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A controversial Trump administration nominee who promoted white supremacist propaganda has announced he's withdrawing from consideration.

Jeremy Carl, Trump's pick to serve as assistant secretary of state for international organizations, has an extensive history of inflammatory statements on social media, including claiming that Jan. 6 rioters were treated worse than Black Americans under Jim Crow, and that the head of the American Federation of Teachers should be executed.

President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that the U.S. is opening the first domestic oil refinery in the last half-century.

Trump claimed in a new post on Truth Social that the refinery will be located in Brownsville, Texas, and will be built using funds from a more than $300 billion investment deal struck with an Indian oil company called Reliance.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Monday she will not appeal a judge's dismissal of charges against 16 individuals involved in the false electors scheme to overturn the 2020 election. In a sweeping 110-page report, Nessel acknowledged believing the defendants committed crimes but concluded the resource-intensive prosecution was unlikely to succeed. She called continued prosecution "fundamentally unjust," arguing lower-level participants were following Trump's direction. The report explicitly states: "This was indeed Trump's criminal conspiracy." Judge Kristen Simmons dismissed charges in September, citing insufficient evidence of criminal intent. Legal experts note it's rare for an AG to publish such a detailed report declining prosecution. Trump issued federal pardons for dozens involved in 2020 election overturn efforts, though his pardon power doesn't extend to state charges. The case mirrors similar dismissals in Nevada, Wisconsin, and New Mexico.

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Pro-Trump country music star John Rich regaled right-wing commentator Tomi Lahren about the time he put "warmonger" Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in his place at a dinner retreat, while Donald Trump watched.

Prior reporting from 2022 describes a heated meeting involving the three in Nashville, as part of a series of secret dinners Trump hosted with his supporters while trying to get together his comeback campaign. Rich and Graham were said to have clashed over Operation Warp Speed, the emergency program Trump put in place to expedite the development of COVID vaccines; Rich railed against vaccination, while Graham defended the vaccines as a signature accomplishment of the Trump administration. Rich has held a grudge against Graham ever since.

A Senate Republican took the Trump administration to task on Tuesday during a new interview with CNN.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) joined CNN's Kasie Hunt on "The Arena" to discuss the strike on an Iranian girls' school that killed about 175 civilians. Last week, a New York Times investigation revealed that American forces likely dropped the bomb on the school as military forces were operating in the area at the time the strike occurred.

Political analysts and observers were aghast on Tuesday after President Donald Trump uncorked his latest threat against Iran.

On Truth Social, Trump threatened that there would be "military consequences" for Iran if the country placed mines around the Strait of Hormuz. He made the threat just a day after Trump proclaimed the war in Iran was over.

Supreme Court Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Brett Kavanaugh engaged in a rare public debate Monday over the court's expanded use of emergency rulings, known as the "shadow docket," to advance Trump administration policies. Jackson criticized the conservative majority's willingness to intervene early in legal challenges, calling the uptick "a real unfortunate problem" that creates "a warped kind of proceeding." She warned the practice signals lower courts how the Supreme Court might ultimately rule and "is not serving the court or this country well," remarks that drew applause from a packed audience including lower court judges. Kavanaugh defended the court's actions, arguing justices must respond to government emergency applications and noting similar requests came from prior administrations. The public exchange marked a rare moment of justices debating internal court business openly, moving beyond written opinion disagreements.

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President Donald Trump has a deep grudge against Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a renegade Republican who sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and whose staunch libertarian streak leads him to frequently oppose Trump and House GOP leadership on key votes. He's campaigning on behalf of Eddie Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL who is challenging Massie in the Republican primary.

But Massie is now fighting back with some dirt: it turns out that Gallrein is only a recent convert to MAGA, and actually left the Republican Party in 2016 over his opposition to Trump, only re-registering as a Republican once he left office in 2021.

Podcaster Joe Rogan slammed President Donald Trump for waging an "insane" series of strikes in Iran after running for election by promising not to start wars for regime change.

During a Tuesday conversation on Rogan's podcast, author Michael Shellenberger said he had scrapped a column on the war in Iran because Trump's reasoning was unclear.

The inspector general for the Social Security Administration is investigating after a whistleblower alleged an official installed by tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency initiative took a flash drive full of sensitive beneficiary information to his new employer.

According to The Washington Post, this allegation, if proven, "would constitute an unprecedented breach of security protocols at an agency that serves more than 70 million Americans."

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman criticized the Trump administration for failing to anticipate the economic consequences of striking Iran, particularly soaring oil prices. Krugman wrote that decision-makers "should have seen this coming," but evidence suggests they didn't prepare for the resulting crisis. Despite U.S. oil self-sufficiency, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz caused American gasoline, diesel, and heating oil prices to surge because oil trades on global markets at roughly uniform prices worldwide. Krugman explained that U.S. oil exports and imports don't insulate the economy from Middle East disruptions. He contrasted this with 1970s price controls that temporarily shielded consumers but created shortages. Krugman argued modern political conditions make such protections unlikely, leaving Americans vulnerable to global oil market volatility triggered by geopolitical conflict.

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