US News

The U.S. House is facing a "massive mess” as a string of absentees and revolting Republicans threaten to send the chamber’s legislative agenda up in smoke, Punchbowl News reported Tuesday.

With just over two months until the midterms, the House is scheduled to remain in session until Thursday before recessing until Sept. 14, and will be out for nearly all of October. And yet, even with “a lot” of bills still on Republicans’ priority list, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told Punchbowl News, inner-party divisions and absentees have risked “torching this week’s legislative agenda.”

A former White House staffer teased growing tensions inside President Donald Trump's administration over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's leadership.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll submitted his resignation directly to the president after clashing repeatedly with the Pentagon chief, and former George W. Bush staffer Ashley Davis told "CNN This Morning" that Trump officials were likely concerned about the dynamic inside the Defense Department.

A bizarre rant by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy at a rally in Michigan on Monday fell flat with the audience and members of a MS NOW panel were beside themselves with laughter.

Appearing in Michigan to boost the candidacy of former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers who is running for a Senate seat, a very animated Duffy exclaimed, “This is my pet peeve. I don’t know if you know about it. You know the stop/start button on your car? I hate that thing. Thank you [EPA Director] Lee Zeldin! He’s gotten rid of it and the first cars without the stop/start button are rolling off the line. Pet peeve: I hate it.”

U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine delivered what one expert described as a “significant” blow to President Donald Trump’s alleged scheme to meddle in the upcoming midterms.

In a letter to Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) shared by CNN’s Zachary Cohen on Monday, Caine confirmed that senior military leaders had “no plans” to deploy federal military personnel or National Guard members to polling places during the midterms, adding that he had “neither received nor anticipate receiving any unlawful order concerning the role of the Joint Force in the upcoming November 2026 midterm elections.”

Rep. Ralph Norman, who lost to Darline Graham in South Carolina's Senate runoff last week, escalated his criticism of President Donald Trump for throwing his weight into the race.

The South Carolina Republican, who had suggested to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in January 2021 that Trump invoke "Marshall Law" to hold onto power despite his election loss, ripped into the 80-year-old president Monday in a two-minute conversation with reporters, according to The Daily Beast.

President Donald Trump's foot-dragging on releasing hundreds of millions of dollars for the midterms is now causing real distress among the deep-pocketed donors who bankrolled him.

According to Politico, money is trickling out of Trump's MAGA Inc. super PAC, but as September begins, Republican donors say it "should be gushing."

It's "chaos season" on the campaign trail, and the first serious week of the fall sprint is already a mess for Republicans thanks to their own party leader.

That's the read from the political outlet NOTUS, which declared the arrival of "chaos season" in its Tuesday morning newsletter, noting that September of an election year is when campaigns lock in the message they'll ride into November. For weeks, GOP leaders and candidates had carefully built a data-center-skeptic pitch, echoing voters souring on the sprawling AI projects as roughly three-quarters of Americans now say they'd oppose one in their own community.

President Donald Trump just pulled off what one political expert described as a "mafia state" type of move that revealed the rotten core of a deal he allegedly struck with a foreign country over its oil reserves.

Trump recently announced that the U.S. and North American Blue Energy Partners, a private company led by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt, entered into a partnership to tap Venezuela's 65 billion barrel oil reserves, a deal that is estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars. Betancourt was previously under investigation on corruption charges until Trump's former attorney, Rudy Giuliani, persuaded the first Trump Department of Justice to drop its probe.

MAGA pundits were cornered by panelists on CNN's "NewsNight" with host Abby Phillip on Monday over the president's latest batch of empty threats toward Iran.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video of him attacking Kharg Island, a strategic island in the Persian Gulf that the Iranian regime has used to attack merchant ships in the area. Trump has previously threatened to strike the island and posted the threat on the same day U.S. forces hit Larak Island in the Strait.

The conservative Wall Street Journal slammed Florida's attorney general for his latest effort to attack vaccination — this time by cracking down on private Catholic schools.

The Journal has frequently gone after what it sees as Democrats assaulting religious liberty, particularly when they try to enforce birth control coverage requirements — and they had just as much contempt for this particular policy, which they called a "dangerous constitutional turn."

Outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) dropped the hammer on several of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein's alleged co-conspirators in a scorched-earth rant on Monday night.

Massie took to the House floor and read the names of several alleged Epstein co-conspirators. The names included Jes Staley, Leon Black, Les Wexner, David Copperfield, Lapo Elkann, Tom Pritzker, Glenn Dubin, Frédéric Fekkai, Eduardo Teodorani-Fabbri, Jean-Luc Brunel, Daniel Siad, Ramsey Elkholy, Prince Andrew, and Lesley Groff. Everyone Massie mentioned who has spoken publicly about their relationship with Epstein has denied any wrongdoing.

MS NOW's Chris Hayes flagged a suspicious episode of tomfoolery in a Democratic primary in Maine, pulled off by Republican dark money — with a deeply ironic twist.

"As Republicans head towards what is currently looking like it could be a shellacking in November ... they are returning to a time-tested playbook," said Hayes. Specifically, he said, that playbook is "unlimited dark money spending."