Trump Press Sec Conveniently Forgets Constitution While Bashing AP

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt decided to only tell her side of the story while claiming a win over the White House press corps on Monday.

Earlier in the day, federal Judge Trevor McFadden stopped short of immediately forcing the White House to restore the Associated Press’s access to the White House—because in his view, the AP had not provided sufficient evidence of harm to elicit an immediate order. 

The Trump administration immediately began to spin it as a win. 

“The winning continues here at the White House.… Today a federal judge right here in Washington, D.C., denied the Associated Press’s emergency request for a temporary restraining order to restore their privilege of returning to the White House press pool,” Leavitt said Monday on Fox News after McFadden’s decision. “The judge’s denial of the Associated Press’s request reinforces what I said from the podium last week and what President Trump has been saying: Covering the American presidency in the most intimate and limited spaces in this White House … is a privilege, it is not a legal right.” 

Leavitt went on to shout out the right-wing podcasters and influencers who have been invited into the White House press corps. 

But McFadden also warned that if and when this conflict (which stems from the AP refusing to abide by Donald Trump’s executive order to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”) did go to court, the law would not be in the president’s favor. The right to a free and uninhibited press is one of the most basic tenets of the First Amendment.  

“It seems pretty clearly viewpoint discrimination,” McFadden told government lawyer Brian Hudak.

While Trump doesn’t seem to care much for the gravity of the Constitution, the First Amendment does state that there shall be “no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The winning Leavitt bragged about may not last for long.

Mike Johnson is trying and failing to maintain the appearance of budget unity within the GOP—and Elon Musk is only making it harder.

The looming Republican budget resolution is an attempt to pack Donald Trump’s beefy agenda into one “big, beautiful bill.” But Republican holdouts, potentially influenced by Musk, have put that beauty in jeopardy.

While Johnson told Politico Tuesday he had “no concerns” and felt “very positive” about the reconciliation bill’s prospects, other Republicans had different ideas.

“If the Republican budget passes, the deficit gets worse, not better,” MAGA cheerleader Representative Thomas Massie wrote Monday on X.

“That sounds bad,” Elon Musk replied, reinforcing the MAGA wing’s opposition to Johnson’s version of the budget, which notably does not include the deep cuts to crucial programs that have huge standard-of-living effects, such as Medicaid—and leaving the budget in a precarious, vote-lacking position.

The weight of a three-word X reply from the country’s most influential unelected civilian seriously irked some members of the Republican Party.

“I hope we’re not going to have this come to whatever is said on X to change months and months of substantive work to actually do this in a deficit-neutral way,” Representative Blake Moore told Politico. “I wish we were eliminating as much of the deficit is possible. What’s missing from that X exchange is what happens if it doesn’t pass, and we have the largest tax increase on lower and middle income Americans ever. We can’t be so singularly focused on one aspect of this.”

At least two other representatives have said they intend to vote against the bill. They include Ohio Republican Warren Davidson and Indiana lawmaker Victoria Spartz, a die-hard Department of Government Efficiency loyalist.

This mess certainly won’t be resolved tonight, as Speaker Johnson told Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman: “There may be a vote tonight. There may not be.”

A MAGA-led group of private military contractors are pitching Donald Trump on a plan to use a civilian army to carry out his promise of mass deportations, Politico reported Tuesday.

The contractors, led by Blackwater CEO Erik Prince and its former Chief Operating Officer Bill Matthews, calling themselves 2USV, sent a proposal to Trump’s advisers before his inauguration, pitching a comprehensive, if not legally dubious, plan to expedite massive deportations to displace 12 million people in two years.

Their pitch included plans for a bounty program, mass deportation hearings, temporary encampments on Army bases, and civilians deputized to apprehend undocumented immigrants.

To reach its goal of 12 million deportations, 2USV projected that it would need to “eject nearly 500,000” undocumented immigrants per month.

“To keep pace with the Trump deportations, it would require a 600% increase in activity,” the proposal said, adding that “the government should enlist outside assistance” to address this rise in demand by deputizing 10,000 private citizens to assist law enforcement.

These private citizens would be former law enforcement agents, military veterans, and former ICE and Border Patrol officials with the same federal law enforcement powers as bona fide immigration officials. They would work under the direction of Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called border czar.

Former ICE Director John Sandweg told Politico that 2USV’s plan to deputize private citizens was legally dubious.

“I don’t see how you could do private sector, deputized law enforcement officers,” Sandweg said. “That’s subject to an immediate injunction by a court.”

Prince, one of the central forces behind 2USV, has several ties to Trump. In 2018, Prince reportedly helped raise money for different MAGA causes, including one to infiltrate organizations that opposed Trump, and another to fund the construction of a wall on the American southern border. Betsy DeVos, Prince’s sister, served as Trump’s secretary of education during his first term. In 2020, Trump pardoned a group of Blackwater military contractors who had been found guilty of manslaughter after massacring 17 Iraqi civilians.

American lawmakers, particularly Republicans, still aren’t willing to face the fact that their constituents hate the reality of Donald Trump’s agenda.

After a fiery town hall in Belton, Missouri, Representative Mark Alford turned to CNN to blame the backlash on outside agitators—even while admitting that members of the angry crowd were actually his constituents.

“This was brought about [by] outside agitators, and some people from outside our district, not our constituents, who came there to make their voices heard,” Alford told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Monday night. “And I respect that. They have every right to be there. We did not prohibit them, even though they did not live in our district.

“Some of them were there who had worked for the IRS and were getting laid off in Kansas City,” Alford continued. “And I really wanted to hear their concerns, and let’s work together about how can we find you the next job? There are thousands of jobs, 150,000 to 175,000 jobs, right now, available in Missouri.”

“You say ‘outside agitators,’” Collins interjected. “Are you saying that none of them were your constituents that were there?”

But Alford clearly didn’t view Democrats in his district as the constituents that he’s beholden to.

“No, no, no, no, I—some were,” Alford responded. “I went—and let me make that very clear. Some were our constituents. They clearly were not on—aligned with my way of thinking, and they did not vote for Trump.”

Alford was practically shut down at his own town hall Monday after he expressed support for Elon Musk’s massive layoff plan. At one point, while suggesting to the crowd that they could vote for someone else in the next election if they didn’t approve of Musk’s appointment, one person shouted back, “We didn’t elect Elon!”

Tensions were high enough that Alford seemingly took the protesters’ presence as a threat.

“This is serious business we’re talking about, and that’s why I went and faced the people who don’t want me in office and some I think who wanted to do me harm,” Alford told CNN. “That’s why we had a SWAT team and many police there.

“And I can take that, but I take this serious because this is the survival of our nation, and I don’t think people understand what a severe point we are,” he added.

Donald Trump is making sure Vivek Ramaswamy doesn’t come anywhere near the White House.

The president endorsed Ramaswamy for governor of Ohio on Monday night, a position the biotech entrepreneur pivoted to after being abruptly ousted as DOGE co-lead, likely in part due to his feuding with Elon Musk and calling white Americans lazy, stupid jocks. 

“VIVEK RAMASWAMY is running for Governor of the Great State of Ohio. I know him well, competed against him, and he is something SPECIAL. He’s Young, Strong, and Smart!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Vivek is also a very good person, who truly loves our Country. He will be a GREAT Governor of Ohio, will never let you down, and has my COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT!”

This entire gubernatorial bid seems to have stemmed from a series of iconically disastrous X posts, in which Ramaswamy opined that “our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.… A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from ‘Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers.”

This, along with what The Washington Post called a “deep philosophical rift” with Elon Musk, eventually got Ramaswamy sent to the toil in the Midwest. 

Ramaswamy is likely to face various other Republican primary challengers in Ohio, a state Trump carried by 11 points in 2024. Former state health director Amy Acton is the likely Democratic nominee.