Trump Admits He Told Top Official to Ignore the Courts

An hour into his Thursday Cabinet meeting, Donald Trump made a remark that should infuriate every American who has been stuck paying high prices for foreign products.

Referring to Minnesota and California, Trump said: “I spoke with Russell Vought. I said, ‘Russell, don’t send them any money.’ He said, ‘But we have a court order that we have to.’ Can you believe it? … Justice Roberts doesn’t like when I say it, but the judges are really hurting this country.”

The “court order” mentioned by Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, refers to a ruling that the Trump administration must refund companies that were taxed for shipping foreign goods into the U.S.—plus interest.

The order was handed down by a judge with the Court of International Trade, and came after the Supreme Court ruled that the tariffs Trump imposed early in his second term were unconstitutional.

Trump has previously suggested the government would not refund the companies and instead try to litigate the decision. “We’ll end up being in court for the next five years,” he said.

The amount of taxpayer money the Trump administration owes these companies increases by $700 million every month. And when the companies aren’t getting their refunds, research shows they’re passing the tariff costs on to consumers.

Yet the Trump administration continues to stall, claiming it doesn’t have the technical capabilities to process the refunds and whining, as Trump did on Thursday, about the judges making it return what is owed.

President Trump wants to turn the White House Treaty Room—traditionally reserved for ambassadors and foreign dignitaries—into a spare suite bedroom with a bathroom attached.

The New York Times reported Thursday that Trump floated his latest home improvement project on February 6 while giving a White House tour to a small group of people from the Committee for the Preservation of the White House and the Commission of Fine Arts. He wants the room used by presidents from Ulysses S. Grant to George W. Bush to be a one-bed, one-bath. It’s unclear why exactly the White House would need another guest room.

“President Trump is the builder-in-chief with an extraordinary eye for detail and design, and his bold vision will be imprinted upon the fabric of America and be felt by generations to come,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Times. “His successes will continue to give the White House the glory it deserves.”

This would be the latest in the slew of White House renovation projects that Trump has unnecessarily undertaken. He turned the Rose Garden into a concrete patio and put tacky gold flourishings throughout the White House, including the Oval Office. And of course, he has already demolished the East Wing in preparation for his true pet project, a 90,000-square-foot grand ballroom. While Trump is quick to tout his prowess as a “builder,” it becomes more and more clear that he thinks the White House is just another one of his estates.

The State Department is reallocating $1.2 billion in foreign aid funding to President Donald Trump’s war criminal–filled Board of Peace, Semafor first reported Thursday.

Officials took $1 billion from international disaster assistance, $200 million from peacekeeping operations, and $50 million from international organizations, in order to finance the president’s slush fund posing as a peace plan for Gaza. In reality, the Board of Peace has not transferred any money to Gaza (despite saying it will), nor has it disclosed how it will spend any of its funding to promote international peace. The whole thing is seemingly a farce to carry out Jared Kushner’s master plan to turn Gaza into a strip of luxury hotels.

Trump previously announced the U.S. would give $10 billion in total to the board, which he assured taxpayers is “a very small number when you look at that compared to the cost of war.” Countries seeking permanent members on the Board of Peace are required to pay $1 billion for their spot.

On Thursday, Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto introduced a bill that would take $1 billion of the Board of Peace’s funding and redirect it to the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, amid skyrocketing gas prices from Trump’s war in Iran.

“Instead of giving President Trump a $1 billion blank check to fund a ‘Board of Peace’ that has offered no transparency about how it is investing its money, let’s focus on helping American families afford their monthly power bill,” Cortez Masto said in a statement.

Like many of Trump’s insane foreign policy stunts, the apparent transfer of funds was done without congressional approval. In a properly functioning government, the president actually wouldn’t be allowed to take billions of dollars in the midst of a partial government shutdown to fund an experimental pet project.

Donald Trump isn’t too happy with Vice President JD Vance’s attempts to distance himself from the president’s reckless war in Iran.

Trump has been making “snide, annoyed comments” about Vance’s and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for his wildly unpopular military campaign in the Middle East, two anonymous sources told Zeteo.

Those who heard Trump’s remarks about Vance were reportedly surprised to hear him talk that way, as the two have been generally simpatico since Trump entered the White House.

Vance has appeared desperate to create daylight between himself and the conflict after some leakers claimed he was skeptical about the president’s war, in an apparent effort to salvage his electability for 2028. And Gabbard refused to back up the White House’s claim that Iran presented an “imminent threat” when she appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month. Both figures have previously expressed a distaste for American intervention in the Middle East.

Now Vance may be headed to Islamabad this weekend to help negotiate the end to the war he supposedly never wanted to start. If those talks go ahead, they will likely fail, and Vance won’t be able to hide from his involvement.

The White House insisted that the president’s relationship with Vance was “as warm as ever.”

“President Trump’s Peace through Strength foreign policy is a tried-and-true approach that keeps America safe and deters global threats,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told Zeteo. “DNI Gabbard is an important member of the President’s team and her work continues to serve him and this country well.”

President Donald Trump was humiliated in a Cabinet meeting Thursday while trying to defend voting by mail in Florida’s special election earlier this week.

When asked by a reporter why he voted by mail—a process he previously referred to as “mail-in cheating” just days earlier—Trump had no coherent response.

“Because of the fact that I’m president of the United States, I did a mail-in ballot for elections that took place in Florida because I felt I should be here, instead of being in the beautiful sunshine,” he responded, claiming he was in Washington, D.C., leading up to the election and could not have voted in person.

That’s not true. The president was at his Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month, as the reporter pointed out.

“But you were in Palm Beach, sir, the last few weekends—could you have gone in person?” she responded, swiftly dismantling any justification Trump claimed to have for voting by mail.

The president has long blasted mail-in voting as a form of mass voter fraud and a threat to democracy. Last week, he rejected his own party’s bid to end the partial government shutdown, calling on the Senate to pass the SAVE Act before making a deal. The Jim Crow–era voter suppression law would make it significantly harder to vote by mail.

According to the Palm Beach County’s Supervisor of Elections website, Trump also voted by mail in 2020.

Following the lie about his whereabouts, Trump rambled aimlessly to defend himself in trademark style.

“We have exceptions for mail-in ballots, you do know that, right?” he said, fumbling his words as he pointed to exceptions like military service, illness, disability, and “being away.” Not one of those applied to him.