MAGA Isn’t Buying White House Defense of Trump’s Chief of Staff |
MAGA isn’t buying White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s excuses for humiliating Donald Trump’s team.
Wiles tried Tuesday to explain away revealing her unfiltered opinions about several Trumpworld figures in an interview with Vanity Fair. She claimed the article was a “disingenuously framed hit piece” that “disregarded” context to “paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative.”
While members of Trumpworld leaped to Wiles’s defense, MAGA wasn’t quite as forgiving. Lara Logan, a discredited former CBS correspondent and prominent figure in far-right media, slammed Wiles’s apparent naïveté.
“It is too late in the game for this to be a defense. Anyone close to the President should know that Vanity Fair leads the way in the information war for Trump’s most powerful & despicable enemies,” she wrote on X.
“If you do not know this, you are not qualified to be in a junior role let alone a senior one,” Logan added.
Joel Pollak, the opinion editor at the conservative tabloid California Post, also questioned Wiles’s decision to speak with Vanity Fair in the first place. “I don’t know why Republicans continue to give privileged access to mainstream media or center-left publications determined to destroy them,” he wrote on X, calling publications such as Vanity Fair and The New York Times “Democrat agenda-driven outlets.”
Mike Cernovich, a right-wing commentator with more than 1.4 million followers on X, accused Wiles of doing “glam interviews with Bolshevik media.”
In another post, Cernovich offered Wiles some advice: “You don’t have to do the media interview. You don’t have to talk to anyone. They will say, ‘We are going to write about you whether you cooperate or not.’ Who cares. Far worse than some hit piece (which don’t even work anymore) is hanging yourself with your own words.”
ICE agents violently restrained a woman in Minneapolis on Monday, dragging her through the snow and pinning her face down as onlookers shouted that the woman was pregnant.
During what was supposed to be a “targeted vehicle stop,” according to ICE officials, protesters swarmed the agents. Esme Murphy, a WCCO reporter, was on the scene, where she saw ICE holding a woman on the ground.
“Please let her go! She’s pregnant!” one onlooker shouted.
“Get her off of her fucking stomach,” another said.
🚨This is one of the most disturbing videos of ICE abuse I’ve seen.
In Minnesota, ICE agents handcuffed a pregnant woman, forced her onto her stomach, and put their full body weight and knees on her, refusing to let her get up.
In the video, you can hear the crowd screaming… pic.twitter.com/4nk2uTsOQg
In response to this, one agent fired a Taser into the crowd. “Who wants more?” he taunted, according to WCCO.
“We kept yelling, ‘She is pregnant, she’s pregnant,’” resident Tonika Deutch told Murphy. “They put their knees on her. We kept telling them, ‘She can’t breathe, let her up, let her up.’”
The woman was then dragged by one arm, as the crowd continued to yell and plead with the ICE agents. Bystanders threw snowballs, and ICE agents fired pepper spray into the crowd—hitting Murphy, the reporter, as well as her photographer.
ICE called the Minneapolis Police Department for backup. Once they arrived, the officers determined there was “no violence occurring” against the agents. “We have been training our officers for the last five years very, very intensely on de-escalation, but unfortunately that is … often not what we are seeing from other agencies in the city,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told WCCO.
According to ICE, they succeeded in arresting the targets of their operation: a young Ecuadorian couple who were abducted from their car, its windows shattered by agents. The woman is currently in custody in Illinois, and it’s not known where her husband is being held. Two U.S. citizens were also arrested for assaulting federal officers, according to CBS.
Four House Republicans have rejected the party line to give Obamacare more juice.
In a major act of defiance against House Speaker Mike Johnson, GOP Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Lawler, Robert Bresnahan, and Ryan Mackenzie signed Democrats’ Affordable Care Act discharge petition Wednesday morning.
They join every House Democrat in doing so, bringing the overall tally on the petition to the 218 signatures required to force a vote on whether to extend enhanced ACA subsidies for another three years.
Last week, Johnson granted Fitzpatrick and Representative Jen Kiggans an opportunity to vote on an amendment to extend the subsidies. But differing opinions over the amendment’s text had blocked efforts to make a deal.
Kiggans is not expected to sign the petition, people close to her told The Hill.
The successful effort does not translate into immediate action, however. Signatories on the petition will have to wait at least seven legislative days to recognize it, according to House rules, after which House leadership will have two days to respond. That would likely put the ACA vote on the agenda sometime around New Year’s Eve, but Johnson could voluntarily speed up the process if he wanted to.
Johnson did not respond when asked by CNN as to whether he would permit a vote before the year’s........