Trump Breaks With Own Defense Department Over Reporter Restrictions

The Pentagon’s latest round of press restrictions go too far, according to the president.

Donald Trump criticized the War Department while en route to Charlie Kirk’s memorial service Sunday, scolding the defense agency for forbidding reporters from publishing “unauthorized” reports—even if they’re founded on nonclassified information.

“Should the Pentagon be part of deciding what reporters can report on?” a reporter asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Trump responded, steps away from Marine One. “Nothing stops reporters. You know that.”

Unfortunately, a government’s white-knuckled control on the flow of information does stop reporters from disseminating information. Under War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new rules, journalists are required to pledge that they would not report on anything from the department that had not been approved for official release. The new policy, announced Friday, would have journalists either report government-sponsored propaganda or have their press credentials revoked.

But even those inside the Pentagon are not on board with Hegseth’s Orwellian scheme. By Monday, three Pentagon officials had already decried the initiative, with one insider telling The Intercept that the rules were a “mockery of American ideals.”

“The idea they want editorial control over the press is something I expect from a banana republic, not the United States,” the same official told The Intercept.

Representatives for America’s media institutions, meanwhile, came out in full force against the restrictions.

“This is a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the U.S. military,” National Press Club president Mike Balsamo said in a statement. “If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting. It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American.”

For months, paranoia in the Pentagon has swelled while Hegseth’s inner circle has continued to shrink. This latest act of censorship is another step in Hegesth’s long journey to rein in his department. So far during the Fox News star’s short tenure atop the military agency, the Pentagon has experienced several astounding leaks that have rattled the Trump administration and its credibility on the international stage.

Those include instances in which The Atlantic’s editor in chief was invited into a Signal group chat between multiple Trump officials where they discussed real-time updates to a U.S. airstrike in Yemen, and another eyebrow-raising situation in which Hegesth intervened in U.S. foreign policy by suspending an aid shipment to Ukraine without notifying anyone—including the president.

President Donald Trump delivered incoherent remarks as he departed for the memorial of Charlie Kirk, claiming the event would be a “time of whatever.”

Trump told reporters outside the White House that he was going to “celebrate the life of a great man today. Really a great man. He’s a young man, but a great man.”

“And we look forward to it. It really is,” Trump continued confusedly. “We want to look at it as a time of healing, a time of whatever.”

Trump has struggled to convey sincere sorrow over Kirk’s death. Just days after his right-wing ally was fatally shot in Utah, Trump repeatedly responded to questions about Kirk by plugging his own plans to add a $200 million ballroom to the White House.

The president also reportedly missed a September 15 vigil for Kirk at the Kennedy Center in favor of going golfing.

True to his word, Trump used the “time of healing” for whatever. The president spent most of his address at Kirk’s memorial complaining about his personal grievances, and even contradicted remarks from Kirk’s widow by promising to enact more political violence and retribution against his administration’s perceived enemies.

A new Forbes report reveals that the Trump family has profited enormously from the presidency, doubling its fortune to a total of about $10 billion.

For Donald Trump, the year of his White House comeback has also been “the most lucrative year of his life,” with the president raking in $3 billion, two-thirds of which came from cryptocurrency—including his meme coin and World Liberty Financial, a crypto company started by his family and that of Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy.

World Liberty is notably at the center of a scandal, as The New York Times revealed last week. In May, the firm secured a $2 billion investment from an Emirati royal who just  happens to control a company that—per a deal with the United Arab Emirates that was announced two weeks later, and which Witkoff helped negotiate—will receive precious AI computer chips from the U.S. government.

Trump’s second son, Eric Trump, has seen his wealth balloon from $40 million last year to an estimated $750 million, in large part thanks to crypto. His older brother, Don Jr., is worth $500 million, compared to $50 million last year, having also cashed in on crypto and “the anti-woke economy,” among other ventures. The president’s youngest son, Barron Trump, is worth $150 million at 19 years old—again, largely from crypto.

Melania Trump, Forbes reports, has profited in both “typical First Lady ways (books, speeches, a documentary)” and “unquestionably Trumpian ways.” The latter category includes her own meme coin, $MELANIA—whose inauguration-eve launch was quite a shady affair: A group of crypto traders took in nearly $100 million by buying $MELANIA minutes before it was announced, then off-loading most of their holdings when its value then spiked.

The president’s daughter Ivanka is worth an estimated $100 million, and her husband, Jared Kushner, is now a billionaire, with a major contributor being a private equity firm he founded the same month Trump left the White House in 2021. Kushner was a senior adviser in the first Trump administration, and has since relied on relationships he built during his tenure to court investors.

Across the board, according to Forbes, the president’s family has doubled its net worth since the 2024 election.

President Donald Trump appeared to feign ignorance over the weekend about shutting down a bribery investigation into White House border czar Tom Homan.

Speaking to reporters Saturday, Trump was asked about a MSNBC report that the Department of Justice had dropped an investigation into Homan, after he was allegedly caught on camera accepting $50,000 in cash payments from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives in return for favorable contracts.

“Did you see the reporting on Tom Homan—” one reporter began. 

“No, I haven’t,” Trump interrupted.

The typically verbose Trump kept quiet about the latest allegations against his border czar—and his administration’s role in covering it up. 

Homan was allegedly caught accepting payments during a September 2024 meeting with undercover agents in Texas, promising that if Trump won, he could ensure favorable contracts for border enforcement. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at the Department of Justice have reportedly shuttered the investigation into Homan.

In a statement to MSNBC, FBI Director Kash Patel and deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed the previous administration’s probe had found “no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.” White House deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson claimed it was a “blatantly political investigation” and that Homan was responsible for awarding contracts under the current Trump administration. Homan had previously served as the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first administration.  

President Trump plans to “save” TikTok by handing it over to America’s oligarchs. 

A senior White House official confirmed Monday that ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, plans to move an 80 percent stake of its company to America’s richest, most powerful men. ByteDance will create a separate, American copy of its infamous algorithm to lease to a new group spearheaded by Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz, Larry Ellison’s Oracle, and the private equity firm Silver Lake. Ellison and Oracle will then control U.S. user data and be able to shape the algorithm as they see fit. 

“The algorithm will be retrained from the ground up and protected by Oracle to ensure Americans’ data is safeguarded and foreign influence is removed,” a senior official told Fox News.

Trump, who has floated banning and saving TikTok multiple times now, has given the men 120 days to finalize a deal. On Sunday, the president also confirmed that Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell and conservative media moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch will also likely be involved in the deal.

The involvement of conservative billionaires and technocrats in the deal has raised valid concerns over the future of free speech. Conservatives are on the record blaming TikTok, for example, for the fact that the overwhelming majority of young Americans are opposed to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Writing for Bari Weiss’s Zionist news site The Free Press, former Republican representative and current Palantir “head of defense” Mike Gallagher outright blamed TikTok’s algorithm for making young people “support Hamas.”    

Gallagher isn’t alone. In fact, his position is identical to the rest of the GOP’s.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts,” Senator Mitt Romney said during a panel in May of last year. “So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the president will get the chance to make action in that regard.”

Now, that algorithm—and your data— will be retrained and refiltered by Oracle and by Ellison, who has a very close relationship with the Israel Defense Forces and believes that “there is no greater honor” than supporting Israel.