MSN

President Donald Trump segued into a bizarre rant during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday, about how Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) supposedly wants a train to be built from the mainland across the Pacific Ocean to her state — a plan she has never advocated for.

“She wanted a tunnel from the mainland to Hawaii," said Trump. "Then she said, ‘Well, we can’t do that, so we’re gonna build a railroad to Hawaii.’ Do you remember? She’s a current, sitting senator, a Democrat. She wants a railroad to go to Hawaii. You know who that is, right?”

The Justice Department has more to worry about than the "stunning pattern" of grand juries pushing back against its political prosecutions of Donald Trump's critics and protesters.

Now it has to worry about trial juries standing in its path as well.

Judge Sara Ellis was not happy with the Justice Department after they withdrew the witness she wanted to hear from in the Friday hearing about 45 minutes before they were set to appear.

Chicago Sun-Times courts reporter ‪Jon Seidel‬ was in the courtroom observing the exchange in which the DOJ said that they had Kyle Harvick from the U.S. Customs & Border Protection. He's a deputy incident commander, according to WTTW News.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett signaled in a recent interview that she, at least, is not fully on board with a renewed push to overturn the right to same-sex marriage.

According to Newsweek, Barrett made the comments during an interview with right-leaning New York Times analyst Ross Douthat, who asked her about "social reliance interests" that the court might have to consider in certain cases. “The Supreme Court recognized a right to same-sex marriage. Originalist justices at the time believed that ruling was wrongly decided. One of the arguments for why Obergefell v. Hodges is unlikely to ever be overturned is the idea that people have made decisions about who to marry and therefore where to live and children ... Everything else, on the basis of that ruling.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with President Donald Trump at the White House on Friday, where the two discussed the ongoing response to the Russian invasion and how to end the war.

CNN's White House correspondent Kristen Holmes said that she found one key piece of the discussion "striking" that harkens back to the infamous Oval Office battle between the two men.

President Donald Trump received a brutal parade of mockery in The Guardian on Friday, over his recent temper tantrum about how he looked on the cover of Time Magazine.

Trump took particular offense at how thin and insubstantial his hair looked in the photo, raging, "They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird! I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture, and deserves to be called out. What are they doing, and why?”

MSNBC host Alex Witt questioned a GOP congressman about whether it's true he's gone into "legislative witness protection" to dodge constituents amid the government shutdown.

Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD) lashed out after being asked about comments from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Friday morning.

President Donald Trump called into a private meeting of Indiana state senate Republicans to pressure them personally to enact an all-Republican Congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, the New York Times reported.

Indiana's Republicans have publicly resisted Trump's extraordinary demands for a mid-decade realignment of the nation's Congressional maps to assure his party retains House control in 2026. State legislators in Texas and Missouri complied with Trump with little or no resistance.

"Mr. Trump was expected to ask the state lawmakers to support a new map that would eliminate the state’s two Democratic districts and give Republicans all nine congressional seats," the Times reported, citing anonymous sources.

Vice President JD Vance has emerged as one of the only high-ranking Republican officials refusing to condemn the Young Republicans scandal, in which several Republican operatives were discovered making racist and even pro-Nazi proclamations in group chats. While the scandal has led to condemnation even from some MAGA figures and the disbandment of some state GOP groups, Vance has proclaimed these were just "kids" telling edgy jokes — even though these operatives are between 18 and 40 years old — and that the real disgrace was the journalists who reported on the leaked messages.

There might be a reason why Vance is so desperate to stake out this position, wrote Ed Kilgore for New York Magazine's The Intelligencer: to make up for all the years he was outside the fold of the Trump movement.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared at the White House on Friday as part of the ongoing conversations with President Donald Trump over ending Russia's years-long invasion.

And at the end of the question-and-answer session with the press, Trump was asked about Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro offering all of the country's minerals to work with the United States.