Trump's FBI In SHAMBLES As Staffers Reveal Director Downfall After Major Screw Up
by John Iadarola
The Damage Report
Dec 16, 2025 #TheDamageReport #JohnIadarola #TheYoungTurks
Donald Trump's FBI leaders, including Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, get hit with devastating news after staffers reveal their massive screw ups are likely to cause their imminent removal. John Iadarola breaks it down on The Damage Report. Leave a comment with your thoughts below!
Transcript
Apparently, according to reports, we
might soon be seeing the last of FBI
Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director
of the FBI Dan Bongino. They could soon
both be gone. Or maybe one of them is
already gone. Actually, we're not sure.
But why? Why would they be going? Well,
Cash Patel has bungled maybe one too
many responses to uh tragedies, to
massacres, and uh Dan Bongino apparently
literally has not shown up to work for
weeks. And so there's three different
sources inside of the FBI that have been
talking to the media about this. And
look, we know that Kash Patel has really
bungled things in a way that has made
him kind of a laughingstock both inside
and outside of the FBI. And remember, he
started off a laughing. He's not a guy
who was qualified for the position. It
was ridiculous that this fawning,
sycophantic conspiracy theorist would be
put in charge of the FBI. It's a dark
mark that hopefully we'll be able to
forget about in the future. That was how
he started. And then of course there was
this Sunday where we had the terrible
shooting at Brown that left two students
dead. So he posted on X this really long
thing where he used a bunch of, you
know, like FBIish words that he probably
had to Google to imply that he's doing
geolocation and thanks to that we've
caught a person of interest. And I think
that if you've been paying attention to
Cash Patel and the FBI throughout this
year, it kind of felt like the immediate
aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk
where uh FBI director Kash Patel wants
to seem like he's got things under
control. So he jumps out there and
perhaps jumps ahead of the facts and
that is what happened here. So he's got
another long message. You can see it's
just everybody everybody stop tweeting
long ass. If you want to write a book,
write a book, okay? Don't do it bit by
bit on Twitter. But anyway, um, no, they
didn't catch the right person. And by
the way, like that itself is not a major
issue or a major surprise. It's just
that he shouldn't have posted the tweet
in the first place. You're in the
immediate aftermath of something like
that. Okay, they're they're they're
they're getting the video, they're
talking to people, they're pulling
people in. Just let it chill for a
second. But he's so hungry. He's so
tryhard. He is so horny to seem like he
knows what he's doing that yet again he
jumped out and made it seem as if they
caught the person and they didn't. And
that makes it twice as bad for
everybody. People are already scared and
then they get a brief moment of thinking
oh we got the guy and then oh wait no we
don't actually and then the fear the
terror that it could happen again comes
rushing back in. Cash Patel did that.
Okay. And it was the second time that he
did it. Remember this same thing
happened after Charlie Kirk was killed.
Take a look.
when we were still looking for the guy.
I know you posted that we got him uh and
that ended up not being true. You took
some incoming because of that. What led
to you posting that? Why did you feel so
certain about it? And what do you have
to say about the criticism?
No, I appreciate this opportunity. Look,
as I stated, I was being transparent
with working with the public on our
findings as I had them. I stated in that
message that that we had a subject and
uh that we were going to interview him
and we did and he was released. The job
of the FBI is not just to manhunt the
actual suspect who did the killing or
suspects, but it's also to eliminate
targets and eliminate subjects who are
not involved in the process. And that's
what we were doing. Could I have worded
it a little better in the heat of the
moment? Sure. But do I regret putting it
out? Absolutely not.
First of all, let me just say I love
that his voice is exactly what it is. I
wouldn't change anything for him. I'm
very glad about that. But second of all,
yeah, he's very glad for the opportunity
to answer to the fact that people are
losing faith in him and and it's just,
you know, we have to eliminate target.
You know, no, no, we we understand that
the FBI, the actual people in the FBI,
they they understand that. Nobody's
questioning any of that, Cash. Nobody's
like, nobody's questioning the process.
They're questioning you and the fact
that you keep trying to make yourself
look cool. You're the one that flies out
and then takes coats off of people and
then begs for like patches to make
yourself. You are so pathetic and
cringy. You honestly make you make
Christy Gnome look a little bit less
embarrassing by compar like she gets
covered a lot more for that sort of
thing. But he is just as desperate to
look serious to look reputable as
Christy Gnome. We we need to make sure
that we spread the the criticism out. Uh
that's what they were criticizing. And
so like this is two strikes now and it's
making the FBI look like a
laughingstock. This is not what Donald
Trump chose him for. I don't know what
Donald Trump chose him for, but it
definitely wasn't this. So he could be
going soon. According to those three
sources, the FBI is in shambles. Morale
is at an all-time low. The cause is at
the top. Yeah, it was a dude who wrote a
pathetic, fawning children's book and
did some podcasts and that was it.
That's why he chose if I was a lifetime
uh you know career FBI agent, I would
probably be in low morale, too. But it
isn't just him. It's also Dan Bongino.
You haven't heard a lot about Dan Bongino
for some time. And there's a reason for
that. He's not really doing anything.
Like he's occasionally tweeting about
something that the FBI is doing, but
that that might like make it seem as if
he's involved in it. I mean, after all,
he's part of the leadership of the FBI,
right?
Maybe kind of. According to uh reports
from inside of the FBI, he has not been
seen in his office for more than two
weeks. It has apparently been empty for
half a month at this point, indicating
to some that he has actually already
left the agency. It just hasn't been
announced yet. And that that might seem
a little bit crazy, but remember Trump
wants to make it seem as if there's not
this turnover that the embarrassing
pathetic toadies that he chose to staff
his regime with uh don't need to be
replaced and actual experts put in. And
so one way that you do that is by not
actually firing them. But if it comes to
the point where you have to fire them or
maybe Dan Bino realizes that his
reputation is just taking too many hits
over the fact that he's just sitting,
you know, in the the Epstein
investigation cuck chair and doing
absolutely nothing uh for the victims.
Maybe he wants to leave and he just
doesn't want to be around anymore. But
either way, he he apparently hasn't been
working. And if that's the case, I feel
like he shouldn't be getting paid. Like,
doesn't he kind of owe us? Like, we pay
for that. we pay for his salary. If he's
not actually clocking in, why the hell
are we paying him that? And I I'm
assuming it's quite a bit of money. So
anyway, uh if he does go, I I think that
the FBI is going to be perfectly fine
with it. One of the staffers asked by
Salon said nobody here will miss him of
Dan Bino. He has no credibility,
obviously. Like, but again, who would
expect that? It's Dan Bonino.
Who thinks he had any credibility? I
guess Trump I guess Trump is stupid
enough to look at Dan Bino and be like I
guess I guess he looks like he could be
an FBI guy or whatever. No, he was never
made for the job. He had no prior FBI
experience. He had previously been a
Secret Service agent and a New York
police officer. I would love to talk to
people who knew him when he was in the
Secret Service about what he was
actually doing at that point. And then
he was just he was a crappy podcaster.
He got fired by the uh the NRA network
and eventually I think he worked for Fox
or whatever. It's utterly that's what
he's made for. And and by the way,
remember he did that interview not that
many days ago where he talked about his
past. I think he's starting to miss it
when you can just pull conspiracy
theories and racist tropes out of your
ass and for some reason generate an
audience and get paid for it. Maybe
that's what he's been doing for the past
couple weeks is prepping for the launch
of his next show. Anyway, uh if he does
end up staying, an FBI source says he
has no future here even if he stays.
Yeah. All of these people, and that
includes Christy Gnome, they technically
work at these places. But if any work is
getting done at these places, and I
question whether it's some of them it
is, it's all just being done around
them. They have nothing to do with it
because they don't know anything about
it.
Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down ...
Re: Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down
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Re: Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down
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Part 1 of 2
EYE OF THE HURRICANE. Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the “Junkyard Dogs”: The White House Chief of Staff On Trump’s Second Term (Part 1 of 2). Throughout the first year of Donald Trump’s second administration, Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple has interviewed Wiles amid each moment of crisis. This insider’s account joins a portfolio of portraits for an unflinching, up-close look at power—and peril.
by Chris Whipple
Photographer Christopher Anderson
December 16, 2025
https://archive.is/79tgs#selection-505.0-559.17
https://archive.is/9ohH5#selection-109.0-1957.63
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
On the morning of November 4, 2025, an off-year Election Day, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was meeting in the Oval Office with the president and his top advisers, men she calls her “core team”: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff. The agenda was twofold: ending the congressional filibuster and forcing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power. As she related it later, President Donald Trump was holding forth on the filibuster when Wiles stood up and started for the door. Trump eyed her. “Is this an emergency, that you have to leave?” he demanded. It was nothing of the sort—but Wiles left Trump guessing. She replied: “It’s an emergency. It doesn’t involve you.” With that, according to Wiles, she departed the Oval.
Wiles, wearing dark pants and a plain black leather top, met me in her office with a smile and a handshake. Over sandwiches from the White House Mess, we talked about the challenges Trump faces. Throughout the past year, Wiles and I have spoken regularly about almost everything: the contents, and consequences, of the Epstein files; ICE’s brutal mass deportations; Elon Musk’s evisceration of USAID; the controversial deployment of the National Guard to US cities; the demolition of the East Wing; the lethal strikes on boats allegedly being piloted by drug smugglers—acts many have called war crimes; Trump’s physical and mental health; and whether he will defy the 22nd Amendment and try to stay on for a third term.
Most senior White House officials parse their words and speak only on background. But over many on-the-record conversations, Wiles answered almost every question I put to her.
We often spoke on Sundays after church. Wiles, an Episcopalian, calls herself “Catholic lite.” One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington, DC, rental. Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn't have first-hand knowledge.)
Wiles is the most powerful person in Trump’s White House other than the president himself; unlike any chief of staff before her, she is a woman.
“So many decisions of great consequence are being made on the whim of the president. And as far as I can tell, the only force that can direct or channel that whim is Susie,” a former Republican chief told me. “In most White Houses, the chief of staff is first among a bunch of equals. She may be first with no equals.”
“I don’t think there’s anybody in the world right now that could do the job that she’s doing,” Rubio told me. He called her bond with Trump “an earned trust.” Vance described Wiles’s approach to the chief’s job. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”
It’s been a busy year. Trump and his team have expanded the limits of presidential power, unilaterally declared war on drug cartels, imposed tariffs according to whim, sealed the southern border, achieved a ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza, and pressured NATO allies into increasing their defense spending.
***
At the same time, Trump has waged war on his political enemies; pardoned the January 6 rioters, firing nearly everyone involved in their investigation and prosecution; sued media companies into multimillion-dollar settlements; indicted multiple government officials he perceives as his foes; and pressured universities to toe his line. He’s redefined the way presidents behave—verbally abusing women, minorities, and almost anyone who offends him. Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September turbocharged Trump’s campaign of revenge and retribution. Critics have compared this moment to a Reichstag fire, a modern version of Hitler’s exploitation of the torching of Berlin’s parliament.
Historically, the White House chief of staff is the president’s gatekeeper, confidant, and executor of his agenda. That often means telling the president hard truths. Upon taking office, Ronald Reagan was hell-bent on reforming Social Security. James A. Baker III explained to him that cutting Social Security benefits was the third rail of American politics. Reagan pivoted to tax cuts—and was ultimately reelected in a landslide. Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford’s chief, explained: “The White House chief of staff is the one person besides his wife…who can look him right in the eye and say, ‘This is not right. You simply can’t go down that road.’ ”
Just how far will Trump veer off the guardrails of democracy?
The question around Wiles’s tenure under Trump has been whether she will do anything to restrain him. A better question: Does she want to?
T-MINUS 9 DAYS
January 11, 2025
Our first conversation took place little more than a week before the inauguration. Wiles called from the road, en route from Mar-a-Lago to her home in Ponte Vedra, Florida, in her BMW 530. She was in high spirits, basking in Trump’s victory. Not that she’d ever doubted the outcome. “At no point did I think we would not win,” she said. “Not in my core, not in my sleep, not in my rational mind.”
But on that January day, as his second inauguration approached, Wiles was determined to show the world a new Trump. “I told Hakeem Jeffries, ‘You will see a different Donald Trump when he gets there,’ ’’ she recounted to me. “I’ve not seen him throw anything, I’ve not seen him scream. I didn’t see that really horrible behavior that people talk about and that I actually experienced years ago.”
Wiles’s childhood had prepared her for difficult men. She was raised in Stamford, Connecticut, and Saddle River, New Jersey, the only daughter and eldest of three siblings. It was her famous father, Pat Summerall, who put Wiles on a path to the pinnacle of political power. Summerall had been a kicker for the New York Giants and afterward parlayed his knowledge and mellifluous baritone into fame and fortune as the “voice of the NFL.”
At her father’s knee, Susie Summerall became a football aficionado, rattling off win-loss records and player stats like a miniature John Madden—an ability she says Trump shares. “The president, it turns out, is a junkie of that and is like a statistical savant,” she said. “And I remember a lot of it.” As a child, Susie also absorbed the zeitgeist of her father’s 1970s Manhattan. “Much of what Donald Trump remembers about the New York of the ’70s I lived through with my dad,” she said. “So when he talks about Frank Sinatra’s bodyguard, I know that name.” Steve Witkoff, Trump’s real estate friend turned special envoy, says Wiles and Trump are creatures of that same bygone era: “That whole world of the Copacabana and Sammy Davis Jr. and all, those are things that he wants to talk about.”
The most valuable gift Susie got from her dad was hard-earned. Summerall was an absentee father and an alcoholic, and Wiles helped her mother stage interventions to get him into treatment. (Summerall was sober for 21 years before his death in 2013.) “Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,” Wiles said.
“Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say. But high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Wiles said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality.” He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Susie Summerall got her first taste of politics in the late 1970s, interning as a college student in the Capitol Hill office of Jack Kemp, the New York congressman, who’d been a Giant with her father. Then, at 23, she landed a job in the Reagan White House as a scheduler, where she watched his chief of staff Baker in action. She married a GOP advance man, Lanny Wiles, and in 1984 they moved to Ponte Vedra. Wiles wanted to “start a family and a life outside politics.” But in 1988, Baker lured Wiles back to work with Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush’s running mate. The couple had two daughters, Katie and Caroline. Wiles plunged into state politics—and over the next two decades became a formidable political strategist, serving as chief of staff to the mayor of Jacksonville, Florida, running Rick Scott’s gubernatorial campaign, and, briefly, leading Jon Huntsman’s campaign for president.
In 2015, Wiles was invited to Trump Tower to meet the real estate tycoon turned presidential candidate. The star of The Apprentice couldn’t believe he was talking to the daughter of the great Pat Summerall. “He’s said it a million times,” Wiles said. “ ‘I judge people by their genes.’ ” Wiles thought Trump was interesting and smart. “And they called me one night and said, ‘We’re serious about Florida now. Would you like to co-chair our leadership team?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I would.’ ”
“I had become disenchanted with what we now call traditional Republicans,” she recalled.
Wiles’s relationship with Trump almost ended at his Miami golf club one night in the fall of 2016. Unhappy with a poll showing him doing worse than expected in Florida, Trump berated her in front of a gaggle of cronies. “It was a horrific hour-plus at midnight,” Wiles told me. “And I don’t think I’ve seen him that angry since. He was ranting and raving. And I didn’t know whether to argue back or whether to be stoic. What I really wanted to do was cry.”
Wiles steeled herself. “I finally said, ‘You know Mr. Trump, if you want somebody to set their hair on fire and be crazy, I’m not your girl. But if you want to win this state, I am. It’s your choice.’ ” Wiles walked out. Trump turned on a dime. “Lo and behold, he called me every day.” Wiles never looked back. Trump carried Florida, the first big prize in his stunning 2016 upset over Hillary Clinton.
Then, in a fateful turn of events, Wiles went to work in 2018 for an ambitious gubernatorial candidate named Ron DeSantis. (Trump urged DeSantis, then his protégé, to hire her.) She led the underdog candidate to victory. But afterward, DeSantis turned on her, denouncing Wiles publicly and bad-mouthing her privately. To this day, Wiles doesn’t know what triggered the governor’s vendetta. “I think he thought I was getting too much attention, which is ironic,” she told me. “I don’t ever seek attention.”
Wiles landed on her feet, organizing Florida for Trump’s 2020 reelection bid. Trump had rescued Wiles, recently divorced, at a dark moment in her life. (Wiles and her husband divorced in 2017—due, she has said, to his bad financial decisions.) Looking back on DeSantis’s behavior, Wiles reflected: “Had he said, ‘Look, thank you. I appreciate your help. We’re done here.’ I believe the course of his history would have been different. I might or might not have gone to work for Donald Trump.”
DAY 1
January 20, 2025
On Trump’s first day in office, the president signed a flurry of executive orders, 26 in all, withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement, rescinding birthright citizenship, sending troops to the southern border, freezing foreign aid, and stopping federal hiring. Then Trump issued pardons to almost everyone convicted in the bloody January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, in which nine people ultimately died and 150 were injured. Even rioters who’d beaten cops within an inch of their lives were set free. (Fourteen people convicted of seditious conspiracy had their sentences commuted.)
A picture of old friends in better times.
A statuette of President Donald Trump sits at the copier in Susie Wiles’s support-staff office.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. departs the White House on November 13.
Did she ever ask the president, “ ‘Wait a minute, do you really want to pardon all 1,500 January 6 convicts, or should we be more selective?’ ”
“I did exactly that,” Wiles replied. “I said, ‘I am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn’t do anything violent. And we certainly know what everybody did because the FBI has done such an incredible job.’ ” (Trump has said his FBI investigators were “corrupt” and part of a “deep state.”) But Trump argued that even the violent offenders had been unfairly treated. Wiles explained: “In every case, of the ones he was looking at, in every case, they had already served more time than the sentencing guidelines would have suggested. So given that, I sort of got on board.” (According to court records, many of the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump had received sentences that were lighter than the guidelines.) “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” Wiles said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”
In the West Wing, Wiles is surrounded by young MAGA men. “She is a ‘go to church every Sunday, uses a swear word very, very rarely’ ” person, said James Blair, Wiles’s 36-year-old deputy chief of staff. “She doesn’t raise her voice. But she likes being around junkyard dogs.” Indeed, Wiles has seemed content to let her pit bulls—deputy chiefs of staff Miller, Blair, and Dan Scavino—run loose as she watches.
During Oval Office events, Wiles almost always sits just off camera. “There’s the president and then there’s whoever the three high-ranking people are on the sofa,” she said. “And then there’s a chair at the corner of the sofa, which is my chair, which means I’m the one that gets hit in the head with the boom mic.”
For all the chaos in the Cabinet, Wiles has kept palace intrigue and shivving to a minimum in the White House. Trump has empowered her; when Wiles weighs in, everyone knows she is speaking for him. She has in turn empowered her team: Blair, Miller, Scavino, and Taylor Budowich, who departed in September.
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
“First and foremost, she brings no ego,” says Blair. “And that is the starting point from which just an immense amount of power flows. There’s so much ego and testosterone around her, there wouldn’t be any room for hers anyway.”
From day one, Wiles had to grapple with another power center: Elon Musk.
“He is a complete solo actor,” said Wiles of Trump’s billionaire pal who led the scorched-earth blitz known as the Department of Government Efficiency. Wiles described Musk as something akin to a jacked-up Nosferatu. “The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” she told me. “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”
Musk triggered the first true crisis of the Trump presidency and an early test for Wiles. Trump’s chief was shocked when the SpaceX founder eviscerated USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. “I was initially aghast,” Wiles told me. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”
In his executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump had decreed that lifesaving programs should be spared. Instead, they were shuttered. “When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” said Wiles. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”
Wiles knew that fixing this was on her. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” she told me. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”
Wiles says she called Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalls telling him. At first, Wiles didn’t grasp the effect that slashing USAID programs would have on humanitarian aid. “I didn’t know a lot about the extent of their grant making.” But with immunizations halted in Africa, lives would be lost. Soon she was getting frantic calls from relief agency heads and former government officials with a dire message: Thousands of lives were in the balance.
Wiles continued: “So Marco is on his way to Panama. We call him and say, ‘You’re Senate-confirmed. You’re going to have to be the custodian, essentially, of [USAID].’ ‘Okay,’ he says.” But Musk forged ahead—all throttle, no brake. “Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Wiles said. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china. But no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
The shuttering of USAID crippled the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The antiretroviral program, launched with $15 billion by George W. Bush in 2003, was credited with preventing millions of deaths. It depended on USAID grants. In an interview with The Financial Times, Bill Gates remarked: “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
Privately, another drama was playing out.
Bush himself had gotten wind of the gutting of PEPFAR. He called Rubio to express alarm, according to a former aide close to Bush. “He’s been appalled by Trump from the beginning and he’s determined not to weigh in,” the aide said. But Musk’s attack on one of his legacy achievements was too much. Bush, said that person, “cares deeply about the PEPFAR program. That and Wounded Warriors are the two things where he will weigh in, not publicly, but with intention.”
Did Rubio have any regrets about the untold number of lives that PEPFAR’s evisceration might cost? “No. First of all, whoever says that, it’s just not being accurate,” he told me. “We are not eviscerating PEPFAR. PEPFAR has been rearranged and reorganized in such a way where we’re now going to be able to deliver aid in a way that has a goal. The goal is to help countries become self-sustaining.” With a note of “America First,” he added: “Let’s begin with the premise: Is it the United States’ fault? Why isn’t China paying for more immunizations? Why isn’t the UK or Canada or any of the G7 countries?” (The UK, following in the footsteps of the US, slashed foreign aid in 2025. In November, China, which funded the Africa CDC, pledged $3.5 million in AIDS prevention in South Africa alone.)
When I repeated Rubio’s comment to a former GOP White House chief of staff, he remarked: “I find that immoral.”
DAY 8
January 27, 2025
“Our job is lethality and readiness and war fighting.” —Pete Hegseth on his first day at the Pentagon, days after Vance cast the tiebreaking vote in his Senate confirmation
For Trump, Wiles has helped pick a Cabinet of MAGA hard-liners: Pete Hegseth, secretary of war (formerly defense); Kash Patel, FBI director; John Ratcliffe, CIA director; Pam Bondi, attorney general; Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence; and Kristi Noem, head of Homeland Security. Wiles calls them “a world-class Cabinet, better than anything I could have conceived of.” Trump’s Cabinet members are either one of the least qualified presidential teams in history or, to hear Wiles tell it, disrupters—the only people with the balls to take on an entrenched deep state.
“People talk about the deep state being at the State Department,” Wiles said. “It’s not. It’s the military-industrial complex.” Hegseth, in her view, is just the guy to take on the powers that be. She referred to Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another world-class disrupter, as “my Bobby” and “quirky Bobby.” In Wiles’s view, RFK Jr.’s shock treatment of HHS is warranted. “He pushes the envelope—some would say too far. But I say in order to get back to the middle, you have to push it too far.” (In December, Kennedy’s federal vaccine panel voted to end the decades-long recommendation for newborn vaccinations against hepatitis B, which is highly infectious and causes liver failure.)
DAY 56
March 16, 2025
“US deports hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador, despite court order.” —NPR
In mid-March, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) shackled and herded 238 immigrants onto transport planes and flew them to a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison. According to Trump, the men were members of Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan gang, but the evidence was sketchy (often based on tattoos alone). Most had committed no serious crimes; one, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported by mistake, the Trump administration admitted.
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
“I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation,” Wiles told me at the time.
When we spoke again in April, in cities across the country, masked ICE agents were snatching people off the street, throwing them in vans, and zip-tying and frog-marching them into makeshift deportation camps. Many were US citizens or entitled to be here. (ProPublica documented 170 cases in the first nine months of 2025 of US citizens being caught up in ICE’s dragnet.)
“If somebody is a known gang member who has a criminal past, and you’re sure, and you can demonstrate it, it’s probably fine to send them to El Salvador or whatever,” Wiles told me. “But if there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check.” But as the usa.gov site itself notes, “In some cases, a noncitizen is subject to expedited removal without being able to attend a hearing in immigration court.” Not long after the El Salvador deportation fiasco, in Louisiana, ICE agents arrested and deported two mothers, along with their children, ages seven, four, and two, to Honduras. The children were US citizens and the four-year-old was being treated for stage 4 cancer. Wiles couldn’t explain it.
“It could be an overzealous Border Patrol agent, I don’t know,” she said of the case, in which both mothers had reportedly been arrested after voluntarily attending routine immigration meetings.“ I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”
DAY 74
April 3, 2025
“Long-threatened tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump have plunged the country into trade wars abroad….” —PBS News
The president declared April 2 “Liberation Day,” bragging about billions of dollars that would flow into US coffers from tariffs, refusing to acknowledge that the levies were a tax on consumers.
“So much thinking out loud is what I would call it,” said Wiles of Trump’s chaotic tariff rollout. “There was a huge disagreement over whether [tariffs were] a good idea.” Trump’s advisers were sharply divided, some believing tariffs were a panacea and others predicting disaster. Wiles told them to get with Trump’s program. “I said, ‘This is where we’re going to end up. So figure out how you can work into what he’s already thinking.’ Well, they couldn’t get there.”
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
Wiles recruited Vance to help tap the brakes. “We told Donald Trump, ‘Hey, let’s not talk about tariffs today. Let’s wait until we have the team in complete unity and then we’ll do it,’ ” she said. But Trump barreled ahead, announcing sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, from 10 to 100 percent—which triggered panic in the bond market and a sell-off of stocks. Trump paused his policy for 90 days, but by that time the president’s helter-skelter levies had given rise to the TACO chant: “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
Wiles believed a middle ground on tariffs would ultimately succeed, she said, “but it’s been more painful than I expected.”
At the time this article went to press, shortly before the December holidays, a Harvard poll showed 56 percent of voters think Trump’s tariff policies have harmed the economy.
DAY 207
August 14, 2025
“National Guard mobilizes 800 troops in DC to Support Federal, Local Law Enforcement—Trump declared a crime emergency in the nation’s capital.” —US Department of War
During the summer, Trump ordered the National Guard into four Democratic-led cities, claiming the troops were needed to crack down on crime and protect federal immigration facilities. In June the president deployed some 4,000 guard troops to Los Angeles; later he sent them to Washington, describing the city’s crime rate as “out of control.” “This was like a vitamin boost of ICE, of the [National] Guard, of the Park Service police, who actually have more authority than the DC Metro Police,” Wiles said. “And the idea was to right the ship and then slowly back off. And that’s what we’re doing.”
Critics denounced the deployments as unconstitutional, performative, and ineffective, and many feared Trump had another, more sinister plan up his sleeve.
Will the president use the military to suppress or even prevent voting during the midterms and beyond?
“I say it is categorically false, will not happen, it’s just wrongheaded,” she snapped.
“Do you understand where people who think that are coming from?” I asked.
“I do a little bit, but not fully. I mean, I think they hate the president. They think he’s too wrapped up in what happened in 2020.”
The president and his team were pushing almost every legal and constitutional boundary and defying courts to stop them. But would Trump obey the Supreme Court? “Do you think he will adhere to whatever the courts decide in the end?” I asked Wiles. “I do,” she replied. But Wiles made a prediction: “The smart lawyers around us think that we will be slowed down, as we already have been, but we will ultimately prevail.”
EYE OF THE HURRICANE. Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the “Junkyard Dogs”: The White House Chief of Staff On Trump’s Second Term (Part 1 of 2). Throughout the first year of Donald Trump’s second administration, Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple has interviewed Wiles amid each moment of crisis. This insider’s account joins a portfolio of portraits for an unflinching, up-close look at power—and peril.
by Chris Whipple
Photographer Christopher Anderson
December 16, 2025
https://archive.is/79tgs#selection-505.0-559.17
https://archive.is/9ohH5#selection-109.0-1957.63
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
On the morning of November 4, 2025, an off-year Election Day, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was meeting in the Oval Office with the president and his top advisers, men she calls her “core team”: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff. The agenda was twofold: ending the congressional filibuster and forcing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power. As she related it later, President Donald Trump was holding forth on the filibuster when Wiles stood up and started for the door. Trump eyed her. “Is this an emergency, that you have to leave?” he demanded. It was nothing of the sort—but Wiles left Trump guessing. She replied: “It’s an emergency. It doesn’t involve you.” With that, according to Wiles, she departed the Oval.
Wiles, wearing dark pants and a plain black leather top, met me in her office with a smile and a handshake. Over sandwiches from the White House Mess, we talked about the challenges Trump faces. Throughout the past year, Wiles and I have spoken regularly about almost everything: the contents, and consequences, of the Epstein files; ICE’s brutal mass deportations; Elon Musk’s evisceration of USAID; the controversial deployment of the National Guard to US cities; the demolition of the East Wing; the lethal strikes on boats allegedly being piloted by drug smugglers—acts many have called war crimes; Trump’s physical and mental health; and whether he will defy the 22nd Amendment and try to stay on for a third term.
“I’m not an enabler. I’m also not a bitch,” said Susie Wiles. “I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”
Most senior White House officials parse their words and speak only on background. But over many on-the-record conversations, Wiles answered almost every question I put to her.
We often spoke on Sundays after church. Wiles, an Episcopalian, calls herself “Catholic lite.” One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington, DC, rental. Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn't have first-hand knowledge.)
Wiles is the most powerful person in Trump’s White House other than the president himself; unlike any chief of staff before her, she is a woman.
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
SUSIE WILES
THE ENFORCER
The architect of President Donald Trump's 2024 election victory, now his WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFFs, is the daughter of the famous sportscaster Pat Summerall. As Wiles explains, her father was an alcoholic, so she knows how to deal with difficult men with big personalities. "I make a specialty of it," she says with a laugh. As the crises of Trump 2.0 pile up -- from Signalgate to revenge and retribution to the Epstein files to alleges war crimes on the high seas -- Wiles has worked at the center of the storm, the Trump whisperer who sees it all. "I am entering my ninth year altogether, my fifth year day-to-day," she says of working with Trump. "So it's hard to surprise me."
“So many decisions of great consequence are being made on the whim of the president. And as far as I can tell, the only force that can direct or channel that whim is Susie,” a former Republican chief told me. “In most White Houses, the chief of staff is first among a bunch of equals. She may be first with no equals.”
“I don’t think there’s anybody in the world right now that could do the job that she’s doing,” Rubio told me. He called her bond with Trump “an earned trust.” Vance described Wiles’s approach to the chief’s job. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”
It’s been a busy year. Trump and his team have expanded the limits of presidential power, unilaterally declared war on drug cartels, imposed tariffs according to whim, sealed the southern border, achieved a ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza, and pressured NATO allies into increasing their defense spending.
***
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
JD VANCE
THE HEIR APPARENT
Once a fierce critic of Trump -- who could be "America's Hitler," Vance said in 2016 -- the VICE PRESIDENT is now his highest-ranking acolyte, a 180-degree transformation that Wiles calls "sort of political." In the wake of his friend Charlie Kirk's assassination, Vance spoke of the "festering violence on the far left," helping fuel Trump's campaign of revenge and retribution against political enemies. "A conspiracy theorist for a decade," according to Wiles, Vance keeps a close eye on the views of younger voters.
At the same time, Trump has waged war on his political enemies; pardoned the January 6 rioters, firing nearly everyone involved in their investigation and prosecution; sued media companies into multimillion-dollar settlements; indicted multiple government officials he perceives as his foes; and pressured universities to toe his line. He’s redefined the way presidents behave—verbally abusing women, minorities, and almost anyone who offends him. Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September turbocharged Trump’s campaign of revenge and retribution. Critics have compared this moment to a Reichstag fire, a modern version of Hitler’s exploitation of the torching of Berlin’s parliament.
Historically, the White House chief of staff is the president’s gatekeeper, confidant, and executor of his agenda. That often means telling the president hard truths. Upon taking office, Ronald Reagan was hell-bent on reforming Social Security. James A. Baker III explained to him that cutting Social Security benefits was the third rail of American politics. Reagan pivoted to tax cuts—and was ultimately reelected in a landslide. Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford’s chief, explained: “The White House chief of staff is the one person besides his wife…who can look him right in the eye and say, ‘This is not right. You simply can’t go down that road.’ ”
Just how far will Trump veer off the guardrails of democracy?
The question around Wiles’s tenure under Trump has been whether she will do anything to restrain him. A better question: Does she want to?
T-MINUS 9 DAYS
January 11, 2025
Our first conversation took place little more than a week before the inauguration. Wiles called from the road, en route from Mar-a-Lago to her home in Ponte Vedra, Florida, in her BMW 530. She was in high spirits, basking in Trump’s victory. Not that she’d ever doubted the outcome. “At no point did I think we would not win,” she said. “Not in my core, not in my sleep, not in my rational mind.”
In Wiles’s view, RFK Jr.’s shock treatment of HHS is warranted. “He pushes the envelope—some would say too far. But I say in order to get back to the middle, you have to push it too far.”
But on that January day, as his second inauguration approached, Wiles was determined to show the world a new Trump. “I told Hakeem Jeffries, ‘You will see a different Donald Trump when he gets there,’ ’’ she recounted to me. “I’ve not seen him throw anything, I’ve not seen him scream. I didn’t see that really horrible behavior that people talk about and that I actually experienced years ago.”
Wiles’s childhood had prepared her for difficult men. She was raised in Stamford, Connecticut, and Saddle River, New Jersey, the only daughter and eldest of three siblings. It was her famous father, Pat Summerall, who put Wiles on a path to the pinnacle of political power. Summerall had been a kicker for the New York Giants and afterward parlayed his knowledge and mellifluous baritone into fame and fortune as the “voice of the NFL.”
At her father’s knee, Susie Summerall became a football aficionado, rattling off win-loss records and player stats like a miniature John Madden—an ability she says Trump shares. “The president, it turns out, is a junkie of that and is like a statistical savant,” she said. “And I remember a lot of it.” As a child, Susie also absorbed the zeitgeist of her father’s 1970s Manhattan. “Much of what Donald Trump remembers about the New York of the ’70s I lived through with my dad,” she said. “So when he talks about Frank Sinatra’s bodyguard, I know that name.” Steve Witkoff, Trump’s real estate friend turned special envoy, says Wiles and Trump are creatures of that same bygone era: “That whole world of the Copacabana and Sammy Davis Jr. and all, those are things that he wants to talk about.”
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
STEPHEN MILLER
THE ZEALOT
Trump's DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF FOR POLICY AND HOMELAND SECURITY ADVISER is the tip of the spear for the president's weaponized roundups of immigrants and the take-no-prisoners approach to alleged drug smugglers. Utterly loyal and a fierce protector of the president's secrets, Miller is a battle-tested soldier in Trump's war against the "deep state." Says Miller: "We come into the second term fully, completely ready and prepared to contend with that bureaucracy and ultimately to impose democratic will onto that bureaucracy."
The most valuable gift Susie got from her dad was hard-earned. Summerall was an absentee father and an alcoholic, and Wiles helped her mother stage interventions to get him into treatment. (Summerall was sober for 21 years before his death in 2013.) “Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,” Wiles said.
“Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say. But high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Wiles said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality.” He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Susie Summerall got her first taste of politics in the late 1970s, interning as a college student in the Capitol Hill office of Jack Kemp, the New York congressman, who’d been a Giant with her father. Then, at 23, she landed a job in the Reagan White House as a scheduler, where she watched his chief of staff Baker in action. She married a GOP advance man, Lanny Wiles, and in 1984 they moved to Ponte Vedra. Wiles wanted to “start a family and a life outside politics.” But in 1988, Baker lured Wiles back to work with Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush’s running mate. The couple had two daughters, Katie and Caroline. Wiles plunged into state politics—and over the next two decades became a formidable political strategist, serving as chief of staff to the mayor of Jacksonville, Florida, running Rick Scott’s gubernatorial campaign, and, briefly, leading Jon Huntsman’s campaign for president.
In 2015, Wiles was invited to Trump Tower to meet the real estate tycoon turned presidential candidate. The star of The Apprentice couldn’t believe he was talking to the daughter of the great Pat Summerall. “He’s said it a million times,” Wiles said. “ ‘I judge people by their genes.’ ” Wiles thought Trump was interesting and smart. “And they called me one night and said, ‘We’re serious about Florida now. Would you like to co-chair our leadership team?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I would.’ ”
“I had become disenchanted with what we now call traditional Republicans,” she recalled.
Wiles’s relationship with Trump almost ended at his Miami golf club one night in the fall of 2016. Unhappy with a poll showing him doing worse than expected in Florida, Trump berated her in front of a gaggle of cronies. “It was a horrific hour-plus at midnight,” Wiles told me. “And I don’t think I’ve seen him that angry since. He was ranting and raving. And I didn’t know whether to argue back or whether to be stoic. What I really wanted to do was cry.”
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
DAN SCAVINO
THE CADDIE
The DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF AND DIRECTOR OF PRESIDENTIAL PERSONNEL is a social media obsessive and veteran of Trump's first term. (He's also an former golf club manager and as a teenager toted the president's clubs.) "When we came into office in Trump 1.0", he says, "the Russia hoax kicked in right away, and it was nothing but investigation after investigation after investigation. This go-around, we came in, we won. There's no investigations. We control the House, the Senate, and the White House, and the president can focus on his policies." Scavino says Trump is relentless. "My toughest challenge is honestly keeping up with the president, because he is literally nonstop, he's always go, go, go."
Wiles steeled herself. “I finally said, ‘You know Mr. Trump, if you want somebody to set their hair on fire and be crazy, I’m not your girl. But if you want to win this state, I am. It’s your choice.’ ” Wiles walked out. Trump turned on a dime. “Lo and behold, he called me every day.” Wiles never looked back. Trump carried Florida, the first big prize in his stunning 2016 upset over Hillary Clinton.
Then, in a fateful turn of events, Wiles went to work in 2018 for an ambitious gubernatorial candidate named Ron DeSantis. (Trump urged DeSantis, then his protégé, to hire her.) She led the underdog candidate to victory. But afterward, DeSantis turned on her, denouncing Wiles publicly and bad-mouthing her privately. To this day, Wiles doesn’t know what triggered the governor’s vendetta. “I think he thought I was getting too much attention, which is ironic,” she told me. “I don’t ever seek attention.”
George W. Bush himself had gotten wind of the gutting of PEPFAR. He called Rubio to express alarm, according to a former aide close to Bush. “He’s been appalled by Trump from the beginning.”
Wiles landed on her feet, organizing Florida for Trump’s 2020 reelection bid. Trump had rescued Wiles, recently divorced, at a dark moment in her life. (Wiles and her husband divorced in 2017—due, she has said, to his bad financial decisions.) Looking back on DeSantis’s behavior, Wiles reflected: “Had he said, ‘Look, thank you. I appreciate your help. We’re done here.’ I believe the course of his history would have been different. I might or might not have gone to work for Donald Trump.”
DAY 1
January 20, 2025
On Trump’s first day in office, the president signed a flurry of executive orders, 26 in all, withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement, rescinding birthright citizenship, sending troops to the southern border, freezing foreign aid, and stopping federal hiring. Then Trump issued pardons to almost everyone convicted in the bloody January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, in which nine people ultimately died and 150 were injured. Even rioters who’d beaten cops within an inch of their lives were set free. (Fourteen people convicted of seditious conspiracy had their sentences commuted.)
A picture of old friends in better times.
A statuette of President Donald Trump sits at the copier in Susie Wiles’s support-staff office.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. departs the White House on November 13.
Did she ever ask the president, “ ‘Wait a minute, do you really want to pardon all 1,500 January 6 convicts, or should we be more selective?’ ”
“I did exactly that,” Wiles replied. “I said, ‘I am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn’t do anything violent. And we certainly know what everybody did because the FBI has done such an incredible job.’ ” (Trump has said his FBI investigators were “corrupt” and part of a “deep state.”) But Trump argued that even the violent offenders had been unfairly treated. Wiles explained: “In every case, of the ones he was looking at, in every case, they had already served more time than the sentencing guidelines would have suggested. So given that, I sort of got on board.” (According to court records, many of the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump had received sentences that were lighter than the guidelines.) “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” Wiles said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”
In the West Wing, Wiles is surrounded by young MAGA men. “She is a ‘go to church every Sunday, uses a swear word very, very rarely’ ” person, said James Blair, Wiles’s 36-year-old deputy chief of staff. “She doesn’t raise her voice. But she likes being around junkyard dogs.” Indeed, Wiles has seemed content to let her pit bulls—deputy chiefs of staff Miller, Blair, and Dan Scavino—run loose as she watches.
During Oval Office events, Wiles almost always sits just off camera. “There’s the president and then there’s whoever the three high-ranking people are on the sofa,” she said. “And then there’s a chair at the corner of the sofa, which is my chair, which means I’m the one that gets hit in the head with the boom mic.”
For all the chaos in the Cabinet, Wiles has kept palace intrigue and shivving to a minimum in the White House. Trump has empowered her; when Wiles weighs in, everyone knows she is speaking for him. She has in turn empowered her team: Blair, Miller, Scavino, and Taylor Budowich, who departed in September.
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
“First and foremost, she brings no ego,” says Blair. “And that is the starting point from which just an immense amount of power flows. There’s so much ego and testosterone around her, there wouldn’t be any room for hers anyway.”
From day one, Wiles had to grapple with another power center: Elon Musk.
“He is a complete solo actor,” said Wiles of Trump’s billionaire pal who led the scorched-earth blitz known as the Department of Government Efficiency. Wiles described Musk as something akin to a jacked-up Nosferatu. “The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” she told me. “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”
Musk triggered the first true crisis of the Trump presidency and an early test for Wiles. Trump’s chief was shocked when the SpaceX founder eviscerated USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. “I was initially aghast,” Wiles told me. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”
In his executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump had decreed that lifesaving programs should be spared. Instead, they were shuttered. “When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” said Wiles. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”
Wiles knew that fixing this was on her. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” she told me. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”
Wiles says she called Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalls telling him. At first, Wiles didn’t grasp the effect that slashing USAID programs would have on humanitarian aid. “I didn’t know a lot about the extent of their grant making.” But with immunizations halted in Africa, lives would be lost. Soon she was getting frantic calls from relief agency heads and former government officials with a dire message: Thousands of lives were in the balance.
“She is a ‘go to church every Sunday, uses a swear word very, very rarely’ ” person, Blair, Wiles’s 36-year-old deputy chief of staff said. “She doesn’t raise her voice. But she likes being around junkyard dogs.”
Wiles continued: “So Marco is on his way to Panama. We call him and say, ‘You’re Senate-confirmed. You’re going to have to be the custodian, essentially, of [USAID].’ ‘Okay,’ he says.” But Musk forged ahead—all throttle, no brake. “Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Wiles said. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china. But no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
The shuttering of USAID crippled the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The antiretroviral program, launched with $15 billion by George W. Bush in 2003, was credited with preventing millions of deaths. It depended on USAID grants. In an interview with The Financial Times, Bill Gates remarked: “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
Privately, another drama was playing out.
Bush himself had gotten wind of the gutting of PEPFAR. He called Rubio to express alarm, according to a former aide close to Bush. “He’s been appalled by Trump from the beginning and he’s determined not to weigh in,” the aide said. But Musk’s attack on one of his legacy achievements was too much. Bush, said that person, “cares deeply about the PEPFAR program. That and Wounded Warriors are the two things where he will weigh in, not publicly, but with intention.”
Did Rubio have any regrets about the untold number of lives that PEPFAR’s evisceration might cost? “No. First of all, whoever says that, it’s just not being accurate,” he told me. “We are not eviscerating PEPFAR. PEPFAR has been rearranged and reorganized in such a way where we’re now going to be able to deliver aid in a way that has a goal. The goal is to help countries become self-sustaining.” With a note of “America First,” he added: “Let’s begin with the premise: Is it the United States’ fault? Why isn’t China paying for more immunizations? Why isn’t the UK or Canada or any of the G7 countries?” (The UK, following in the footsteps of the US, slashed foreign aid in 2025. In November, China, which funded the Africa CDC, pledged $3.5 million in AIDS prevention in South Africa alone.)
When I repeated Rubio’s comment to a former GOP White House chief of staff, he remarked: “I find that immoral.”
DAY 8
January 27, 2025
“Our job is lethality and readiness and war fighting.” —Pete Hegseth on his first day at the Pentagon, days after Vance cast the tiebreaking vote in his Senate confirmation
For Trump, Wiles has helped pick a Cabinet of MAGA hard-liners: Pete Hegseth, secretary of war (formerly defense); Kash Patel, FBI director; John Ratcliffe, CIA director; Pam Bondi, attorney general; Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence; and Kristi Noem, head of Homeland Security. Wiles calls them “a world-class Cabinet, better than anything I could have conceived of.” Trump’s Cabinet members are either one of the least qualified presidential teams in history or, to hear Wiles tell it, disrupters—the only people with the balls to take on an entrenched deep state.
“It was a horrific hour-plus at midnight,” Wiles said of an interaction with Trump in 2016. “And I don’t think I’ve seen him that angry since. He was ranting and raving. And I didn’t know whether to argue back or whether to be stoic. What I really wanted to do was cry.”
“People talk about the deep state being at the State Department,” Wiles said. “It’s not. It’s the military-industrial complex.” Hegseth, in her view, is just the guy to take on the powers that be. She referred to Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another world-class disrupter, as “my Bobby” and “quirky Bobby.” In Wiles’s view, RFK Jr.’s shock treatment of HHS is warranted. “He pushes the envelope—some would say too far. But I say in order to get back to the middle, you have to push it too far.” (In December, Kennedy’s federal vaccine panel voted to end the decades-long recommendation for newborn vaccinations against hepatitis B, which is highly infectious and causes liver failure.)
DAY 56
March 16, 2025
“US deports hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador, despite court order.” —NPR
In mid-March, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) shackled and herded 238 immigrants onto transport planes and flew them to a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison. According to Trump, the men were members of Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan gang, but the evidence was sketchy (often based on tattoos alone). Most had committed no serious crimes; one, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported by mistake, the Trump administration admitted.
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
“I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation,” Wiles told me at the time.
When we spoke again in April, in cities across the country, masked ICE agents were snatching people off the street, throwing them in vans, and zip-tying and frog-marching them into makeshift deportation camps. Many were US citizens or entitled to be here. (ProPublica documented 170 cases in the first nine months of 2025 of US citizens being caught up in ICE’s dragnet.)
“I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Wiles said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality.”
“If somebody is a known gang member who has a criminal past, and you’re sure, and you can demonstrate it, it’s probably fine to send them to El Salvador or whatever,” Wiles told me. “But if there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check.” But as the usa.gov site itself notes, “In some cases, a noncitizen is subject to expedited removal without being able to attend a hearing in immigration court.” Not long after the El Salvador deportation fiasco, in Louisiana, ICE agents arrested and deported two mothers, along with their children, ages seven, four, and two, to Honduras. The children were US citizens and the four-year-old was being treated for stage 4 cancer. Wiles couldn’t explain it.
“It could be an overzealous Border Patrol agent, I don’t know,” she said of the case, in which both mothers had reportedly been arrested after voluntarily attending routine immigration meetings.“ I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”
DAY 74
April 3, 2025
“Long-threatened tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump have plunged the country into trade wars abroad….” —PBS News
The president declared April 2 “Liberation Day,” bragging about billions of dollars that would flow into US coffers from tariffs, refusing to acknowledge that the levies were a tax on consumers.
The question around Wiles’s tenure under Trump has been whether she will do anything to restrain him. A better question: Does she want to?
“So much thinking out loud is what I would call it,” said Wiles of Trump’s chaotic tariff rollout. “There was a huge disagreement over whether [tariffs were] a good idea.” Trump’s advisers were sharply divided, some believing tariffs were a panacea and others predicting disaster. Wiles told them to get with Trump’s program. “I said, ‘This is where we’re going to end up. So figure out how you can work into what he’s already thinking.’ Well, they couldn’t get there.”
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
Wiles recruited Vance to help tap the brakes. “We told Donald Trump, ‘Hey, let’s not talk about tariffs today. Let’s wait until we have the team in complete unity and then we’ll do it,’ ” she said. But Trump barreled ahead, announcing sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, from 10 to 100 percent—which triggered panic in the bond market and a sell-off of stocks. Trump paused his policy for 90 days, but by that time the president’s helter-skelter levies had given rise to the TACO chant: “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
Wiles believed a middle ground on tariffs would ultimately succeed, she said, “but it’s been more painful than I expected.”
At the time this article went to press, shortly before the December holidays, a Harvard poll showed 56 percent of voters think Trump’s tariff policies have harmed the economy.
DAY 207
August 14, 2025
“National Guard mobilizes 800 troops in DC to Support Federal, Local Law Enforcement—Trump declared a crime emergency in the nation’s capital.” —US Department of War
During the summer, Trump ordered the National Guard into four Democratic-led cities, claiming the troops were needed to crack down on crime and protect federal immigration facilities. In June the president deployed some 4,000 guard troops to Los Angeles; later he sent them to Washington, describing the city’s crime rate as “out of control.” “This was like a vitamin boost of ICE, of the [National] Guard, of the Park Service police, who actually have more authority than the DC Metro Police,” Wiles said. “And the idea was to right the ship and then slowly back off. And that’s what we’re doing.”
“I don’t think there’s anybody in the world right now that could do the job that she’s doing,” Rubio said of Wiles. He called her bond with Trump “an earned trust.”
Critics denounced the deployments as unconstitutional, performative, and ineffective, and many feared Trump had another, more sinister plan up his sleeve.
Will the president use the military to suppress or even prevent voting during the midterms and beyond?
“I say it is categorically false, will not happen, it’s just wrongheaded,” she snapped.
“Do you understand where people who think that are coming from?” I asked.
“I do a little bit, but not fully. I mean, I think they hate the president. They think he’s too wrapped up in what happened in 2020.”
The president and his team were pushing almost every legal and constitutional boundary and defying courts to stop them. But would Trump obey the Supreme Court? “Do you think he will adhere to whatever the courts decide in the end?” I asked Wiles. “I do,” she replied. But Wiles made a prediction: “The smart lawyers around us think that we will be slowed down, as we already have been, but we will ultimately prevail.”
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Part 2 of 2
EYE OF THE HURRICANE. Susie Wiles Talks Epstein Files, Pete Hegseth’s War Tactics, Retribution, and More (Part 2 of 2)
Trump’s chief reveals her thoughts on the first year, and on the team she’s built with JD Vance, Karoline Leavitt, Marco Rubio, and 3 more key players. Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple reports.
by Chris Whipple
Vanity Fair
December 16, 2025
https://archive.is/9ohH5
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
DAY 289
November 4, 2025
The day I met Wiles at the White House was a watershed for Trump: Voters would choose governors in New Jersey and Virginia and a new mayor in New York City; they would also vote on Proposition 50, California governor Gavin Newsom’s proposal to counter a brazen Republican gerrymander in Texas. Collectively, the contests were a referendum on Trump’s second presidency.
Over lunch in her West Wing corner office, Wiles recounted the morning. Escorting Trump from the White House residence to the Oval Office, she gave the president her election predictions: “I’m on the hook because he thinks I’m a clairvoyant.” Wiles thought the GOP had a chance of electing the governor in New Jersey, but she knew they were in for a tough night. (It would prove to be a Republican disaster, with Democrats running the table on the marquee races, passing Proposition 50, and winning downballot elections in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Mississippi.)
Given voters’ anxiety about the cost of living, Wiles told me she thought Trump should pivot more often from world affairs to kitchen-table issues. “More talks about the domestic economy and less about Saudi Arabia is probably called for,” said Wiles. “They like peace in the world. But that’s not why he was elected.”
Not far from where we sat was a gaping hole where the East Wing had been until just days before. I asked her about the fierce criticism that followed its demolition to make way for Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom. “Were you surprised by it?”
“No,” Wiles replied. “Oh, no. And I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning.”
Was she saying that Trump was planning more, as yet undisclosed renovations?
“I’m not telling.”
T-MINUS 232 DAYS
June 2, 2024
“Would you declassify the Epstein files?” —Fox News’s Rachel Campos-Duffy
“Yeah....I think I would.” —Trump
For many of Trump’s followers, it’s an article of faith that the US government has long been run by an elite cabal of pedophiles. Less conspiratorially but no less seriously, others question whether politicians and powerful people either participated in or knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of young women, from his posh Manhattan town house to his private Caribbean islands. Perhaps most critical to Trump followers, though, is the fact that Trump indicated a willingness to release the files—and didn’t. As this article went to press, grand jury material from the Epstein records was due to be released in December.
Wiles told me she underestimated the potency of the scandal: “Whether he was an American CIA asset, a Mossad asset, whether all these rich, important men went to that nasty island and did unforgivable things to young girls,” she said, “I mean, I kind of knew it, but it’s never anything I paid a bit of attention to.”
In February, Bondi gave binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a group of conservative social media influencers who were visiting the White House, including Liz Wheeler, Jessica Reed Kraus, Rogan O’Handley, and Chaya Raichik. The binders turned out to contain nothing but old information. “I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said of Bondi. “First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
As Noah Shachtman reported in Vanity Fair, “dozens and dozens” of FBI agents at the New York field office were tasked with combing through the Epstein files. Many observers assumed they were looking for (and possibly redacting) Trump’s name. “I don’t know how many agents looked through things, but it was a lot,” said Wiles. “They were looking for 25 things, not one thing.”
Wiles told me she’d read what she calls “the Epstein file.” And, she said, “[Trump] is in the file. And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.” Wiles said that Trump “was on [Epstein’s] plane…he’s on the manifest. They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever—I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.” (Trump started dating Melania Knauss, whom he married in 2005, sometime in 1998. Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s most prominent accuser, who died by suicide earlier this year, first met Epstein while she was a Mar-a-Lago spa worker in 2000. Trump and Epstein reportedly had a falling out in 2004.)
Trump has claimed, without evidence, that Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s infamous private island, Little St. James, “supposedly 28 times.” “There is no evidence” those visits happened, according to Wiles; as for whether there was anything incriminating about Clinton in the files, “The president was wrong about that.”
The people that really appreciated what a big deal this is are Kash [Patel] and [FBI deputy director] Dan Bongino,” she said. “Because they lived in that world. And the vice president, who’s been a conspiracy theorist for a decade…. For years, Kash has been saying, ‘Got to release the files, got to release the files.’ And he’s been saying that with a view of what he thought was in these files that turns out not to be right.”
In July, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and Trump’s former lawyer, traveled to a Tallahassee, Florida, courthouse to interview Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. Convicted on sex trafficking charges in 2021, she received a 20-year prison sentence. “It’s not typical, is it,” I asked Wiles, “to send the number two guy in the DOJ and the president’s former defense lawyer to interview a convicted sex trafficker?” According to Wiles, “It was [Blanche’s] suggestion.”
Wiles said that neither she nor Trump had been consulted about Maxwell’s transfer to a less restrictive facility after Blanche’s visit. “The president was ticked,” according to Wiles. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.” But, she said, “if that’s an important point, I can find out.” (At press time, Wiles said she still had not found out.)
What about the birthday greeting featuring a sketch of a nude woman, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, bore Trump’s name and was sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday? “That letter is not his,” Wiles said. “And nothing about it rings true to me, nor does it to people that have known the president a lot longer than I have. I can’t explain The Wall Street Journal, but we’re going to get some discovery because we sued them. So we’re going to find out.” Trump’s lawyers filed a $20 billion defamation lawsuit against Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, which the defendants have asked a federal judge in Florida to dismiss.
So will the president sit for a deposition in that process?
“I mean, if he had to,” she said.
The Epstein files debacle poses a dire political threat to Trump and the future of the GOP. “The people that are inordinately interested in Epstein are the new members of the Trump coalition, the people that I think about all the time—because I want to make sure that they are not Trump voters, they’re Republican voters,” Wiles said. “It’s the Joe Rogan listeners. It’s the people that are sort of new to our world. It’s not the MAGA base.”
A senior White House official described the mindset of an overlapping bloc of voters who are angered by both Trump’s handling of the Epstein files and the war in Gaza. It’s as much as 5 percent of the vote and includes “union members, the podcast crowd, the young people, the young Black males. They are interested in Epstein. And they are the people that are disturbed that we are as cozy with Israel as we are.”
Vance keeps his eye on the voters. “It’s Epstein, Gaza, and the coziness with Israel,” said this White House source. “If you dive deeply into the internet, you’ll find things that say, ‘Well, why don’t we just put Bibi at the Resolute Desk?’ ” the source said, referring to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Across our year of conversations, Wiles wanted to put an end to what she believes is a persistent myth, that Trump is a warmonger. To the contrary, Wiles says, the president genuinely cares about ending wars and saving human lives. “I cannot overstate how much his ongoing motivation is to stop the killing, which is not, I don’t think, where he was in his last term,” she said. “Not that he wanted to kill people necessarily, but stopping the killing wasn’t his first thought. It’s his first and last thought now.” Whether that thought is genuine or driven by his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize is, of course, open to debate.
DAY 213
August 20, 2025
“Israel says it has taken first steps of military operation in Gaza City.” —Reuters
In early October, Trump announced that his envoys had brokered a deal with mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey to end two years of bloodshed in Gaza. The 20-point plan, calling for the disarmament of Hamas and the administering of Gaza by a multinational force, was far from a sure thing. But the ceasefire and the release of almost all the hostages (the remains of one are still missing) was a considerable achievement. During his triumphant appearance at Israel’s Knesset, Trump struck a bellicose tone, praising Netanyahu and the Israeli armed forces with no mention of the Palestinian civilian casualties. Trump had previously lauded Bibi’s efforts in another action by calling him a “war hero”—a remark partially aimed at Israelis. Talking about it then, Wiles winced. “I’m not sure he fully realizes,” she said, “that there’s an audience here that doesn’t love it.”
When I asked her last fall what she thought Trump’s greatest achievement had been in 2025, Wiles was upbeat: “I think the country is beginning to see that he’s proud to be an agent of peace. I think that surprises people. Doesn’t surprise me, but it doesn’t fit with the Donald Trump people think they know. I think this legislation [the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill], which funded the entire domestic agenda, is a huge accomplishment. And even though it isn’t popular in total, the component parts of it are. And that will be a very big deal in the midterms.”
DAY 287
November 2, 2025
“Three killed in latest US strike on alleged drug boat in Caribbean.” —BBC News
During my first visit with Wiles at the White House in November, Trump’s revenge tour against his domestic enemies was in full swing. So was his lethal campaign against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, who, Trump was convinced, headed a powerful drug cartel. Over lunch, Wiles told me about Trump’s Venezuela strategy: “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.” (Wiles’s statement appears to contradict the administration’s official stance that blowing up boats is about drug interdiction, not regime change.)
I’d already pressed Wiles on Trump’s practice of blowing boats out of the water. The casualties almost certainly include unsuspecting fishermen. In 2016, Trump had famously mused that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters. Now he seemed to be testing that idea on the global stage. When a critic on X denounced these killings as “war crimes,” Vance posted: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” Pressed at an October press conference on why he didn’t just ask Congress for a declaration of war, Trump swatted the question away: “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay?” I asked Wiles: “What do you say to people who ask, doesn’t anybody in this administration have a heart?”
Wiles didn’t mince words: “The president believes in harsh penalties for drug dealers, as he’s said many, many times…. These are not fishing boats, as some would like to allege.” The boats, she argued, carried drugs; eliminating them saves lives. “The president says 25,000. I don’t know what the number is. But he views those as lives saved, not people killed.”
As of this article’s publication, at least 87 people had been killed in US strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The Washington Post reported that Hegseth had directed the US military to “kill everybody” in a strike on a boat; this was followed by a second strike that killed two survivors—a possible war crime. Hegseth said an admiral was responsible for the second strike. Congressional Democrats and even some Republicans were talking about calling hearings to investigate the matter.
“Drug smuggling,” I pointed out to Wiles, “is not a death penalty offense, even if the president wishes it were.”
Wiles’s office bookshelf featuring a replica FIFA trophy and some unsubtle Wicked Witch imagery.
A Marine stands sentry.
The flag from JD Vance's inauguration ceremony.
“No, it’s not. I’m not saying that it is. I’m saying that this is a war on drugs. [It’s] unlike another one that we’ve seen. But that’s what this is.”
“Obviously it’s a war declared only by the president and without any congressional approval,” I said.
“Don’t need it yet,” Wiles replied.
“We’re very sure we know who we’re blowing up,” she’d told me during lunch in November. “One of the great untold stories of the US government is the talents of the CIA. And there may be an interest in going inside territorial waters, which we have permission [to do] because they’re skirting the coastline to avoid getting [caught].” But Wiles conceded that attacking targets on Venezuela’s mainland would force Trump to get congressional approval. “If he were to authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress. But Marco and JD, to some extent, are up on the Hill every day, briefing.”
In October I asked Rubio what legal authority the administration had to conduct its lethal strikes. “Obviously, that’s a DOD [Department of Defense] operation,” he replied. “So I’m not in any way disavowing it. I agree with it 100 percent. I think we’re on very strong, firm footing, but I don’t want to be giving legal answers on behalf of the White House or the Department of War.” The secretary of state was unequivocal about the targets of the US strikes. “These are not alleged drug dealers,” he said. “These are drug dealers. Where are the YouTube videos of the family saying my poor innocent fisherman son, you know, was killed?”
DAY 40
February 28, 2025
“Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy get into heated exchange during Oval Office meeting.” —Face the Nation
I asked Wiles what she makes of the president’s affinity for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who seems to have cast a spell over Trump since he first ran for president. In 2018 the leaders met in Finland, where Trump appeared to side with Putin when asked whether he believed him about Moscow’s noninterference in the 2016 election. “Watching it at a distance in Helsinki,” she recalled, “I thought there was a real sort of friendship there, or at least an admiration. But on the phone calls that we’ve had with Putin, it’s been very mixed. Some of them have been friendly and some of them not.”
Vance, Rubio, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s all-purpose special envoy, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, an informal adviser, have been running Trump’s foreign policy since the departure of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who was moved to UN ambassador after Signalgate. “I’m not horrified by it,” Wiles said of the infamous unsecured chat about US attack plans against the Houthis to which The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly admitted. She noted, with an edge, “The burden’s on us to make sure that [national security] conversations are preserved. In this case, Jeff Goldberg did it for us.”
Wiles said she saw trouble brewing before Trump’s infamous Oval Office scrum with Volodymyr Zelenskyy last February, when the president and Vance berated Ukraine’s leader on worldwide television. “If we had it to do over,” Wiles said, “I wouldn’t have cameras, because it was going to end that way.”
Wiles claims the ugly spectacle was the culmination of churlish behind-the-scenes behavior by Zelenskyy and his entourage. It began with Zelenskyy failing to show up for a meeting with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent when he visited Kyiv to make a deal on mineral rights—and escalated. “It just was a bad sort of sentiment all the way around. And I wouldn’t say JD snapped, because he’s too controlled for that. But I think he’d just had enough.”
The Trump-Putin relationship has zigged and zagged. In the walk-up to the August summit with Putin in Alaska, Trump had publicly sought a ceasefire in Ukraine. It seemed he was finally getting tough with Putin. But in fact, Trump gave up on a ceasefire before the Anchorage meeting began.
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
Trump’s team was divided on whether Putin’s goal was anything less than a complete Russian takeover of Ukraine. “The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy,” Wiles told me in August. But privately, Trump wasn’t buying it—he didn’t believe Putin wanted peace. “Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country,” Wiles told me.
In October I asked Rubio if that was true. “There are offers on the table right now to basically stop this war at its current lines of contact, okay?” he said. “Which include substantial parts of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which they’ve controlled since 2014. And the Russians continue to turn it down. And so…you do start to wonder, well, maybe what this guy wants is the entire country.” (In Wiles’s office is a photograph of Trump and Putin standing together, signed by Trump: “TO SUSIE YOU ARE THE GREATEST! DONALD.”)
I asked Wiles about the remarkable 180-degree conversion of the secretary of state and the vice president from fierce Trump critics to high-ranking acolytes—and heirs apparent. Trump has floated a Vance-Rubio GOP presidential ticket in 2028. Rubio’s transformation was ideological and principled, she said: “Marco was not the sort of person that would violate his principles. He just won’t. And so he had to get there.” By contrast, she suggested, Vance had other motivations. “His conversion came when he was running for the Senate. And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political.” During another visit to the White House on November 13, when I asked Vance about his conversion to Trump loyalist, he said: “I realized that I actually liked him, I thought he was doing a lot of good things. And I thought that he was fundamentally the right person to save the country.”
Will Rubio challenge Vance for the top spot on the 2028 GOP presidential ticket? His answer: “If JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”
Wiles is known for having an open-door policy. Trump sometimes comes in unannounced (“he apparently never did in the first administration”). During lunch, no one interrupted us, and Wiles checked her phone only once. She was enjoying a rare moment of downtime. “They don’t know what I’m doing,” she said, motioning toward the Oval, and laughed out loud. After an hour, as I got up to go, I told her about how President Barack Obama’s chief Rahm Emanuel used to complain to visitors about how thankless his job was: “This is nice,” he said, pointing to the wood-burning fireplace, “and this is nice,” gesturing toward the outdoor patio. “And everything in between sucks.” Wiles replied: “I don’t feel that way at all.”
To the left of the fireplace was a freestanding video monitor: a live feed of Trump’s Truth Social posts.
The average tenure for a modern White House chief of staff is a year and a half. George W. Bush’s Andrew Card holds the record at five years and three months. Wiles may yet eclipse Trump’s so-far longest-lasting chief, John Kelly, at 17 months. If she chose to quit, Wiles could make a fortune running the campaign of any number of would-be GOP nominees; though Wiles says she earned around $350,000 for her role managing Trump’s 2024 campaign, she was reported to have made millions more through her consulting firm (Wiles had not replied when asked about this by the time this article went to print). When reports emerged that Biden aide Mike Donilon stood to make $8 million if his boss had stayed in the race and won, Wiles said her co–campaign chair Chris LaCivita sent her a note that said, “Boy, am I stupid. Why was [ I] so cheap?
Wiles says she’d originally planned to serve as chief for six months. “I have not had a day I would describe as overwhelming, though there’s plenty of frustration here. But you go to bed at night, you say your prayers, and you get up and do it again.” I asked her about her health and the president’s. “Mine is good,” she said. “His is great. My kids are grown. I’m divorced. This is what I do if I stay four years.”
In December, when asked about Trump falling asleep in Cabinet meetings, Wiles said, “He’s not asleep. He’s got his eyes closed and his head leaned back…and, you know, he’s fine.”
What about Trump’s increasingly frequent verbal attacks on women, as when, in November, he snapped “Quiet, Piggy!” at a female reporter from Bloomberg? Wiles replied: “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.”
Is Wiles really irreplaceable, as Rubio said? “Not patting myself on the back, but just recognizing the reality of this president at this time,” she said, “I’m just not [sure] who else could do this.”
In August I’d asked her if she felt she would outlast her Trump predecessors. “As long as I still feel honored to do it, and I feel like things are going well, we’re moving the country forward positively,” she’d said. “It’s two steps forward, one step back. I get that. But it’s two steps nobody else could make.”
“Will the president run for a third term?” I asked in November.
“No,” she said and then added, “But he sure is having fun with it.” Wiles said he knows it’s “driving people crazy.”
“So that’s why he talks about it,” I said.
“Yeah, 100 percent.”
“Would you say categorically no, and that the 22nd Amendment rules out [a third term]?”
“I do. Yeah. And I’m not a lawyer, but based on my reading of it, it’s pretty unequivocal.”
“And has he told you that in so many words?”
“Yes. Oh, a couple times, yeah.”
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
And then she went on. “Sometimes he laments, ‘You know, gosh, I feel like we’re doing really well. I wish I could run again.’ And then he immediately says, ‘Not really. I will have served two terms and I will have gotten done what I need to get done, and it’s time to give somebody else a chance.’ So, you know, any given day, right? But he knows he can’t run again.”
Months earlier she’d mused on the future of the party and the need for it to turn Trump voters into Republican voters. “Donald Trump will be an ex-president,” she said, looking ahead. And “I’ll be gone to do whatever I do next, which hopefully will be nothing.”
The 2026 midterm elections may determine the fate of Trump’s presidency. Vance told me that he hopes to minimize GOP losses in 2026. “I think a good midterm election for an incumbent presidency would be to lose a dozen seats in Congress and two or three seats in the Senate,” he said. “I think it will be better than that.” I asked Wiles for her prediction. “We’re going to win the midterms,” she said crisply.
DAY 15
February 3, 2025
A couple weeks into his presidency, Trump found himself taking stock. “How is it that you’re doing this so well?” he asked Wiles. “Sir,” Wiles replied, “remember that I am the chief of staff, not the chief of you.” She was paraphrasing one of James Baker’s favorite maxims.
But executing the president’s agenda requires telling him the truth. This is especially important when the president is surrounded by acolytes reading almost entirely from the same playbook. An effective chief steers the president clear of land mines. An ineffective one, by ducking tough conversations, lets him blunder into harm’s way. Four years into Reagan’s presidency, Baker, who understood the job, was replaced as White House chief by Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, who didn’t. Soon after, an ill-fated scheme to trade arms to Iran for hostages was born. Richard Nixon overreacted to the leak of the Pentagon Papers by authorizing a special investigative unit in the White House nicknamed the “plumbers”; the result was the Watergate scandal.
Bill Daley, Obama’s former chief of staff, believes Trump and his team could fall victim to overreach. “There’s no doubt the Charlie Kirk assassination gives them an opportunity to put the left on its heels,” he told me. “They believe they are in an incredibly strong position to do whatever the hell they want,” said Daley. “And usually that’s when [people] make mistakes. They go too far.”
DAY 309
November 24, 2025
“US judge throws out criminal cases against James Comey and Letitia James.” —The Guardian
In late September, in a message to “Pam,” his attorney general, Trump wrote (apparently inadvertently) on Truth Social that he’d been seeing posts online saying “same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia [sic]??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.” He told her, “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”
Five days later, a federal grand jury indicted James Comey, the ex-FBI director, for making a false statement and obstructing a congressional investigation. Then, on October 9, 2025, a Virginia grand jury indicted Letitia James, the New York attorney general, on one count of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a financial institution.
Back in March, on the 56th day of Trump’s presidency, I’d asked Wiles: “Do you ever go in to Trump and say, ‘Look, this is not supposed to be a retribution tour? ’”
“Yes, I do,” she’d replied. “We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”
In late August, I asked Wiles: “Remember when you said to me months ago that Trump promised to end the revenge and retribution tour after 90 days?”
“I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour,” she said. “A governing principle for him is, ‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to somebody else.’ And so people that have done bad things need to get out of the government. In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”
“So all of this talk,” I said, “about accusing Letitia James of mortgage fraud….”
“Well, that might be the one retribution,” Wiles replied.
“So you haven’t called him [out] on that, or said, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ ”
“No, no, not on her,” Wiles said. “Not on her. She had a half a billion dollars of his money!” Wiles laughed. (The massive civil fraud penalty won by the New York attorney general’s office in a case against Trump had just been thrown out by an appeals court.)
“Do you really think that Merrick Garland went after the president, persecuted him?” I’d asked her in March, referring to Biden’s buttoned-down, by-the-book attorney general.
“I do,” she replied, “and I think history will prove it to be so.”
In November, it was Comey’s turn in the dock. “So tell me why the Comey prosecution doesn’t just look like the fix is in,” I asked her.
“I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.” Wiles said of Trump: “I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”
On November 24, a federal judge dismissed the Comey and James indictments, finding that prosecutor Lindsey Halligan had been appointed unlawfully. Bondi vowed to appeal both decisions—in the Comey case, the statute of limitations may prevent it. Still, Trump’s retribution campaign continued.
Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s formidable White House chief, has never met Wiles but observes, “A good chief of staff is willing to stand up and look the president in the eye and say no,” Panetta told me. “I’m not sure whether she’s an enabler,” he said, “or whether she’s somebody who’s a disciplinarian and wants to try to make sure that he does the right thing.”
Wiles told me in March that she had difficult conversations with Trump every day. “They’re over little things, not big,” she said. “I hear stories from my predecessors about these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that.”
Wiles said Trump has been clear-eyed about what he wanted to do, “having not been there for four years and [having] had time to think about it.” And therefore she can pick her battles.
“So no, I’m not an enabler. I’m also not a bitch. I try to be thoughtful about what I even engage in. I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”
As the 2026 midterm elections approach, the stakes for Trump and his chief of staff couldn’t be higher. Trump’s second term has been more consequential than his first. He could leave office as a transformational president who sealed the southern border, passed major tax cuts, brought peace to Gaza, and re-created the GOP in his image. Or he could pursue reckless vendettas, shred democratic guardrails, and end up in the crosshairs of Democrat-led investigations. Either way, Wiles may be the thin line between the president and disaster. As one former GOP chief put it, “She may be more consequential than any of us.”
“I think what he meant by that,” I told Wiles, “is that we’ve never had a president who governs so much by whim and who depends so much on one person: you.”
“Oh, good Lord,” Wiles said. “Trump doesn’t depend on anybody.”
EYE OF THE HURRICANE. Susie Wiles Talks Epstein Files, Pete Hegseth’s War Tactics, Retribution, and More (Part 2 of 2)
Trump’s chief reveals her thoughts on the first year, and on the team she’s built with JD Vance, Karoline Leavitt, Marco Rubio, and 3 more key players. Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple reports.
by Chris Whipple
Vanity Fair
December 16, 2025
https://archive.is/9ohH5
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
DAY 289
November 4, 2025
The day I met Wiles at the White House was a watershed for Trump: Voters would choose governors in New Jersey and Virginia and a new mayor in New York City; they would also vote on Proposition 50, California governor Gavin Newsom’s proposal to counter a brazen Republican gerrymander in Texas. Collectively, the contests were a referendum on Trump’s second presidency.
Over lunch in her West Wing corner office, Wiles recounted the morning. Escorting Trump from the White House residence to the Oval Office, she gave the president her election predictions: “I’m on the hook because he thinks I’m a clairvoyant.” Wiles thought the GOP had a chance of electing the governor in New Jersey, but she knew they were in for a tough night. (It would prove to be a Republican disaster, with Democrats running the table on the marquee races, passing Proposition 50, and winning downballot elections in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Mississippi.)
Given voters’ anxiety about the cost of living, Wiles told me she thought Trump should pivot more often from world affairs to kitchen-table issues. “More talks about the domestic economy and less about Saudi Arabia is probably called for,” said Wiles. “They like peace in the world. But that’s not why he was elected.”
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
KAROLINE LEAVITT
THE MOUTHPIECE
The combative WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY fields questions from the press corps with all the subtlety of a rottweiler. Wiles calls her a "scary good" communicator, right up there with New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. "The president doesn't give a crap if you're a man or a woman," Leavitt says. "He just wants you to be good at your job." How's she faring in the onslaught of questions about the Epstein files after Trump's about-face? "It's pretty clear he wants us to be aggressively offensive when it comes to this issue."
Not far from where we sat was a gaping hole where the East Wing had been until just days before. I asked her about the fierce criticism that followed its demolition to make way for Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom. “Were you surprised by it?”
“No,” Wiles replied. “Oh, no. And I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning.”
Was she saying that Trump was planning more, as yet undisclosed renovations?
“I’m not telling.”
T-MINUS 232 DAYS
June 2, 2024
“Would you declassify the Epstein files?” —Fox News’s Rachel Campos-Duffy
“Yeah....I think I would.” —Trump
For many of Trump’s followers, it’s an article of faith that the US government has long been run by an elite cabal of pedophiles. Less conspiratorially but no less seriously, others question whether politicians and powerful people either participated in or knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of young women, from his posh Manhattan town house to his private Caribbean islands. Perhaps most critical to Trump followers, though, is the fact that Trump indicated a willingness to release the files—and didn’t. As this article went to press, grand jury material from the Epstein records was due to be released in December.
What about accusing Letitia James of mortgage fraud?
“Well, that might be the one retribution,” Susie Wiles replied.
Wiles told me she underestimated the potency of the scandal: “Whether he was an American CIA asset, a Mossad asset, whether all these rich, important men went to that nasty island and did unforgivable things to young girls,” she said, “I mean, I kind of knew it, but it’s never anything I paid a bit of attention to.”
In February, Bondi gave binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a group of conservative social media influencers who were visiting the White House, including Liz Wheeler, Jessica Reed Kraus, Rogan O’Handley, and Chaya Raichik. The binders turned out to contain nothing but old information. “I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said of Bondi. “First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
As Noah Shachtman reported in Vanity Fair, “dozens and dozens” of FBI agents at the New York field office were tasked with combing through the Epstein files. Many observers assumed they were looking for (and possibly redacting) Trump’s name. “I don’t know how many agents looked through things, but it was a lot,” said Wiles. “They were looking for 25 things, not one thing.”
Wiles told me she’d read what she calls “the Epstein file.” And, she said, “[Trump] is in the file. And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.” Wiles said that Trump “was on [Epstein’s] plane…he’s on the manifest. They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever—I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.” (Trump started dating Melania Knauss, whom he married in 2005, sometime in 1998. Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s most prominent accuser, who died by suicide earlier this year, first met Epstein while she was a Mar-a-Lago spa worker in 2000. Trump and Epstein reportedly had a falling out in 2004.)
Trump has claimed, without evidence, that Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s infamous private island, Little St. James, “supposedly 28 times.” “There is no evidence” those visits happened, according to Wiles; as for whether there was anything incriminating about Clinton in the files, “The president was wrong about that.”
The people that really appreciated what a big deal this is are Kash [Patel] and [FBI deputy director] Dan Bongino,” she said. “Because they lived in that world. And the vice president, who’s been a conspiracy theorist for a decade…. For years, Kash has been saying, ‘Got to release the files, got to release the files.’ And he’s been saying that with a view of what he thought was in these files that turns out not to be right.”
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
MARCO RUBIO
THE HAWK
A double threat -- both SECRETARY OF STATE AND NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER (the first since Henry Kissinger) -- Rubio takes a hard line against Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and a softer line against Russian president Vladimir Putin. (Infer what you will from the gator skull he keeps on display.) "I think the president is losing his patience through the process," Rubio says of administration talks with Putin to end the Ukraine War. "He's given Putin every opportunity to get to yes. But so far, Putin has not taken that."
In July, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and Trump’s former lawyer, traveled to a Tallahassee, Florida, courthouse to interview Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. Convicted on sex trafficking charges in 2021, she received a 20-year prison sentence. “It’s not typical, is it,” I asked Wiles, “to send the number two guy in the DOJ and the president’s former defense lawyer to interview a convicted sex trafficker?” According to Wiles, “It was [Blanche’s] suggestion.”
Wiles said that neither she nor Trump had been consulted about Maxwell’s transfer to a less restrictive facility after Blanche’s visit. “The president was ticked,” according to Wiles. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.” But, she said, “if that’s an important point, I can find out.” (At press time, Wiles said she still had not found out.)
“Sometimes he laments, ‘You know, gosh, I feel like we’re doing really well. I wish I could run again.’” Wiles said of Trump. “And then he immediately says, ‘Not really.”
What about the birthday greeting featuring a sketch of a nude woman, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, bore Trump’s name and was sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday? “That letter is not his,” Wiles said. “And nothing about it rings true to me, nor does it to people that have known the president a lot longer than I have. I can’t explain The Wall Street Journal, but we’re going to get some discovery because we sued them. So we’re going to find out.” Trump’s lawyers filed a $20 billion defamation lawsuit against Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, which the defendants have asked a federal judge in Florida to dismiss.
So will the president sit for a deposition in that process?
“I mean, if he had to,” she said.
The Epstein files debacle poses a dire political threat to Trump and the future of the GOP. “The people that are inordinately interested in Epstein are the new members of the Trump coalition, the people that I think about all the time—because I want to make sure that they are not Trump voters, they’re Republican voters,” Wiles said. “It’s the Joe Rogan listeners. It’s the people that are sort of new to our world. It’s not the MAGA base.”
A senior White House official described the mindset of an overlapping bloc of voters who are angered by both Trump’s handling of the Epstein files and the war in Gaza. It’s as much as 5 percent of the vote and includes “union members, the podcast crowd, the young people, the young Black males. They are interested in Epstein. And they are the people that are disturbed that we are as cozy with Israel as we are.”
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
JAMES BLAIR
THE BULLDOG
The 36-year-old White House DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF FOR LEGISLATIVE, POLITICAL, AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS is one of Wiles's favored "junkyard dogs." Blair says Trump's "genius is being able to simplify, like don't use a $10 word when a $2 word will do. He has a real talent for just cutting through all the bullshit and the clutter and getting down to brass tacks." Staring down a possible GOP shellacking in the 2026 midterms, Blair says the Epstein scandal is one of the big threats. But he's "more worried about making sure people are feeling economically better a year from now. Because even if Epstein were perfect but they don't feel good about economics, we're fucked."
Vance keeps his eye on the voters. “It’s Epstein, Gaza, and the coziness with Israel,” said this White House source. “If you dive deeply into the internet, you’ll find things that say, ‘Well, why don’t we just put Bibi at the Resolute Desk?’ ” the source said, referring to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Across our year of conversations, Wiles wanted to put an end to what she believes is a persistent myth, that Trump is a warmonger. To the contrary, Wiles says, the president genuinely cares about ending wars and saving human lives. “I cannot overstate how much his ongoing motivation is to stop the killing, which is not, I don’t think, where he was in his last term,” she said. “Not that he wanted to kill people necessarily, but stopping the killing wasn’t his first thought. It’s his first and last thought now.” Whether that thought is genuine or driven by his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize is, of course, open to debate.
DAY 213
August 20, 2025
“Israel says it has taken first steps of military operation in Gaza City.” —Reuters
In early October, Trump announced that his envoys had brokered a deal with mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey to end two years of bloodshed in Gaza. The 20-point plan, calling for the disarmament of Hamas and the administering of Gaza by a multinational force, was far from a sure thing. But the ceasefire and the release of almost all the hostages (the remains of one are still missing) was a considerable achievement. During his triumphant appearance at Israel’s Knesset, Trump struck a bellicose tone, praising Netanyahu and the Israeli armed forces with no mention of the Palestinian civilian casualties. Trump had previously lauded Bibi’s efforts in another action by calling him a “war hero”—a remark partially aimed at Israelis. Talking about it then, Wiles winced. “I’m not sure he fully realizes,” she said, “that there’s an audience here that doesn’t love it.”
When I asked her last fall what she thought Trump’s greatest achievement had been in 2025, Wiles was upbeat: “I think the country is beginning to see that he’s proud to be an agent of peace. I think that surprises people. Doesn’t surprise me, but it doesn’t fit with the Donald Trump people think they know. I think this legislation [the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill], which funded the entire domestic agenda, is a huge accomplishment. And even though it isn’t popular in total, the component parts of it are. And that will be a very big deal in the midterms.”
DAY 287
November 2, 2025
“Three killed in latest US strike on alleged drug boat in Caribbean.” —BBC News
During my first visit with Wiles at the White House in November, Trump’s revenge tour against his domestic enemies was in full swing. So was his lethal campaign against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, who, Trump was convinced, headed a powerful drug cartel. Over lunch, Wiles told me about Trump’s Venezuela strategy: “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.” (Wiles’s statement appears to contradict the administration’s official stance that blowing up boats is about drug interdiction, not regime change.)
What about Trump’s increasingly frequent verbal attacks on women? Wiles replied: “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.”
I’d already pressed Wiles on Trump’s practice of blowing boats out of the water. The casualties almost certainly include unsuspecting fishermen. In 2016, Trump had famously mused that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters. Now he seemed to be testing that idea on the global stage. When a critic on X denounced these killings as “war crimes,” Vance posted: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” Pressed at an October press conference on why he didn’t just ask Congress for a declaration of war, Trump swatted the question away: “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay?” I asked Wiles: “What do you say to people who ask, doesn’t anybody in this administration have a heart?”
Wiles didn’t mince words: “The president believes in harsh penalties for drug dealers, as he’s said many, many times…. These are not fishing boats, as some would like to allege.” The boats, she argued, carried drugs; eliminating them saves lives. “The president says 25,000. I don’t know what the number is. But he views those as lives saved, not people killed.”
As of this article’s publication, at least 87 people had been killed in US strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The Washington Post reported that Hegseth had directed the US military to “kill everybody” in a strike on a boat; this was followed by a second strike that killed two survivors—a possible war crime. Hegseth said an admiral was responsible for the second strike. Congressional Democrats and even some Republicans were talking about calling hearings to investigate the matter.
“Drug smuggling,” I pointed out to Wiles, “is not a death penalty offense, even if the president wishes it were.”
Wiles’s office bookshelf featuring a replica FIFA trophy and some unsubtle Wicked Witch imagery.
A Marine stands sentry.
The flag from JD Vance's inauguration ceremony.
“No, it’s not. I’m not saying that it is. I’m saying that this is a war on drugs. [It’s] unlike another one that we’ve seen. But that’s what this is.”
“Obviously it’s a war declared only by the president and without any congressional approval,” I said.
“Don’t need it yet,” Wiles replied.
“We’re very sure we know who we’re blowing up,” she’d told me during lunch in November. “One of the great untold stories of the US government is the talents of the CIA. And there may be an interest in going inside territorial waters, which we have permission [to do] because they’re skirting the coastline to avoid getting [caught].” But Wiles conceded that attacking targets on Venezuela’s mainland would force Trump to get congressional approval. “If he were to authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress. But Marco and JD, to some extent, are up on the Hill every day, briefing.”
In December, when asked about Trump falling asleep in Cabinet meetings, Wiles said, “He’s not asleep. He’s got his eyes closed and his head leaned back…and, you know, he’s fine.”
In October I asked Rubio what legal authority the administration had to conduct its lethal strikes. “Obviously, that’s a DOD [Department of Defense] operation,” he replied. “So I’m not in any way disavowing it. I agree with it 100 percent. I think we’re on very strong, firm footing, but I don’t want to be giving legal answers on behalf of the White House or the Department of War.” The secretary of state was unequivocal about the targets of the US strikes. “These are not alleged drug dealers,” he said. “These are drug dealers. Where are the YouTube videos of the family saying my poor innocent fisherman son, you know, was killed?”
DAY 40
February 28, 2025
“Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy get into heated exchange during Oval Office meeting.” —Face the Nation
I asked Wiles what she makes of the president’s affinity for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who seems to have cast a spell over Trump since he first ran for president. In 2018 the leaders met in Finland, where Trump appeared to side with Putin when asked whether he believed him about Moscow’s noninterference in the 2016 election. “Watching it at a distance in Helsinki,” she recalled, “I thought there was a real sort of friendship there, or at least an admiration. But on the phone calls that we’ve had with Putin, it’s been very mixed. Some of them have been friendly and some of them not.”
Vance, Rubio, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s all-purpose special envoy, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, an informal adviser, have been running Trump’s foreign policy since the departure of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who was moved to UN ambassador after Signalgate. “I’m not horrified by it,” Wiles said of the infamous unsecured chat about US attack plans against the Houthis to which The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly admitted. She noted, with an edge, “The burden’s on us to make sure that [national security] conversations are preserved. In this case, Jeff Goldberg did it for us.”
Wiles said she saw trouble brewing before Trump’s infamous Oval Office scrum with Volodymyr Zelenskyy last February, when the president and Vance berated Ukraine’s leader on worldwide television. “If we had it to do over,” Wiles said, “I wouldn’t have cameras, because it was going to end that way.”
Wiles claims the ugly spectacle was the culmination of churlish behind-the-scenes behavior by Zelenskyy and his entourage. It began with Zelenskyy failing to show up for a meeting with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent when he visited Kyiv to make a deal on mineral rights—and escalated. “It just was a bad sort of sentiment all the way around. And I wouldn’t say JD snapped, because he’s too controlled for that. But I think he’d just had enough.”
The Trump-Putin relationship has zigged and zagged. In the walk-up to the August summit with Putin in Alaska, Trump had publicly sought a ceasefire in Ukraine. It seemed he was finally getting tough with Putin. But in fact, Trump gave up on a ceasefire before the Anchorage meeting began.
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
Trump’s team was divided on whether Putin’s goal was anything less than a complete Russian takeover of Ukraine. “The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy,” Wiles told me in August. But privately, Trump wasn’t buying it—he didn’t believe Putin wanted peace. “Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country,” Wiles told me.
In October I asked Rubio if that was true. “There are offers on the table right now to basically stop this war at its current lines of contact, okay?” he said. “Which include substantial parts of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which they’ve controlled since 2014. And the Russians continue to turn it down. And so…you do start to wonder, well, maybe what this guy wants is the entire country.” (In Wiles’s office is a photograph of Trump and Putin standing together, signed by Trump: “TO SUSIE YOU ARE THE GREATEST! DONALD.”)
Will Marco Rubio challenge Vance for the top spot on the 2028 GOP presidential ticket? His answer: “If JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”
I asked Wiles about the remarkable 180-degree conversion of the secretary of state and the vice president from fierce Trump critics to high-ranking acolytes—and heirs apparent. Trump has floated a Vance-Rubio GOP presidential ticket in 2028. Rubio’s transformation was ideological and principled, she said: “Marco was not the sort of person that would violate his principles. He just won’t. And so he had to get there.” By contrast, she suggested, Vance had other motivations. “His conversion came when he was running for the Senate. And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political.” During another visit to the White House on November 13, when I asked Vance about his conversion to Trump loyalist, he said: “I realized that I actually liked him, I thought he was doing a lot of good things. And I thought that he was fundamentally the right person to save the country.”
Will Rubio challenge Vance for the top spot on the 2028 GOP presidential ticket? His answer: “If JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”
Wiles is known for having an open-door policy. Trump sometimes comes in unannounced (“he apparently never did in the first administration”). During lunch, no one interrupted us, and Wiles checked her phone only once. She was enjoying a rare moment of downtime. “They don’t know what I’m doing,” she said, motioning toward the Oval, and laughed out loud. After an hour, as I got up to go, I told her about how President Barack Obama’s chief Rahm Emanuel used to complain to visitors about how thankless his job was: “This is nice,” he said, pointing to the wood-burning fireplace, “and this is nice,” gesturing toward the outdoor patio. “And everything in between sucks.” Wiles replied: “I don’t feel that way at all.”
In Wiles’s office is a photograph of Trump and Vladimir Putin standing together, signed by Trump: “TO SUSIE YOU ARE THE GREATEST! DONALD.”
To the left of the fireplace was a freestanding video monitor: a live feed of Trump’s Truth Social posts.
The average tenure for a modern White House chief of staff is a year and a half. George W. Bush’s Andrew Card holds the record at five years and three months. Wiles may yet eclipse Trump’s so-far longest-lasting chief, John Kelly, at 17 months. If she chose to quit, Wiles could make a fortune running the campaign of any number of would-be GOP nominees; though Wiles says she earned around $350,000 for her role managing Trump’s 2024 campaign, she was reported to have made millions more through her consulting firm (Wiles had not replied when asked about this by the time this article went to print). When reports emerged that Biden aide Mike Donilon stood to make $8 million if his boss had stayed in the race and won, Wiles said her co–campaign chair Chris LaCivita sent her a note that said, “Boy, am I stupid. Why was [ I] so cheap?
Wiles says she’d originally planned to serve as chief for six months. “I have not had a day I would describe as overwhelming, though there’s plenty of frustration here. But you go to bed at night, you say your prayers, and you get up and do it again.” I asked her about her health and the president’s. “Mine is good,” she said. “His is great. My kids are grown. I’m divorced. This is what I do if I stay four years.”
In December, when asked about Trump falling asleep in Cabinet meetings, Wiles said, “He’s not asleep. He’s got his eyes closed and his head leaned back…and, you know, he’s fine.”
What about Trump’s increasingly frequent verbal attacks on women, as when, in November, he snapped “Quiet, Piggy!” at a female reporter from Bloomberg? Wiles replied: “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.”
Will the president sit for a deposition in his Jeffrey Epstein-related suit against the Wall Street Journal?
“I mean, if he had to,” Wiles said.
Is Wiles really irreplaceable, as Rubio said? “Not patting myself on the back, but just recognizing the reality of this president at this time,” she said, “I’m just not [sure] who else could do this.”
In August I’d asked her if she felt she would outlast her Trump predecessors. “As long as I still feel honored to do it, and I feel like things are going well, we’re moving the country forward positively,” she’d said. “It’s two steps forward, one step back. I get that. But it’s two steps nobody else could make.”
“Will the president run for a third term?” I asked in November.
“No,” she said and then added, “But he sure is having fun with it.” Wiles said he knows it’s “driving people crazy.”
“So that’s why he talks about it,” I said.
“Yeah, 100 percent.”
“Would you say categorically no, and that the 22nd Amendment rules out [a third term]?”
“I do. Yeah. And I’m not a lawyer, but based on my reading of it, it’s pretty unequivocal.”
“And has he told you that in so many words?”
“Yes. Oh, a couple times, yeah.”
Photographer Christopher Anderson.
And then she went on. “Sometimes he laments, ‘You know, gosh, I feel like we’re doing really well. I wish I could run again.’ And then he immediately says, ‘Not really. I will have served two terms and I will have gotten done what I need to get done, and it’s time to give somebody else a chance.’ So, you know, any given day, right? But he knows he can’t run again.”
Months earlier she’d mused on the future of the party and the need for it to turn Trump voters into Republican voters. “Donald Trump will be an ex-president,” she said, looking ahead. And “I’ll be gone to do whatever I do next, which hopefully will be nothing.”
The 2026 midterm elections may determine the fate of Trump’s presidency. Vance told me that he hopes to minimize GOP losses in 2026. “I think a good midterm election for an incumbent presidency would be to lose a dozen seats in Congress and two or three seats in the Senate,” he said. “I think it will be better than that.” I asked Wiles for her prediction. “We’re going to win the midterms,” she said crisply.
DAY 15
February 3, 2025
A couple weeks into his presidency, Trump found himself taking stock. “How is it that you’re doing this so well?” he asked Wiles. “Sir,” Wiles replied, “remember that I am the chief of staff, not the chief of you.” She was paraphrasing one of James Baker’s favorite maxims.
Wiles said that neither she nor Trump had been consulted about Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer to a less restrictive facility after Blanche’s visit. “The president was ticked.”
But executing the president’s agenda requires telling him the truth. This is especially important when the president is surrounded by acolytes reading almost entirely from the same playbook. An effective chief steers the president clear of land mines. An ineffective one, by ducking tough conversations, lets him blunder into harm’s way. Four years into Reagan’s presidency, Baker, who understood the job, was replaced as White House chief by Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, who didn’t. Soon after, an ill-fated scheme to trade arms to Iran for hostages was born. Richard Nixon overreacted to the leak of the Pentagon Papers by authorizing a special investigative unit in the White House nicknamed the “plumbers”; the result was the Watergate scandal.
Bill Daley, Obama’s former chief of staff, believes Trump and his team could fall victim to overreach. “There’s no doubt the Charlie Kirk assassination gives them an opportunity to put the left on its heels,” he told me. “They believe they are in an incredibly strong position to do whatever the hell they want,” said Daley. “And usually that’s when [people] make mistakes. They go too far.”
DAY 309
November 24, 2025
“US judge throws out criminal cases against James Comey and Letitia James.” —The Guardian
In late September, in a message to “Pam,” his attorney general, Trump wrote (apparently inadvertently) on Truth Social that he’d been seeing posts online saying “same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia [sic]??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.” He told her, “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”
Five days later, a federal grand jury indicted James Comey, the ex-FBI director, for making a false statement and obstructing a congressional investigation. Then, on October 9, 2025, a Virginia grand jury indicted Letitia James, the New York attorney general, on one count of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a financial institution.
“There is no evidence” Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s island, according to Wiles; as for whether there was anything incriminating about Clinton in the files, “The president was wrong about that.”
Back in March, on the 56th day of Trump’s presidency, I’d asked Wiles: “Do you ever go in to Trump and say, ‘Look, this is not supposed to be a retribution tour? ’”
“Yes, I do,” she’d replied. “We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”
In late August, I asked Wiles: “Remember when you said to me months ago that Trump promised to end the revenge and retribution tour after 90 days?”
“I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour,” she said. “A governing principle for him is, ‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to somebody else.’ And so people that have done bad things need to get out of the government. In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”
“So all of this talk,” I said, “about accusing Letitia James of mortgage fraud….”
“Well, that might be the one retribution,” Wiles replied.
“So you haven’t called him [out] on that, or said, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ ”
“No, no, not on her,” Wiles said. “Not on her. She had a half a billion dollars of his money!” Wiles laughed. (The massive civil fraud penalty won by the New York attorney general’s office in a case against Trump had just been thrown out by an appeals court.)
Wiles said that Trump “was on [Epstein’s] plane…he’s on the manifest. They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever—I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.”
“Do you really think that Merrick Garland went after the president, persecuted him?” I’d asked her in March, referring to Biden’s buttoned-down, by-the-book attorney general.
“I do,” she replied, “and I think history will prove it to be so.”
In November, it was Comey’s turn in the dock. “So tell me why the Comey prosecution doesn’t just look like the fix is in,” I asked her.
“I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.” Wiles said of Trump: “I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”
On November 24, a federal judge dismissed the Comey and James indictments, finding that prosecutor Lindsey Halligan had been appointed unlawfully. Bondi vowed to appeal both decisions—in the Comey case, the statute of limitations may prevent it. Still, Trump’s retribution campaign continued.
Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s formidable White House chief, has never met Wiles but observes, “A good chief of staff is willing to stand up and look the president in the eye and say no,” Panetta told me. “I’m not sure whether she’s an enabler,” he said, “or whether she’s somebody who’s a disciplinarian and wants to try to make sure that he does the right thing.”
Was Wiles saying that Trump was planning more, as yet undisclosed White House renovations?
“I’m not telling.”
Wiles told me in March that she had difficult conversations with Trump every day. “They’re over little things, not big,” she said. “I hear stories from my predecessors about these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that.”
Wiles said Trump has been clear-eyed about what he wanted to do, “having not been there for four years and [having] had time to think about it.” And therefore she can pick her battles.
“So no, I’m not an enabler. I’m also not a bitch. I try to be thoughtful about what I even engage in. I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”
As the 2026 midterm elections approach, the stakes for Trump and his chief of staff couldn’t be higher. Trump’s second term has been more consequential than his first. He could leave office as a transformational president who sealed the southern border, passed major tax cuts, brought peace to Gaza, and re-created the GOP in his image. Or he could pursue reckless vendettas, shred democratic guardrails, and end up in the crosshairs of Democrat-led investigations. Either way, Wiles may be the thin line between the president and disaster. As one former GOP chief put it, “She may be more consequential than any of us.”
“I think what he meant by that,” I told Wiles, “is that we’ve never had a president who governs so much by whim and who depends so much on one person: you.”
“Oh, good Lord,” Wiles said. “Trump doesn’t depend on anybody.”
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Re: Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down
by admin » Wed Dec 17, 2025 2:56 am
Trump PANICS As "QUITTING MAGA" Goes Viral
by Steve Harness
Really American and Raw America
Dec 16, 2025
Really American host Steve Harness breaks down viral videos going around of MAGATs finally coming to their senses and leaving MAGA for good!
Transcript
So if you are contemplating
leaving MAGA and you were scared to tell
people, yes, it's scary. There's fear
around it, but
once you do it, you're like, why was I
even scared of that?
Yeah, it seems that as the holidays
approach, some people are rethinking the
mega cult and are quitting in record
numbers, only to be embraced by some
family members and shunned by others.
And that mom right there, she just gave
an impassioned and tearful explanation
of why she quit cult 47 just in time for
Christmas. But does she still deserve a
lump of coal in her stocking? Or should
those of us outside of the mega cult
embrace her? And conversely, should we
cut family members out of our lives that
still support Trump and his lawless,
immoral regime? I have to say, I'm lucky
I do not have any Republicans in my
immediate family. But people I care
about sure do and this is an issue that
they have been struggling with. So hit
subscribe to Really American Media. Help
us out. We're almost at a million
subscribers. So hit subscribe here on
YouTube and go find us on Substack and
maybe go follow this woman right here.
This is Carter Brown because she could
use a little support as she wakes up
from a life lived in the GOP bubble. So,
I told my in-laws that I have left MAGA
and I'm a leftist now. And my
mother-in-law basically cried. And when
we were hugging,
she told me, she's like, "You're finally
really my daughter-in-law now."
And
I get that. I get thinking that.
Um, you know,
to be able to be embraced or being able
to change my mind and not feel judged
about
was really awesome.
So, if you are contemplating
leaving MAGA and you were scared to tell
people, yes, it's scary. There's fear
around it. But
once you do it, you're like, why was I
even scared of that?
No, I still haven't told my parents yet.
And um
I mean they're genuinely going to this
is what's so sad is they're going to
genuinely think that I sold my soul
which is crazy.
Yeah, it is crazy. And I wouldn't be
surprised if her parents freak the [ __ ]
out because you don't just stumble into
a cult, you're indoctrinated into them.
And that often starts with your parents.
We'll talk about the difference between
education and indoctrination in a
moment. Let's get back to that mom who
just had to stop recording because she
is crying her eyes out over all of this.
Sorry to pull myself together, but yeah,
it's crazy. And like that is scary
having them think that. But the moment
you stop caring about what other people
think is the moment you can finally
start living.
It's going to be painful and it's going
to hurt and you will literally feel like
you are being unal alived.
You will feel like you are goo in the
cocoon,
but you will be a butterfly on the other
side of this.
I know I am.
Yeah. So, I applaud Carter there for
seeing the obviousness of the truth that
Mega is a cult and they're destroying
our country in real time. But not
everyone on our team has embraced her
conversion. The video I just showed you
right there was posted about two days
ago. This one I'm going to show you was
posted two hours ago.
I've recently been talking about my
journey about leaving MAGA, and I made
an incredible observation last night as
I was falling asleep. For the most part,
most of the left is incredibly
welcoming, but there are a lot of people
that are not, and I understand that.
But last night, I was thinking about all
the people that go to the right,
and they are 100% welcomed with open
arms from everyone.
And that's why it's a cult. Of course,
the members of the cult are going to be
extremely welcoming of you,
and the people outside of the cult
are freaking pissed at you. But then
there are the people that also
understand and have empathy for what
you've gone through. Y'all are amazing.
Yeah. And this brings up a topic that is
becoming more and more relevant every
time Trump does something stupid. Do we
embrace or reject those that have seen
the light and abandoned our wannabe
dictator? So Nick and I were recently
talking about Lev Parnes and his son
Aaron Parnes who also left the mega cult
and are now fighting the good fight with
our team. And we shared our two cents on
how to handle these domestic political
refugees. You know, listen, I a few
people gave me a little grief about, you
know, those guys were Trumpers. Why
would you bring them on? And like you
and I were talking off air, like we're
trying to get people out of the mega
cult. We're trying to get people to see
the light. Yeah. Yeah.
So, when somebody does, and Lev has made
it very clear he's trying to make amends
for what he now knows was, you know,
terrible mistakes. Like, I think you
have to embrace that. Okay.
I was telling you yesterday, I see the
same stuff with Aaron uh Parnes all the
time that people say like, you know, he
used to be Republican. Yeah. Leah, thank
God, dude. Thank God that now he is
fighting for us because we see how
effective he is with his social media,
with his connections, and with his
words. So, like, thank God. Like what
are we going to do? Be just, hey, you
got a scarlet letter on you. We're never
going to let you into the club. It's
exactly what we want to happen. It's
what we're fighting for each and every
day. So when the midterms roll around,
we can do some [ __ ] [ __ ]
Yeah, exactly. We need to do some
[ __ ] [ __ ] And we need a team of
like-minded individuals if we're going
to overthrow the Trump kingdom at the
voting booth. And to circle back to what
I brought up before, there is a big
difference between education and
indoctrination. And if you don't know
what that difference is, you just might
be a Republican sheep.
What's crazy is when I was in the MAGA
cult um and I was leaving like
deconstructing around 2020, I
I didn't watch CNN, MSNBC. I didn't
watch any liberal media. I was still
watching and listening to consuming so
to say um right-wing media. So like Ben
Shapiro, Joe Rogan, um Matt Walsh, I was
listening to those chuckle [ __ ] Um
and just going to college and learning
how to research and verify information
um was enough to switch something in my
brain. A lot of people ask me how to
help their friends and loved ones get
out of the MAGA cult. And education is a
huge part of it. And so is
deconstructing your religion. Um that's
another topic we'll talk about a
different day. But people who are not
educated just do not have the capability
for discernment. They don't know how to
verify information or they don't even
know what a reliable source is
exactly. They don't even know where to
begin, but education is a great start.
Conservatives often say the colleges
indoctrinate kids into being a liberal.
No, it's just the first time a lot of
people get out of their little hometowns
and start to learn about the world. Then
magically they become a so-called
liberal. As I always say, to be liberal
is just to be logical. And that usually
starts with education.
Smart people don't like me, you know,
and they don't like what we talk about.
New smart people do not like Trump or
what he's talking about. And that is not
a coincidence. And this mega movement is
tearing families apart across the
country. And it doesn't matter if you're
workingass or a celebrity. Here's Jimmy
Kimmel's wife talking about this topic.
It hurts me so much because um of the
personal relationship I now have where
my husband is out there fighting this
man. And to me, them voting for Trump is
them not voting for my husband and me
and our family. And I I I unfortunately
have kind of lost relationships with
people in my family because of it. I
it's it's like this is not just
Republican versus Democrat for me
anymore. It is to me it's family values.
And it's it's really hard for me because
I grew up believing in these Christian
ideals of taking care of the sick and
taking care of the poor. And I don't see
that happening with this Republican
party.
Yeah. Spot on. In the good old days, we
could agree to disagree on tax cuts or
policy differences. But nowadays, the
differences between the left and the
right speak to your moral compass. Do
you believe in treating people fairly?
Do you believe in science? Do you
believe in the rule of law? If you
answered yes, you just might be a
liberal.
Hey y'all, former MAGA here, and I just
want to send out a message to all those
still trapped inside. It's okay to
leave. It's okay to admit you were
wrong. The only reason you're still
inside is because
you just want him to be right. You
supported him and you voted for him and
you wanted him to be right. And the
thing is is that he lied to us all
nonstop to get our votes. He's not
following through with any of his
campaign promises. He didn't say
anything about Elon dismantling the
whole government. He never said that. He
said he was going to bring prices down.
He said he was going to give us great
insurance, clean drinking water. He's
not doing any of that. All he's doing is
stealing as much money as him and his
billionaire friends possibly can from
the United States and all of us. That's
all he cares about is money for himself.
He doesn't care about us. He doesn't
care about anyone in this country. He
wants to take away your health
insurance, your kids' health insurance,
your kids' education. He wants to take
away the safety of the United States. He
appointed a bunch of morons
to all his cabinet positions. Nobody
who's going to help a single one of us.
Just let go. No one's going to blame
you. We're happy if you leave. You'll be
happier if you leave, too.
Well, better late than never. I mean,
we're going to need people like that to
clean Trump's clock in the midterm
elections next year. So, welcome to the
right side of history. Now, this next
verse I'm going to play for you brings
up a point that I stumbled into this
past April 1st. Yeah, April Fool's Day.
So, Nick and I did a whole episode of
the vocal minority where as a joke I
pretended to leave the left and I joined
MAGA. I spent a whole hour arguing just
like they do. And as wrong as it felt to
my core, I got to tell you, there's a
certain appeal of living in an alternate
reality where facts don't matter. You
just blame everything on the others and
you're also warmly embraced by that
cult. I can see why it's fun. And that
is what this woman also discovered.
Yes, me too. MAGA. MAGA from day one.
Y'all, MAGA is a spell first. First and
foremost, it's this patriotic
Christian um talking points. Very
spelllike. Um and it's captivating. Like
it's it's it's I got to say it's fun. It
was fun. It was fun. Uh, you know, I had
the gold Trump high tops. I mean, I like
I went to the Kid Rock uh
big American weekend bash um with all
kinds of um other artists and it was
Tucker Carlson came out. It was very fun
and patriotic to be in the MAGA
movement, I got to say. So, uh yeah,
it's uh to have that veil lifted. It's
been um
I don't have the words for it, but uh
yeah. Uh
voted for him for three time. Yeah, the
Charlie Kirk thing really opened my eyes
too in the um the list uh that never got
off Pam Bondi's desk that we're told to
forget about. Um I won't forget about
it. Don't gaslight me anymore, fat
orange man. I swear I I cannot believe I
I uh fell for all that, y'all. I'm
sorry. Um, I'm sorry it took so long,
but at least it at at least I see it
now. Um, a lot of people in my comments
are mad that it took so long. Well, I'm
sorry. Like, it's just when it's an echo
chamber of information that we get our
news from, Fox News, um, people that you
learn to love and trust and whenever
they lied about the shooter, like I
realized they're lying and have been
lying to me for over a decade now.
Yeah, exactly. called 47 is being lied
to and most people don't want to believe
that. They don't want to believe that
they could be that gullible and that
leaves them very confused about what
they can trust.
I don't know what to think anymore. I
don't [ __ ] I literally trust nobody.
I don't trust anybody, man. I don't
definitely don't trust the government
and I don't know who to believe and I
don't know what to think anymore.
I don't want to think that it's not
true. I don't I'm not happy that it's
true, but I don't want to think that
they it's some kind of a [ __ ] setup.
It's some kind of a smoke and mirror
show. I don't want to think that it's
some kind of a distraction to distract
us from what's really going on like
economy and Epstein.
But I don't know what to think anymore.
It's so scary when you can't even trust
your own [ __ ] government.
And it just seems like this whole thing
is nothing but deception,
corruption,
lies,
division. This country has never been
more [ __ ] divided than it's than
ever. I mean, in the last two weeks,
look at the [ __ ] mess. Look at the
fighting and the arguing and the
backstabbing and the lying and the
turning in and the accusing this person
of that and that person. The left ps.
The right and the right take the left.
it. This is [ __ ] insane.
Yeah, it is [ __ ] insane and it's what
you voted for. But I have to assume that
some good people made a bad choice in
voting for Trump and now they are
starting to see that. We're even hearing
it from some, you know, old white guys
wearing red hats.
Mr. Trump, see this? I was your
supporter. I was your supporter. I used
to love you. I used to vote for you. I
used to believe in you. But don't you
dare give any of my money. Don't you
give $20 billion dollar of our money to
the to the leader of Argentina so that
he can just give it over to Netanyahu.
Now listen to you. You need to start
doing the will of the people, not what
you think. You are becoming a dictator.
And I'm telling you that right now. You
are not doing what you said you were
going to do. You say you are, but you're
not. And you're dragging feet. You're
dragging your feet. And how about your
son-in-law in bed with Netanyahu? Your
son-in-law, Jared Kushner. No wonder,
godamn it, you are you are not you are
not taking care of that that that swamp
in Israel.
And in case you need some help or advice
on how to get any of your family members
out of the mega cult, this guy left the
cult and started a website called
Leaving Mega.
I wrote a mega copa. And in that
apology, I said that I was wrong, that I
was sorry for supporting Trump and the
MAGA movement, and that I wanted to
apologize to anyone I may have hurt with
my words, deeds, and rhetoric. And the
God's honest truth is, I never thought
that anybody would care that I had left,
but I discovered that people did care.
And it was born my organization, Leaving
MAGA, is where it came from. So, I want
everyone to think about those in their
in your own lives who are still in the
thr of MAGA. Uh myself, all of our
leaders at Leaving MAGA. We are living
proof that it is possible to leave.
Yes, it is possible. And we're in the
season of miracles. So, don't be silent
at your family holiday gatherings this
year. Instead, get vocal. From the vocal
minority with Nick and Steve podcast,
I'm Steve Harnesses for Really American
Media.
by Steve Harness
Really American and Raw America
Dec 16, 2025
Really American host Steve Harness breaks down viral videos going around of MAGATs finally coming to their senses and leaving MAGA for good!
Transcript
So if you are contemplating
leaving MAGA and you were scared to tell
people, yes, it's scary. There's fear
around it, but
once you do it, you're like, why was I
even scared of that?
Yeah, it seems that as the holidays
approach, some people are rethinking the
mega cult and are quitting in record
numbers, only to be embraced by some
family members and shunned by others.
And that mom right there, she just gave
an impassioned and tearful explanation
of why she quit cult 47 just in time for
Christmas. But does she still deserve a
lump of coal in her stocking? Or should
those of us outside of the mega cult
embrace her? And conversely, should we
cut family members out of our lives that
still support Trump and his lawless,
immoral regime? I have to say, I'm lucky
I do not have any Republicans in my
immediate family. But people I care
about sure do and this is an issue that
they have been struggling with. So hit
subscribe to Really American Media. Help
us out. We're almost at a million
subscribers. So hit subscribe here on
YouTube and go find us on Substack and
maybe go follow this woman right here.
This is Carter Brown because she could
use a little support as she wakes up
from a life lived in the GOP bubble. So,
I told my in-laws that I have left MAGA
and I'm a leftist now. And my
mother-in-law basically cried. And when
we were hugging,
she told me, she's like, "You're finally
really my daughter-in-law now."
And
I get that. I get thinking that.
Um, you know,
to be able to be embraced or being able
to change my mind and not feel judged
about
was really awesome.
So, if you are contemplating
leaving MAGA and you were scared to tell
people, yes, it's scary. There's fear
around it. But
once you do it, you're like, why was I
even scared of that?
No, I still haven't told my parents yet.
And um
I mean they're genuinely going to this
is what's so sad is they're going to
genuinely think that I sold my soul
which is crazy.
Yeah, it is crazy. And I wouldn't be
surprised if her parents freak the [ __ ]
out because you don't just stumble into
a cult, you're indoctrinated into them.
And that often starts with your parents.
We'll talk about the difference between
education and indoctrination in a
moment. Let's get back to that mom who
just had to stop recording because she
is crying her eyes out over all of this.
Sorry to pull myself together, but yeah,
it's crazy. And like that is scary
having them think that. But the moment
you stop caring about what other people
think is the moment you can finally
start living.
It's going to be painful and it's going
to hurt and you will literally feel like
you are being unal alived.
You will feel like you are goo in the
cocoon,
but you will be a butterfly on the other
side of this.
I know I am.
Yeah. So, I applaud Carter there for
seeing the obviousness of the truth that
Mega is a cult and they're destroying
our country in real time. But not
everyone on our team has embraced her
conversion. The video I just showed you
right there was posted about two days
ago. This one I'm going to show you was
posted two hours ago.
I've recently been talking about my
journey about leaving MAGA, and I made
an incredible observation last night as
I was falling asleep. For the most part,
most of the left is incredibly
welcoming, but there are a lot of people
that are not, and I understand that.
But last night, I was thinking about all
the people that go to the right,
and they are 100% welcomed with open
arms from everyone.
And that's why it's a cult. Of course,
the members of the cult are going to be
extremely welcoming of you,
and the people outside of the cult
are freaking pissed at you. But then
there are the people that also
understand and have empathy for what
you've gone through. Y'all are amazing.
Yeah. And this brings up a topic that is
becoming more and more relevant every
time Trump does something stupid. Do we
embrace or reject those that have seen
the light and abandoned our wannabe
dictator? So Nick and I were recently
talking about Lev Parnes and his son
Aaron Parnes who also left the mega cult
and are now fighting the good fight with
our team. And we shared our two cents on
how to handle these domestic political
refugees. You know, listen, I a few
people gave me a little grief about, you
know, those guys were Trumpers. Why
would you bring them on? And like you
and I were talking off air, like we're
trying to get people out of the mega
cult. We're trying to get people to see
the light. Yeah. Yeah.
So, when somebody does, and Lev has made
it very clear he's trying to make amends
for what he now knows was, you know,
terrible mistakes. Like, I think you
have to embrace that. Okay.
I was telling you yesterday, I see the
same stuff with Aaron uh Parnes all the
time that people say like, you know, he
used to be Republican. Yeah. Leah, thank
God, dude. Thank God that now he is
fighting for us because we see how
effective he is with his social media,
with his connections, and with his
words. So, like, thank God. Like what
are we going to do? Be just, hey, you
got a scarlet letter on you. We're never
going to let you into the club. It's
exactly what we want to happen. It's
what we're fighting for each and every
day. So when the midterms roll around,
we can do some [ __ ] [ __ ]
Yeah, exactly. We need to do some
[ __ ] [ __ ] And we need a team of
like-minded individuals if we're going
to overthrow the Trump kingdom at the
voting booth. And to circle back to what
I brought up before, there is a big
difference between education and
indoctrination. And if you don't know
what that difference is, you just might
be a Republican sheep.
What's crazy is when I was in the MAGA
cult um and I was leaving like
deconstructing around 2020, I
I didn't watch CNN, MSNBC. I didn't
watch any liberal media. I was still
watching and listening to consuming so
to say um right-wing media. So like Ben
Shapiro, Joe Rogan, um Matt Walsh, I was
listening to those chuckle [ __ ] Um
and just going to college and learning
how to research and verify information
um was enough to switch something in my
brain. A lot of people ask me how to
help their friends and loved ones get
out of the MAGA cult. And education is a
huge part of it. And so is
deconstructing your religion. Um that's
another topic we'll talk about a
different day. But people who are not
educated just do not have the capability
for discernment. They don't know how to
verify information or they don't even
know what a reliable source is
exactly. They don't even know where to
begin, but education is a great start.
Conservatives often say the colleges
indoctrinate kids into being a liberal.
No, it's just the first time a lot of
people get out of their little hometowns
and start to learn about the world. Then
magically they become a so-called
liberal. As I always say, to be liberal
is just to be logical. And that usually
starts with education.
Smart people don't like me, you know,
and they don't like what we talk about.
New smart people do not like Trump or
what he's talking about. And that is not
a coincidence. And this mega movement is
tearing families apart across the
country. And it doesn't matter if you're
workingass or a celebrity. Here's Jimmy
Kimmel's wife talking about this topic.
It hurts me so much because um of the
personal relationship I now have where
my husband is out there fighting this
man. And to me, them voting for Trump is
them not voting for my husband and me
and our family. And I I I unfortunately
have kind of lost relationships with
people in my family because of it. I
it's it's like this is not just
Republican versus Democrat for me
anymore. It is to me it's family values.
And it's it's really hard for me because
I grew up believing in these Christian
ideals of taking care of the sick and
taking care of the poor. And I don't see
that happening with this Republican
party.
Yeah. Spot on. In the good old days, we
could agree to disagree on tax cuts or
policy differences. But nowadays, the
differences between the left and the
right speak to your moral compass. Do
you believe in treating people fairly?
Do you believe in science? Do you
believe in the rule of law? If you
answered yes, you just might be a
liberal.
Hey y'all, former MAGA here, and I just
want to send out a message to all those
still trapped inside. It's okay to
leave. It's okay to admit you were
wrong. The only reason you're still
inside is because
you just want him to be right. You
supported him and you voted for him and
you wanted him to be right. And the
thing is is that he lied to us all
nonstop to get our votes. He's not
following through with any of his
campaign promises. He didn't say
anything about Elon dismantling the
whole government. He never said that. He
said he was going to bring prices down.
He said he was going to give us great
insurance, clean drinking water. He's
not doing any of that. All he's doing is
stealing as much money as him and his
billionaire friends possibly can from
the United States and all of us. That's
all he cares about is money for himself.
He doesn't care about us. He doesn't
care about anyone in this country. He
wants to take away your health
insurance, your kids' health insurance,
your kids' education. He wants to take
away the safety of the United States. He
appointed a bunch of morons
to all his cabinet positions. Nobody
who's going to help a single one of us.
Just let go. No one's going to blame
you. We're happy if you leave. You'll be
happier if you leave, too.
Well, better late than never. I mean,
we're going to need people like that to
clean Trump's clock in the midterm
elections next year. So, welcome to the
right side of history. Now, this next
verse I'm going to play for you brings
up a point that I stumbled into this
past April 1st. Yeah, April Fool's Day.
So, Nick and I did a whole episode of
the vocal minority where as a joke I
pretended to leave the left and I joined
MAGA. I spent a whole hour arguing just
like they do. And as wrong as it felt to
my core, I got to tell you, there's a
certain appeal of living in an alternate
reality where facts don't matter. You
just blame everything on the others and
you're also warmly embraced by that
cult. I can see why it's fun. And that
is what this woman also discovered.
Yes, me too. MAGA. MAGA from day one.
Y'all, MAGA is a spell first. First and
foremost, it's this patriotic
Christian um talking points. Very
spelllike. Um and it's captivating. Like
it's it's it's I got to say it's fun. It
was fun. It was fun. Uh, you know, I had
the gold Trump high tops. I mean, I like
I went to the Kid Rock uh
big American weekend bash um with all
kinds of um other artists and it was
Tucker Carlson came out. It was very fun
and patriotic to be in the MAGA
movement, I got to say. So, uh yeah,
it's uh to have that veil lifted. It's
been um
I don't have the words for it, but uh
yeah. Uh
voted for him for three time. Yeah, the
Charlie Kirk thing really opened my eyes
too in the um the list uh that never got
off Pam Bondi's desk that we're told to
forget about. Um I won't forget about
it. Don't gaslight me anymore, fat
orange man. I swear I I cannot believe I
I uh fell for all that, y'all. I'm
sorry. Um, I'm sorry it took so long,
but at least it at at least I see it
now. Um, a lot of people in my comments
are mad that it took so long. Well, I'm
sorry. Like, it's just when it's an echo
chamber of information that we get our
news from, Fox News, um, people that you
learn to love and trust and whenever
they lied about the shooter, like I
realized they're lying and have been
lying to me for over a decade now.
Yeah, exactly. called 47 is being lied
to and most people don't want to believe
that. They don't want to believe that
they could be that gullible and that
leaves them very confused about what
they can trust.
I don't know what to think anymore. I
don't [ __ ] I literally trust nobody.
I don't trust anybody, man. I don't
definitely don't trust the government
and I don't know who to believe and I
don't know what to think anymore.
I don't want to think that it's not
true. I don't I'm not happy that it's
true, but I don't want to think that
they it's some kind of a [ __ ] setup.
It's some kind of a smoke and mirror
show. I don't want to think that it's
some kind of a distraction to distract
us from what's really going on like
economy and Epstein.
But I don't know what to think anymore.
It's so scary when you can't even trust
your own [ __ ] government.
And it just seems like this whole thing
is nothing but deception,
corruption,
lies,
division. This country has never been
more [ __ ] divided than it's than
ever. I mean, in the last two weeks,
look at the [ __ ] mess. Look at the
fighting and the arguing and the
backstabbing and the lying and the
turning in and the accusing this person
of that and that person. The left ps.
The right and the right take the left.
it. This is [ __ ] insane.
Yeah, it is [ __ ] insane and it's what
you voted for. But I have to assume that
some good people made a bad choice in
voting for Trump and now they are
starting to see that. We're even hearing
it from some, you know, old white guys
wearing red hats.
Mr. Trump, see this? I was your
supporter. I was your supporter. I used
to love you. I used to vote for you. I
used to believe in you. But don't you
dare give any of my money. Don't you
give $20 billion dollar of our money to
the to the leader of Argentina so that
he can just give it over to Netanyahu.
Now listen to you. You need to start
doing the will of the people, not what
you think. You are becoming a dictator.
And I'm telling you that right now. You
are not doing what you said you were
going to do. You say you are, but you're
not. And you're dragging feet. You're
dragging your feet. And how about your
son-in-law in bed with Netanyahu? Your
son-in-law, Jared Kushner. No wonder,
godamn it, you are you are not you are
not taking care of that that that swamp
in Israel.
And in case you need some help or advice
on how to get any of your family members
out of the mega cult, this guy left the
cult and started a website called
Leaving Mega.
I wrote a mega copa. And in that
apology, I said that I was wrong, that I
was sorry for supporting Trump and the
MAGA movement, and that I wanted to
apologize to anyone I may have hurt with
my words, deeds, and rhetoric. And the
God's honest truth is, I never thought
that anybody would care that I had left,
but I discovered that people did care.
And it was born my organization, Leaving
MAGA, is where it came from. So, I want
everyone to think about those in their
in your own lives who are still in the
thr of MAGA. Uh myself, all of our
leaders at Leaving MAGA. We are living
proof that it is possible to leave.
Yes, it is possible. And we're in the
season of miracles. So, don't be silent
at your family holiday gatherings this
year. Instead, get vocal. From the vocal
minority with Nick and Steve podcast,
I'm Steve Harnesses for Really American
Media.
- admin
- Site Admin
- Posts: 40175
- Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am
Re: Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down
by admin » Wed Dec 17, 2025 5:31 pm
Trump orders 'blockade' of sanctioned oil tankers leaving, entering Venezuela
by Idrees Ali, Phil Stewart, Shariq Khan and Marianna Parraga
Reuters
December 17, 20259:12 AM PST Updated 14 mins ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/ ... 025-12-16/
Summary
• Oil prices rise over 1% following blockade announcement
• Trump labels Venezuelan "regime" a foreign terrorist organization
• Venezuela rejects Trump's "grotesque threat"
• Maduro claims US aims to control Venezuela's vast oil reserves
WASHINGTON, Dec 16 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump ordered on Tuesday a "blockade" of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela, in Washington's latest move to increase pressure on Nicolas Maduro's government, targeting its main source of income.
It is unclear how Trump will impose the move against the sanctioned vessels, and whether he will turn to the Coast Guard to interdict vessels like he did last week. The administration has moved thousands of troops and nearly a dozen warships - including an aircraft carrier - to the region.
The Reuters Tariff Watch newsletter is your daily guide to the latest global trade and tariff news. Sign up here.
"For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela."
In a statement, Venezuela's government said it rejected Trump's "grotesque threat."
Oil prices rose more than 1% in Asian trade on Wednesday. Brent crude futures LCOc1 were up 70 cents, or 1.2%, at $59.62 a barrel at 0245 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude CLc1 rose 73 cents, or 1.3%, to $56.00 a barrel.
U.S. crude futures climbed over 1% to $55.96 a barrel in Asian trading after Trump's announcement. Oil prices settled at $55.27 a barrel on Tuesday, the lowest close since February 2021.
Oil market participants said prices were rising in anticipation of a potential reduction in Venezuelan exports, although they were still waiting to see how Trump’s blockade would be enforced and whether it would extend to include non-sanctioned vessels.
LEGAL QUESTIONS.
American presidents have broad discretion to deploy U.S. forces abroad, but Trump’s asserted blockade marks a new test of presidential authority, said international law scholar Elena Chachko of UC Berkeley Law School.
Blockades have traditionally been treated as permissible “instruments of war,” but only under strict conditions, Chachko said. “There are serious questions on both the domestic law front and international law front,” she added.
U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, called the blockade "unquestionably an act of war."
"A war that the Congress never authorized and the American people do not want," Castro added on X.
There has been an effective embargo in place after the U.S. seized a sanctioned oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela last week, with loaded vessels carrying millions of barrels of oil staying in Venezuelan waters rather than risk seizure.
Since the seizure, Venezuelan crude exports have fallen sharply, a situation worsened by a cyberattack that knocked down state-run PDVSA's administrative systems this week.
While many vessels picking up oil in Venezuela are under sanctions, others transporting the country's oil and crude from Iran and Russia have not been sanctioned, and some companies, particularly the U.S.' Chevron (CVX.N), opens new tab, transport Venezuelan oil in their own authorized ships.
Oil tanker on Lake Maracaibo, in Cabimas
An oil tanker sails on Lake Maracaibo, in Cabimas, Venezuela October 14, 2022. REUTERS/Issac Urrutia Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
China is the biggest buyer of Venezuelan crude, which accounts for roughly 4% of its imports, with shipments in December on track to average more than 600,000 barrels per day, analysts have said.
For now, the oil market is well supplied and there are millions of barrels of oil on tankers off the coast of China waiting to offload. If the embargo stays in place for some time, then the loss of nearly a million barrels a day of crude supply is likely to push oil prices higher.
Two U.S. officials said the new policy, if implemented fully, could have a major impact on Maduro.
David Goldwyn, a former State Department energy diplomat, said if Venezuela's affected exports are not replaced by increased OPEC spare capacity, the impact on oil prices could be in the range of five to eight dollars a barrel.
"I would expect inflation to skyrocket, and massive and immediate migration from Venezuela to neighboring countries," Goldwyn said.
Since the U.S. imposed energy sanctions on Venezuela in 2019, traders and refiners buying Venezuelan oil have resorted to a "shadow fleet" of tankers that disguise their location and to vessels sanctioned for transporting Iranian or Russian oil.
As of last week, more than 30 of the 80 ships in Venezuelan waters or approaching the country were under U.S. sanctions, according to data compiled by TankerTrackers.com.
INCREASED TENSIONS
Trump's pressure campaign on Maduro has included a ramped-up military presence in the region and more than two dozen military strikes on vessels in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea near Venezuela, which have killed at least 90 people.
Trump has also said that U.S. land strikes on the South American country will soon start.
Maduro has alleged that the U.S. military build-up is aimed at overthrowing him and gaining control of the OPEC nation's oil resources, which are the world's largest crude reserves.
In wide-ranging interviews with Vanity Fair, Susie Wiles, Trump's chief of staff, said Trump "wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle."
The Pentagon and Coast Guard referred questions to the White House.
The Trump administration has formally designated Venezuela's Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization, saying the group includes Maduro and other high-ranking officials.
Maduro, speaking Tuesday before Trump's post, said, "Imperialism and the fascist right want to colonize Venezuela to take over its wealth of oil, gas, gold, among other minerals. We have sworn absolutely to defend our homeland and in Venezuela peace will triumph."
Reporting by Idrees Ali and Jasper Ward in Washington, Shariq Khan in New York, Marianna Parraga in Houston, Additional reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb and Mike Scarcella; Editing by Scott Malone and Stephen Coates
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
by Idrees Ali, Phil Stewart, Shariq Khan and Marianna Parraga
Reuters
December 17, 20259:12 AM PST Updated 14 mins ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/ ... 025-12-16/
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115731908387416458
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela. The Illegal Aliens and Criminals that the Maduro Regime has sent into the United States during the weak and inept Biden Administration, are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation and, likewise, will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
DONALD J. TRUMP
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Dec 16, 2025, 3:46 PM
Summary
• Oil prices rise over 1% following blockade announcement
• Trump labels Venezuelan "regime" a foreign terrorist organization
• Venezuela rejects Trump's "grotesque threat"
• Maduro claims US aims to control Venezuela's vast oil reserves
WASHINGTON, Dec 16 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump ordered on Tuesday a "blockade" of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela, in Washington's latest move to increase pressure on Nicolas Maduro's government, targeting its main source of income.
It is unclear how Trump will impose the move against the sanctioned vessels, and whether he will turn to the Coast Guard to interdict vessels like he did last week. The administration has moved thousands of troops and nearly a dozen warships - including an aircraft carrier - to the region.
The Reuters Tariff Watch newsletter is your daily guide to the latest global trade and tariff news. Sign up here.
"For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela."
In a statement, Venezuela's government said it rejected Trump's "grotesque threat."
Oil prices rose more than 1% in Asian trade on Wednesday. Brent crude futures LCOc1 were up 70 cents, or 1.2%, at $59.62 a barrel at 0245 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude CLc1 rose 73 cents, or 1.3%, to $56.00 a barrel.
U.S. crude futures climbed over 1% to $55.96 a barrel in Asian trading after Trump's announcement. Oil prices settled at $55.27 a barrel on Tuesday, the lowest close since February 2021.
Oil market participants said prices were rising in anticipation of a potential reduction in Venezuelan exports, although they were still waiting to see how Trump’s blockade would be enforced and whether it would extend to include non-sanctioned vessels.
LEGAL QUESTIONS.
American presidents have broad discretion to deploy U.S. forces abroad, but Trump’s asserted blockade marks a new test of presidential authority, said international law scholar Elena Chachko of UC Berkeley Law School.
Blockades have traditionally been treated as permissible “instruments of war,” but only under strict conditions, Chachko said. “There are serious questions on both the domestic law front and international law front,” she added.
U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, called the blockade "unquestionably an act of war."
"A war that the Congress never authorized and the American people do not want," Castro added on X.
There has been an effective embargo in place after the U.S. seized a sanctioned oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela last week, with loaded vessels carrying millions of barrels of oil staying in Venezuelan waters rather than risk seizure.
Since the seizure, Venezuelan crude exports have fallen sharply, a situation worsened by a cyberattack that knocked down state-run PDVSA's administrative systems this week.
While many vessels picking up oil in Venezuela are under sanctions, others transporting the country's oil and crude from Iran and Russia have not been sanctioned, and some companies, particularly the U.S.' Chevron (CVX.N), opens new tab, transport Venezuelan oil in their own authorized ships.
Oil tanker on Lake Maracaibo, in Cabimas
An oil tanker sails on Lake Maracaibo, in Cabimas, Venezuela October 14, 2022. REUTERS/Issac Urrutia Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
China is the biggest buyer of Venezuelan crude, which accounts for roughly 4% of its imports, with shipments in December on track to average more than 600,000 barrels per day, analysts have said.
For now, the oil market is well supplied and there are millions of barrels of oil on tankers off the coast of China waiting to offload. If the embargo stays in place for some time, then the loss of nearly a million barrels a day of crude supply is likely to push oil prices higher.
Two U.S. officials said the new policy, if implemented fully, could have a major impact on Maduro.
David Goldwyn, a former State Department energy diplomat, said if Venezuela's affected exports are not replaced by increased OPEC spare capacity, the impact on oil prices could be in the range of five to eight dollars a barrel.
"I would expect inflation to skyrocket, and massive and immediate migration from Venezuela to neighboring countries," Goldwyn said.
Since the U.S. imposed energy sanctions on Venezuela in 2019, traders and refiners buying Venezuelan oil have resorted to a "shadow fleet" of tankers that disguise their location and to vessels sanctioned for transporting Iranian or Russian oil.
As of last week, more than 30 of the 80 ships in Venezuelan waters or approaching the country were under U.S. sanctions, according to data compiled by TankerTrackers.com.
INCREASED TENSIONS
Trump's pressure campaign on Maduro has included a ramped-up military presence in the region and more than two dozen military strikes on vessels in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea near Venezuela, which have killed at least 90 people.
Trump has also said that U.S. land strikes on the South American country will soon start.
Maduro has alleged that the U.S. military build-up is aimed at overthrowing him and gaining control of the OPEC nation's oil resources, which are the world's largest crude reserves.
In wide-ranging interviews with Vanity Fair, Susie Wiles, Trump's chief of staff, said Trump "wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle."
The Pentagon and Coast Guard referred questions to the White House.
The Trump administration has formally designated Venezuela's Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization, saying the group includes Maduro and other high-ranking officials.
Maduro, speaking Tuesday before Trump's post, said, "Imperialism and the fascist right want to colonize Venezuela to take over its wealth of oil, gas, gold, among other minerals. We have sworn absolutely to defend our homeland and in Venezuela peace will triumph."
Reporting by Idrees Ali and Jasper Ward in Washington, Shariq Khan in New York, Marianna Parraga in Houston, Additional reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb and Mike Scarcella; Editing by Scott Malone and Stephen Coates
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
- admin
- Site Admin
- Posts: 40175
- Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am
Re: Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down
by admin » Thu Dec 18, 2025 1:24 am
MAGA Melts Down as VIRAL Boston ICE Protest ERUPTS
Really American
and U.S. Democratic Socialists
Dec 17, 2025
Really American Host Kenny Hesse breaks down MAGA Bootlickers MELTING DOWN Over the Viral Boston "ICE" Tea Party Protests against Donald Trump's Immigration Enforcement.
Transcript
Yeah, folks, that is footage of the
Boston Iced Tea Party protest that took
place at the Boston Harbor last night.
both celebrating the 252nd anniversary
of the infamous Boston Tea Party while
simultaneously giving a massive [ __ ] you
to Donald Trump and his Gestapo.
She's pregnant. She's pregnant. You
don't see her stomach.
Very fittingly, that edit of the
protests, of which I've seen virtually
no coverage from the mainstream media,
was set to the iconic song Shipping Up
to Boston by local legends, the Dropkick
Murphy's, whose own protesting we've
covered extensively on the channel. Now,
naturally, this pissed off a lot of MAGA
morons on the internet who felt pretty
emboldened to out themselves at the
labmized bootlicking dick suckers they
truly are. Because as we'll see later,
not only do they not understand history,
they're openly defending some incredibly
heinous [ __ ] Just [ __ ]
resist [ __ ] go.
So, do us a favor and smash that like
button and subscribe to help the true
Bostononian patriots go viral and get
the recognition they deserve.
252 years ago tonight, protesters dumped
tea into Boston Harbor. Tonight, it was
ice.
ICE,
no Kings,
no Kings,
no terrorists,
no terrorists,
no ICE,
no ICE,
no terrorist.
The group was protesting US Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE,
which has carried out the Trump
administration's immigration agenda.
Before arriving at the Congress Street
Bridge, demonstrators marched along the
warf, decrying what they describe as
abuses of power, unjust tariffs, and
armed government intimidation.
Hell yeah, Boston. I couldn't think of a
more patriotic way to protest something
so inherently unamerican. And then
someone made this incredible edit of the
protest that's going viral set to, as I
said, shipping up to Boston by the
Dropkick Murphy's.
Now, this is incredible for a number of
reasons. Firstly, because of what ICE is
doing literally right now to people
across this country. Here's some brand
new footage of the just heinous acts
that they're committing. And viewer
discretion is advised.
You move. Hey, make your right.
Do not move. Back up.
Grab it. Grab it.
Grab that. Grab that red car. Black man.
Stop. [ __ ] go.
Wait. She's pregnant, bro.
Yes, we need assistance immediately.
This is a
Homeland Security. I got officers
getting attacked.
Okay. Where
on West 29th and Pillsbury. I got
forwarded in Minneapolis and they're not
answering their phone.
29th.
It's right down the street from Chicago
Lake Rickers. Yep. West 29th and
Pillsbury Avenue.
Are you all right?
They're surrounded and they're being
attacked.
How many is it like?
Okay,
we only have a few officers, but we have
what do they say? 60 to 70 agitators
that are fighting them.
They're not they're not answering their
phone now, so I don't know if they got
knocked out or what, but we need help.
Right. And with that as the contextual
background, it makes some of these
[ __ ] MAGA comments from these
absolute snowflakes all the more
egregious. You have this MAGA idiot,
Forest Mommy, saying, "Yet they all vote
for higher taxes. As if anyone who is
against Donald Trump actually voted for
the tariffs that are an inherent tax on
Americans." This [ __ ] says maybe they
should reread the history books, which
is actually really ironic coming from
someone who definitely can't read. You
have this bootlicker posting stupid
people do stupid things. Congratulation
Massachusetts Democrats with a picture
of Trump saying, "Hey, Democrats, I'm
your daddy." And then you have even more
just complete [ __ ] posting [ __ ] like
this. Uh stuff like this that they feel
emboldened to post because uh you know
the the president says [ __ ] like that.
This one this peaceful manga patriot
named Boston Common Sense says I'm going
to hell. You think? I picture walking up
from behind them, grabbing their ankles,
flipping them over the rail into the
harbor with their ice. Relax. I'd help
them back out. Just a little cold shock
therapy to see if we can get their
brains functioning. If only I could say
what I think truly about that on the
internet without getting a lawsuit. Cuz
the reality is the people that say [ __ ]
like that behind their internet screen
name or whatever on the cesspool that is
Twitter, if they actually tried to say
these things in person or go be a MAGA
person in the real world and touch some
[ __ ] grass, they'd likely get owned
in the same way this MAGA idiot did at
the Dropkick Murphy's concert in this
moment that went absolutely viral. Where
the [ __ ] are all the other punk bands?
The reason we speak out, we don't care
if we lose fans because when history is
said and done, we want it known that
Dropkick Murphy stood with the people.
We stood with the workers. Okay?
And and and it's all aing scam, guys.
Okay? I want to propose in the in the
name of decency and fairness, sir, I'd
like to propose a friendly a friendly
wager. You can't lose this wager. would
you in the name of dialogue and
discourse and I appreciate you being
here. Would you agree to a friendly
wager? He says, "Sure. That's a good
sport." Well, first of all, do you I do
you support American workers?
Of course you do. Of course you do.
Okay.
So, and do you support American
businesses? Obviously. Okay. So, I don't
know if you guys are aware cuz we don't
go around [ __ ] bragging about it, but
Dropkick Murphy's always sells proudly
made in America merchandise only.
And And here's the bet I'd like to make.
If you lose the bet,
we switch we switch shirts. Okay? If you
win the bet, I give you $100 and the
shirts. Right? That's why I said you
can't lose, right? All right. Matt, can
we get a little drum roll, please?
This is [ __ ] high drama here.
American maid, sir. Could you both turn
backwards? Don't worry. No one's gonna
He just needs to check your tags on your
shirt and your hat. Just need to see
where they're made. No, no, no, no. The
mega shirt. The mega shirt. Let's see
where that's made.
Nicaragua.
It's made in Nicaragua.
Oh,
so I know he is a good sport. He's
taking the shirt off. We're taking crime
off the street.
God bless your [ __ ] heart. That's a
good sport. You get one proudly made in
America dropkick Murphy shirt.
So, huge shout out to those Patriots and
the Dropkick Murphy's and the entire
Boston community that put this together.
And to the MAGA morons licking ISIS's
boot and cheering this on and calling
people the Rword or unpatriotic or
saying the most dumb [ __ ] [ __ ] on the
internet, here's what I'll say to you.
In my personal opinion, the solution
here, I know B, would be to use the
bloated resources that ICE now has after
Trump dies before his third term can
even become a thing and we take back the
White House to flip the script and get
woke ICE warriors, let's call them, just
to piss them off, to go around and wrap
up all of the people with MAGA hats, all
of the Trump supporters, regardless if
they're US citizens or not, because
Trump has proven that that doesn't
[ __ ] matter. and we'll ship them off
to, I don't know, Nicaragua. Throw a
dart at the map and we'll send you
there. Cuz if you don't like the way
people in this country are acting, maybe
you should [ __ ] leave it and we can
help with that. I don't think we should
be above using what Trump has wrought on
this world against the people who voted
for it to be here. Why let all the
billions of dollars were pumping into
ICE go to waste? In fact, at that time
in 2029, let's say, it would actually be
an upgrade for these people because if
we send them to a detention center, who
knows [ __ ] where, they'd probably bet
better healthcare than what they're
going to have due to Trump's [ __ ]
egregious bill. So, MAGA, you keep
outing yourselves as the horrible,
racist, bigot, bootlicking [ __ ] dicks
suckers you are. And we here at Really
American will continue to highlight that
so that when the time comes, you get
your just [ __ ] desserts. And in the
meantime, enjoy getting exactly what the
[ __ ] you voted for, cuz sooner rather
than later, those ICE agents will be
coming to a neighborhood near you. With
no due respect, [ __ ] every maamoron out
there. For Really American, I'm Kenny
Hess and I'll see you guys in the next
Really American
and U.S. Democratic Socialists
Dec 17, 2025
Really American Host Kenny Hesse breaks down MAGA Bootlickers MELTING DOWN Over the Viral Boston "ICE" Tea Party Protests against Donald Trump's Immigration Enforcement.
Transcript
Yeah, folks, that is footage of the
Boston Iced Tea Party protest that took
place at the Boston Harbor last night.
both celebrating the 252nd anniversary
of the infamous Boston Tea Party while
simultaneously giving a massive [ __ ] you
to Donald Trump and his Gestapo.
She's pregnant. She's pregnant. You
don't see her stomach.
Very fittingly, that edit of the
protests, of which I've seen virtually
no coverage from the mainstream media,
was set to the iconic song Shipping Up
to Boston by local legends, the Dropkick
Murphy's, whose own protesting we've
covered extensively on the channel. Now,
naturally, this pissed off a lot of MAGA
morons on the internet who felt pretty
emboldened to out themselves at the
labmized bootlicking dick suckers they
truly are. Because as we'll see later,
not only do they not understand history,
they're openly defending some incredibly
heinous [ __ ] Just [ __ ]
resist [ __ ] go.
So, do us a favor and smash that like
button and subscribe to help the true
Bostononian patriots go viral and get
the recognition they deserve.
252 years ago tonight, protesters dumped
tea into Boston Harbor. Tonight, it was
ice.
ICE,
no Kings,
no Kings,
no terrorists,
no terrorists,
no ICE,
no ICE,
no terrorist.
The group was protesting US Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE,
which has carried out the Trump
administration's immigration agenda.
Before arriving at the Congress Street
Bridge, demonstrators marched along the
warf, decrying what they describe as
abuses of power, unjust tariffs, and
armed government intimidation.
Hell yeah, Boston. I couldn't think of a
more patriotic way to protest something
so inherently unamerican. And then
someone made this incredible edit of the
protest that's going viral set to, as I
said, shipping up to Boston by the
Dropkick Murphy's.
Now, this is incredible for a number of
reasons. Firstly, because of what ICE is
doing literally right now to people
across this country. Here's some brand
new footage of the just heinous acts
that they're committing. And viewer
discretion is advised.
You move. Hey, make your right.
Do not move. Back up.
Grab it. Grab it.
Grab that. Grab that red car. Black man.
Stop. [ __ ] go.
Wait. She's pregnant, bro.
Yes, we need assistance immediately.
This is a
Homeland Security. I got officers
getting attacked.
Okay. Where
on West 29th and Pillsbury. I got
forwarded in Minneapolis and they're not
answering their phone.
29th.
It's right down the street from Chicago
Lake Rickers. Yep. West 29th and
Pillsbury Avenue.
Are you all right?
They're surrounded and they're being
attacked.
How many is it like?
Okay,
we only have a few officers, but we have
what do they say? 60 to 70 agitators
that are fighting them.
They're not they're not answering their
phone now, so I don't know if they got
knocked out or what, but we need help.
Right. And with that as the contextual
background, it makes some of these
[ __ ] MAGA comments from these
absolute snowflakes all the more
egregious. You have this MAGA idiot,
Forest Mommy, saying, "Yet they all vote
for higher taxes. As if anyone who is
against Donald Trump actually voted for
the tariffs that are an inherent tax on
Americans." This [ __ ] says maybe they
should reread the history books, which
is actually really ironic coming from
someone who definitely can't read. You
have this bootlicker posting stupid
people do stupid things. Congratulation
Massachusetts Democrats with a picture
of Trump saying, "Hey, Democrats, I'm
your daddy." And then you have even more
just complete [ __ ] posting [ __ ] like
this. Uh stuff like this that they feel
emboldened to post because uh you know
the the president says [ __ ] like that.
This one this peaceful manga patriot
named Boston Common Sense says I'm going
to hell. You think? I picture walking up
from behind them, grabbing their ankles,
flipping them over the rail into the
harbor with their ice. Relax. I'd help
them back out. Just a little cold shock
therapy to see if we can get their
brains functioning. If only I could say
what I think truly about that on the
internet without getting a lawsuit. Cuz
the reality is the people that say [ __ ]
like that behind their internet screen
name or whatever on the cesspool that is
Twitter, if they actually tried to say
these things in person or go be a MAGA
person in the real world and touch some
[ __ ] grass, they'd likely get owned
in the same way this MAGA idiot did at
the Dropkick Murphy's concert in this
moment that went absolutely viral. Where
the [ __ ] are all the other punk bands?
The reason we speak out, we don't care
if we lose fans because when history is
said and done, we want it known that
Dropkick Murphy stood with the people.
We stood with the workers. Okay?
And and and it's all aing scam, guys.
Okay? I want to propose in the in the
name of decency and fairness, sir, I'd
like to propose a friendly a friendly
wager. You can't lose this wager. would
you in the name of dialogue and
discourse and I appreciate you being
here. Would you agree to a friendly
wager? He says, "Sure. That's a good
sport." Well, first of all, do you I do
you support American workers?
Of course you do. Of course you do.
Okay.
So, and do you support American
businesses? Obviously. Okay. So, I don't
know if you guys are aware cuz we don't
go around [ __ ] bragging about it, but
Dropkick Murphy's always sells proudly
made in America merchandise only.
And And here's the bet I'd like to make.
If you lose the bet,
we switch we switch shirts. Okay? If you
win the bet, I give you $100 and the
shirts. Right? That's why I said you
can't lose, right? All right. Matt, can
we get a little drum roll, please?
This is [ __ ] high drama here.
American maid, sir. Could you both turn
backwards? Don't worry. No one's gonna
He just needs to check your tags on your
shirt and your hat. Just need to see
where they're made. No, no, no, no. The
mega shirt. The mega shirt. Let's see
where that's made.
Nicaragua.
It's made in Nicaragua.
Oh,
so I know he is a good sport. He's
taking the shirt off. We're taking crime
off the street.
God bless your [ __ ] heart. That's a
good sport. You get one proudly made in
America dropkick Murphy shirt.
So, huge shout out to those Patriots and
the Dropkick Murphy's and the entire
Boston community that put this together.
And to the MAGA morons licking ISIS's
boot and cheering this on and calling
people the Rword or unpatriotic or
saying the most dumb [ __ ] [ __ ] on the
internet, here's what I'll say to you.
In my personal opinion, the solution
here, I know B, would be to use the
bloated resources that ICE now has after
Trump dies before his third term can
even become a thing and we take back the
White House to flip the script and get
woke ICE warriors, let's call them, just
to piss them off, to go around and wrap
up all of the people with MAGA hats, all
of the Trump supporters, regardless if
they're US citizens or not, because
Trump has proven that that doesn't
[ __ ] matter. and we'll ship them off
to, I don't know, Nicaragua. Throw a
dart at the map and we'll send you
there. Cuz if you don't like the way
people in this country are acting, maybe
you should [ __ ] leave it and we can
help with that. I don't think we should
be above using what Trump has wrought on
this world against the people who voted
for it to be here. Why let all the
billions of dollars were pumping into
ICE go to waste? In fact, at that time
in 2029, let's say, it would actually be
an upgrade for these people because if
we send them to a detention center, who
knows [ __ ] where, they'd probably bet
better healthcare than what they're
going to have due to Trump's [ __ ]
egregious bill. So, MAGA, you keep
outing yourselves as the horrible,
racist, bigot, bootlicking [ __ ] dicks
suckers you are. And we here at Really
American will continue to highlight that
so that when the time comes, you get
your just [ __ ] desserts. And in the
meantime, enjoy getting exactly what the
[ __ ] you voted for, cuz sooner rather
than later, those ICE agents will be
coming to a neighborhood near you. With
no due respect, [ __ ] every maamoron out
there. For Really American, I'm Kenny
Hess and I'll see you guys in the next
- admin
- Site Admin
- Posts: 40175
- Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am
Re: Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down
by admin » Thu Dec 18, 2025 6:06 pm
South Park Apologizes to Pete Hegseth #southpark #trump #petehegseth #mattstone #treyparker
Don't Be Smart Alec
Nov 29, 2025
Transcript
Hello, I'm the HR rep to Trump Park,
formerly known as South Park, TP for
short, and it's come to our attention
that we may have offended Pete Superb
Bro Hegath. And we just want to say
we're so sorry, Brochado. There's no
need to bro down. We are so sorry.
Offending famed boozer Pete Hexith was a
tragedy that none of us here at Trump
Park could have foreseen. We are so
sorry. Do you need a refill? Bro, we are
so sorry that the song Pete Hexith sucks
went platinum. We didn't know there'd be
so many people who would agree. Highway
too. We're so sorry. We're sorry. We
want to make things right with you, Mega
Chad. So, since we know that you like a
beverage or six or maybe seven, we're
going to offer you six or maybe seven
cases of Grifters Cola to make things
right. Grifters Cola is made from the
finest sweat shops that billionaire
white people could buy. You'd be so
proud. Please forgive us down that rod.
We here at TP would like to come to
whatever frat house you're currently
sleeping at and personally apologize to
you. We are so sorry. We here at TP
understand that the content creation
that you do is more important than
whatever job you're doing for the actual
government. So, we hope and pray that
the video that we're putting out right
now does not get more shares, likes, and
comments than whatever you're putting
out. We're so sorry. Tag South Park in
the comments and tell them what your
favorite color is until they give me a
job or I don't know sue me or
**********************
Phillies land All-Star closer Jhoan Duran ahead of MLB trade deadline
Baobaobaodam
Dec 8, 2025
Transcript
Watch out.
You okay?
I'm Oh my god.
Oh my god.
Just chop, man.
[Music]
I know.
Are you kidding me? What is this? I
almost broke my neck.
What the You kidding me? Hey, are you
out of your mind? You can't just put a
giant fake hole in the middle of the
sidewalk.
[Music]
Please listen carefully.
ground water to the
Don't Be Smart Alec
Nov 29, 2025
Transcript
Hello, I'm the HR rep to Trump Park,
formerly known as South Park, TP for
short, and it's come to our attention
that we may have offended Pete Superb
Bro Hegath. And we just want to say
we're so sorry, Brochado. There's no
need to bro down. We are so sorry.
Offending famed boozer Pete Hexith was a
tragedy that none of us here at Trump
Park could have foreseen. We are so
sorry. Do you need a refill? Bro, we are
so sorry that the song Pete Hexith sucks
went platinum. We didn't know there'd be
so many people who would agree. Highway
too. We're so sorry. We're sorry. We
want to make things right with you, Mega
Chad. So, since we know that you like a
beverage or six or maybe seven, we're
going to offer you six or maybe seven
cases of Grifters Cola to make things
right. Grifters Cola is made from the
finest sweat shops that billionaire
white people could buy. You'd be so
proud. Please forgive us down that rod.
We here at TP would like to come to
whatever frat house you're currently
sleeping at and personally apologize to
you. We are so sorry. We here at TP
understand that the content creation
that you do is more important than
whatever job you're doing for the actual
government. So, we hope and pray that
the video that we're putting out right
now does not get more shares, likes, and
comments than whatever you're putting
out. We're so sorry. Tag South Park in
the comments and tell them what your
favorite color is until they give me a
job or I don't know sue me or
**********************
Phillies land All-Star closer Jhoan Duran ahead of MLB trade deadline
Baobaobaodam
Dec 8, 2025
Transcript
Watch out.
You okay?
I'm Oh my god.
Oh my god.
Just chop, man.
[Music]
I know.
Are you kidding me? What is this? I
almost broke my neck.
What the You kidding me? Hey, are you
out of your mind? You can't just put a
giant fake hole in the middle of the
sidewalk.
[Music]
Please listen carefully.
ground water to the
- admin
- Site Admin
- Posts: 40175
- Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am
Re: Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down
by admin » Sat Dec 20, 2025 9:53 pm
Epstein LEAKS ENDS Fox Host’s CAREER As NIGHTMARE EXPOSED!
Jack Cocchiarella
Dec 20, 2025 Jack Cocchiarella Show
Political commentator Jack Cocchiarella reacts to Megyn Kelly's epstein lies being exposed.
Transcript
Megan Kelly defended Jeffrey Epstein and
now we know exactly why she did. It's
the same feeling that I had when Donald
Trump said to Colleen Maxwell, "I wish
you well." Huh, that was strange. And
when Megan Kelly said this overwhelming
evidence proving that Epstein was a
disgusting criminal pedto, she said,
"Well, I'm not sure. I don't know. Maybe
maybe we shouldn't jump to conclush back
on. Oh, that was a weird thing to say,
Megan Kelly. But now with a new huge
dump of Epstein evidence, we are seeing
why. A photo that should end Megan
Kelly's career and the explanation for
her Epstein defense. We are going to get
into it all, but before we do, if I
could quickly ask you to leave a like on
this video, and if you haven't already
and you enjoy our channel, hit that
subscribe button because it goes a long
way in supporting our work. Now, before
we get into the photo that proves Megan
Kelly's lies and exposes her should end
her career, I want to start with what Ro
Connor had to say about what else is
coming in these Epstein files. More
photos, more videos, more documents, and
what the survivors expect to be told
about the men associated with Epstein.
Uh, tonight, uh, Congressman, both you
and your Republican co-sponsor,
Congressman Tom Massie of Kentucky, have
said on social media already, way short
doesn't do it. Has the Justice
Department given you a credible,
reasonable explanation of why?
No, they have not. And I'm uh saddened
today because I was talking to the
survivors. There was so much
anticipation for today. They thought
finally they are being seen. They're
being heard. We're going to have a
release. This morning when the deputy
attorney general went on television and
said he's going to release hundreds of
thousands of documents, not the whole
thing, Thomas Massie and I texted each
other and we said, "We'll give him the
benefit of the doubt. We're not as
concerned about having the full release
as long as they're complying with the
spirit of the law. At least they're
going to release something." But then we
saw the documents filled with blanket
redactions. Documents that judges had
ordered to be released. They had blanked
out. There's no draft indictment there
that actually has the names of other men
who may be implicated in the abuse.
There's not the prosecution's original
memo that we wanted to see released.
There are none of the files on Epstein's
computer. And we do not know then who
these other rich and powerful men were
who abused these survivors. And we know
from the survivors and the survivors
lawyers that that information is in the
files. So this is deeply disappointing.
They have not complied with the law and
we're going to continue to fight to make
sure they do. First,
there is so much more coming. This was
about 1% of the Epstein files. And for
all the Trump sickopants and defenders
like Megan Kelly who say, "Oh, it's
fine. Oh, we we just move on." Who maybe
for a second there entertained the idea
of actually caring about this until they
realized how damaging it would be to
their president. They've just told us to
stop paying attention. In fact, they
moved from the position of stop paying
attention. Stop caring. Just move on.
Just don't worry about it. To defending
Epstein,
that's what they did. And defending
Donald Trump's relationship with him. It
was a lot of, "Oh, he bumped into him at
a dinner. Oh, he was at his house. Well,
everybody was at his house. Well, he was
his best friend." Well, lots of people
say that they're best friends. I I don't
believe it. They kept moving the
goalposts. We saw this happen in real
time. But maybe the most disgusting
example of it was how Megan Kelly tried
to justify
Epstein's assaults on children and and
what she actually what she thought was
going on. This clip is so important
before we get into the photo that proves
it all wrong. But we just got to start
with this disgusting thing Megan Kelly
said.
As for Epstein, I've said this before,
but just as a reminder, I do know
somebody very, very close to this case
who is in a position to know virtually
everything. Not everything, but
virtually everything. And this person
has told me from the start years and
years ago that Jeffrey Epste in this
person's view was not a pedophile. This
is this person's view who was there for
a lot of this. But that he was into the
barely legal type. Like he liked
15year-old girls.
And I I realize this is disgusting. I'm
definitely not trying to make an excuse
for this. I'm just giving you facts. um
that he wasn't into like eight year
olds, but he liked the very young teen
types that could pass for even younger
than they were, but would look legal to
a passer by.
Megan Kelly's position was
not that bad. A teenager
and anything else going on? Can I
complain about Joe Biden? Donald Trump's
best friend was assaulting teenagers. I
was just teenagers,
practically adults,
almost legal. That was Megan Kelly's
defense of Donald Trump. It was
disgusting. It was disgusting in the
moment, but it has only been made more
disgusting, more appalling
by the photos that were released of
Epstein. This is incredibly disturbing,
but we got to take a look. This photo of
Epstein with a toddler, clearly a young
child to his left, was released in the
Epstein files. And the first person who
posted it wrote, "That's a toddler. I'm
going to puke." With a Twitter user
responding, "Just underscores how
absolutely [ __ ] up that this guy's
best friend is the president." A MAGA
account shared this photo, clearly a
child in pajamas, and wrote, "This is
getting too dark. This is not fun." A
lot of people responded to this, but I
thought the most important was, "Yeah,
man. I thought Pedophile Rapist Island
was going to be a hoot." And responding
to that same photo of Epstein with the
child, a Twitter user wrote, "Remember
when that Megan Kelly [ __ ] was saying,
"Actually, it's not pedophilia. Epstein
was just into teenagers." So, how are
you feeling now, Megan Kelly?
How are you feeling now?
Photos with children. How are you
feeling now? Do you feel like you made a
really great contribution in the
conversation? We just all had to know
what you thought and that it was it was
pretty much okay. as teenagers. It's all
good. Are you really really glad you
gave us your two cents? But it reveals
to me something deeper about how MAGA
has viewed this the whole time. How
Republicans,
how Donald Trump and his supporters have
viewed this the whole time. They really
did think it was a joke.
They thought it was a joke. It was a
political pawn for them the whole time.
We've always known this, but they really
did think it was a joke for people to
respond and say, "Oh my god, this is
gross. This is dark. I can't I can't
believe it was going to be like What did
you think was going to come out? He was
a pedophile.
He was convicted. What What did you
think this was going to be? Donald Trump
and his and his idiot goons turned
Epstein into like this joke like, "Oh,
we're going to get the Epstein files.
We're going to get them and and yeah,
the conspiracy and the libs and Bill
Clinton."
And it was a and it was a a joke to
them.
Like Stephen Chong, Donald Trump's comms
guy, that fat ugly [ __ ] job of the hut
looking blah.
He was posting like Bill Clinton like,
"Oh, he's up to something. Oh, look,
it's Bill Clinton.
Then arrest him." Like
they think it's a game.
They think it's a game. Like they think
it's funny. They've thought it was
funny. They thought it was a bit. It was
a joke.
Jeffrey Epstein is not a conspiracy
theory.
That is how MAGA viewed him. He was not
a conspiracy theory. He was a real
criminal. He was a disgusting rapist.
Like that's what Jeffrey Epstein was. He
wasn't a bit He wasn't the punchline to
a joke. He ruined and destroyed and
ended the lives of countless young girls
and women and and and who knows how many
people. It wasn't a joke. It wasn't a
conspiracy.
And that's clearly how MAGA viewed it
and how they view everything else. Just
a fun little toy to play around with, a
joke. They don't take any of this
seriously. They never did and never do.
That's what we're learning. And that's
how Megan Kelly clearly viewed it as
well. It's kind of a joke. She didn't
care. And that's why she was so quick to
defend him because it was all abstract
to them. They don't take it seriously.
Well, now it's real [ __ ] serious,
isn't it? It's not so much fun anymore.
This isn't fun. What type of response is
that? You thought the Epstein files were
going to be fun. Like, that's what they
thought on the campaign trail. Oh, we're
going to release the Epstein files. It's
going to be fun. What part of this would
be fun? People's lives were ended and
ruined. You thought it was fun. They're
disgusting people. They really are. It's
why accountability needs to be coming.
And Roana is going to be one of the
people to deliver it, which is why he
said what he said right here was so
important.
Well, the survivors were approaching
today with such anticipation. And I'm
glad that they're actually releasing
documents and abiding in that way with
the law. But I've got to tell you, I've
been very disappointed with the partial
nature of the release. One of the
documents, 119 pages that a federal
judge wanted released is totally
redacted and there's no explanation for
the redactions. We also so far have not
seen the draft indictment and a lot of
the witness interview memorandum that
would explain who were the rich and
powerful men who abused these young
girls or who were at parties covering up
the abuse. So, there needs to be a lot
more that comes out uh in the days
ahead.
Congressman, speaking of those rich and
powerful men, your co-author of this
bill, Congressman Thomas Massie, said
yesterday that at least 20 men accused
of sex crimes are in the FBI's Epstein
files. He said that if this release
doesn't include some of the names, that
that is an indication that not all of
the documents have been produced. Do you
agree with that? And do you know when
and if that list will come out?
Well, he's right. And he's right because
he's talked to the survivors. He's
talked to the survivors lawyers. They
have said that there are other rich and
powerful men who engaged in either sex
trafficking, paying for sex with young
women, engaged in abuse of underage
girls or were present at parties where
16 and 15 year olds were paraded and
just watched and did nothing. And the
reality is that's what we want to see
come out. It's less about is this a full
release and more about the quality of
the release and what are they hiding?
Why are they not having the draft
indictment come out which has some of
this information or leads to this
information? Why are they not having the
witness interviews come out? Uh that is
really what the survivors want out and
what we're after.
The Department of Justice has said in
the letter sent over to members of
Congress like yourself that they have
not fully released this. We we know that
at this point. Uh what can you do to
compel the Department of Justice to
release all of these documents? What are
the tools at your disposal?
Well, first of all, the Department of
Justice 6 months ago, Pam Bondi said
they've released everything and now
they're releasing more. So, obviously,
they weren't being fully truthful back
then. We can have the survivors come
back to the Hill to demand a release.
That is what moved public opinion in the
first place. That is uh what got my bill
to pass the House and the Senate and the
president to sign it. There are also of
course punitive actions. Thomas Massie
and I have discussed possible
impeachment, referrals for criminal
prosecution if people aren't complying.
And folks say, "Well, how's the Justice
Department going to prosecute their own
people?" But uh this there's no statute
of limitations that runs out when we
have a new administration. We could hold
them in inherent contempt of Congress.
So there are many options including
lawsuits against the Department of
Justice, but my interest is not punitive
against Pam Bondi or uh the deputy
attorney general or Trump. It's to find
justice and I want to see what we can do
to get more of these documents released.
There will be accountability. Uh there
needs to be a clear message sent to
everyone involved that if you are a part
of this cover up, you are a criminal. It
is the same with the illegal orders that
Pete Hegsath is giving out. If you
follow them, you are breaking the law.
This is not a just following orders
thing. So, either come to the right side
of history or go to jail with Pam Bondi.
That's it. That's the truth. And we're
going to keep speaking that truth on
this show every single day. And if you
want to support that, as always, you can
hit that subscribe button, leave a like
on this video. If you stuck around to
the end, drop a blue heart in the
comments. Keep on fighting, y'all. Don't
let them silence you. And until next
time, I'll see you
Jack Cocchiarella
Dec 20, 2025 Jack Cocchiarella Show
Political commentator Jack Cocchiarella reacts to Megyn Kelly's epstein lies being exposed.
Transcript
Megan Kelly defended Jeffrey Epstein and
now we know exactly why she did. It's
the same feeling that I had when Donald
Trump said to Colleen Maxwell, "I wish
you well." Huh, that was strange. And
when Megan Kelly said this overwhelming
evidence proving that Epstein was a
disgusting criminal pedto, she said,
"Well, I'm not sure. I don't know. Maybe
maybe we shouldn't jump to conclush back
on. Oh, that was a weird thing to say,
Megan Kelly. But now with a new huge
dump of Epstein evidence, we are seeing
why. A photo that should end Megan
Kelly's career and the explanation for
her Epstein defense. We are going to get
into it all, but before we do, if I
could quickly ask you to leave a like on
this video, and if you haven't already
and you enjoy our channel, hit that
subscribe button because it goes a long
way in supporting our work. Now, before
we get into the photo that proves Megan
Kelly's lies and exposes her should end
her career, I want to start with what Ro
Connor had to say about what else is
coming in these Epstein files. More
photos, more videos, more documents, and
what the survivors expect to be told
about the men associated with Epstein.
Uh, tonight, uh, Congressman, both you
and your Republican co-sponsor,
Congressman Tom Massie of Kentucky, have
said on social media already, way short
doesn't do it. Has the Justice
Department given you a credible,
reasonable explanation of why?
No, they have not. And I'm uh saddened
today because I was talking to the
survivors. There was so much
anticipation for today. They thought
finally they are being seen. They're
being heard. We're going to have a
release. This morning when the deputy
attorney general went on television and
said he's going to release hundreds of
thousands of documents, not the whole
thing, Thomas Massie and I texted each
other and we said, "We'll give him the
benefit of the doubt. We're not as
concerned about having the full release
as long as they're complying with the
spirit of the law. At least they're
going to release something." But then we
saw the documents filled with blanket
redactions. Documents that judges had
ordered to be released. They had blanked
out. There's no draft indictment there
that actually has the names of other men
who may be implicated in the abuse.
There's not the prosecution's original
memo that we wanted to see released.
There are none of the files on Epstein's
computer. And we do not know then who
these other rich and powerful men were
who abused these survivors. And we know
from the survivors and the survivors
lawyers that that information is in the
files. So this is deeply disappointing.
They have not complied with the law and
we're going to continue to fight to make
sure they do. First,
there is so much more coming. This was
about 1% of the Epstein files. And for
all the Trump sickopants and defenders
like Megan Kelly who say, "Oh, it's
fine. Oh, we we just move on." Who maybe
for a second there entertained the idea
of actually caring about this until they
realized how damaging it would be to
their president. They've just told us to
stop paying attention. In fact, they
moved from the position of stop paying
attention. Stop caring. Just move on.
Just don't worry about it. To defending
Epstein,
that's what they did. And defending
Donald Trump's relationship with him. It
was a lot of, "Oh, he bumped into him at
a dinner. Oh, he was at his house. Well,
everybody was at his house. Well, he was
his best friend." Well, lots of people
say that they're best friends. I I don't
believe it. They kept moving the
goalposts. We saw this happen in real
time. But maybe the most disgusting
example of it was how Megan Kelly tried
to justify
Epstein's assaults on children and and
what she actually what she thought was
going on. This clip is so important
before we get into the photo that proves
it all wrong. But we just got to start
with this disgusting thing Megan Kelly
said.
As for Epstein, I've said this before,
but just as a reminder, I do know
somebody very, very close to this case
who is in a position to know virtually
everything. Not everything, but
virtually everything. And this person
has told me from the start years and
years ago that Jeffrey Epste in this
person's view was not a pedophile. This
is this person's view who was there for
a lot of this. But that he was into the
barely legal type. Like he liked
15year-old girls.
And I I realize this is disgusting. I'm
definitely not trying to make an excuse
for this. I'm just giving you facts. um
that he wasn't into like eight year
olds, but he liked the very young teen
types that could pass for even younger
than they were, but would look legal to
a passer by.
Megan Kelly's position was
not that bad. A teenager
and anything else going on? Can I
complain about Joe Biden? Donald Trump's
best friend was assaulting teenagers. I
was just teenagers,
practically adults,
almost legal. That was Megan Kelly's
defense of Donald Trump. It was
disgusting. It was disgusting in the
moment, but it has only been made more
disgusting, more appalling
by the photos that were released of
Epstein. This is incredibly disturbing,
but we got to take a look. This photo of
Epstein with a toddler, clearly a young
child to his left, was released in the
Epstein files. And the first person who
posted it wrote, "That's a toddler. I'm
going to puke." With a Twitter user
responding, "Just underscores how
absolutely [ __ ] up that this guy's
best friend is the president." A MAGA
account shared this photo, clearly a
child in pajamas, and wrote, "This is
getting too dark. This is not fun." A
lot of people responded to this, but I
thought the most important was, "Yeah,
man. I thought Pedophile Rapist Island
was going to be a hoot." And responding
to that same photo of Epstein with the
child, a Twitter user wrote, "Remember
when that Megan Kelly [ __ ] was saying,
"Actually, it's not pedophilia. Epstein
was just into teenagers." So, how are
you feeling now, Megan Kelly?
How are you feeling now?
Photos with children. How are you
feeling now? Do you feel like you made a
really great contribution in the
conversation? We just all had to know
what you thought and that it was it was
pretty much okay. as teenagers. It's all
good. Are you really really glad you
gave us your two cents? But it reveals
to me something deeper about how MAGA
has viewed this the whole time. How
Republicans,
how Donald Trump and his supporters have
viewed this the whole time. They really
did think it was a joke.
They thought it was a joke. It was a
political pawn for them the whole time.
We've always known this, but they really
did think it was a joke for people to
respond and say, "Oh my god, this is
gross. This is dark. I can't I can't
believe it was going to be like What did
you think was going to come out? He was
a pedophile.
He was convicted. What What did you
think this was going to be? Donald Trump
and his and his idiot goons turned
Epstein into like this joke like, "Oh,
we're going to get the Epstein files.
We're going to get them and and yeah,
the conspiracy and the libs and Bill
Clinton."
And it was a and it was a a joke to
them.
Like Stephen Chong, Donald Trump's comms
guy, that fat ugly [ __ ] job of the hut
looking blah.
He was posting like Bill Clinton like,
"Oh, he's up to something. Oh, look,
it's Bill Clinton.
Then arrest him." Like
they think it's a game.
They think it's a game. Like they think
it's funny. They've thought it was
funny. They thought it was a bit. It was
a joke.
Jeffrey Epstein is not a conspiracy
theory.
That is how MAGA viewed him. He was not
a conspiracy theory. He was a real
criminal. He was a disgusting rapist.
Like that's what Jeffrey Epstein was. He
wasn't a bit He wasn't the punchline to
a joke. He ruined and destroyed and
ended the lives of countless young girls
and women and and and who knows how many
people. It wasn't a joke. It wasn't a
conspiracy.
And that's clearly how MAGA viewed it
and how they view everything else. Just
a fun little toy to play around with, a
joke. They don't take any of this
seriously. They never did and never do.
That's what we're learning. And that's
how Megan Kelly clearly viewed it as
well. It's kind of a joke. She didn't
care. And that's why she was so quick to
defend him because it was all abstract
to them. They don't take it seriously.
Well, now it's real [ __ ] serious,
isn't it? It's not so much fun anymore.
This isn't fun. What type of response is
that? You thought the Epstein files were
going to be fun. Like, that's what they
thought on the campaign trail. Oh, we're
going to release the Epstein files. It's
going to be fun. What part of this would
be fun? People's lives were ended and
ruined. You thought it was fun. They're
disgusting people. They really are. It's
why accountability needs to be coming.
And Roana is going to be one of the
people to deliver it, which is why he
said what he said right here was so
important.
Well, the survivors were approaching
today with such anticipation. And I'm
glad that they're actually releasing
documents and abiding in that way with
the law. But I've got to tell you, I've
been very disappointed with the partial
nature of the release. One of the
documents, 119 pages that a federal
judge wanted released is totally
redacted and there's no explanation for
the redactions. We also so far have not
seen the draft indictment and a lot of
the witness interview memorandum that
would explain who were the rich and
powerful men who abused these young
girls or who were at parties covering up
the abuse. So, there needs to be a lot
more that comes out uh in the days
ahead.
Congressman, speaking of those rich and
powerful men, your co-author of this
bill, Congressman Thomas Massie, said
yesterday that at least 20 men accused
of sex crimes are in the FBI's Epstein
files. He said that if this release
doesn't include some of the names, that
that is an indication that not all of
the documents have been produced. Do you
agree with that? And do you know when
and if that list will come out?
Well, he's right. And he's right because
he's talked to the survivors. He's
talked to the survivors lawyers. They
have said that there are other rich and
powerful men who engaged in either sex
trafficking, paying for sex with young
women, engaged in abuse of underage
girls or were present at parties where
16 and 15 year olds were paraded and
just watched and did nothing. And the
reality is that's what we want to see
come out. It's less about is this a full
release and more about the quality of
the release and what are they hiding?
Why are they not having the draft
indictment come out which has some of
this information or leads to this
information? Why are they not having the
witness interviews come out? Uh that is
really what the survivors want out and
what we're after.
The Department of Justice has said in
the letter sent over to members of
Congress like yourself that they have
not fully released this. We we know that
at this point. Uh what can you do to
compel the Department of Justice to
release all of these documents? What are
the tools at your disposal?
Well, first of all, the Department of
Justice 6 months ago, Pam Bondi said
they've released everything and now
they're releasing more. So, obviously,
they weren't being fully truthful back
then. We can have the survivors come
back to the Hill to demand a release.
That is what moved public opinion in the
first place. That is uh what got my bill
to pass the House and the Senate and the
president to sign it. There are also of
course punitive actions. Thomas Massie
and I have discussed possible
impeachment, referrals for criminal
prosecution if people aren't complying.
And folks say, "Well, how's the Justice
Department going to prosecute their own
people?" But uh this there's no statute
of limitations that runs out when we
have a new administration. We could hold
them in inherent contempt of Congress.
So there are many options including
lawsuits against the Department of
Justice, but my interest is not punitive
against Pam Bondi or uh the deputy
attorney general or Trump. It's to find
justice and I want to see what we can do
to get more of these documents released.
There will be accountability. Uh there
needs to be a clear message sent to
everyone involved that if you are a part
of this cover up, you are a criminal. It
is the same with the illegal orders that
Pete Hegsath is giving out. If you
follow them, you are breaking the law.
This is not a just following orders
thing. So, either come to the right side
of history or go to jail with Pam Bondi.
That's it. That's the truth. And we're
going to keep speaking that truth on
this show every single day. And if you
want to support that, as always, you can
hit that subscribe button, leave a like
on this video. If you stuck around to
the end, drop a blue heart in the
comments. Keep on fighting, y'all. Don't
let them silence you. And until next
time, I'll see you
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- Site Admin
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Re: Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down
by admin » Sun Dec 21, 2025 3:20 am
Massie Stuns Press With Epstein Intelligence Remark
The Young Turks
Dec 20, 2025 #TYT #TheYoungTurks #BreakingNews
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie finally admitted that Jeffrey Epstein has ties to Israeli intelligence. Cenk Uygur and Yasmin Khan discuss on The Young Turks.
Transcript
All right, guys. Uh, welcome to the
revolution. Uh, so I'm going to give you
guys some updates on some ideas and and
and wonderful things that you guys have
done in a minute. But first, I wanted to
give you a story that we promised you
earlier on the Young Turks. It fits into
the revolution because it's a story uh
about how we are uh there are forces
inside America trying to control uh
American government uh on behalf of a
different country in this case Israel.
So let's do this story.
I love that he finally said it. Yes,
it's definitely Israel. We're going to
show you here with a new story from
Dropside News that shows once again that
Epstein was working with the Israelis.
And so, the mainstream media has been
ignoring it. He But he's a US
congressman. So, they're probably going
to have to address it. And if they're
going to address it, they're going to
probably do what Dana Bash did with
Marjorie Taylor Green. Are you saying
that Israel was involved? That sounds
conspiratorial.
Yeah, because it was a literal
conspiracy where Epstein was working
behind the scenes to help Israel. So,
let's give you the facts and you'll see
for yourself. So, um latest article from
job site, Jeffrey Epste pursued Swiss
Rothschild Bank to finance Israeli cyber
weapons empire.
Gee, I wonder if he was working with
Israel.
Okay, look, I it's unfortunate that this
bank happens to be called Rothschild
because there's there is a actual
conspiracy theory that is anti-Semitic
about how the Rothschilds run the whole
world. I think it's a comical theory,
but in this case, it just happens to be
a bank and a person with that same name.
So, the central figures here are Epstein
Ehud Barack, the former prime minister
of Israel, and this is hilarious,
Baroness Arian Rothschild. We have a
baroness who would also of course like
to help Israel and so she's the CEO of
Edmund de Rothschild group. Uh that's an
enormous Swiss private bank. Okay. Epste
spent years trying to connect Barack and
the Rothschild and that's what the story
is about. So they explain in one note,
Epstein passed along tentalizing offer
from the Rothschild to Barack. If Ahood
wants to make serious money, he will
have to build a relationship with me.
take time so that we can truly
understand one another. So now the
Baroness
wants Israel to get cyber weapons. And
now that's the former prime minister of
Israel. So she's like, "Come here and
I'll give you the money and then you
could do this plot for us, but you have
to get to know me first." Okay. Then uh
they explained Barack asked for advice,
deferring to Epstein's supposed
expertise on women. He said, 'I'm ready,
but I need your advice regarding how
ladies is your forte.
Not really. Young children that he's
raping is his forte, but okay. Uh,
according to Drop Site News, the purpose
of connecting Rothschild and Barack was
to secure financing for this. Quote,
Barack's private communications showed
discussions about a wide range of cyber
weapons, concepts drawn from Israeli
military research inspired in part by
the astonishing scope of US global
surveillance apparatus revealed by NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.
Oh, great. The Israelis need more cyber
weapons. And so you've got Epstein
trying to arrange that with the former
prime minister and the and the good
baroness the Rothschild. Okay. Um so
there's now by the way to be clear
there's no evidence to confirm whether
or not the Rothschild bank actually
directly financed the cyber weapon
startup. So we don't know from the
material that we have here. This is the
leaked emails of Aud Barack. Uh these
are part of the Hondela uh leaks and
they have been confirmed in parts by
drop site news and the US government. So
but in October 2015 they explained the
do the Rothschild negotiated a $25
million contract with Epstein's southern
trust company the same entity Epste used
to fund Barack's intelligence link
security startup uh reporting homeland
security known as Carbine earlier that
year.
So now that's interesting because
um here is an effort to fund Israel's
cyber weapons
and Epstein is deeply involved in it and
he's getting money too. So people
wondered where did all of Epstein's
money come from. Now look, they probably
came from a variety of different
sources, but apparently some of it came
to procure help procure cyber weapons
for Israel. Now, since this is such a
huge story and Epstein is one of the
largest stories certainly of this
administration and maybe of any
administration and the mainstream press
is reporting, oh, did Donald Trump do
it? Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald
Trump. Okay, Donald Trump is one of the
people who might or might not have done
it. He's the president of the United
States, so I understand why you're
paying a lot of attention to that, but
we found out who he was working with. It
was Israel. Do you want to pay attention
to that at all? No. No. No. No. No. No
way. No way. No way. Don't say it. Don't
say it. Cover it up for Israel. But
we're objective.
If you're objective, why are you trying
to hide the news? That's super weird.
Okay. So, now you've published many
other pieces as well. Drop site News has
about EP's links to the Israeli
government and intelligence agencies,
and we've told you about that. He was
trying to get America to bomb Syria on
behalf of Israel. Then he tried to get
America to bomb Iran on behalf of
Israel. uh he arranged a meeting with
Vladimir Putin and Ahoud Barack that
Ahoud Barack couldn't arrange. So he is
more powerful than the former prime
minister of Israel. He's powerful enough
to get a meeting with Vladimir Putin
anytime he wants. He was working with
some of the top bankers, some of the
countries in the world. And all of it in
all of the emails are to help Israel.
But mainstream media is like what was
the adage? Was it follow the propaganda,
follow the husb?
Wait, it was follow the money, right?
The journalism adage. No, no, don't
follow the money. Don't follow it.
Whatever you do, don't follow it. Okay,
guys, we got it. We got it. You love
Israel, but you're supposed to be
American media. The way that they are so
unbelievably biased is maddening. Which
leads us to the next part of the story.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post editorial
board is chiding Congress for voting to
release the Epstein files. Gee, I wonder
why the Washington Post editorial board
cares. Why hide the Epstein files? No,
please don't find out it's Israel.
Please, please shut up everybody. You're
all anti-semites. All of America is
anti-semmites.
You of course the children of America
should be raped for Israel's advantage
because but if you say it, you're
anti-semmites. You No, no, no. Bring
your children otherwise you're an
anti-semite. You have to allow them to
do it. Anti-semite.
No. Absurd. And stop saying that. that
it isn't about all Jews. It's about
these particular guys who are not loyal
to Jews overall. They're loyal to a
country, Israel, a government, Israel.
Okay. So,
uh and the board did slam Donald Trump
here uh for flip-flopping on this issue
of it uh whether they should be
unveiled. They didn't want them to
flip-flop. They wanted them to hide the
Epstein files forever so their beloved
Israel wouldn't be exposed. Anyway,
here's editorial board. quote, "The
whole sorted exercise is a testament to
the collapse of political trust, and no
one comes out looking good." Yes, the
political trust has collapsed because
a-holes like you go, "Don't release
anything secret and nefarious to the
American people. They're not to be
trusted. They're all dirty
anti-semmites." No, you hide all the
evidence of all the wrongdoing by the
powerful and you screw over the American
people. I wonder why they lost political
trust. Huh? I can't figure it out. I
mean, really, is the Washington Post
editorial board that stupid?
Really? Are you that mentally deficient
that you can't figure out that that's
why maybe people lost trust in the
government? Cuz they keep hiding things
like the Epstein files, the the brain
trust that the Washington Post got
together. This is the editorial board.
They're like, "What do you think? Uh,
you think if we hide the Epstein files,
they'll have more trust in the
government?" Oh, of course. Of course.
You think if we hide the fact that Epc
was working with Israel, they'll trust
the government more? Of course, of
course, of course. Hide. Hide. Hide.
Hide. And what are you in the business
of? Journalism.
Are you Are you Is that journalism?
Hiding the dirty secrets of the
powerful. Well, these days they that is
what mainstream media does. That is what
the Washington Post does. So, it's not
that surprising at all that they would
think, yeah, that's our job is to hide
the crimes of the powerful and to help
them crush the powerless. Okay. So, they
continue. The lone congressional
objector, Representative Klay Higgins,
has a point when he says the
indiscriminate release abandons 250
years of criminal justice procedure in
America and could result in innocent
people being hurt. Absurd. They're like,
"Oh no, the poor little innocent
pedophiles. Oh, don't let Oh, no. Oh,
the kids who got raped, who cares about
them? They're useless. They're
irrelevant. We've already gotten all the
use we need out of them. But the
pedophiles, won't anyone protect the
pedophiles?" Now look, I understand what
they're saying. Well, what if they
somebody was talking to Epstein or is in
his book and his name gets released, but
we don't know whether they did it or
not. Well, first of all, we're going to
get the information. And so, we're not
that dumb that we see a name. For
example, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton
are already two names we know. Are we
assuming for sure that they did it?
Maybe partisans are, right? Oh, yeah. I
bet Trump did it, but Clinton didn't. I
bet Clinton did it, but Trump didn't.
That's partisan brain, right? But the
rest of us get it. We don't know yet. We
don't know if Trump did it. We don't
know if Clinton did it. Maybe we'll get
information that'll show or not, but
we're not nearly as dumb as you guys are
in the Washington Post editorial board.
So, we're not just going to see a name
and be like, "Oh, that's it. He
definitely did it." Right. And second of
all, if you say that someone definitely
did it, and they didn't, they could sue
you. Alan Dersitz can't wait. He was in
a segment with my co-host Kasparian uh
on LA Arabia and he's like, "Oh, I can't
wait to get the victim's names cuz we're
going to punish them. We're going to sue
them all. Whoever says a wrong name. So,
he's already chomping at the bit. You
know, it does whether it's a wrong name
or you don't have sufficient evidence to
prove it. No, they're can't those
billionaires can't wait to have somebody
like Alan Derswood sue the the victims.
They they're already lined up to do
that. But the Washington Post board
apparently didn't think about that. They
don't know that that's possible. And
who's abandoning criminal justice? Look
guys, think about this core issue,
right? So they say, "No, no, we should
keep hiding the names cuz what if the
pedophiles are harmed?" Or, "But what if
one of them is not a pedophile?" Okay.
Well, wait a minute. If you're in favor
of justice, then why didn't you do an
editorial about the government not
prosecuting the actual pedophiles? So,
that's a great way for us to know who
did it and who didn't do it. The
government finds the people who did it
and they prosecute them. And then the
other ones, they say they didn't do it,
so you and we're not going to prosecute
them. That's how justice would normally
work. But no, the Washington Post says,
"Don't do any of that." And who cares
that they didn't prosecute any of the
guilty because we don't care about the
kids who were raped. We don't care about
them at all. We don't care about the
American people. We don't care that
Epstein is working with Israel. We don't
care about any of that. All we care
about is protecting the super powerful
who are connected to Epstein. Gee, I
wonder why. I wonder why. So, uh, the
board argued that the bill is filled
with loopholes. Wait, you don't want it
released in the first place. So, what do
you care about the loopholes?
Information that is released might not
necessarily be incriminating. Again,
we're not, uh, we're not as dumb as you
are. We can make that, uh, distinction.
And according to both the FBI and the
federal lead prosecutor in charge of
negotiating FC's 2008 plea deal
agreement, Epstein was the only one
abusing children. Yeah, if you're an
idiot, you believe that. And uh but if
you were a journalist, you'd go, "Well,
is that really true? Let me investigate
a little bit more." In fact, that's what
Julie Brown did at the Miami Herald. And
she did a fantastic of job of of
realizing and showing and proving that
no, the 2008 was a sweetheart deal.
Epstein had committed way more rape uh
than that uh you know that case uh
you know was adjudicated as because they
just gave him a plea deal and they let
him go out in in during the daytime
basically used the the jail as a as a
hotel. It was a disgusting deal and that
the corrupt prosecutor who did it was
later rewarded uh and made a labor
secretary randomly under Donald Trump in
his first term. So, but they take that
obviously corrupt deal and the
Washington Post is like, "You see that?
That proves the innocence." No, it
proves that you're part of the
corruption. It proves that you love to
cover up the crimes of the powerful
while pretending to be reporters and
journalists. You're the exact opposite.
And this is what we have to fix about
our country. Our mainstream media is a
joke. They don't do the news. They do
propaganda. And apparently they do
propaganda from time to time on behalf
of foreign countries, on behalf of the
powerful, on behalf of the donors.
So they've been lying to us our whole
life. Oh yeah, no, the politicians are
honest. No, they're not. The politicians
take money from Israel, from big pharma,
from oil, from military industrial
complex, and they serve those donors
loyally. And the job of the Washington
Post is to go and cover that up. Cover
they're they're the getaway driver in
this crime. and their job is to cover up
all of the evidence. No, no, no. Don't
give them the news. Give them
propaganda. Give them propaganda. Oh,
no. Politicians are not affected by the
millions of dollars that they get. None
of the When we talk about legislation,
we are going to pretend they're having
debates. We're not going to tell you
that. In reality, they all got paid by
donors and voted with the donors
approximately
100% of the time. And the legendary
Washington Post, the actual publication
that where the adage came from, follow
the money during Watergate says don't
follow the money. Don't follow evidence.
Hide all the evidence. And that's what
real journalism looks like. No, it's an
absolute piece of trash. And the whole
point of that paper is to cover up the
crimes of the powerful to make sure you
never find out about it. I hope I was
clear enough.
What a ridiculous ed editorial board
filled with obviously corrupt,
disgusting people who are against the
American voters and against American
citizens. Now, I think I'm even more
clear. Every time you ring the bell
below, an angel gets it wings. Totally
not true, but it does keep you updated
on our live shows. Every time you ring
the bell below, an angel gets his wings.
Totally not true, but it does keep you
updated on our live shows.
The Young Turks
Dec 20, 2025 #TYT #TheYoungTurks #BreakingNews
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie finally admitted that Jeffrey Epstein has ties to Israeli intelligence. Cenk Uygur and Yasmin Khan discuss on The Young Turks.
Transcript
All right, guys. Uh, welcome to the
revolution. Uh, so I'm going to give you
guys some updates on some ideas and and
and wonderful things that you guys have
done in a minute. But first, I wanted to
give you a story that we promised you
earlier on the Young Turks. It fits into
the revolution because it's a story uh
about how we are uh there are forces
inside America trying to control uh
American government uh on behalf of a
different country in this case Israel.
So let's do this story.
Epstein also had close ties to our own
intelligence agencies and Israel's
intelligence agencies. That's why
there's so much u effort in trying to
stop this and and I do believe they'll
try to stop it somewhere else. Uh, and
that's going to backfire on them, too.
I love that he finally said it. Yes,
it's definitely Israel. We're going to
show you here with a new story from
Dropside News that shows once again that
Epstein was working with the Israelis.
And so, the mainstream media has been
ignoring it. He But he's a US
congressman. So, they're probably going
to have to address it. And if they're
going to address it, they're going to
probably do what Dana Bash did with
Marjorie Taylor Green. Are you saying
that Israel was involved? That sounds
conspiratorial.
Yeah, because it was a literal
conspiracy where Epstein was working
behind the scenes to help Israel. So,
let's give you the facts and you'll see
for yourself. So, um latest article from
job site, Jeffrey Epste pursued Swiss
Rothschild Bank to finance Israeli cyber
weapons empire.
Gee, I wonder if he was working with
Israel.
Okay, look, I it's unfortunate that this
bank happens to be called Rothschild
because there's there is a actual
conspiracy theory that is anti-Semitic
about how the Rothschilds run the whole
world. I think it's a comical theory,
but in this case, it just happens to be
a bank and a person with that same name.
So, the central figures here are Epstein
Ehud Barack, the former prime minister
of Israel, and this is hilarious,
Baroness Arian Rothschild. We have a
baroness who would also of course like
to help Israel and so she's the CEO of
Edmund de Rothschild group. Uh that's an
enormous Swiss private bank. Okay. Epste
spent years trying to connect Barack and
the Rothschild and that's what the story
is about. So they explain in one note,
Epstein passed along tentalizing offer
from the Rothschild to Barack. If Ahood
wants to make serious money, he will
have to build a relationship with me.
take time so that we can truly
understand one another. So now the
Baroness
wants Israel to get cyber weapons. And
now that's the former prime minister of
Israel. So she's like, "Come here and
I'll give you the money and then you
could do this plot for us, but you have
to get to know me first." Okay. Then uh
they explained Barack asked for advice,
deferring to Epstein's supposed
expertise on women. He said, 'I'm ready,
but I need your advice regarding how
ladies is your forte.
Not really. Young children that he's
raping is his forte, but okay. Uh,
according to Drop Site News, the purpose
of connecting Rothschild and Barack was
to secure financing for this. Quote,
Barack's private communications showed
discussions about a wide range of cyber
weapons, concepts drawn from Israeli
military research inspired in part by
the astonishing scope of US global
surveillance apparatus revealed by NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.
Oh, great. The Israelis need more cyber
weapons. And so you've got Epstein
trying to arrange that with the former
prime minister and the and the good
baroness the Rothschild. Okay. Um so
there's now by the way to be clear
there's no evidence to confirm whether
or not the Rothschild bank actually
directly financed the cyber weapon
startup. So we don't know from the
material that we have here. This is the
leaked emails of Aud Barack. Uh these
are part of the Hondela uh leaks and
they have been confirmed in parts by
drop site news and the US government. So
but in October 2015 they explained the
do the Rothschild negotiated a $25
million contract with Epstein's southern
trust company the same entity Epste used
to fund Barack's intelligence link
security startup uh reporting homeland
security known as Carbine earlier that
year.
So now that's interesting because
um here is an effort to fund Israel's
cyber weapons
and Epstein is deeply involved in it and
he's getting money too. So people
wondered where did all of Epstein's
money come from. Now look, they probably
came from a variety of different
sources, but apparently some of it came
to procure help procure cyber weapons
for Israel. Now, since this is such a
huge story and Epstein is one of the
largest stories certainly of this
administration and maybe of any
administration and the mainstream press
is reporting, oh, did Donald Trump do
it? Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald
Trump. Okay, Donald Trump is one of the
people who might or might not have done
it. He's the president of the United
States, so I understand why you're
paying a lot of attention to that, but
we found out who he was working with. It
was Israel. Do you want to pay attention
to that at all? No. No. No. No. No. No
way. No way. No way. Don't say it. Don't
say it. Cover it up for Israel. But
we're objective.
If you're objective, why are you trying
to hide the news? That's super weird.
Okay. So, now you've published many
other pieces as well. Drop site News has
about EP's links to the Israeli
government and intelligence agencies,
and we've told you about that. He was
trying to get America to bomb Syria on
behalf of Israel. Then he tried to get
America to bomb Iran on behalf of
Israel. uh he arranged a meeting with
Vladimir Putin and Ahoud Barack that
Ahoud Barack couldn't arrange. So he is
more powerful than the former prime
minister of Israel. He's powerful enough
to get a meeting with Vladimir Putin
anytime he wants. He was working with
some of the top bankers, some of the
countries in the world. And all of it in
all of the emails are to help Israel.
But mainstream media is like what was
the adage? Was it follow the propaganda,
follow the husb?
Wait, it was follow the money, right?
The journalism adage. No, no, don't
follow the money. Don't follow it.
Whatever you do, don't follow it. Okay,
guys, we got it. We got it. You love
Israel, but you're supposed to be
American media. The way that they are so
unbelievably biased is maddening. Which
leads us to the next part of the story.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post editorial
board is chiding Congress for voting to
release the Epstein files. Gee, I wonder
why the Washington Post editorial board
cares. Why hide the Epstein files? No,
please don't find out it's Israel.
Please, please shut up everybody. You're
all anti-semites. All of America is
anti-semmites.
You of course the children of America
should be raped for Israel's advantage
because but if you say it, you're
anti-semmites. You No, no, no. Bring
your children otherwise you're an
anti-semite. You have to allow them to
do it. Anti-semite.
No. Absurd. And stop saying that. that
it isn't about all Jews. It's about
these particular guys who are not loyal
to Jews overall. They're loyal to a
country, Israel, a government, Israel.
Okay. So,
uh and the board did slam Donald Trump
here uh for flip-flopping on this issue
of it uh whether they should be
unveiled. They didn't want them to
flip-flop. They wanted them to hide the
Epstein files forever so their beloved
Israel wouldn't be exposed. Anyway,
here's editorial board. quote, "The
whole sorted exercise is a testament to
the collapse of political trust, and no
one comes out looking good." Yes, the
political trust has collapsed because
a-holes like you go, "Don't release
anything secret and nefarious to the
American people. They're not to be
trusted. They're all dirty
anti-semmites." No, you hide all the
evidence of all the wrongdoing by the
powerful and you screw over the American
people. I wonder why they lost political
trust. Huh? I can't figure it out. I
mean, really, is the Washington Post
editorial board that stupid?
Really? Are you that mentally deficient
that you can't figure out that that's
why maybe people lost trust in the
government? Cuz they keep hiding things
like the Epstein files, the the brain
trust that the Washington Post got
together. This is the editorial board.
They're like, "What do you think? Uh,
you think if we hide the Epstein files,
they'll have more trust in the
government?" Oh, of course. Of course.
You think if we hide the fact that Epc
was working with Israel, they'll trust
the government more? Of course, of
course, of course. Hide. Hide. Hide.
Hide. And what are you in the business
of? Journalism.
Are you Are you Is that journalism?
Hiding the dirty secrets of the
powerful. Well, these days they that is
what mainstream media does. That is what
the Washington Post does. So, it's not
that surprising at all that they would
think, yeah, that's our job is to hide
the crimes of the powerful and to help
them crush the powerless. Okay. So, they
continue. The lone congressional
objector, Representative Klay Higgins,
has a point when he says the
indiscriminate release abandons 250
years of criminal justice procedure in
America and could result in innocent
people being hurt. Absurd. They're like,
"Oh no, the poor little innocent
pedophiles. Oh, don't let Oh, no. Oh,
the kids who got raped, who cares about
them? They're useless. They're
irrelevant. We've already gotten all the
use we need out of them. But the
pedophiles, won't anyone protect the
pedophiles?" Now look, I understand what
they're saying. Well, what if they
somebody was talking to Epstein or is in
his book and his name gets released, but
we don't know whether they did it or
not. Well, first of all, we're going to
get the information. And so, we're not
that dumb that we see a name. For
example, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton
are already two names we know. Are we
assuming for sure that they did it?
Maybe partisans are, right? Oh, yeah. I
bet Trump did it, but Clinton didn't. I
bet Clinton did it, but Trump didn't.
That's partisan brain, right? But the
rest of us get it. We don't know yet. We
don't know if Trump did it. We don't
know if Clinton did it. Maybe we'll get
information that'll show or not, but
we're not nearly as dumb as you guys are
in the Washington Post editorial board.
So, we're not just going to see a name
and be like, "Oh, that's it. He
definitely did it." Right. And second of
all, if you say that someone definitely
did it, and they didn't, they could sue
you. Alan Dersitz can't wait. He was in
a segment with my co-host Kasparian uh
on LA Arabia and he's like, "Oh, I can't
wait to get the victim's names cuz we're
going to punish them. We're going to sue
them all. Whoever says a wrong name. So,
he's already chomping at the bit. You
know, it does whether it's a wrong name
or you don't have sufficient evidence to
prove it. No, they're can't those
billionaires can't wait to have somebody
like Alan Derswood sue the the victims.
They they're already lined up to do
that. But the Washington Post board
apparently didn't think about that. They
don't know that that's possible. And
who's abandoning criminal justice? Look
guys, think about this core issue,
right? So they say, "No, no, we should
keep hiding the names cuz what if the
pedophiles are harmed?" Or, "But what if
one of them is not a pedophile?" Okay.
Well, wait a minute. If you're in favor
of justice, then why didn't you do an
editorial about the government not
prosecuting the actual pedophiles? So,
that's a great way for us to know who
did it and who didn't do it. The
government finds the people who did it
and they prosecute them. And then the
other ones, they say they didn't do it,
so you and we're not going to prosecute
them. That's how justice would normally
work. But no, the Washington Post says,
"Don't do any of that." And who cares
that they didn't prosecute any of the
guilty because we don't care about the
kids who were raped. We don't care about
them at all. We don't care about the
American people. We don't care that
Epstein is working with Israel. We don't
care about any of that. All we care
about is protecting the super powerful
who are connected to Epstein. Gee, I
wonder why. I wonder why. So, uh, the
board argued that the bill is filled
with loopholes. Wait, you don't want it
released in the first place. So, what do
you care about the loopholes?
Information that is released might not
necessarily be incriminating. Again,
we're not, uh, we're not as dumb as you
are. We can make that, uh, distinction.
And according to both the FBI and the
federal lead prosecutor in charge of
negotiating FC's 2008 plea deal
agreement, Epstein was the only one
abusing children. Yeah, if you're an
idiot, you believe that. And uh but if
you were a journalist, you'd go, "Well,
is that really true? Let me investigate
a little bit more." In fact, that's what
Julie Brown did at the Miami Herald. And
she did a fantastic of job of of
realizing and showing and proving that
no, the 2008 was a sweetheart deal.
Epstein had committed way more rape uh
than that uh you know that case uh
you know was adjudicated as because they
just gave him a plea deal and they let
him go out in in during the daytime
basically used the the jail as a as a
hotel. It was a disgusting deal and that
the corrupt prosecutor who did it was
later rewarded uh and made a labor
secretary randomly under Donald Trump in
his first term. So, but they take that
obviously corrupt deal and the
Washington Post is like, "You see that?
That proves the innocence." No, it
proves that you're part of the
corruption. It proves that you love to
cover up the crimes of the powerful
while pretending to be reporters and
journalists. You're the exact opposite.
And this is what we have to fix about
our country. Our mainstream media is a
joke. They don't do the news. They do
propaganda. And apparently they do
propaganda from time to time on behalf
of foreign countries, on behalf of the
powerful, on behalf of the donors.
So they've been lying to us our whole
life. Oh yeah, no, the politicians are
honest. No, they're not. The politicians
take money from Israel, from big pharma,
from oil, from military industrial
complex, and they serve those donors
loyally. And the job of the Washington
Post is to go and cover that up. Cover
they're they're the getaway driver in
this crime. and their job is to cover up
all of the evidence. No, no, no. Don't
give them the news. Give them
propaganda. Give them propaganda. Oh,
no. Politicians are not affected by the
millions of dollars that they get. None
of the When we talk about legislation,
we are going to pretend they're having
debates. We're not going to tell you
that. In reality, they all got paid by
donors and voted with the donors
approximately
100% of the time. And the legendary
Washington Post, the actual publication
that where the adage came from, follow
the money during Watergate says don't
follow the money. Don't follow evidence.
Hide all the evidence. And that's what
real journalism looks like. No, it's an
absolute piece of trash. And the whole
point of that paper is to cover up the
crimes of the powerful to make sure you
never find out about it. I hope I was
clear enough.
What a ridiculous ed editorial board
filled with obviously corrupt,
disgusting people who are against the
American voters and against American
citizens. Now, I think I'm even more
clear. Every time you ring the bell
below, an angel gets it wings. Totally
not true, but it does keep you updated
on our live shows. Every time you ring
the bell below, an angel gets his wings.
Totally not true, but it does keep you
updated on our live shows.
- admin
- Site Admin
- Posts: 40175
- Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am
Re: Part 2 Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down
by admin » Tue Dec 23, 2025 1:06 am
All Hell Breaks Loose With ICE In Home Depot
Really American
Dec 22, 2025
Really American host Steve Harness breaks down Home Depot being hit with a massive protest after months of helping ICE with their raids on innocent immigrants.
Transcript
Get ice out of home. Get ice out of
home. Get ice out of Home Depot.
Yes. T is the season for peace on earth,
goodwill to man, and to boycott Home
Depot. Because not only are they doing
nothing to stop or denounce these ICE
raids that are happening at their stores
nationwide, they are now testing out a
new way to torture day laborers in an
attempt to scare them away. And I'm not
using the word torture loosely. They're
using a highfrequency noise that has
literally been used as a torture device
in countries like Cuba. And all of this
is happening as holiday boycots are
continuing because of their perceived
coordination with those ICE raids. So
hit subscribe to Really American Media
here on YouTube and help us hit a
million subscribers. And also go find
our Substack page. All right. Now,
before you think I'm some giant
conspiracy theorist ranting about high
frequency noises being used against
people here in our country, go ahead,
see it and hear it for yourself.
A high-pitched, piercing sound. That's
what day laborers looking for work are
met with at the Home Depot in Cypress
Park. The home improvement store has
installed three noise machines in their
parking lot in what company officials
say is an effort to keep customers safe.
But advocates and local city officials
are calling for the loud noise machines
to be removed, calling them an attempt
to harass day laborers. Sounds about
right, pun intended. And as one LA city
council member points out, they are
weaponizing sound.
They chose to weaponize sound.
Literally, devices like these are used
as torture against our people. Yeah, I
would say this is a cause for alarm and
as word of these new devices have
started to spread. People are taking
note and it's definitely a sour note.
Community members in Cypress Park are
sounding the alarm after these noise
machines were placed high above on at
least three light posts in the parking
lot of the Home Depot.
It is annoying and then you know you got
to walk away or or always use your
earplugs otherwise it's you get headed.
Jose de Laator is one of many day
laborers irritated by the high-pitch
continuous beep. But the earplugs he
bought soon after the machines were
installed last month can only block out
so much.
What's the purpose? I guess uh probably
don't like the laborers here.
That's what immigrant rights activists
claim is the real reason behind these
anti-ordering machines they believe are
meant to scare off workers.
We're obviously concerned about the
health and safety of our worker members.
um who use the day labor center uh on a
daily basis, our staff, but also
community members and customers.
Yeah, it's cruel enough to do it to
these day laborers, but Home Depot
doesn't need any more reasons to piss
off their customers because they're
already more pissed off than Ebanese or
Scrooge.
Home Depot.
Home Depot.
[Music]
Holy.
Long line of returns, that's for sure.
Not yet scraped ice out of Columbus or
Home Depot even, but we're going to keep
trying.
[Music]
Oh, what fun it is to stand for workers
right today.
We wish you an angry Christmas. We wish
you an icy Christmas and a new year.
Yeah. Community members are giving the
gift of mass protests against Home Depot
and doing whatever they can to stand up
for these day laborers who are
ironically only looking for an honest
day's pay instead of going out and
committing crimes to make ends meet
which defies the imagery that ICE is
putting out about going after the worst
of the worst for these deportations. So,
as far as we're concerned, this is a an
attempt to harass day laborers to get
rid of them. And we're just really
concerned given the fact that we have
asked Home Depot numerous times about
their collusion, if any, with
immigration enforcement.
She's referring to the numerous ICE
raids that have happened on or near Home
Depot across town. Yeah, there's been a
lot of raids at Home Depot, which we
don't hear about those raids happening
at other home improvement stores like
Lowe's. So, what does Home Depot have to
say for themselves and these new sonic
torture devices that they're using? They
sent KTLA these images, saying, "This
specific location is unique and the
measures are intended to deter illegal
overnight parking." Adding in a
statement, quote, "To conflate this
issue with immigration enforcement or to
say that we are cooperating with
immigration enforcement activities is
just false. We are not informed when
these activities are going to happen and
we're in no way involved in the
operations."
Right. So, Home Depot says they
installed the noise machine torture
devices to deter illegal overnight
parking. Then why are they on during the
day when the store is open? And if
people park illegally, why don't they
just have them towed? One person
commented on YouTube, quote, "Private
company, private property. They can do
what they want. Also, they can trespass
anyone they desire." End quote. All of
which is true. So why don't they just
call the cops and have these day
laborers trespass? And since it's their
property, they could tell ICE that they
can't do raids there without a warrant.
But they haven't done that even once.
Nor have they denounced any of these
raids, hence the calls to protest them.
[Music]
We are asking for Home Depot to publicly
condemn the ice ring.
Buy your Christmas tree anywhere else by
Home Depot.
Toddlers have been kidnapped outside
their schools when they stay silent.
Over 52 Home Depots have been raided.
Over 500 people have been kidnapped off
their properties.
[Music]
Fascism is at our doors.
[Music]
It is time to mobilize and it's time to
fight back.
Yeah. People are out peacefully
protesting Home Depot and refusing to
shop there this holiday season. And in
some cases, some mega supporters are
pushing back and being anything but
peaceful.
Our undocumented folks
have
20 million illegal documents,
right?
I don't give a No, I don't give up
your livelihood so we can take care of
them,
my livelihood.
Are you losing your job to undocumented?
Your ass couldn't work. You could listen
you couldn't do their jobs even if you
wanted to. You know that happened.
Yeah. Good on that protester for
fighting the good fight and not
relenting. We have seen people violently
arrested during some of these Home Depot
raids. US citizens have been swept up.
People have died while in ICE custody.
We even saw a baby got left in a car as
ICE agents drove off from one of these
Home Depot raids. All while the company
does nothing to stop it.
[Music]
Yeah, bro. The guy was doing absolutely
nothing, bro.
Look at that. Look at that. With a baby
in the back.
Yeah.
Look at that.
And they about to drive
in the car. Seat in the car. Why don't
you take off your mask?
What are you going to do? Shoot.
[Music]
[Laughter]
[Music]
Yeah. Well, good. I'm glad Home Depot
stock has taken a hit. Using a sonic
device to torture people is insanity, no
matter what the reason is. And we the
people have the power to protest with
our wallets. And it's the most effective
way to hurt a company that is truly
acting unamerican, especially during the
holiday season. So I applaud everyone
out there getting vocal. Better watch
out. She better not cry. She better not
pout. I'm telling you why.
Is going to jail.
[Music]
She knows where you are.
She sees if you're not
hearing
you.
Please like this video, share it
worldwide, comment below, and like all
of those protesters, get vocal. From the
vocal minority with Nick and Steve
podcast, I'm Steve Harnesses for Really
American Media.
Really American
Dec 22, 2025
Really American host Steve Harness breaks down Home Depot being hit with a massive protest after months of helping ICE with their raids on innocent immigrants.
Transcript
Get ice out of home. Get ice out of
home. Get ice out of Home Depot.
Yes. T is the season for peace on earth,
goodwill to man, and to boycott Home
Depot. Because not only are they doing
nothing to stop or denounce these ICE
raids that are happening at their stores
nationwide, they are now testing out a
new way to torture day laborers in an
attempt to scare them away. And I'm not
using the word torture loosely. They're
using a highfrequency noise that has
literally been used as a torture device
in countries like Cuba. And all of this
is happening as holiday boycots are
continuing because of their perceived
coordination with those ICE raids. So
hit subscribe to Really American Media
here on YouTube and help us hit a
million subscribers. And also go find
our Substack page. All right. Now,
before you think I'm some giant
conspiracy theorist ranting about high
frequency noises being used against
people here in our country, go ahead,
see it and hear it for yourself.
A high-pitched, piercing sound. That's
what day laborers looking for work are
met with at the Home Depot in Cypress
Park. The home improvement store has
installed three noise machines in their
parking lot in what company officials
say is an effort to keep customers safe.
But advocates and local city officials
are calling for the loud noise machines
to be removed, calling them an attempt
to harass day laborers. Sounds about
right, pun intended. And as one LA city
council member points out, they are
weaponizing sound.
They chose to weaponize sound.
Literally, devices like these are used
as torture against our people. Yeah, I
would say this is a cause for alarm and
as word of these new devices have
started to spread. People are taking
note and it's definitely a sour note.
Community members in Cypress Park are
sounding the alarm after these noise
machines were placed high above on at
least three light posts in the parking
lot of the Home Depot.
It is annoying and then you know you got
to walk away or or always use your
earplugs otherwise it's you get headed.
Jose de Laator is one of many day
laborers irritated by the high-pitch
continuous beep. But the earplugs he
bought soon after the machines were
installed last month can only block out
so much.
What's the purpose? I guess uh probably
don't like the laborers here.
That's what immigrant rights activists
claim is the real reason behind these
anti-ordering machines they believe are
meant to scare off workers.
We're obviously concerned about the
health and safety of our worker members.
um who use the day labor center uh on a
daily basis, our staff, but also
community members and customers.
Yeah, it's cruel enough to do it to
these day laborers, but Home Depot
doesn't need any more reasons to piss
off their customers because they're
already more pissed off than Ebanese or
Scrooge.
Home Depot.
Home Depot.
[Music]
Holy.
Long line of returns, that's for sure.
Not yet scraped ice out of Columbus or
Home Depot even, but we're going to keep
trying.
[Music]
Oh, what fun it is to stand for workers
right today.
We wish you an angry Christmas. We wish
you an icy Christmas and a new year.
Yeah. Community members are giving the
gift of mass protests against Home Depot
and doing whatever they can to stand up
for these day laborers who are
ironically only looking for an honest
day's pay instead of going out and
committing crimes to make ends meet
which defies the imagery that ICE is
putting out about going after the worst
of the worst for these deportations. So,
as far as we're concerned, this is a an
attempt to harass day laborers to get
rid of them. And we're just really
concerned given the fact that we have
asked Home Depot numerous times about
their collusion, if any, with
immigration enforcement.
She's referring to the numerous ICE
raids that have happened on or near Home
Depot across town. Yeah, there's been a
lot of raids at Home Depot, which we
don't hear about those raids happening
at other home improvement stores like
Lowe's. So, what does Home Depot have to
say for themselves and these new sonic
torture devices that they're using? They
sent KTLA these images, saying, "This
specific location is unique and the
measures are intended to deter illegal
overnight parking." Adding in a
statement, quote, "To conflate this
issue with immigration enforcement or to
say that we are cooperating with
immigration enforcement activities is
just false. We are not informed when
these activities are going to happen and
we're in no way involved in the
operations."
Right. So, Home Depot says they
installed the noise machine torture
devices to deter illegal overnight
parking. Then why are they on during the
day when the store is open? And if
people park illegally, why don't they
just have them towed? One person
commented on YouTube, quote, "Private
company, private property. They can do
what they want. Also, they can trespass
anyone they desire." End quote. All of
which is true. So why don't they just
call the cops and have these day
laborers trespass? And since it's their
property, they could tell ICE that they
can't do raids there without a warrant.
But they haven't done that even once.
Nor have they denounced any of these
raids, hence the calls to protest them.
[Music]
We are asking for Home Depot to publicly
condemn the ice ring.
Buy your Christmas tree anywhere else by
Home Depot.
Toddlers have been kidnapped outside
their schools when they stay silent.
Over 52 Home Depots have been raided.
Over 500 people have been kidnapped off
their properties.
[Music]
Fascism is at our doors.
[Music]
It is time to mobilize and it's time to
fight back.
Yeah. People are out peacefully
protesting Home Depot and refusing to
shop there this holiday season. And in
some cases, some mega supporters are
pushing back and being anything but
peaceful.
Our undocumented folks
have
20 million illegal documents,
right?
I don't give a No, I don't give up
your livelihood so we can take care of
them,
my livelihood.
Are you losing your job to undocumented?
Your ass couldn't work. You could listen
you couldn't do their jobs even if you
wanted to. You know that happened.
Yeah. Good on that protester for
fighting the good fight and not
relenting. We have seen people violently
arrested during some of these Home Depot
raids. US citizens have been swept up.
People have died while in ICE custody.
We even saw a baby got left in a car as
ICE agents drove off from one of these
Home Depot raids. All while the company
does nothing to stop it.
[Music]
Yeah, bro. The guy was doing absolutely
nothing, bro.
Look at that. Look at that. With a baby
in the back.
Yeah.
Look at that.
And they about to drive
in the car. Seat in the car. Why don't
you take off your mask?
What are you going to do? Shoot.
[Music]
[Laughter]
[Music]
Yeah. Well, good. I'm glad Home Depot
stock has taken a hit. Using a sonic
device to torture people is insanity, no
matter what the reason is. And we the
people have the power to protest with
our wallets. And it's the most effective
way to hurt a company that is truly
acting unamerican, especially during the
holiday season. So I applaud everyone
out there getting vocal. Better watch
out. She better not cry. She better not
pout. I'm telling you why.
Is going to jail.
[Music]
She knows where you are.
She sees if you're not
hearing
you.
Please like this video, share it
worldwide, comment below, and like all
of those protesters, get vocal. From the
vocal minority with Nick and Steve
podcast, I'm Steve Harnesses for Really
American Media.
- admin
- Site Admin
- Posts: 40175
- Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am
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