Trump Press Secretary Announces Terrifying Change to White House Press

The Trump administration has decided to take over determining the press pool that covers the White House, shutting out the White House Correspondents’ Association. 

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Tuesday that the White House’s press team would take over the press pool, effectively determining which journalists get to travel with Donald  Trump for their news coverage. 

“We want more outlets and new outlets to have a chance to take part in the press pool to cover this administration’s unprecedented achievements up close, front and center,” Leavitt said. “We are going to give the power back to the people who read your papers, who watch your television shows, and who listen to your radio stations.”

On Monday, a federal court ruled against restoring the Associated Press’s access to White House press events, causing Leavitt to declare victory and insist that “covering the American presidency in the most intimate and limited spaces in this White House … is a privilege, it is not a legal right.” The AP has been barred ever since Trump signed an executive order to change the Gulf of Mexico’s name to the Gulf of America, a change the wire service has not adopted. 

The WHCA issued a statement criticizing the Trump administration’s move, claiming that the White House gave no notice of the change and saying that it “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States.”

“Since its founding in 1914, the WHCA has sought to ensure that the reporters, photographers, producers and technicians who actually do the work—365 days of every year—decide amongst themselves how these rotations are operated, so as to ensure consistent professional standards and fairness in access on behalf of all readers, viewers and listeners,” WHCA President Eugene Daniels, a correspondent for Politico, said. 

It’s an unprecedented move for a president to determine the journalists that travel with him. In the past, presidents usually ignored the media outlets or journalists that they did not like, instead of barring them from the White House or Air Force One. The famously thin-skinned Trump has already filed lawsuits against media organizations he doesn’t like and is using the Federal Communications Commission to go after broadcast outlets that irk him. Now he’s trying to dictate news coverage of his administration. 

DOGE deleted the top five highest savings claims on its “wall of receipts” leaderboard after various news outlets pointed out multiple errors in its calculations, The New York Times’ David Fahrenthold reported Tuesday.

The savings, deleted with no explanation from DOGE or the White House, include: a $232 million cut to the Social Security Administration that actually amounted to only $560,000; an $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was actually only $8 million; and three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development that ended up being a measly $18 million. These mistakes all seem to be completely avoidable human errors.

The bottom of DOGE’s savings list reads: “Scoreboard normalized to agency size and budget.

“This is a preliminary leaderboard, and there will likely be some initial mistakes in the relative rankings.”

DOGE had claimed earlier this week that it has saved $65 billion thanks to all of its cuts. Its website still boasts this number, despite the recently deleted claims.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to stop its U.S. Agency for International Development spending freeze, giving the government an 11:59 p.m. deadline on Wednesday to pay “all invoices and letter of credit drawdown requests” for work done prior to February 13.

Judge Amir Ali granted the motion to enforce his restraining order against the USAID budget freeze on Tuesday, noting that the Trump administration could take “no action to impede foreign assistance funds for work already completed,” according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

The motion comes nearly two weeks after Ali initially ordered the White House to stop withholding congressionally appropriated humanitarian aid that was supposed to be distributed by the agency. In his ruling, the judge underscored the financial devastation wreaked on the nation’s suppliers and nonprofits—who work in tandem with USAID to supply humanitarian assistance—by the spontaneous disruption.

Ali ultimately declined a request by a coalition of nonprofits to find the Trump administration in contempt of the order, though the judge did find that the White House was seemingly wasting time in order to cook up “a new, post hoc rationalization for the en masse suspension.”

The continued inaction led to a fiery moment between Ali and a Justice Department attorney on Tuesday, in which the judge became increasingly irate that the Trump administration could not point to any concrete actions they had taken to implement the restraining order.

“I don’t know why I can’t get a straight answer from you,” Ali said, according to Cheney. “Are you aware of an unfreezing of the disbursement of funds for those contracts and agreements that were frozen before February 13?”

“I’m not in a position to answer that,” the DOJ attorney responded.

USAID provides humanitarian assistance and funding for infrastructure and developmental tech in developing nations. The information obtained through the agency’s work immediately aids and shields American citizens. Data aggregated from aid missions around the world inform U.S. policy on issues ranging from public health to diplomacy. Earlier this month, news that there was an Ebola outbreak in Kampala, Uganda, was reported via a USAID mission, for example. Choosing to nix the agency would force the U.S. into an information dark age that could see the country caught off guard in future health crises.

Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk has made it a personal mission to dismantle USAID. Earlier this month, Musk slammed USAID—which distributed more than $40 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign aid in 2023 and has closed $86 billion in private-sector deals—as a “criminal organization” that is an “arm of the radical-left globalists.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin just offered to cut Donald Trump in on his invasion of Ukraine by pillaging its seized minerals.

After Ukraine initially refused to offer up its mineral reserves as payback for U.S. military aid, Putin has swooped in to offer the U.S. minerals from … Russian-occupied Ukraine. Putin told state media Monday that Russia was “ready to work with our partners, including the Americans” to access several mineral reserves across the country—and outside of it too, according to Politico.

The autocrat emphasized that Russia had “an order of magnitude more resources of this kind than Ukraine,” but it seems that his bid also included reserves in Ukraine. Putin name-dropped Donbas, a Ukrainian region occupied by Russian forces, and referred to the country’s seized lands as “so-called new historical territories.”

The offer comes as U.S. and Ukraine officials enter the final stages of a contentious mineral agreement.

The deal would funnel half of the Eastern European nation’s rare earth minerals—hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of materials used in tech and electronic products—into the American market but wouldn’t do anything to ensure Ukraine’s security or economic interests in the future.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy publicly balked at a deal proposed by the Trump administration Sunday, which would grant the U.S. preferential access to Ukraine’s critical mineral resources.

“I will not sign what ten generations of Ukrainians will have to pay back,” Zelenskiy said Sunday. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice Olga Stefanishyna wrote in a post on X Monday that U.S. and Ukrainian officials were “in the final stages” of negotiations.

On Monday, Trump held a meeting with the G7 Summit, where he said that he “emphasized the importance” of the proposed “Critical Minerals and Rare-Earths Deal” between the U.S. and Ukraine. The Trump administration has repeatedly pledged to bring an end to the war in Ukraine, but has also openly echoed Moscow’s rhetoric downplaying its role in the yearslong conflict. Last week, Trump claimed that Ukraine had actually invited Russia’s illegal and deadly incursion into its territory, and the U.S. also joined 18 countries that refused to sign a U.N. resolution to condemn Russia for invading Ukraine.

Should Trump accept Putin’s offer to raid Ukraine’s mineral resources, he won’t just be rubber-stamping Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he will be participating in it too!

House Speaker Mike Johnson refused Tuesday to promise not to cut Medicaid. 

At a press conference, Johnson was asked by a reporter if “unequivocally … further down the line, there won’t be any cuts to Medicaid programs.” 

Johnson’s response wasn’t encouraging. 

“Medicaid is hugely problematic because it has a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse. Everybody knows that, we all know it intuitively. No one in here would disagree,” Johnson said, claiming that experts say that the Medicaid program has $50 billion in fraud. 

“Everybody is committed to preserving Medicare benefits for those who desperately need it and deserve it and qualify for it. What we’re talking about is rooting out the fraud, waste, and abuse,” Johnson added. 

Johnson was echoed by Republican Representative Nick LaLota, who told CNN Tuesday morning that Social Security and Medicare were off the table in the House’s budget talks but that Medicaid “was a subject for discussion,” claiming that undocumented immigrants—whom he called “illegals”—needed to be taken off the rolls. LaLota added that work requirements for Medicaid were also needed and that waste, fraud, and abuse within the program needed to be curbed.   

Johnson’s and LaLota’s comments seem to indicate that cuts are coming to a program popular on both sides of the aisle. While House Republicans seem to be trying to downplay any such cuts, claiming that Medicare and Social Security will be largely left intact, the fact that they can’t say the same for Medicaid doesn’t bode well, especially since Donald Trump has already endorsed sweeping cuts to the program. There may soon be a backlash to the GOP’s budget when it gets released.