voters, four congressional districts currently held by Republicans would be redrawn to favor Democrats, leaving only one of the state's 11 districts as safe GOP territory.
The referendum faced an intense campaign with aggressive spending both for and against the measure.
Virginia is the second Democratic-controlled state to hold such a referendum, after California voters passed a similar one to add five Democratic-leaning seats last year.
These referenda were in response to Trump calling on Republican-controlled states to redraw their own maps to give themselves extra seats, with the hope of preserving their House majority amid declining poll numbers.
"Totally outrageous," one voter told CNN's Jeff Zeleny of Trump's effort to gerrymander elections for Republicans.
Republicans in Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri all acted to redraw for Republicans. However, the effort ended in failure in states like Kansas, Indiana, and New Hampshire, while Ohio Democrats managed to cut a compromise that left their state's map only slightly more favorable to the GOP.
Florida lawmakers are set to consider redistricting in the coming weeks.
President Donald Trump once again threatened to obliterate the Iranian civilization in a Truth Social post on Tuesday as war negotiations seem to be faltering.
CNN reported on Tuesday that Trump's administration has had a hard time identifying a negotiator with decision-making authority inside Iran as it evaluates multiple proposals it has received. Those negotiations have also slowed the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway that has been blockaded for multiple weeks due to the ongoing war in Iran.
Trump again lashed out at his Iranian counterparts in a new post.
"Iran doesn’t want the Strait of Hormuz closed, they want it open so they can make $500 Million Dollars a day (which is, therefore, what they are losing if it is closed!)," Trump wrote. "They only say they want it closed because I have it totally BLOCKADED (CLOSED!), so they merely want to “save face.” People approached me four days ago, saying, 'Sir, Iran wants to open up the Strait, immediately.' But if we do that, there can never be a Deal with Iran, unless we blow up the rest of their Country, their leaders included!"
A conservative broadcaster declared Sen. Cory Booker a servant of darkness this week after the New Jersey Democrat delivered a thunderous speech calling on Americans to fight for democracy, all because of one line about grassroots organizing.
Booker took the stage at the Michigan Democratic Women's Caucus Legacy Luncheon last weekend and delivered a fiery 25-minute speech, imploring Democrats to become "foot soldiers for democracy" and warning of "darkness and wind" facing the nation ahead of the midterms.
But it was one particular moment that sent BlazeTV and YouTube host Pat Gray over the edge: Booker gesturing skyward while declaring that what the country needed was not help "from on high."
Gray played the clip on a recent episode of "Pat Gray Unleashed" and rendered his verdict without much deliberation.
"He's telling you we don't need God. Well, that's an antichrist," Gray declared, throwing up a hand in disbelief. "That is an antichrist. Maybe not the antichrist, but he's an antichrist."
In Gray's reading, Booker was telling Americans to abandon God entirely, with Democrats positioning themselves as a replacement for divine authority.
"It's really not good. I'm serious about this being antichrist," Gray added. "It's despicable. It's anti-American. It's anti-Christian. It's anti-God."
His panel agreed, with co-host Jeffy diagnosing the Democratic Party with Trump Derangement Syndrome, warning the "infection" had spread.
A Democratic analyst caught a slip-up by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche during a press conference on Tuesday.
Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced on Tuesday that the Trump administration had indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts of wire and bank fraud for its efforts to infiltrate extremist groups. The indictment was announced just days after The Atlantic published a bombshell report that alleged Patel has been drinking excessively on the job and was chronically absent from the office, which Patel denies.
At one point during the press conference, Blanche was asked whether he had read The Atlantic's report. Blanche denied, but Democratic analyst Adam Mockler noted that Blanche later let slip some details that suggested he had read the report.
"I have a lot of concerns, and my concerns are completely around the anonymous reporting that comes forth constantly, that you know, reporters have an obligation to report, and they have due diligence that they're supposed to do," Blanche said. "And when an entire article is based on anonymous sources, and there are things in the article suggesting, for example, that senior DOJ personnel were informed of something. That's me. I wasn't informed. No one called me about that. So like, listen, I did not read that article."
Mockler discussed the press conference in a new reaction video on YouTube.
"That has nothing to do with the article at hand. Meaning ... Wait a minute!? So you have read the article?" Mockler said.
Patel has denied the allegations contained in The Atlantic's report and sued the outlet for $250 million in damages. The Atlantic has said it stands by its reporting.
But his denial of a key part of the story is already contradicted, noted All Rise News' Adam Klasfeld on X — by what he admits in his own legal complaint.
Specifically, Patel has publicly denied the incident reported in The Atlantic story in which he was briefly locked out of his computer system, then had a meltdown because he assumed that meant he was fired, until IT staff were able to get it back online.
"Did Kash Patel read his own lawsuit?" asked Klasfeld. "When asked why he was locked out of his computer — as The Atlantic reported and Patel *admitted* in his lawsuit — Patel denied it happened: 'I was never locked out of my systems,' he just claimed."
The problem, Klasfeld noted, is that Patel's complaint acknowledges the incident happened — it just disputes his panicked reaction to it.
"The Article's assertions that on April 10, 2026, Director Patel 'panicked, frantically' announcing he had been fired, engaged in a 'freak-out,' and 'is deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy,' are false," stated the suit. "On April 10, 2026, Director Patel had a routine technical problem logging into a government system, which was quickly fixed. Director Patel's sole focus is on carrying out the administration's law enforcement priorities. Prior to publication, the FBI expressly informed Defendants that the firing rumor was a 'made-up rumor,' and that the 'freak-out' and job-jeopardy claims were fabricated."
All of this comes as other legal observers cast doubt on the merits of Patel's lawsuit, which echoes previous legal actions he has taken against similar stories that have not gone particularly well.
