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Donald Trump’s aggressive use of his presidential pardon powers has reached such a fevered pitch that some White House insiders are getting nervous about blowback that they are not prepared to push back on.

According to a deep dive from the Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Ballhaus, Josh Dawsey and C. Ryan Barber on the almost weekly presidential announcements of commutations and pardons flying out of the Oval Office, some of the high-profile cases were not vetted and flew under the radar of even some White House insiders.

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) turned up the heat in his demands for House Republicans to allow the closed-door testimony from former special counsel Jack Smith to be released in a post on Wednesday morning.

Smith was in charge of the federal prosecutions of President Donald Trump for the 2020 election conspiracy plot, and for the hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, both of which were brought to a halt by Trump's re-election to the presidency.

Ridicule of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s change in appearance since she joined Donald Trump’s administration led a Wall Street Journal columnist to rush to her defense by arguing that, while there are some obvious enhancements at work, there is nothing wrong with it.

On the day before Christmas, columnist Louise Perry argued that the furor of a photo of Leavitt in Vanity Fair last week, where injection marks could be plainly seen around her inflated lips, were hypocritical because women on the left have their own aesthetic that is less obvious, but just as calculated.

Republican lawmakers admitted 2025 was a legislative wasteland, with Congress setting a modern record for lowest output in a president's first year, but some attributed their inaction to a simple explanation: President Donald Trump did much of their work for them through executive orders.

With fewer than 40 bills signed into law, the House and Senate managed historically low productivity, reported the Washington Post. The House cast just 362 votes — barely half the number from 2017, Trump's first year, when Republicans also held the majority. Meanwhile, nearly 60 percent of Senate votes focused on confirming Trump's nominees rather than passing legislation.

Senior White House adviser and speechwriter Stephen Miller blew a gasket on Fox News Tuesday, amid reporting of internal anger at CBS after newly-installed right-wing network chief Bari Weiss put a hold on a long-in-the-works "60 Minutes" investigation into the horrific conditions at the Salvadoran CECOT megaprison where President Donald Trump has shipped hundreds of migrants.

"Every one of those producers at '60 Minutes' engaged in this revolt, fire them," shouted Miller, an anti-immigrant fanatic known to crib Nazi Germany in his speeches. "Clean house, fire them. That's what I say."

President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social platform on Tuesday, reposting a long conspiracy theory screed alleging mass voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, and calling for the state's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, to be jailed, alongside Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Atlanta poll worker Ruby Freeman.

"BREAKING: The Georgia Board of Elections just dropped this BOMBSHELL revealing that HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of ballots in Georgia in the 2020 presidential election were counted twice and it was NOT by human error - but by INTENTIONAL HUMAN INTERVENTION, which was in fact MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD that STOLE the election from the actual winner of Georgia, President Donald J Trump," said the original post, made by the account @Joshua2024.

A "close outside adviser" to President Donald Trump recently told Jonathan Lemire of The Atlantic that the president has just discovered "the quickest way to become a lame duck."

Trump's MAGA base has been fracturing for some time after the administration declined to release the Jeffrey Epstein files in full earlier this year. That move sparked considerable backlash from MAGA figureheads like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who was one of Trump's fiercest defenders before the debacle began.

The Supreme Court dropped a bombshell on Tuesday by handing President Donald Trump a rare loss, ruling 6-3 to deny a stay on deploying the National Guard to Illinois — but the rebuke of Trump was not the only thing some legal experts noticed in the opinion.

Specifically, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who drafted a concurrence with the majority on one of the key issues in the decision, made statements in his opinion that suggest he may regret one of the most controversial court decisions in recent months.

One of President Donald Trump's former business partners made a stunning comparison on Tuesday between the way the Trump administration has handled the Jeffrey Epstein files and another high-profile case of serial sexual abuse.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department released another trove of documents from the FBI's investigation into disgraced financier and convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. The files included emails that placed Trump on Epstein's infamous plane on eight occasions, and other revelations that were politically damaging for the president.

President Donald Trump got a rare and devastating blow at the Supreme Court on Tuesday, as three right-wing justices joined with the three liberals to deny a stay of a lower court ruling that prevents him from federalizing the National Guard to deploy troops to Chicago — and said the administration is unlikely to prevail when the case is litigated on the merits.

The decision triggered an eruption from legal commentators on social media, including an outpouring of approval of the decision to rein in Trump's use of executive and military power over states and cities that protest his agenda.