Trump’s Defense Pick Reportedly Questioned Women’s Right to Vote

Pete Hegseth doesn’t think women deserve the right to vote, according to his ex-sister-in-law.

NBC reported on Tuesday that senators received the affidavit of Danielle Hegseth that contained new allegations against Hegseth, including that he regularly passed out from alcohol abuse and made his second wife fear for her life. Senator Jack Reed noted that the affidavit contained claims that Hegseth’s ex-wife Samantha also had an “escape plan” and a “safe word” in case things went too far.

Within Reed’s review of the affidavit was another deeply alarming claim: Hegseth reportedly believed that “women should not vote or work and that Christians needed to have more children so they could overtake the Muslim population.” This backward and racist take perfectly aligns with the brand of warrior Christian nationalism he’s been subscribing to for years.

This is the same man who described our current historical moment as “much like the 11th century.”

“We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must,” he once wrote. “Arm yourself—metaphorically, intellectually, physically. Our fight is not with guns. Yet.”

The latest allegations come after Hegseth’s confirmation hearing last week. Many expected him to be confirmed before this news came out.

Fear of increased ICE raids have already negatively affected the nation’s agricultural sector, causing alarm that food prices could skyrocket in the near future as a result of Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration policies.

Bakersfield, California, saw a massive drop off in the number of field workers showing up for work last week after Border Patrol agents in unmarked Chevy Suburbans rounded up and detained immigrants in the area, profiling individuals they believed to be field workers, reported CalMatters.* The end result: acres of unpicked oranges roasting in the California sun at the height of the season.

Bakersfield makes up a small portion of California’s Central Valley, which produces approximately a quarter of the nation’s food. Kern County, where Bakersfield is located, has ranked within the top three agricultural counties in the nation for the last several years, largely off the backs of undocumented laborers, who are estimated to comprise more than half of the county’s workforce, according to CalMatters.

During a three-day operation in Kern County, undocumented workers were targeted walking in and out of gas stations, getting breakfast, at Home Depot, or while driving along the 99 Highway, leaving many with no other option than to simply stay at home.

“We’re in the middle of our citrus harvesting,” Casey Creamer, president of the industry group California Citrus Mutual, told CalMatters. “This sent shockwaves through the entire community. People aren’t going to work and kids aren’t going to school. Yesterday about 25 percent of the workforce, today 75 percent didn’t show up.”

Losing the bulk of America’s agricultural workforce overnight is a recipe for “absolute economic devastation,” according to Richard S. Gearhart, an associate professor of economics at Cal State-Bakersfield, who spoke with the nonprofit news outlet.

“You are talking about a recession-level event if this is the new long-term norm,” Gearhart said, arguing that the end result of Trump’s policies will be felt in the grocery store check-out lines across America.

The 47th president has effectively promised a full-throttle immigration crackdown for the next four years that includes attacking birthright citizenship and ordering high-profile ICE raids around the country against undocumented immigrants, decisions that could keep the backbone of the nation’s agricultural workforce inside.

But just two days into the administration, it appears that anti-immigration efforts will be a relative free-for-all. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would roll back an Obama-era directive, suddenly allowing the immigration agency to detain people in sensitive areas such as hospitals, places of worship, court rooms, funerals, and weddings.

“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” a spokesperson for the agency said in a statement. “The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”

* This article previously misstated when the raids in Bakersfield occurred.

Recently pardoned former Proud Boys founder Enrique Tarrio promised “retribution” in an interview with Alex Jones shortly after being freed from prison on Tuesday.

“I’d like to thank again President Donald J. Trump for helping us through these difficult times and releasing me, Joe Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola. Right? And all the J6ers,” Tarrio said. “We went through hell, and I’m gonna tell you, it was worth it, because what we stood for and what those guys stood for was what we’ve been fighting for and what we saw yesterday on the inauguration stage. I can’t tell you it’s been easy, but I will tell you it’s been worth it.”

The former Proud Boy was serving 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy over his role in planning January 6. He was freed after Trump pardoned or commuted every single person involved with the insurrection on Monday.

Tarrio struck a vengeful tone in what was nearly a 45-minute interview with Jones after his release.

They didn’t care about the evidence. They cared about putting Trump supporters in prison. Well, now it’s our turn. Now it’s our turn. I’m happy that the president’s focusing not on retribution and focusing on success, but I will tell you that I’m not gonna play by those rules. The people who did this, they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars, and they need to be prosecuted. They pardon the J6 committee? Fine. In this country, our case proves that you could be put in prison for anything. They need to be imprisoned. We need to find and put them behind bars for what they did. They need to pay for what they did.

“We’ve got to do everything in our power to make sure that the next 4 years sets us up for the next 100 years.”

Tarrio split with the Proud Boys in 2021 after his former work as a federal informant came to light.

Donald Trump repeatedly promised during his presidential campaign to quickly end Russia’s war with Ukraine. It appears his plan to do so involves the threat of sanctions against the country.

In a Truth Social post Wednesday morning, Trump called out Russian President Vladimir Putin by name, saying that if “we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”

Although Trump began by praising Russia and the Russian people, as well as touting his close relationship with Putin, the rest of the post contains possibly some of his toughest language to date against the country and its leader. Some of Trump’s threats are already in place, however: Sanctions have been in place against Russia since the early days of the Ukraine war, hurting the country’s economy.

Trump repeatedly bragged on the campaign trail that he could end the Russia-Ukraine War in “24 hours,” but after he won the election, Russia threw cold water on that idea, even boosting its troop levels less than a week later. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, the new president’s choice for special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, a post solely focused on ending the war, has suggested withholding aid for Ukraine in order to force negotiations with Russia.

Kellogg has already backtracked on a quick end to the war, suggesting that Trump never really had a concrete plan to quickly end hostilities as he promised. The fact that the president is now bringing up sanctions when only four months ago, he decried their use against Russia, seems to indicate that his threat is a bluff and he’s making up a plan on the fly. Russia is probably not going to respond in the way Trump wants.

Vivek Ramaswamy was pushed out of the fledgling Department of Government Efficiency because his vision didn’t align with the sieg heil-ing shadow president Elon Musk, according to an exclusive report from The Washington Post.

Ramaswamy was behind November’s Wall Street Journal op-ed that outlined a plan to slash trillions of dollars’ worth of essential government services and contract out the functions of the administrative state. He wanted DOGE to function more like a think tank, determining which government agencies could be shut down and which regulations could be repealed without congressional approval.

While Ramaswamy focused on that, Musk was meant to focus on spending and technology. But, the technocrat billionaire—glued to the president’s side—was reportedly on an entirely different page about how to best eviscerate the administrative state, according to several people who spoke with the Post. And his vision seems to have won out.

Monday’s executive order officially establishing the Department of Government Efficiency was merely a rebranding of the U.S. Digital Service, an Obama-era group created to respond to manage issues with the Affordable Care Act’s website, and that now determines best practices for the government use of technology.

While it seems like a pivot from creating a brand-new agency, this change is far more aligned with Musk’s technology-forward vision for the organization. It also lands him a White House office, and all the unfettered access that entails.

The executive order gave Musk “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” a privilege that will likely benefit the billionaire technocrat who has already made tens of billions of dollars from government contracts.

Musk also imagined DOGE being structured as a small team within the government, not the nongovernmental body structure Ramaswamy imagined. Because it’s a White House office, Musk will also be able to sidestep federal hiring rules—and Trump’s hiring freeze.

None of the work from Ramaswamy’s team garnered mention in an executive order Monday, according to the Post.

Earlier reports said that Ramawamy exited the cost-cutting department over clashes with rank-and-file members. Someone close to Trump said that Ramaswamy had “worn out his welcome.”

And it seems that held true up the ranks. “They’ve been wanting Vivek to step aside so Elon could have more control,” one person briefed on the matter told the Post. “There was tension, and then they had an out and kind of took the out.”