Trump administration policies slashing staffing and funding for public lands are waking a sleeping political giant in Montana. Will either party notice?

In interviews with Vanity Fair, Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said President Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” called JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist” and concluded that Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the early handling of the Epstein files.

Straight up mafia behavior

"The short-term strategy is, win the House of Representatives," stated the former president, garnering applause. "Because that's going to be the circuit breaker that will give us control of one major component of the federal government. With that as a bulwark, we're now able to block some of the worst impulses that are coming out of this White House."

The former president laid out a two-pronged strategy for Democrats: to reclaim a House majority next year, and to work on honing the party's messaging in the coming years.

"Long term, let's tell a story, a better story about who we are as Americans and what we share," Obama said, according to excerpts shared with CBS News. "We have to tell the story that makes people who feel outside that process, we've got to bring them back in."

[A]lso after Charlie Kirk’s death, the Heritage Foundation twisted data to claim that “50% of all major (non-gang-related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology.” That was in an effort to get the FBI to create a new domestic terror threat category for “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Extremism.”

How much longer until they decide to just round up the transgender people with the Gestapo ICE? It's getting scary for transgender people.

Legal experts have raised concerns US forces may have committed a war crime by killing survivors of initial strike

The Pentagon will not make public the full video of a September attack in the Caribbean that killed two individuals as they were clinging to the wreckage of a burning boat, Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday.

The strike has been the most controversial development in Donald Trump’s campaign against Venezuela, which has seen US forces blow up vessels alleged to be transporting narcotics from the South American country to the United States, seize an oil tanker and threaten further military action against the president, Nicolás Maduro.

Legal experts have raised concerns that US forces may have committed a war crime by killing the survivors of an initial air strike on 2 September, and that the campaign is illegal. Democrats have called for the release of video detailing that attack, and Trump at one point supported making the footage public but later backtracked and deferred

Elon Musk is expected to back the GOP in next year's midterms with a financial package that could give the Republican Party a "huge boost."

Insiders speaking to Axios claim the Tesla CEO could offer his support to Donald Trump and the Republican Party at the 2026 election, despite previously saying he would create a third party. Musk had enjoyed a close relationship with the Trump administration at the start of this year, though it soon soured. The president and Musk were spotted dining together alongside Cristiano Ronaldo recently, and it appears their relationship has been mended, Axios reported.

It appears the dinner did wonders for how Musk feels about the GOP and Trump, with insiders suggesting the money donated to the party's election efforts could be a massive aid.

The US House member says president’s rhetoric about her and Somali Americans could have dangerous consequences

US congresswoman Ilhan Omar has warned that Donald Trump’s repeated personal attacks and dehumanising rhetoric are fuelling a climate of political violence that could have dangerous consequences.

Speaking days after the president called for her to be thrown out of the country, Omar said Trump’s incendiary language reaches “the worst humans possible” and encourages them to act.

“We’ve had people incarcerated for threatening to kill me,” she told the Guardian in an interview at her Washington office. “We have people that are being prosecuted right now for threatening to kill me and so it is something that does stay in the back of our minds. But I also worry about those people finding someone who looks like me in Minneapolis or across the country and thinking it is me and harming them.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez holds a slight lead over Vice President JD Vance in a hypothetical 2028 presidential matchup, according to a new poll.

The New York Democratic congresswoman, known as AOC, edges the likely Republican nominee 51% to 49%, in The Argument/Verasight survey released on Tuesday. However, the result was within the poll's 2.7 percentage point margin of error, making the two candidates statistically tied. The poll asked voters who they would vote for if the election was between the two of them.

The FBI director recently fired one of his former far-right allies, Stephen Friend, after Friend appeared to accuse Patel of a cover-up in the D.C. pipe bomb probe.

FBI Director Kash Patel is learning the pitfalls of running an agency chock-full of conspiracy theorists like himself.

The director, who was seemingly nominated for the role primarily because of his sworn allegiance to Donald Trump and a habit of pushing MAGA conspiracy theories, has become the movement’s whipping boy ever since he assumed his position — largely over his failures to provide evidence supporting MAGA conspiracy theories.

Last week, this came to a head when Patel fired Stephen Friend, a far-right influencer, FBI agent and former Patel ally who gained fame among the MAGA faithful after being suspended from the agency under the Biden administration for reportedly sympathizing with Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said in a sweeping interview published Tuesday that Vice President Vance has been a “conspiracy theorist” for a decade.

Wiles made the remarks during a Vanity Fair interview in which she discussed various administration officials’ understanding of how important President Trump’s base of supporters considered the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

“The people that really appreciated what a big deal this is are Kash [Patel] and [FBI Deputy Director] Dan Bongino,” Wiles told author Chris Whipple.

“Because they lived in that world. And the vice president, who’s been a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” she continued. “For years, Kash has been saying, ‘Got to release the files, got to release the files.’ And he’s been saying that with a view of what he thought was in these files that turns out not to be right.”

“There is no legal requirement that US citizens carry papers or have proof of their citizenship on them,” said an attorney at the ACLU of Northern California.

Federal law enforcement agencies are detaining US citizens who do not carry proof of their citizenship in what civil rights advocates describe as a flagrant violation of constitutional rights—and a top Trump administration official is claiming the government has the authority to do so.

A Somali-born Minnesota man was alarmed by the practice last Tuesday when immigration agents tackled him, handcuffed him, and arrested him, refusing to accept his REAL ID as proof of his legal residence in a video that was widely circulated on social media.

The man, who identified only as Mubashir, was placed into a chokehold and forced to his knees in the snow on his way to get food in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, which has a large Somali population.

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's popularity in the metropolis has surged since his election last month, according to a new poll.

Gavin Newsom has launched a new site to ‘detail the criminal records, corruption cases, and extremist ties of the people Donald Trump elevates, protects, pardons, and surrounds himself with’

California Governor Gavin Newsom has found a new way to troll the Trump administration by launching a website that tracks Donald Trump’s “criminal cronies.”

Newsom’s team launched the site Tuesday, along with crime statistics that show falling rates of violent crime across major cities in California.

“With crime dropping — again — California is proving what real public safety leadership looks like,” Newsom said. “Meanwhile in D.C., Trump is a felon who surrounds himself with scammers and drug traffickers.”

Trump is labeled “criminal in chief” in the news release, with the word “felon” branded across his 2023 mugshot.

Access options:

• gift link — registration required
• archive.today

A top official at the U.S. Department of Education has been keeping a controversial flag linked to Christian nationalism and the Jan. 6 insurrection hung outside his office, according to the agency's union and a department employee who has observed it.

It's the latest in a series of instances in which the flag – which depicts a pine tree and the words "An Appeal to Heaven" – has been associated with agencies and figures at the highest levels of the federal government.

Though long tied to the American Revolution, the banner in more recent years "has been adopted primarily by evangelical Christian nationalist groups," as well as the Proud Boys and certain neo-Nazi groups, according to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an independent nonprofit organization. It was flown in 2021 by rioters at the U.S. Capitol as they tried to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said there will not be an amendment vote on extending expiring ObamaCare enhanced subsidies as part of a House Republican health care bill this week, in a move that is infuriating moderate Republicans who had been pushing to go on the record about the subsidies.

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), one of the members who had been pushing for a vote to extend the subsidies that expire Dec. 31, fumed at the decision as he emerged from a House Republican Conference meeting Tuesday morning.

“I think it’s idiotic not to have an up-or-down vote on this issue,” Lawler said, adding: “It is political malpractice.”