Push Notification

After running clips of Donald Trump promising before the election to pardon all of the Jan. 6 rioters, MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire called out the former president's sudden about-face just days after he was re-elected.

In July the former president was asked, "Officers were assaulted that day. There were broken bones, one officer lost an eye, one had two cracked ribs, two had smashed spinal discs, another had a stroke. Were the people who assaulted those 140 officers, including those I just mentioned patriots who deserve pardons? My question is on those rioters who assaulted officers? Would you pardon those people?" to which he replied, "Absolutely I would."

As "Morning Joe's" Lemire pointed out, that promise has apparently gone by the wayside.

ALSO READ: A second reign of terror: Inside Trump’s blueprint for home raids

"You heard Trump there, very clear of what he would do," the host explained. "Yesterday, a campaign spokeswoman distanced the Trump transition team from that promise, telling NBC News that president Trump will make pardon decisions on a case-by-case basis."

"Yeah, he could do that," panelist Eugene Robinson offered. "Look, the range of possibilities is from a total blanket pardon, it was a day of love, and they're all pardoned or no pardons. You know, one or two –– who knows if he's going to do it case by case, that means whim by whim in Donald Trump's world and so we have no idea what he's going to do. The idea that this is even a thing, that this is even being considered is ridiculous and outrageous, but it's what he said he would do and imagine –– what about the cases that haven't been brought yet?"

'They are never going to be brought by Matt Gaetz if he is attorney general," he added.

Watch below or at the link right here.

Billionaire Elon Musk is directing candidates interested in working in his new Department of Government Efficiency to submit their résumés through his social media platform X, — apparently granting himself and X access to what he describes as “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”

Government regulations usually require official communications to be conducted and saved on government servers. It’s unclear how that would happen under this scenario, or why Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s new department wouldn’t have a government email address and website.

Don't get distracted by President-elect Donald Trump's decision to choose for his team a Fox News anchor who thinks germs aren't real because he can't see them, a vaccine-denier who confessed to Roseanne Barr that he once staged a bear cub crime scene, and a Florida man subjected to a federal probe over accusations he had sex with a minor — the real problem is Tulsi Gabbard, a new report contends.

The intelligence community is terrified at the prospect that a former congresswoman from Hawaii with a problematic habit of spreading Russian propaganda could be the next Director of National Intelligence, Time Magazine reported on Friday.

Iran provided written assurance to president Joe Biden's administration weeks before the election that it wouldn't try to kill Donald Trump.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Iran delivered the message Oct. 14 in response to a private written warning the previous month that U.S. officials say reflected the administration's public message that threats against the Republican nominee were a top-line national security issue and that any attempt to kill him would be treated as an act of war.

Billionaire businessman and Cantor Fitzgerald head Howard Lutnick — who’s reportedly a top contender for secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in Donald Trump’s Cabinet — “caused a huge uproar” in the former president’s “orbit” that led to Trump’s decision to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Department of Health and Human Services secretary, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported.

Collins interviewed Lutnick 10 days before the election, and the billionaire businessman “unequivocally said RFK Jr. would not be getting a Cabinet position” in Trump’s administration.

“That is kind of maybe what led to today,” Collins said Thursday on CNN. “It caused a huge uproar internally in Trump’s orbit.”

READ MORE: Trump's loyalty test: How his new nominees could turn America into a police state

“People were so upset that 10 days before the election he was bluntly saying it and they thought it was too early,” Collins said. “RFK Jr. was upset. He and Trump had discussions — Trump has said that he would let him ‘go crazy' on health policy.”

“It was pretty clear the writing was on the wall that RFK Jr. was likely to get something,” Collins continued. “They talked about a health czar role. But this is another instance of Trump basically daring the Senate to say, ‘Block my nominee. Tell me I'm not going to do this.’ He has put up pick after pick that has caused a lot of skeptical Republicans to say, ‘Let’s wait and see how the confirmation hearings go.’”

Collins dismissed suggestions that Trump is floating these nominees as a trial balloon to help usher in a spate of less controversial picks.

“They fully expect all of these picks to get confirmed,” Collins said. “They are not putting these up as a false flag to then put someone less controversial up. They fully believe these people should be confirmed — and very well might."

In a video posted to YouTube, conservative attorney George Conway lit up Republican lawmakers who have been expressing surprise and dismay as Donald Trump has rolled out the names of nominees he would like to see in his cabinet, suggesting they have been living under a rock.

As part of his "George Conway Explains It All" podcast for the conservative Bulwark, the never-Trump attorney and former GOP strategist Sarah Longwell zeroed in on the nomination of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to head up the Department of Justice as part of their examination of Trump's "nightmare cabinet of clowns and criminals."

Addressing how he discovered Trump had proposed the scandal-plagued Gaetz to be his attorney general, Conway pointed out he thought it was an internet joke on the level with one that claimed Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) would lead the Department of Education despite only having a GED.

ALSO READ: A second reign of terror: Inside Trump’s blueprint for home raids

After Conway joked both Gaetz and Boebert were qualified to be "specialists in sex education," Longwell added, "I have been very annoyed at the 'Oh, the Republicans who want to support Trump but want to remain respectable' who are like 'Well, this is a real unforced error by Trump, I'm like ...yeah."

"Where have you been!" Conway interrupted. "This is everything we were saying, this time he is not going to bother with the good people. He's basically told us that and people are surprised? "

"I understand there are some heavyweight Republicans, like RNC members I'm told who are in Florida and they are horrified," he continued. "It's like excuse me. There is one I know actually and I heard he is horrified and it is like, dude I want to call him up and tell him this is what I've been telling you."

Watch below or at the link.

The world's richest man will oversee a non-governmental agency with a joke name aimed at cutting the federal budget and eliminating regulations, and some swing voters are already wary of his influence over the incoming president.

Donald Trump has tapped billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk to co-chair the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, whose acronym nods toward the decade-old DOGE meme, and is tasked with identifying programs and services he deems wasteful, but voters told Axios this isn't quite what they envisioned for the former president's second term.

Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner will likely play a pivotal role in the incoming administration's Middle East efforts without having a formal position in the government, according to diplomats and political allies.

Kushner was heavily involved with the former president's Middle East diplomacy in his first term and established personal relationships with leaders throughout the region that he has maintained since Trump left office, and sources told CNN those ties are important.

Donald Trump's political career has closely tracked the trajectories of autocratic leaders Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, whose rise to power offer a "chillingly clear" picture of where his second term could lead, according to historians.

The former president and his supporters are tremendously hostile to civic institutions like the judiciary, the media, universities, many nonprofits and even some religious groups, and Trump will likely follow the lead of those autocratic leaders in Hungary and Russia by sidelining experts, regulators and other civil servants, wrote New York Times columnist M. Gessen.

Summing up Donald Trump's cabinet picks so far, former Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass and journalist John Heilemann agreed that there is no doubt that the president-elect is rushing headlong and heedlessly into tearing apart America's institutions.

With both appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," host Jonathan Lemire asked Haass what to make of the plans to deploy anti-vax conspiracist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

"There's questions of judgment and there are questions about managerial competence," Hass began. "These are big jobs, large numbers of agencies, large numbers of people, massive budgets. The idea that someone like Kennedy could have this job – talk about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse."

ALSO READ: Why Trump voters should be held accountable for their choice

"He's supposed to save lives, if he actually were to implement some of his policies people would die," he continued. "Young people, particularly young people, because they wouldn't get vaccinated. The idea you put a conspiracy theorist in charge of this essential department? We could go on and on."

"This is trolling the United States. What's missing from this it's not just a question of competence and judgment but seriousness," he added.

Heilemann chimed in, "I don't think you understand the nature of the project. The nature of the project is to destroy the government. The framework that we all have, which is these very important agencies and they do important work and you need to make them better, why aren't we taking that seriously. It was weakened in the Trump administration in 2017 when Steve Bannon said the thing about our goal is the deconstruction of the administrative state."

"That is what they're doing now, this is about tearing the government to pieces," he warned. "That's the goal."

Watch below or at the link.