JD Vance Gets Wrench Thrown in Cotswolds Vacation by Angry Pub Staff

Vice President JD Vance’s quiet vacation to the English countryside is becoming a real disturbance.

The vice president appears to be making no friends in the Cotswolds: Staff at The Bull in Charlbury reportedly told management that they would refuse to serve Vance if his family’s reservation at the sixteenth-century pub was accepted, according to The Daily Beast.

Meanwhile, other members of America’s political class have breezed through the town without complaint. Vance’s predecessor—Vice President Kamala Harris—was practically feted when she dined at The Bull mere weeks ago to celebrate Steve Jobs’s daughter Eve ahead of her wedding.

“It’s been the talk of the village—it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened here for a very long time,” one local told The Sun at the time.

Vance, on the other hand, has been pissing his Cotswolds neighbors off since his arrival in the tranquil neighborhood. Earlier this week, police affiliated with the vice president’s Secret Service were accused of going door-to-door to obtain residents’ information.

“We have had the police knocking on every door. They wanted the names of everybody living there and details of their social media. I know several people refused,” an unidentified dog walker from the hamlet told The Observer.

Vance’s office and the local police have denied the claim, telling press that the only residents they interacted with were to ensure passage through a blockade for the vice president.

“[We] are supporting the United States during the Vice President’s visit to our area to ensure the safety of all involved,” a spokesperson for Thames Valley Police told the Daily Mail. “A restricted access area has been put in place in a small part of Dean as part of our operation. We spoke to affected residents to ensure we are able to facilitate movement within the restricted access area. Residents were under no obligation to answer any questions and were not asked about social media.”

Vance’s presence has brought helicopters and SUVs to the quaint town. Villagers also expressed their malcontent with Vance after his expanded security detail overcrowded a local supermarket, blocking several handicapped parking spaces with his Secret Service entourage.

When Donald Trump seized the Washington, D.C., police and announced the deployment of scores of federal agents and National Guardsmen to the nation’s capital, he said these forces had license to do “whatever the hell they want.” Reportedly, what some of them want is to take down signs protesting their presence and leave sex toys on the ground.

Alex Koma, a politics reporter at Washington’s NPR member station, reported Friday that, according to residents of D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, a gaggle of federal agents gathered around a pro-immigration banner for a photo, before tearing it down and leaving a dildo in its place.

Footage of the incident, from a Ring doorbell surveillance camera across the street, shows a handful of agents surrounding the poster (which stated “Chinga la migra [Fuck ICE]. Mount Pleasant melts ICE”), before one of them rips it from the fence to which it’d been affixed. (The alleged dildo placement isn’t clearly visible in the video.)

This instance of immature vandalism joins other noble deeds performed by the forces descending on the capital on Trump’s orders, along with ambling around the city’s safest neighborhoods, bothering residents smoking cigarettes on a stoop, and sending a reported 20 officers to arrest a man for throwing a Subway sandwich at an agent (despite the man having offered to turn himself in, per his lawyer).

Donald Trump’s loyalty test is stretching far beyond the confines of the White House.

The Trump administration has released a scorecard to rank the endeavors of some 553 companies and trade associations to advance the president’s agenda and his “big, beautiful bill.”

Organizations are ranked on the sheet as strong, moderate, or low, Axios reported Friday, with ratings built off social media posts, press releases, video testimonials, ads, White House event attendance, and other budget law–oriented efforts.

The data is being circulated among White House senior staff as a temperature gauge on how to interact with companies and open calls with K Street (a nickname for Washington’s business district).

Some of these “good partners” include Uber, DoorDash, United, Delta, AT&T, Cisco, Airlines for America, and the Steel Manufacturers Association, according to Axios.

The scoresheet “helps us see who really goes out and helps vs. those who just come in and pay lip service,” a senior White House official told the publication. But that doesn’t mean the project is done—instead, the administration plans to continue updating the list, considering it an evolving document as more corporate behavior plays out in relation to Trump’s agenda.

“If groups/companies want to start advocating more now for the tax bill or additional administration priorities, we will take that into account in our grading,” the official said.

Loyalty has been a chief internal priority for Trump and his team since before the election. That common denominator carried more weight than practically any other quality as the forty-seventh president selected dozens of nominees to lead different agencies, nearly all of whom had previously lent a hand to Trump in his criminal trials, donated money to his political campaign, or helped build out one of his presidential transition playbooks, such as Project 2025.

Senator Bill Hagerty is dusting off the Three-Fifths Compromise as precedent for his bill to exclude undocumented immigrants from the U.S. census.

Hagerty appeared on Fox Business Friday to support the legislation, which would end the practice of counting all residents of a state—regardless of citizenship status—in the decennial census, which is used to determine congressional apportionment.

“We should only be counting citizens,” he said, arguing that his proposal to abandon centuries of precedent would stop Democratic states from “backfilling with illegal aliens.”

Fox Business host Ashley Webster let out a concerned huff and then asked: “Is it constitutionally legal to do that?”

“There’s constitutional interpretation, I think, that has been misapplied,” Hagerty replied. “It goes back to slavery days and, you know, what portion of a person is going to be counted, et cetera.”

Here, of course, he was referring to the notorious Three-Fifths Compromise, reached between Northern and Southern states at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, under which only three-fifths of a state’s enslaved population counted for apportionment and taxation purposes (all enslaved individuals were still included in the federal census, even if in an “odious way,” as legal scholar Steve Vladeck put it).

Not done making ludicrous statements in support of his bill, Hagerty went on to claim it was “not the intent of Founding Fathers” to count undocumented immigrants.

But the Framers, even while including the Three-Fifths Compromise, conspicuously opted to use the term “persons,” rather than “citizens,” to describe who was to be counted. In 1866, when the Fourteenth Amendment did away with the compromise, members of Congress chose to include noncitizens as well, deciding that apportionment populations include “the whole number of persons in each State.”

The U.S. Defense Department is sharing AI-generated images of female soldiers to make it seem like the government’s recruitment efforts are actually working.

In a propaganda segment on One America News’s The Matt Gaetz Show Thursday, Defense Department press secretary Kingsley Wilson lauded the department’s “incredible success” in recruiting women.

“These numbers are fantastic. Under the previous administration we had about 16,000 female recruits last year. Now we’ve got upwards of 24,000,” Wilson said. While the Pentagon has not officially released these numbers, it gave the same ones to Fox News earlier this week.

The broadcast showed several “photographs” of strikingly beautiful and notably diverse female officers. But lo and behold, a Grok AI watermark was distinctly visible in the corner of each image, revealing that the military’s newest recruits were nothing but ghosts in the machine.

A DOD spokesperson told CNN that they had not provided the phony images. Later, during Thursday evening’s show, Gaetz apologized for showing AI-generated images. “The DOD didn’t give us these images; Grok did. And we’ll use better judgment going forward,” he said.

But the DOD doesn’t seem to care either way. The clip—and the fake photographs—were shared by the Department of Defense Rapid Response account on X, touting the military’s success in hitting its recruitment goals early. The Army also said that it met its yearly recruitment goal of 61,000 new soldiers in June, but recruitment numbers were reportedly rising even before Donald Trump’s reelection. That didn’t stop Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from claiming a so-called “Trump Bump.”

One might recall just several months ago when Hegseth specifically said that women were not fit for combat roles. “It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” he explained. “Our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where traditionally—not traditionally, over history—men in those positions are more capable.”

Now his agency is desperate to welcome female service members—or, at least, make it look like it does.