House Republicans Are in Danger of Chaos as Last Race Called

Democratic candidate Adam Gray defeated incumbent Republican Representative John Duarte in the final 2024 House race to be called. Gray’s victory, flipping California’s 13th congressional district, means the House Republican majority will be even more razor-thin than before.

With Gray’s win, called early Wednesday morning by the Associated Press, House Republicans will have just a 220–215 majority in the 119th Congress, as the Democrats have netted one more House seat. As CNN reporter Harry Enten noted last week while results were still pending, a party’s majority in the House has not been this slim since the Herbert Hoover administration, following elections for the 72nd Congress.

The House Republican majority is poised to be further deflated, temporarily, to 217–215 in early 2025 with the expected vacancies of three Republican seats.

Representative Matt Gaetz resigned from his seat last month, after he was tapped to be Trump’s attorney general but before he withdrew from consideration in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations. Two other Republican representatives, Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz, are expected to resign to join the Trump administration. Until these three vacancies are filled, a single Republican defector in a party-line vote would dash a piece of legislation.

The scantiness of the House majority—on top of internal strife among Republican representatives—could significantly hamper the party’s ability to enact its legislative agenda early on in the coming Trump administration.

Kash Patel, Trump’s pick for FBI director, has a fake Covid-19 vaccine “detox” supplement side hustle.

According to a report from NBC News Wednesday, Patel has helped push “Warrior Essentials,” a right-wing faux “wellness” company that sells three different types of supplements claiming to “undo the damage from the spike protein” (essentially the Covid vaccine).

He first advertised them in February on his Truth Social, writing, “Spike the Vax, order this homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax. Huge discount now by ordering via link below,” above an image that read, “If the Covid vaccines were actually ‘safe’ we wouldn’t be essential.”

He shouted Warrior Essentials out again in April, this time writing, “Mrna detox, reverse the vaxx n get healthy with @warrioressentials,” above an image stating, “You were immune to the propaganda, but are you immune to the shedders?”

“Since the mRNA covid vaccines were rolled out we’ve learned our DNA may have been infiltrated by the mRNA in the covid vaccines,” the Warrior Essentials website states. “Our DNA is already under stress from environmental pollutants and chemical additives in our foods. The spike could undermine it all. Not to worry. Warrior Essentials has your back with a support system to bring you back to peak health.”

Patel is a loyal MAGA disciple who wants to dismantle the very agency he is set to head. It only makes sense that he’s doing weird supplement grifting too—after all, he’s learned from one of the best.

Donald Trump has decided to appoint his former lawyer Peter Navarro to serve as senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.

Trump made the announcement in a Truth Social post Wednesday, claiming Navarro “was treated horribly by the Deep State, or whatever else you would like to call it,” but failing to mention that the one-time Trump lawyer served four months in prison for contempt of Congress after defying a subpoena from the House January 6 committee.

Even while in prison, Navarro maintained his steadfast loyalty to the president-elect, going so far as to discuss Trump’s first-term agenda from behind bars. After being released, he stayed in the Trump orbit but was critical of how team Trump ran their 2024 presidential campaign. Now, according to Trump, Navarro will be helping to “successfully advance and communicate the Trump Manufacturing, Tariff, and Trade Agendas.”

In 2022, Navarro was indicted for failing to testify or provide documents to the House committee. He spent years refusing to testify before the House, trying to claim executive privilege because he was acting on Trump’s instructions after the 2020 election, although Trump never told the January 6 committee this nor did he back up Navarro’s claim in any way.

After a federal judge rejected the executive privilege argument, Navarro made a last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court that Chief Justice John Roberts promptly threw out, making Navarro the first ever former White House official to go to prison for being in contempt of Congress.

Trump credited Navarro for renegotiating “unfair Trade Deals like NAFTA and the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS)” in his first term, and the new role he envisions for the economist appears to be on similar policy matters. With Trump’s proposed tariffs egging on a likely trade war this time around, the trade war hawk with staunch loyalty to the president-elect will have plenty to keep him busy the next four years.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump is leaning in to his joking suggestion that the United States annex Canada with a bizarre Truth Social meme.

Last week, Trump announced that he plans to impose a 25 percent, potentially trade war–inducing tariff on goods from top U.S. trading partners Mexico and Canada when he takes office in January.

On Friday, when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Trump of the damage this would cause, the president-elect reportedly joked that “if Canada can’t survive without ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion a year, then maybe Canada should become the fifty-first state and Trudeau should become its governor.”

The joke has proven an understandably controversial one, but Trump on Tuesday afternoon followed up on it by posting an apparently AI-generated image to Truth Social captioned “Oh Canada!” The image depicts the president-elect atop a mountain, beside a Canadian flag, gazing upon a pinnacle that users have noted closely resembles that of the Matterhorn in Switzerland.

The post recalls some of the more delirious moments of Trump’s first term, namely his half-joking posts about the administration purchasing Greenland. It also offers a foretaste of the presidential communications that await us in his second term, thanks to the wonders of AI image generation.

But in this instance, behind the post and original joke, there lies a serious threat against our top trading partners, which analysts say would have dire consequences if fulfilled—even barring retaliatory actions.

NPR reports that Trump’s proposed tariffs would likely raise the cost of groceries and gasoline for American consumers. The Brookings Institute notes that the tariffs could be even more ruinous considering “approximately 50% of U.S. trade with Canada and Mexico is driven by supply chains” in which products cross borders repeatedly during their production.

Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk may be on the same team now that Donald Trump has named them co-chairs of the still-in-the-works Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE, but behind closed doors, Ramaswamy has reportedly spent years bad-mouthing the Tesla CEO.

A new report by CNN’s K-File uncovered audio and video recordings in which Ramaswamy openly derided the SpaceX founder, routinely referring to Musk as a “circus monkey,” while accusing him of “bending the knee to Xi Jinping” when it came to international economics.

“I think Tesla is increasingly beholden to China,” Ramaswamy said in May 2023, while discussing Musk’s decision to build a battery plant in Shanghai. “I have no reason to think Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need.”

Ramaswamy’s more pointed critiques honed in on Musk’s comments about Taiwan, after the carmaker drew praise from Chinese officials in 2022 for claiming that the former Chinese colony should become a “special administrative zone.” That, according to Ramaswamy, was little more than a successful political ploy for Musk to obtain regulatory approvals and tax breaks from the Chinese Communist Party for his Shanghai factory, which singularly accounted for more than half of Tesla’s global sales in 2023.

Musk’s apparent aptitude for political games for the benefit of his own companies ultimately calls into question his appointment to a (still nonexistent) agency with high ambitions of cutting government spending, and whether he’ll follow through on those claims or simply restructure the government from the inside to line his own wallet.

“Both Tesla and SpaceX quite likely would not exist as successful businesses if it were not for the use of public funding, either through subsidies, through the electric car industry, or through actual government contracting in the case of SpaceX,” Ramaswamy said in 2022 on a Fox News podcast. “Elon Musk has, I think, demonstrated his willingness to change his political tunes based on the favors that he gets to be able to do business in China.”

In a lengthy 2023 post on X in which Ramaswamy openly targeted Musk, the biotech billionaire wrote that “the U.S. needs leaders who aren’t in China’s pocket.”

In a statement to CNN, Ramaswamy said that the pair had “aired some of these issues” the first time they spoke.

“I love him and respect the hell out of him, and I’m proud to call him a friend. The only country he puts first is the same one I do: the United States of America,” Ramaswamy told the network.