Trump Allegedly Told GOP Leader “No One Gives a [Bleep] About Housing”

Former slumlord President Donald Trump reportedly told Speaker Mike Johnson that “no one gives a [bleep] about housing.”

Punchbowl News reported that Trump told Johnson this in private conversation earlier this week, and the House speaker then relayed it to a small committee of GOP leadership on Tuesday. The report was based on four sources who heard Johnson recount his conversation with the president as he tried to convey that a housing bill isn’t nearly as important as the SAVE Act, the GOP plan to force every American to prove their citizenship to vote—a blatant voter-suppression attempt.

Americans absolutely give a shit about housing. There are hundreds of thousands of people sleeping on the street every night. Many millennials and Gen Zers can’t afford to pay rent in this country, much less buy a house—making sure that the central tenet of the so-called “American dream” will never be a reality.

Trump himself campaigned on a kind of economic populism and uplifting the American working class (while blaming immigrants in the process, of course). And while his grift has been obvious to some for a while, millions of Americans actually believed in him and voted for him. At least now they have something showing them he couldn’t care less.

“Americans don’t give a shit about housing costs. They want DC to prioritize policies that actually improve their everyday lives,” Vox’s Eric Levitz wrote sarcastically. “Such as disenfranchising people who lack passports, putting a new Khamenei in charge of Iran, and making the Kennedy Center’s programming less woke.”

Jeffrey Epstein reportedly paid a settlement to a woman who also accused Donald Trump of sexually abusing her. 

Representative Ro Khanna told PBS News Hour’s Ali Rogin Wednesday that Richard Kahn, Epstein’s accountant, confirmed that the alleged sex trafficker’s estate had made a payment to a woman who accused both Epstein and Trump. Kahn did not say how much the settlement was, or when it was paid, during his deposition in front of the House Oversight Committee earlier in the day. 

“If it was fake, then why was she paid a settlement? There must be some validity to it,” Khanna said, according to Rogin. “Now, I’m not saying validity necessarily against Donald Trump. Maybe it was against Epstein. But he did confirm that there was a settlement payout.”

Khanna said that the Oversight Committee was “exploring” interviewing this woman as part of its investigation into Trump’s ties to Epstein. 

It wasn’t immediately clear which survivor of Epstein’s abuse Khanna was referring to. 

Buried in the FBI’s massive trove of documents were multiple interviews with a woman who claimed Trump had forced her to perform oral sex, punched her in the head, and raped her when she was between 13 and 15 years old. The woman, according to her testimony to the FBI, was abused by Epstein for years, and was harassed into silence for years after the abuse ended.  

The Department of Justice had previously removed the record of this woman’s FBI interviews from its Epstein database. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the rereleased testimony amounted to “completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence, from a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history.”

Last week, the FBI released a memo detailing an interview with yet another victim of Epstein’s who claimed Trump was on speakerphone while she was being abused. 

Journalists are getting better at asking an aging Donald Trump hard-hitting questions, and the man is starting to get truly ticked off.

A few days after New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh went semi-viral for confronting Trump about his assertion that Iran had possibly used a Tomahawk missile to bomb its own school, the president snapped at PBS News Hour reporter Liz Landers on Wednesday after she dared to push back against his false claims about the 2020 election.

After Landers asked Trump why the FBI had seized records related to the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona, on Monday, he replied, “Well, they probably thought the election was rigged, right?”

“It wasn’t rigged, though,” Landers shot back.

“Oh really—how do you know?” Trump said.

“Your own attorney general in 2020 said there was no measurable voter fraud to change the outcome of the election,” Landers said.

“You don’t think it was rigged?” Trump said. “I think it was rigged.”

“Sir, where’s the evidence of that?” Landers pressed.

“You say it wasn’t rigged, you’re a rotten reporter,” Trump said, before walking away from Landers to take another question.

A plethora of lawsuits, audits, and internal reviews have concluded that there was no systemic voting fraud in the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden by 38 electoral votes. As Landers noted, even Bill Barr, a Trump-appointed attorney general, concluded there was no widespread fraud after an investigation by the Department of Justice.

In fact, the closest thing to fraud in the 2020 election was a Trump-supporting Colorado county clerk named Tina Peters, who allowed a shady third party access to state voting machines. (Peters was eventually sentenced to nine years in jail, though Trump is now trying to get her clemency.)

But of course, Trump threw a massive hissy fit after losing power, to the point of kinda-sorta trying to stage a coup, so many MAGAcolytes in office and in the media continue to parrot his false claims today.

Donald Trump’s war on Iran is backfiring in a critical area: Iran is exporting more oil through the Strait of Hormuz than before.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Iran has taken control of the key waterway and effectively shut out the rest of the oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf. Since the war began February 28, Iran has loaded seven tankers, and in the past week, tankers have loaded an average of 2.1 million barrels of oil each day, more than its 2.0 million barrel average in February.

China, one of Iran’s biggest oil importers, appears to be taking most of the oil. And almost all ship traffic moving across the strait is “linked to Iran or China,” Christopher Long, head of intelligence at U.K. maritime-security company Neptune P2P Group, told the Journal.

Trump has claimed that it’s safe for ships to traverse the strait and tried to bully oil companies into challenging Iran, to no avail. He hasn’t followed up on his offer to use the U.S. Navy to escort ships, and even if he did, there are now more stopped ships than the Navy can handle. And now, Iran has reportedly begun laying mines in the strait, complicating naval traffic further.

“If for any reason mines were placed, and they are not removed forthwith, the Military consequences to Iran will be at a level never seen before. If, on the other hand, they remove what may have been placed, it will be a giant step in the right direction!” Trump angrily posted on Truth Social Tuesday. On Wednesday, the U.S. Central Command said it had destroyed 16 Iranian mine-laying ships.

But none of that seems to have affected Iran’s control of the strait, and its ability to export oil. It’s a scenario that the U.S. should have seen coming, considering that closing off the strait has been threatened by Iran before and is a long-standing pillar of Iranian defense strategy. To make matters worse, the U.S. decommissioned four anti-mine ships stationed in the Persian Gulf in January. Right now, Iran is controlling one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes for oil, and is exposing Trump’s lack of planning for this war.

We’re almost two weeks into the Iran war, and President Donald Trump still isn’t sure what his goals are.

Asked on Wednesday whether he would be able to declare victory in the Middle East if Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—becomes the new supreme leader of Iran, Trump balked.

“I don’t want to comment on that,” the president said.

Trump then changed the subject, launching into one of his patented rambling monologues: “I spoke with various countries, the leaders of various countries. You’ll have a list. And they said they’ve never seen anything like it.… We have the greatest military in the world by far.”

In comments given just a few hours later, Trump added that the U.S. “knocked out, twice, [Iranian] leadership. Now they have a new group coming up. Let’s see what happens to them.”

While Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a brutal ruler, quashing local dissent and sometimes executing citizens who defied his regime, Mojtaba Khamenei may be even worse for regular Iranians. A report from the Atlantic Council noted that Mojtaba is close with the “most ideologically extremist clerics” in Iran, and some experts say he is more likely to sink resources into building nuclear weapons than his father. Mojtaba was closely involved in his father’s decision-making throughout the latter’s time as supreme leader.

Trump said he was “not happy” with the Iranian Council of Experts’ decision to appoint the younger Khamenei as supreme leader last week. “I have to be involved in the appointment,” he told Axios at the time.

By not answering what should be an easy question, Trump is continuing what seems to be his Cabinet’s prevailing strategy surrounding the war: Be as unclear and disorganized as possible. Trump and his officials have not been able to decide whether the Iran war is a war or not, whether it’s over or just getting started, what caused the U.S. to get involved, and what exactly our demands for the people we’re bombing should be.

The Iran war ending would obviously be a good thing. But if all that changed is that we assassinated the ayatollah and now have his even crazier son in charge of the country, then what the hell was all this for?