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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's defense on Thursday of slapping President Donald Trump's face on a $250 bill ahead of America's 250th birthday appalled a political analyst.

During the daily press briefing, Bessent was challenged by CNN's Kaitlan Collins about whether putting the president's face on a new currency is appropriate, given the cost-of-living challenges many Americans are facing, and Trump is seeking more than $1 billion in taxpayer money to build his ballroom. There is also a federal law that prohibits living presidents from being featured on U.S. currency.

President Donald Trump's Justice Department has opened a federal criminal investigation into the legal funding for E. Jean Carroll, the writer who successfully sued Trump for defamation after accusing him of rape, and the investigation could reportedly expand into whether Carroll committed perjury when she discussed the source of her legal fees.

But this move is going to blow up in his face, Steve Benen wrote for MS NOW's MaddowBlog in an analysis published Thursday — not only because he won't get a conviction out of it, but because it will only bring his long history of alleged sexual abuse back into the spotlight.

An expert in Middle East affairs shared a startling prediction about President Donald Trump's latest peace plan for the region during a new podcast interview on Thursday.

Trump has demanded that more Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East sign on to the Abraham Accords, a bilateral agreement the first Trump administration struck with some Middle Eastern countries in 2020, as part of the peace deal for the war in Iran. Reporting from Politico suggests that the idea has been met with "laughter, dismissal and, often, silence" from leaders in Middle Eastern countries.

Fox News commentator Harris Faulkner went all in on Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin's ongoing threat to pull customs officers out of airports in sanctuary cities — a plan that, if enacted, could cause widespread collapse of the national air traffic system and mass flight cancellations.

"The latest DHS list of sanctuary cities includes Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and San Francisco," said Faulkner. "All of those airports handle 1,100 international flights per day. They're not just gonna not fly. They're going to go to red states and cities. A boon for red states. People will hate living in blue states."

A Fox News segment about Jill Biden's bombshell debate admission took a sharp turn Wednesday when Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) pushed back hard on host Martha MacCallum's attempt to draw a contrast between Joe Biden's fitness and Donald Trump's.

The segment opened with MacCallum pressing Coons on Jill Biden's revelation to CBS News that she feared her husband was having a stroke during his disastrous June 2024 debate against Trump.

A school board official in the Deer Valley neighborhood of Phoenix, Arizona is facing outrage and calls for censure after she protested the direction of a meeting by giving a Nazi salute.

According to local news station 12 News, Kimberly Fisher "held up a Nazi salute and said 'heil' at the end" of the meeting on Tuesday night. She then doubled down when she "took to Facebook after ... and expressed her displeasure with how the end of the meeting was handled, even calling the board president a 'dictator.'"

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is not usually seen as a champion for racial justice issues — mere weeks ago, he joined the majority in a controversial decision weakening the racial gerrymandering protections of the Voting Rights Act. But there's one racial issue on which the Republican justice has proven keen to buck most of his right-wing colleagues, and he proved this on Thursday, with a landmark ruling in Pitchford v. Cain.

Specifically, Ian Millhiser wrote for Vox, Kavanaugh strengthened protections against racial bias in jury selection — and he did so using the same logic he wrote in an essay all the way back in law school on the very same subject.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent got testy at the White House briefing Wednesday when CNN's Kaitlan Collins pressed him on the Trump administration's push to put the president's face on a $250 bill — eventually cutting her off mid-question.

Bessent was filling in for press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who is on maternity leave, when Collins went after him on a Washington Post report that two of his political appointees had been pushing the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to design a note featuring Trump's portrait — potentially in violation of federal law, which prohibits living people from appearing on U.S. currency.