GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna deletes social media posts featuring Russian fighter jets

ALSO READ: 'Expect the worst': Dems name wild card some fear will let Trump trample midterms

The office of Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) deleted two of the congresswoman’s social media posts after Raw Story reported that the airplane silhouettes used in her happy birthday message to the U.S. Air Force were actually Russian fighter jets.

“Happy Birthday United States Air Force! As an Air Force Veteran myself, I’m especially thankful for everything I learned while serving in this incredible branch of our Armed Forces,” Luna, an influencer on Instagram before being elected to Congress last year, wrote on her posts.

RELATED ARTICLE: Republican congresswoman used Russian fighter jet images in salute to U.S. Air Force

Rob Young, historian for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, said the jets were a model developed in the old Soviet Union that evolved over the years and are still in use.

An image of a Sept. 18, 2023, Instagram post — now deleted — from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL). Instagram

“As I examine them, the silhouettes look most like MiG-29s,” Young said.

Multiple messages from Raw Story to Luna’s office before publication were not returned.

Late Tuesday night, Edie Heipel, Luna’s communications director, sent a response via email.

“This post was published without approval from me as the comms director, via a junior staffer,” Heipel wrote. “Rep. Luna is a US Air Force veteran who worked in airfield management and her husband is a Bronze Star/Purple Heart Combat Controller. To suggest she doesn’t know the difference between American and Russian fighter jets is asinine.”

The posts had been online since Sept. 18.

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Dirt on Susie Wiles reaches Trump ‘every hour’ as factions battle to replace her: report

Rival camps in President Donald Trump’s circle are jockeying to pick the next chief of staff as the president considers a West Wing shake-up after the midterms, seven insiders told the Daily Mail.

“Oppo is flooding to POTUS every hour destroying Susie Wiles and her team, especially LaCivita and Blair,” one source in Trump’s orbit said.

The competing groups are loyalists of current chief of staff Susie Wiles, allies of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and the longtime MAGA faithful. Wiles’ side prefers Mike Needham, a former Heritage Action chief now deputy national security adviser. Kushner’s allies back envoy Steve Witkoff and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. The MAGA veterans lean toward deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and housing official Bill Pulte. A wildcard is John McEntee, Trump’s former personnel chief, who sources say Wiles has kept out of the White House this term.

Trump has also reportedly considered former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and sources claim Wiles is steering him toward McCarthy to preserve her influence after she exits. Rollins said she has “no plans or interest to leave.”

The pressure follows reports that Wiles allies James Blair and Chris LaCivita earned large fees advising a pro-Russian region in Bosnia and that Wiles’ daughter visited the region with an energy executive. Her lobbying firm said she didn’t speak with any U.S. official about it.

Trump told reporters there’s “zero chance” he replaces Wiles. “She’s phenomenal,” he said.

A former adviser claimed Trump privately believes the House is lost and the Senate is at risk. A source close to the White House dismissed the succession chatter as “Susie haters trying to will something into reality,” adding that if Republicans hold the Senate, Wiles “will look pretty good” to Trump.

A Kushner spokesman said Wiles “is the best Chief of Staff President Trump has ever had.”

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Trump voters hit with ‘pretty striking’ reality check in damning new poll: analyst

President Donald Trump's own base is starting to recognize something critics have long warned about, according to an economic analyst.

On Friday's episode of "Receipts Live," The Bulwark economics editor Catherine Rampell and its editor Jonathan V. Last pointed to new AP-NORC polling showing that 55 percent of Republicans believe Trump has prioritized his own business interests since returning to office.

About three-quarters of Americans overall said the same, and a similar share of Republicans said Trump has prioritized the business interests of his friends, family and those close to him, Rampell noted.

"This is penetrating, which I think is pretty striking because again, this is a group of voters, a group of Americans who are not particularly inclined to unplug their ears and hear this inconvenient news about how Donald Trump is getting paid off," Rampell said.

She pointed to a string of recent reports, including one that a federal regulator was told to back off a probe into suspiciously timed trades and another on the apparently overseas buyers of Trump's memecoin.

"Even Republicans are now acknowledging, yeah, he's in it for himself," she said.

Last zeroed in on the intensity of those Republicans' responses.

"Twenty-one percent of Republicans say not at all, which is insane. But that number is slightly smaller than the percentage of Republicans who say a lot, which is 23 percent," Last said.

"You get almost a quarter of Republicans saying, yeah, sure seems like he's using the government to enrich himself a lot," he added. "And that's not nothing."

Last cautioned that the numbers don't mean those voters will turn against Trump, noting some might still argue "everybody does it" or that it's "no worse than what Joe Biden" did.

Rampell also flagged a caveat. Republicans in the same survey overwhelmingly said Trump was prioritizing the country at large and people like them as well.

"If you know how priorities work, you can't prioritize everything and everyone," she said. "But I think this is the only way to keep a handle on all of that cognitive dissonance."

Rampell added that a recent Fox News poll found corruption in government topped voters' list of concerns heading into the midterms, edging out inflation and gas prices.

Trump’s trade war doomed workers to ‘a whole career’ without a raise: economist

President Donald Trump’s tariffs could leave American workers paying higher prices without the wage increases needed to keep up, according to economist Justin Wolfers, who warned that the financial damage could last an entire career.

In his “Platypus Economics” Substack newsletter, Wolfers explained why Trump’s trade policies could have lasting consequences for workers even if they don’t trigger runaway inflation.

“Being 2% poorer for a year is a bad thing, but being 2% poorer for a whole career is far worse,” Wolfers said Friday.

The University of Michigan economist made the argument in a post titled, “The $7.26 Cappuccino Problem,” examining why inflation feels worse than official figures suggest.

Consumer prices rose 3.7% over the past year, while producer prices climbed 6.3%, according to figures Wolfers cited.

But he argued that Trump’s tariffs have created a different problem from ordinary inflation.

“With tariffs, your boss’s costs rise,” Wolfers explained. “It’s a different kind of shock. Economists call it a supply shock.”

Businesses may raise prices to cover those costs, he said, but that doesn’t mean they’re making more money.

“There’s no extra money to go around,” Wolfers said. “It’s a cost-driven shock.”

His conclusion was straightforward.

“So now what happens is prices rise, and wages don’t rise,” he said.

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