Lisa Murkowski Suddenly Realizes She Got Played on Trump Budget Bill

Remember all of those hefty handouts Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski won in exchange for sealing the deal on Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill? It looks like the president has found a way to get out of delivering.

“I feel cheated,” Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News Friday. “I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else.”

Ahead of the bill’s passage earlier this month, Murkowski had co-sponsored an amendment to ease the phaseout of tax credits for solar and wind energy under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act. Her measure would ensure a 12-month window for clean energy projects, which would end in 2027. These tax credits would help to alleviate a looming energy crisis along Alaska’s Railbelt, the electrical grid that serves roughly 75 percent of the population, due to declining resources of natural gas.

Trump threw a wrench in that agreement Friday when he issued an executive order to “end market distorting subsidies” for green energy projects. The order directs Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to take actions to “strictly enforce the termination of the clean electricity production and investment tax credits.”

Now Murkowski claims that she and her pals were duped. “Do I feel like the administration was not being up-front with us? Yes,” she told the Anchorage Daily News.

She torched Trump’s order as “reckless,” claiming that it directly “goes against” what he signed into law earlier this month with the budget.

Murkowski was the deciding vote to pass Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” through the Senate, green-lighting the gutting of social programs such as SNAP and Medicaid while extending tax breaks for the rich, and agreeing to add trillions to the national deficit. She’d sent the bill back to the House with the hopes that lawmakers would continue to refine the massive tax and spending bill, only for it to be immediately passed and then signed into law.

But under the Trump administration, which regularly skirts congressional authority to withhold federal spending and obliterate government agencies, lawmakers should know better than to think the president actually cares about the law of the land.

The U.K.’s Stop Trump Coalition and other protesters are planning to put Vice President JD Vance’s luxury vacation spot on blast.

Vance and his family have a trip scheduled for the Cotswolds, a countryside region in Southwest England often frequented by the rich and famous (Ellen DeGeneres currently resides there). They’re expected to be met with a wide variety of demonstrators—anti-Trump, pro-Palestinian, trade union members, and environmentalists.

“JD Vance is every bit as unwelcome in the UK as Donald Trump,” a representative from the Stop Trump Coalition told The Telegraph. “We remember how Vance cut short his ski trip in Vermont because he was so enraged by the sight of a few protesters. We are sure that, even in the Cotswolds, he will find the resistance waiting.” The group also plans to protest President Trump’s upcoming visit to Scotland, which begins on Friday.

Vance will be in London in mid-August, then head to Cotswolds, and later to Scotland. The vice president has been met with vitriol on his vacations thus far, speaking to the mostly negative feelings that much of the public has for the current administration, both home and abroad. He and his family were booed ruthlessly while they were at Disneyland earlier this month.

“Hope you enjoy your family time, @JDVance,” California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote on X. “The families you’re tearing apart certainly won’t.”

According to a new report, Jeffrey Epstein’s first accuser, on two occasions, mentioned Donald Trump’s name to law enforcement as an associate worth investigating. The revelation raises the possibility that files related to the case of the deceased sex trafficker contain information that would embarrass the president.

Artist Maria Farmer, who worked for Epstein from 1995 to 1996 and says she was sexually assaulted by him and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, told The New York Times that, when she spoke to law enforcement about Epstein in 1996 and 2006, she urged them to investigate his associates, including now-President Trump.

The Times report describes an unpleasant encounter Farmer recalls with Trump at Epstein’s Manhattan offices in 1995.

After Farmer was called in to work by Epstein one night, she said Trump arrived and “started to hover over” her, while staring “at her bare legs.”

Farmer, who was wearing running shorts, grew frightened, before Epstein entered and told Trump, “No, no, She’s not here for you.”

Epstein and Trump then are said to have left the room, at which point Farmer heard Trump speculate that she was 16 years old.

While Farmer reports having no “alarming interactions” with Trump afterward and “did not see him engage in inappropriate conduct with girls or women,” her experience—which the White House fervently denies happened, but which is corroborated by accounts from her mother and sister—was apparently enough for her to bring up Trump’s name when speaking to the New York Police Department and FBI.

The report, as the Times notes, shows how the Epstein files may “contain material that is embarrassing or politically problematic to” the president, as he continues to dismiss the case as a Democratic hoax, disowning his supporters who remain invested in it after his DOJ effectively closed the case earlier this month.

Details about Trump’s long-documented relationship to Epstein are continuing to surface. Days before the Times report, The Wall Street Journal unearthed a sexually suggestive birthday card Trump reportedly gave Epstein in 2003. (Trump has denied the veracity of the report and is now suing the paper.)

Meanwhile, when asked whether his name appears in the Epstein files, Trump has insisted that the files were concocted by the previous two Democratic administrations.

Donald Trump has become so desperate in trying to change the subject from Jeffrey Epstein, that he’s now started ranting about imprisoning former President Barack Obama.

During a posting spree on Truth Social Sunday night, Trump posted a series of lame memes attacking Obama, after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard suggested last week that the former president should be prosecuted for participating in a “treasonous conspiracy.”

Gabbard released a declassified report alleging that members of the Obama administration had “manufactured and politicized” intelligence to create the narrative that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. It’s worth noting that shortly after the 2016 election, the Obama administration insisted that hackers had not affected the vote tallies.

Gabbard said she would deliver her findings to the Department of Justice to seek long-awaited accountability on behalf of Trump, who, despite twice finding his way back into the White House anyway, obviously never emotionally recovered from the so-called Russiagate “hoax.”

On Truth Social, Trump posted a Brady Bunch–style photo grid of Obama Cabinet officials wearing prison jumpsuits, and a video of different Democratic officials declaring that “no one is above the law” while circus music played. He also shared an AI-generated video of Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and donning prison orange.

This is the third week of fallout from the Trump administration’s disastrous rollout of the Epstein files—or lack thereof. The Justice Department announced earlier this month that the sex offender kept no incriminating “client list,” even though Trump’s attorney general claimed one had been sitting on her desk, sparking widespread backlash among Trump’s conspiracy-addled following. Now Trump hopes to shift the flames by tossing them another political enemy.

Donald Trump just made good on his threat to sue The Wall Street Journal for reporting on his lewd birthday note to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The president filed a lawsuit in Miami court Friday against Dow Jones, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, and two Wall Street Journal reporters, according to Reuters. The two journalists named in the lawsuit are likely Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo, whose names appeared in the story byline.

The Journal reported Thursday that in 2003, Trump penned Epstein a “bawdy” note inside of a doodle of a voluptuous woman as part of a book of birthday notes for the financier. The president wrote that he had “certain things in common” with the child sex offender, and wished his “pal” that “everyday may be a wonderful secret.”

In a post on Truth Social Thursday night, Trump fumed over the report, threatening legal action.

“The Wall Street Journal, and Rupert Murdoch, personally, were warned directly by President Donald J. Trump that the supposed letter they printed by President Trump to Epstein was FAKE and, if they print it, they will be sued,” he wrote.

Trump said he’d insisted the letter was fake, but that the publication had proceeded with the “false, malicious, and defamatory story anyway.”

“President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly,” Trump wrote.

By the next morning, Trump was ranting about getting Murdoch to testify in court. And within 24 hours of the story being published, a lawsuit had been filed. Talk about promises made and promises kept.

Trump’s lawsuit against the publication isn’t the least bit surprising—he has a tendency to sue any outlet that makes him look bad.

Paramount recently agreed to a $16 million settlement with Trump over the editing of CBS’s 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, despite CBS calling the suit “completely without merit.” The settlement summoned criticism that Paramount was attempting to ease its sale to Skydance Media, which will require approval from the Trump administration. On Friday, there was rampant speculation that openly criticizing the deal had cost Stephen Colbert his late-night gig.

Earlier this year, ABC News agreed to pay Trump $15 million to settle his defamation lawsuit over George Stephanopoulos’s use of the phrase “liable for rape” while discussing Trump’s E. Jean Carroll case verdict, which technically found Trump liable for sexual abuse, not rape. That settlement showed the then president-elect exactly how he can silence the press during his second administration.

This story has been updated.