Trump “Not in a Rush” to End Hugely Unpopular War as Gas Costs Surge

President Donald Trump accidentally just handed Democrats another sound bite they can use to destroy him.

During an appearance on Fox News Monday, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly was asked to explain Trump’s thinking about high energy prices.

Kelly claimed Trump was “clear-eyed” about the rising gas prices, adding that Iran had been “incredibly decimated” militarily and “totally crippled” economically.

“The president is not in a rush—he has all the cards at his disposal, because he knows that Iran is getting weaker and weaker by the day, while the United States is getting stronger and stronger,” she said.

Kelly’s insistence that Trump is in control of the disaster he created in the Middle East is at once both deluded and damaging.

Shackled by sycophancy, Kelly insisted that Trump maintains a mastery over world events, including the economic disruption that is hurting Americans. He could end our suffering with a snap of his fingers, but he’s “not in a rush.” In reality, Trump’s demonstrated inability to strike a deal with Iran after more than two months shows just how out of control this situation has become.

Meanwhile, the average price of gas in the United States reached more than $4.50 per gallon Sunday, according to the AAA motor club. U.S. households are expected to pay at least $876 more on gas this year than last year, according to Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.

But speaking in the Oval Office Monday, Trump claimed that there was no cause for concern, because gas prices would “drop like a rock” as soon as Iran relinquished its grip on the Strait of Hormuz.

It’s not clear this will be anytime soon, as reports suggest Trump has spoken hyperbolically about the extent of destruction in Iran. A recent CIA analysis suggested that Iran could survive another three to four months under the U.S. military blockade without experiencing severe economic hardships. The president has also overstated the damage to Iranian military assets while the Pentagon has downplayed the extensive damage to U.S. military assets.

Jeffrey Epstein associate and former child actor Brock Pierce was a guest at one of Donald Trump’s Florida golf courses last week, helping to unveil a golden statue of the president.

Pierce was a business partner and friend to Epstein for nearly a decade, helping him invest in the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase while emailing him about women. In 2012 Pierce told Epstein, “I had a great time with the girls. Hope they had fun too. Thanks.”

Also that year, Pierce sent Epstein dozens of pictures of a Ukrainian woman named Anastasia, writing that “Ukraine is now my favorite country,” after Epstein asked him to “take photos and find me a present.”

In 2018, Pierce emailed Epstein about how he had “a boat in Antigua full of amazing Ukraine’s finest” waiting for him.

This is the man who was cutting the ribbon for the golden statue at the president’s resort last week.

Senator John Fetterman has aligned himself with one more MAGA talking point.

The Pennsylvania Democrat appeared on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast Monday, laughing alongside the “anti-woke” comedian as the pair mutually praised Donald Trump’s “honest” treatment of the press, including an instance in which the president called a female journalist a “piggy.”

“The things that he says aloud, the way he just voices his interior monologue—there is something not exactly psychologically normal about someone who just voices their interior monologue—but it gives him an authenticity that no one else can possibly match,” Maher said.

“I saw his interview with Norah O’Donnell after the shooting, the next day, and she quotes the assassin who called him a pedophile, Hitler, whatever he called him,” Maher continued, referring to the attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and taking a moment to suggest that Trump is not a pedophile. “But his reaction immediately was, to her, ‘You’re a terrible person.’ And he didn’t just think it—like any politician, that’s exactly what they’re thinking. He just says it.”\

“It’s at the same time horrifying and also kind of like, refreshing. It’s shockingly—the honesty, as someone who loves honesty and has made my career about it as much as I could, it is—there’s some level of it where you tip your hat and you go, ‘Wow, total honesty,’” said the longtime political satirist.

Amused, Fetterman responded: “Yeah, the ultimate—‘Quiet, piggy.’ That’s the president of America.”

Trump routinely insults reporters in order to evade their questions. The moment Fetterman referred to took place in November, when Trump ended a line of questioning about the Epstein files by barking at a female Bloomberg News reporter, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

Fetterman has displayed a penchant for Trumpian politics since he moved to Washington, despite the fact that he ran on the progressive ticket. Since Fetterman entered office in 2023, he has sided with Republicans dozens of times, frequently leveraging his position to advance Trump’s agenda.

He also voted to confirm several of Trump’s Cabinet selections, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin as well as the last Homeland Security chief, Kristi Noem, who was transferred to work in a relatively unknown section of the government in March following a string of embarrassing scandals.

Residents in Arizona are struggling to receive SNAP benefits as the state rushes to install new eligibility requirements set by Donald Trump’s “one, big, beautiful bill,” NBC News reported Monday.

Since Trump’s behemoth budget bill passed last July, setting in motion nearly $187 million in cuts from SNAP over the next 10 years, 3.5 million people have fallen off SNAP rolls nationwide. The law requires able-bodied adults between ages 18 and 64 without dependents to work 80 hours a month, or 20 hours a week, to qualify for SNAP benefits.

Arizona has moved rapidly to comply with Trump’s new requirements, increasing the amount of documentation individuals must produce and bolstering the review process. The result: As of March, there had been a 50 percent decrease in the state’s SNAP enrollees compared to just a year earlier—the largest drop-off in the country—including 200,000 children.

In the rush to enforce these new requirements, it seems many eligible Americans have also been pushed off the program.

Following a months-long paperwork back-and-forth with state employees, Tiffany Hudson, a single mother of two young children, decided to show up in person to the state Department of Economic Security office. Despite being exempt from the new work requirements, Hudson said she’d stopped receiving her $600 in SNAP benefits three months ago.

“It’s been really hard. We’ve been going to food banks every week,” Hudson told NBC News. “We’re eating less, we’re eating more frozen stuff.”

After waiting for hours to speak with an employee, she was told she needed to provide more documentation, as well as a written statement from her father clarifying that a birthday gift she’d received over Zelle was not a recurring payment.

Inside the Arizona Department of Economic Security, increased requirements have placed a strain on the employees charged with processing SNAP applications after 400 people were laid off in July. Part of Trump’s “beautiful bill” required states to keep their payment error rate below 6.6 percent or be forced to pay for a portion of SNAP benefits themselves. Arizona’s error rate was 8.8 percent in fiscal year 2024, and projected to be around 10 percent in fiscal year 2025. The state could face up to $208 million in costs if it doesn’t lower that rate this year.

Meanwhile, the Arizonans who are getting kicked off their benefits are turning to donations to survive. St. Mary’s Food Bank, the largest in the state, reported a 12 percent increase in demand across Arizona. Milton Liu, head of St. Mary’s, told NBC News that demand has already increased as much as 25 percent over the past year in some rural counties. He expected that number will only continue to grow.

House Republicans are trying to completely expunge any record of President Trump’s two impeachments.

This latest show of fealty, led by California Representative Darrell Issa, would have Trump’s 2019 and 2021 impeachments “expunged as if such Articles had never passed the full House of Representatives.”

“An impeachment is basically an indictment and it’s an indictment that you can’t really be acquitted from. If you are impeached by the House, famously, ‘Where do you go to get your reputation back?’ is the question,” Issa said to Fox News Digital. “And that’s sort of a problem that we’re dealing with, which is that the president was wrongfully accused, the evidence is now out that there was withheld information and false information, but where do we go to unring this bell? And the answer is we go back to Congress and we go to the House floor and we have a vote.”

The president was not wrongfully accused on either count. There is a wealth of evidence to confirm the first article of Trump’s 2019 impeachment, which came after he tried to convince the Ukrainian government to give him some damning dirt on Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election. There is a transcript of Trump personally requesting it. As for his second impeachment, the president most certainly incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021. Yet GOP House members are acting as if they have some moral obligation to strike the impeachments from the record.

Even more confusing—both of these impeachment attempts failed spectacularly, and Trump came out of them stronger, winning reelection in 2024. Isn’t that a more compelling story to Republicans than trying to rewrite history with a symbolic expungement for someone who never faced consequences?

President Trump wants to suspend the federal gas tax, telling CBS News Monday that he thinks “it’s a great idea.”

“We’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time, and when gas goes down, we’ll let it phase back in,” Trump said in a phone interview. It’s a tacit admission that the effects of the Iran war aren’t going away anytime soon.

Gas prices have gone up 50 percent since the war started February 28, and cost an average of $4.52 per gallon in the U.S. as of this writing. As long as Iran (and the United States) block transit to and from the Strait of Hormuz, those prices will stay high. Pausing the federal taxes on fuel would amount to 18.4 cents less per gallon of gas and 24.4 cents less per gallon of diesel, but doing so requires an act of Congress.

Republicans in Congress are already working to carry out the president’s wish. Senator Josh Hawley and Representative Anna Paulina Luna said Monday that they plan to introduce bills in the Senate and House, respectively. If they’re successful, pausing the gas tax would cost the federal government half a billion dollars per week, money that pays for highway maintenance and other transportation projects.

Meanwhile, a peace deal with Iran is far away. Trump said Monday that the current ceasefire was on “massive life support” after he rejected Iran’s latest proposal as “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE” the day before. If the ceasefire ends and the U.S. resumes strikes against Iran, that would only send oil prices even higher, wiping out whatever temporary relief Americans get from the tax pause.

Trump’s poll numbers are already historically low. Does he think he can fool the American people with a temporary measure?

President Trump just got sued for painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue as part of an increasingly expensive renovation project.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on increasing “support and understanding for cultural landscapes,” filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Monday against the Department of the Interior and the National Parks Service, alleging the Trump administration broke federal law with the new paint job.

The lawsuit states that since the pool is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the paint job was subject to a review under law. The organization is seeking either a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order to prevent more blue paint from being added.

The group’s president and CEO, Charles Birnbaum, said in a statement that the blue paint “is more appropriate to a resort or theme park,” adding that the bottom of the pool has been grey since its construction in 1924.

The lawsuit comes on the same day as a New York Times report that found Trump’s renovation of the pool will cost more than seven times the $1.8 million he originally estimated. The Interior Department said Friday that it now plans to pay $13.1 million to a Virginia firm, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which Trump chose because it worked on his Sterling, Virginia, golf club’s swimming pools.

Last month, the company was awarded a no-bid contract by the Trump administration, which claimed that renovating the pool was so urgent that delaying it would cause “serious injury” to the government, but wouldn’t say why. The government has also said that Trump wants to get the project done before America’s 250th birthday celebrations on July Fourth. The contract gives Atlantic Industrial Coatings a 20 percent profit margin.

This is just another example of Trump attempting to remake Washington, D.C., in the aesthetic of his real estate properties. He is also getting sued over his proposed golden arch and White House ballroom. With a compliant Congress and Supreme Court, it seems Trump will end up leaving his permanent stamp on the nation’s capital.

The architect of Donald Trump’s second-term immigration agenda is losing his influence.

White House deputy chief of staff and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller has aimed to rewrite U.S. immigration policy since his early days in Washington as a Senate aide. But even atop his perch within the Trump administration, Miller’s schemes have experienced myriad setbacks.

Thus far, the president has dismantled the Border Patrol strike forces that Miller had campaigned for, turned on former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for effectively following Miller’s orders, and handed the reins of America’s deportation program back to law enforcement officials, reported The Atlantic Monday.

The White House insists that Miller’s place within Trump’s entourage has not changed, and that he remains a steadfast and widely respected adviser to the president.

“The President loves Stephen,” White House communications director Steven Cheung told The Atlantic in a statement. “And the White House staff respects him tremendously.”

But behind the scenes, Trump’s language about the immigration aide is changing. The president has privately joked that Miller’s “truest feelings” are too extreme for the public, and reportedly thinks that sometimes Miller takes things too far, according to presidential advisers that spoke with the magazine.

Trump reportedly disagreed with Miller’s description of Alex Pretti—one of two U.S. citizens shot and killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis this winter—as a “domestic terrorist,” and acknowledged afterward that U.S. policy needed to shift as a result.

Miller has framed immigration as an “invasion.” He has advocated to end habeas corpus for immigrants; promoted large-scale raids at workplaces, churches, and neighborhoods; threatened the futures of immigrants who do not “self-deport”; and encouraged the White House to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. He has leveraged his position within the administration to advance American warmongering abroad, pushing the White House to bomb boats in the Caribbean when a plan to invade Mexico fell through.

What is not clear is how long Trump will keep Miller, and his violent ideologies, around. Miller’s influence on his pet project, immigration, is already waning.

“I think the president knows very, very well what he can go to Stephen for, and what he probably shouldn’t tell him if he doesn’t want to get an earful,” one former administration official told The Atlantic. Another adviser was more blunt: “The president knows who he is, period.”

Since Noem was ousted, the power structure has shifted, with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and border czar Tom Homan taking the lead on U.S. immigration policy in Miller’s place.

“The new secretary is listening to Tom Homan and [Border Protection Commissioner] Rodney Scott before he is ever listening to Stephen Miller,” a senior administration official told The Atlantic. “We just have law enforcement in charge.”

Without Noem to muck up the agenda, Miller’s direct involvement with the agency no longer seems necessary.

“The entire White House has to worry less about cleaning up after DHS with new leadership in there,” one White House official said.

Under President Donald Trump’s strict immigration policies, immigrants who call 911 are being detained, and those who are too afraid to call are dying as a result.

In December, Axel Sanchez Toledo was violently arrested by police officers after he called 911 to request a welfare check on his 4-year-old daughter after hearing she’d fallen sick while staying with his ex-girlfriend, The Marshall Project reported Monday.

Sanchez Toledo greeted two officers from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office with his girlfriend and their infant son. One of the officers took Sanchez Toledo’s ID and retreated back to the patrol car. When he returned, he accused Sanchez Toledo of being undocumented, and said he was being detained for ICE.

Police body camera footage obtained by The Marshall Project showed Sanchez Toledo take off running. The two deputies pursued him, shocking him with a Taser, and kicking and tackling him while his girlfriend sobbed. As Sanchez Toledo was pinned to the ground, he moaned: “Please, guys, I’m not a criminal,” insisting he had documentation. (His lawyer confirmed to The Marshall Project that he had a pending asylum case.) “I don’t want to go,” he begged.

“Too fucking bad now!” one deputy screamed.

Sanchez Toledo was charged with resisting arrest. Those charges were dropped on April 29. He currently remains in ICE custody.

The officers who arrested Sanchez Toledo were part of the sheriff’s office 287(g) Task Force, through an agreement that grants state and local law enforcement to operate with federal immigration powers in return for reimbursements and other incentives.

Of the 1,500 officers at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, only 150 are deputized to make immigration arrests. But between September 2025 and March, they have been responsible for arresting 60 immigrants per month, the highest arrest rate in the state, and have received almost $1 million for their work, according to The Marshall Project. More than 1,100 law enforcement agencies across the country have signed 287(g) agreements.

These bleeding boundaries between state and local enforcement, combined with Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts, are actively putting people in danger.

The family of a Virginia woman who died after she was allegedly assaulted by her partner are claiming the woman was afraid to report her domestic abuse to the police over concerns she’d be detained over her immigration status, according to NBC Washington. The Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit that supports immigrants fleeing gender-based violence, told the outlet that 76 percent of its clients were afraid to go to the police.

Law enforcement’s collaboration with federal immigration enforcement has eroded many immigrants’ sense of safety and their reliance on the police. In another story, one asylum-seeker told The Washington Post she’d been contacted by a man who assaulted her at a previous job. But since immigration agents had raided her workplace and started sweeping up neighbors, she said she wouldn’t consider calling law enforcement if anything happened to her.

President Trump has once again appeared to doze off on camera in the middle of a White House event, this time, just seconds after he spoke.

Trump was joined by Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Oz, Republican Senator Katie Britt, philanthropist and maternal health advocate Olivia Walton, principal deputy assistant secretary for health Dr. Dorothy Fink, and others at the White House Monday morning to announce the “Moms.gov” website, a new tactic in the Trump administration’s campaign to convince American women to have more babies.

It was the president’s first public event of the day, beginning at 11 a.m, and he appeared to doze off with his eyes fully closed multiple times while the people behind him spoke. It is becoming a regular occurrence for the president to take a little nap during an event, the most recent instance being just last week.

This isn’t some late-night Situation Room meeting or some three-hour Cabinet meeting. This is the president’s first scheduled event of the day. Even if he’s not completely asleep, he certainly is not fully present. Capable presidents don’t fall asleep at 11:30 a.m.