JD Vance's ascent as Trump's likely successor is poised to hit a serious snag: the vice president's close friendship with Tucker Carlson, who is now actively antagonizing the president.

Vance's recent media blitz and involvement in the Iran peace negotiations have dramatically improved his standing with Donald Trump, Axios is reporting, noting that the VP gave 33 interviews in June alone — from conservative podcasts to HBO's "Real Time" to ABC's "The View" — all of which have caught the president's eye.

According to a White House insider speaking with Marc Caputo of Axios, "POTUS isn't asking, 'JD or Marco [Rubio]?' anymore. He's no longer asking, 'How's JD doing?' He's now saying, 'JD looks great, right?'"

But there's a major problem: Carlson, one of Vance's closest allies, is becoming increasingly toxic to Trump.

Carlson has publicly stated he can't stomach voting Republican in the upcoming midterms and is exploring building an entirely new political party to challenge both Democrats and Republicans. His escalating criticism of Trump could present Vance with a dilemma that would place him in peril with Carlson's avid fanbase.

"So far, Tucker isn't a problem," one Trump adviser told Caputo. "But it could be if Trump tells JD to distance himself from him."

The report notes that Trump is already "not too happy" with Carlson's rebellion and his ties to the vice president, with insiders predicting the president is unlikely to look the other way as Vance maintains a close alliance with someone openly abandoning the Republican Party.

Emergency managers in central Kansas say a tornado that tore through their communities on April 13 caught them off guard for one reason: the forecast said clear skies, and they blame staffing cuts under President Donald Trump for gutting the data behind it, according to Politico.

"The issue is the forecast," said Thomas Winter, emergency manager for Franklin County. "There was a zero percent chance of thunderstorms — and that forecast comes from the storm prediction center out of Oklahoma."

Meteorologists point to reductions carried out by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, which thinned the ranks at National Weather Service offices that launch weather balloons twice daily. Those balloons feed the models used for severe-storm forecasts, and understaffed western offices have delayed or dropped the morning launches, creating data holes. Ahead of the April 13 twister, NOAA data showed no balloon launches upstream of eastern Kansas.

Alan Gerard, a former NOAA severe-storms lab director, said going from "no risk area defined" to "you have strong tornadoes" is highly unusual.

NOAA rejected the idea that its balloon operations have compromised forecasts, saying it has found no degradation. The agency noted the Storm Prediction Center flagged severe-weather potential as early as April 10, and that weak, short-lived tornadoes are notoriously hard to predict.

The concerns follow a year of scrutiny after DOGE's cuts, including the deadly July 2025 Texas floods that killed more than 100 people, among them children at a summer camp, and reporting that DOGE pushed out a "vital" weather employee beforehand.

Critics have long warned that "DOGE has consequences" for public safety.

President Donald Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children's faces while targeting them for their religion.

The video showed students at Gateway Kindergarten in St. Paul, Minnesota, celebrating their graduation in caps, gowns, and hijabs. Trump posted it on Truth Social on Monday morning.

"Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota," the right-wing X account @EndWokeness wrote in a post that Trump then amplified — again showing the children's unblurred faces. "Every girl is in a hijab... in kindergarten."

In December, Trump called Somali immigrants "garbage" at a cabinet meeting and said their country "stinks." He told reporters, "I don't want them in our country," according to NPR. He later posted on Truth Social calling for Somalis to be "sent back from where they came," NBC News reported.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a Somali American congresswoman whose district includes the largest Somali American population in the U.S., has warned that Trump's attacks have real consequences.

"People who share the identities I hold — Black, Somali, hijabi, immigrant — will suffer the consequences of his words, which so often go unchecked," Omar wrote in December.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations logged a record 8,683 anti-Muslim discrimination complaints nationwide in 2025 — the highest volume since it began publishing its civil rights report in 1996 — according to Al Jazeera.