Washington Free Beacon

JERUSALEM—Donald Trump named more than half a dozen pro-Israel hawks to key foreign policy roles this week, reassuring Israelis that the president-elect’s incoming administration will be as supportive as his first.

Trump’s picks largely ended talk in Israel that MAGA isolationism could weaken U.S. backing of the Jewish state. Israeli commentators hailed the roster—led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) for secretary of state and Fox News host Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense—as a “dream team.”

“This is a great reassurance from Israel’s perspective. The new appointments point to a hawkish administration that will not be afraid to confront the Iranians and radical Islam, and even to present a credible military option against them and create a new reality in the Middle East,” former Israeli diplomat Jacob Dayan wrote for Israel’s Channel 12 news. “This is undoubtedly the U.S. ‘dream team’ for Israel.”

Trump takes office at a pivotal moment for Israel. Over more than 13 months of fighting, the Israeli military has dealt major blows to Iran’s military and most important terrorist affiliates, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Now, Israeli leaders hope to win U.S. backing for a new regional order in which the threat from Iran is better contained—if not eliminated.

According to polling, Israelis overwhelmingly wanted Trump to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris in last week’s presidential election. But in the days after Trump won, Hebrew media played up the influence of isolationists in his inner circle, including son Donald Trump Jr., Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Much was also made of the absence of pro-Israel favorites from Trump’s first term. Son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly opted out of a White House return, and Trump publicly rejected former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

“In Israel, Fears of the Threat of Trump’s Chaos,” Israeli tabloid Maariv blared over the weekend. “Israel’s closest friends remain on the sidelines, and those close to Trump show no willingness to express clear support.”

Then, Trump started rolling out his would-be foreign policy principals, most of whom will need to be confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate. In addition to Hegseth and Rubio, Trump’s picks included South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R.) for secretary of homeland security, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) for U.N. ambassador, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R.) for ambassador to Israel, former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe for CIA director, real estate investor Steve Witkoff for Middle East envoy, and Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.) for national security adviser.

Video clips of the Americans expressing strong support for Israel’s war with the Iranian axis circulated widely in Israeli media.

• Asked by a pro-Palestinian activist to support a ceasefire in Gaza weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, Rubio replied: “On the contrary … I want [the Israelis] to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals who did horrifying crimes.”
• Hegseth, speaking on Fox News following a 2020 Iranian attack on U.S. troops in Iraq, called the Islamic Republic an “evil regime,” “like if ISIS controlled a state, just [a] Shia version.” He advised then-President Donald Trump to bomb infrastructure in Iran, including energy and nuclear sites, saying, “I don’t want to hit cultural sites on purpose, but if you’re using one to harbor your most dangerous weapons, then that should be on the target list, too.”
• Ratcliffe praised Israel on Fox News in September for, like Trump, “understanding the only way to deter terrorists like Iran and their proxies is to put your foot on their throat.” “Israel has done that,” Ratcliffe added. “We should be assisting Israel in doing so.”
• Stefanik vowed in a May address to Israel’s parliament: “As long as I serve the American people, I will defend George Washington’s vision of religious pluralism and freedom,” she vowed. “Today, this means crushing anti-Semitism at home and supplying the State of Israel with what it needs, when it needs it, without conditions, to achieve total victory in the face of evil.”

Israeli journalists who had predicted a reprise of Trump’s first term—during which he moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, intensified sanctions on Iran, and ordered the assassination of Iranian terror chief Qassem Soleimani—took a victory lap on X.

“Just a week or two ago, they explained to us here in the news how much you can’t trust Trump and that he will sell out Israel at the first opportunity,” said Avishai Grinzaig, a reporter at Israel’s i24 news.

“A few more Trump appointments and Iran will ask Israel to calm America down,” joked Ariel Schnabel, a staff writer at Israel’s Makor Rishon magazine. “And seriously—excellent appointments one by one of the true lovers of Israel in everything related to foreign policy. A dream and an opportunity that must not be missed.”

Pro-Israel stalwarts will also play leading roles in staffing the rest of Trump’s second administration. Billionaire financier Howard Lutnick, a major donor to Zionist causes who has said he joined Trump’s campaign in large part to support Israel, is the co-chair of the transition. Brian Hook, a special envoy for Iran during Trump’s first term who helped oversee the “maximum pressure campaign,” will reportedly lead the transition at the State Department.

The post WATCH: Trump Foreign Policy Picks Are ‘Dream Team’ for Israel appeared first on .

Donald Trump’s first term as president was the best thing that ever happened to MSNBC. The Democratic-aligned cable news channel enjoyed record ratings between 2017 and 2020 as anxious #Resistance liberals tuned in for group therapy sessions hosted by Joy Reid, Nicolle Wallace, Rachel Maddow, and other anti-Trump commentators whose increasingly unhinged rhetoric mirrored the deteriorating mental health of their viewers. But after four years of sagging ratings under President Joe Biden, amid a media landscape that has changed dramatically since 2016, there is reason to doubt that MSNBC and its roster of relentlessly partisan grievance-mongers can repeat that success in Trump’s second term. A more pressing question: Can the network even survive in its current form?

In the days since the election, MSNBC’s ratings haven’t seen a “Trump bump”—they’ve cratered. More on that shortly. But the ratings collapse comes as MSNBC—with its increasingly ugly rhetoric, denigration of Trump supporters, and ethically challenged hosts—has emerged as a major headache for parent company Comcast, much as Fox News Channel was a perennial problem for its then-parent company, 21st Century Fox, or CNN was for its then-owner, Time Warner, in Trump’s first term. Furthermore, MSNBC’s harsh partisanship is increasingly seen as a drag on its sister news operation, the supposedly nonpartisan NBC News, which is dogged by allegations of liberal bias and continues to draw fewer viewers than rival ABC News.

Comcast’s recent comments that it’s considering spinning off its portfolio of cable channels suggest that the company’s owners, the billionaire Roberts family, would like to rid themselves of MSNBC, and the accompanying bad publicity, once and for all. It is, after all, “a declining asset.” After averaging 1.1 million viewers in the month of October, MSNBC’s rating declined more than 30 percent last week in the days following Trump’s election. During the primetime hours of 8-11 p.m.—when advertising rates are the highest—the network’s ratings plummeted more than 50 percent. NBCUniversal put out a press release boasting that, for the first time in history, MSNBC had more viewers on Election Night than CNN, even though many attributed those numbers to gleeful conservatives tuning in to gawk at the left-wing pundits experiencing public meltdowns. Not to mention the fact that CNN was also experiencing a historic ratings collapse in the Biden era.

Days before the election, Comcast president Mike Cavanagh announced the company was exploring the option of spinning off its struggling cable networks—which include MSNBC and CNBC as well as Bravo, E!, and Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen—into a separate entity. Comcast’s stock price jumped, an apparent confirmation that many investors indeed view these cable networks as declining assets. MSNBC in particular, with its reputation for partisan hysteria, looks increasingly like a tainted liability that company executives would be wise to jettison. Puck‘s Dylan Byers, often regarded as a pliant mouthpiece for corporate titans who revels in layoffs and pours salt in the wounds of declining news organizations, described Cavanagh’s announcement as “the latest reminder that several of the media institutions that played starring roles in Trump’s first term might not be up for it this time around.”

In an article headlined “The #Resistance Is Futile,” Byers ran through the various reasons why MSNBC might not have “the muscle or momentum to return to its old, occasionally shrill form.” The former Politico scribe, best known for helping ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos preempt a Washington Free Beacon report on his donations to the Clinton Foundation, explained that MSNBC’s most popular host, Rachel Maddow, works just one night a week despite signing a massive new contract worth $30 million per year. Byers observed that Maddow’s colleagues at the network “increasingly seem to be influencing no one other than themselves and about a million or so liberals with AARP cards.” The Free Beacon can confirm that elderly whites—who shelled out thousands of dollars for tickets—were disproportionately represented at the MSNBC “democracy” festival in Brooklyn two months ago. (NBC nepo baby Luke Russert hosted the event.)

MSNBC is hardly the only liberal media outlet struggling to confront this grim reality. CNN is reportedly planning to fire “hundreds” of employees and scale back on ludicrously exorbitant anchor salaries (who is “John Berman” and why does he make more than $1 million a year?) in an effort to cut costs and divert more resources to its digital operations to restore its once-respectable brand. The beleaguered Washington Post conducted a round of layoffs in 2023, a year in which the publication posted a loss of nearly $80 million. The Post‘s traffic has dropped 60 percent since its peak in April 2020, when lefty readers flocked to the website in droves for anti-Trump COVID updates.

But there is reason to believe that MSNBC is uniquely ill-suited to bounce back in the post-Biden era. The network’s top personalities exude all of the traits many Democrats argue have caused the party to lose touch with normal Americans. Sneering condescension. Inscrutable woke vocabulary. A tendency to embrace bizarre conspiracy theories and view every political problem through the lens of patriarchal white supremacy. The MSNBC stable of “talent” is rife with individuals tainted by scandal of some kind. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Rachel Maddow

MSNBC’s premier host is now making about $30 million a year to work one day a week, a deal that’s become an increasing source of embarrassment for former boy wonder Cesar Conde, the NBCUniversal News Group chairman who was somehow suckered into approving the arrangement. Over the last eight years, during and prior to her semi-retirement, Maddow has sought to justify her astronomical paycheck by pushing a spurious welter of conspiracy theories involving Trump’s alleged ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin. During the Trump administration, she covered every Russia-related storyline with what National Review‘s Rich Lowry described as “a consistent breathlessness.” Guardian columnist Ross Barkan slammed Maddow as the epitome of the liberal media’s overzealous pursuit of ratings in the #Resistance era. “No twist was too minuscule or outlandish for Maddow,” he wrote. “Every night, seemingly, brought another nail in the coffin of the soon-to-be-dead Trump presidency.” Barkan wondered, in March 2019, if Maddow would face a “reckoning” for her hysterical coverage. Not exactly.

Despite (or perhaps because of) Maddow’s years of credulous on-camera detective work being thoroughly discredited, Conde decided to pay her more to work less. Earlier this year, Maddow produced her first documentary, shamelessly titled From Russia with Lev, about Lev Parnas, the obscure Ukrainian figure who served 20 months in prison for making illegal donations to Trump’s campaign. We’re still waiting for NBC News “disinformation reporter” Brandy Zadrozny to turn her attention to Maddow’s Russia reports.

Al Sharpton 

Sharpton, the formerly obese racial agitator who promoted the Tawana Brawley rape hoax and incited an anti-Semitic riot in Crown Heights, has found a lucrative home at MSNBC, collecting what’s believed to be a high-six-figure to low-seven-figure salary to struggle to read the teleprompter on his weekend show, PoliticsNation. He frequently appears elsewhere on the network as an expert on racial grievance and combating anti-Semitism. (Seriously.) Sharpton described the widespread criticism of Claudine Gay, the Harvard president who resigned in disgrace after she failed to condemn anti-Semitism on campus and was exposed as a serial plagiarist, as “an attack on every black woman in this country.” A shameless grifter, Sharpton is believed to have gotten his first MSNBC show in 2011 in a quid pro quo for using his political connections to help finalize Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal. (NBC denies this, but no one believes them.) In 2015, black business tycoon Byron Allen sued Comcast, Sharpton, and other civil rights groups, accusing Comcast of making “sham diversity agreements” with Sharpton in exchange for $3.8 million in donations to his far-left activist group, the National Action Network.

Sharpton recently orchestrated a $500,000 donation from Kamala Harris’s campaign to his nonprofit a few weeks before conducting a softball interview with the candidate on his show. The Free Beacon reported on Thursday that the National Action Network has twice awarded (in 2020 and 2024) MSNBC president Rashida Jones its “Chairman’s Award,” an accolade she lists on her official bio, bestowed upon her by Sharpton, someone her network has paid millions of dollars. Perhaps Maddow should train her documentary cameras on this shameless grifting rather than helping Parnas rebrand himself as a victim of Trump’s “treason.”

Joy Reid 

Considered by many cable television observers to be MSNBC’s new standard-bearer, in light of Maddow’s near-total absence, Joy Reid is believed to make about $3 million year. She uses her MSNBC platform to spew—unchallenged—racially charged bile at the same time as she puts one foot in her mouth after the other. Last week, Megyn Kelly called Reid “racist” and demanded that NBC fire her after Reid suggested that Trump would deport “brown people” who were in the country legally. “She wants a race riot,” said Kelly, who herself was pushed out of NBC after she defended a Bravo star, “Countess” Luann de Lesseps, for wearing blackface on Halloween. Reid has faced no such consequences for her almost daily racist remarks.

Seemingly indifferent to any standards of decency, Reid, a Harvard graduate, presides over a show that is a carnival of racial grievance, nastiness, and assorted nonsense. Experts are invited on to complain that Republicans have “doubled down on the idea of codifying white nationalism” by making it “literally illegal” for black people to vote. She accused Republicans of having “taught people the word ‘inflation.'” Her inability to relate to normal Americans is remarkable even for an MSNBC host. For instance, Reid was shocked that Harris lost after waging a “flawlessly run” campaign and being endorsed by Queen Latifah, who “never endorses anyone.” She has since lashed out at Latino men for betraying their race. “Y’all voted with Stephen Miller and David Duke, and against your own sisters,” she said. “So, you own everything that happens to your mixed-status families and to your wives, sisters, and abuelas from here on in.” Reid also interviewed a Yale psychologist who said Harris voters were “entitled” to shun their Trump-voting family members because it “may be essential for your mental health.”

Reid’s power within MSNBC has grown considerably since facing what some thought would be a career-ending crisis in 2018. When internet sleuths uncovered homophobic and anti-Semitic posts on her old blog, she falsely claimed to have been hacked and asked authorities to investigate the alleged crime. (Nothing came of it, obviously.) As more and more offensive blog postings turned up, making it manifestly clear that Reid was lying, her job was saved by Maddow, who as a gay woman vouched for Reid’s character. Now Reid is unfettered and untrammeled, firmly entrenched in the upper echelons of the NBC News Group’s power elite, free to race-bait and demean normal Americans as she sees fit.

Nicolle Wallace

In October 2022, disgraced former FBI official Peter Strzok went on Wallace’s show and said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were “nothing compared to January 6,” referring to the 2021 unrest at the Capitol. That’s pretty much all you need to know about Wallace’s show on MSNBC, one of the lowest-rated programs on television. As far as Wallace is concerned, the events of Nov. 5, 2024, might be even worse. “The stakes literally are life and death for every woman in America,” she said of the election. “It’s not hyperbole. It’s not an exaggeration.” (It was.) At one point Wallace, a former Republican operative with ties to Sarah Palin, warned she could be taken off the air if Trump won. (She definitely could, just not for the reason she had in mind.). Wallace, who was played by a dour Sarah Paulson in the movie Game Change, became a diehard member of the liberal elite after moving to New York City and getting paid lots of money to appear on television. The now-52-year-old divorced her first husband in 2019 and announced she was dating New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, 41, who regularly appeared on her show. Schmidt, now married to Wallace, is coproducing a new Netflix series with Noah Oppenheim, the self-dealing former NBC News president whose wife “wrote” a children’s book with Savannah Guthrie that got coveted promotion on the Today show. He also allegedly discouraged Ronan Farrow from reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual abuse. Crotchety liberal activist Robert De Niro will play the lead.

Stephanie Ruhle

Kamala Harris chose the aging and formerly attractive host to conduct her first solo interview of the campaign in late September. It was an obvious choice, given that days earlier Ruhle had eagerly defended Harris by arguing that the vice president’s policy views didn’t really matter because Trump was a threat to democracy. At the aforementioned MSNBC “democracy” summit, Ruhle scolded the American people for being concerned about inflation and suggested Harris’s critics were racist. “When people say, ‘Oh, she’s super-progressive,’ what they’re really saying is ‘She’s a black woman,'” Ruhle huffed indignantly. She is a notorious flirt. When she worked at Bloomberg, Ruhle was known for wearing yoga pants and working out in the newsroom, climbing up on the studio desks like a crazy person. She was embroiled in a shareholder lawsuit against Under Armour after the Wall Street Journal reported in 2019 that she had an intimate relationship with Under Armour’s CEO, Kevin Plank. Ruhle, who’s married with kids,  was alleged to have traveled with Plank on his private jet and provided business advice to the executive. She even hawked Under Armour shoes on the Today show—without disclosing the relationship. MSNBC still credulously promoted her in 2020. Ruhle seamlessly shifted from shameless suck-up to Bloomberg CEOs to clownishly liberal TV activist. Joy Reid had better watch out: Ruhle’s ambition knows no bounds.

Joe Scarborough 

Like most MSNBC viewers, his entire personality and political outlook consists of hating Donald Trump. For Scarborough, though, it’s personal. His long-running friendly relationship with Trump soured into an intense personal hatred, perhaps due to Scarborough’s own presidential ambitions. The dispute reached its nadir when in 2017, when Trump claimed that Joe’s on-air sidekick (and future wife), Mika Brzezinski, was “bleeding badly from a facelift.” Trump, while president, called Joe “psycho” and Mika “low IQ.” He also urged NBC, via X, to investigate a “mystery” in Joe’s past (a female staffer was found dead in his Florida congressional office in 2001, a tragedy that has dogged Joe for years; an AP “fact check” claimed the woman died from natural causes).

Fast-forward to 2024. Joe is rumored to have extracted from NBCUniversal a compensation package for himself and Mika that is fairly close to Maddow’s in size, albeit for more work. He’d been privately advising Kamala Harris for years and vigorously defended Joe Biden against critics who questioned the president’s cognitive health. “I’m about to tell you the truth,” the Morning Joe host said in March, several weeks before Biden’s infamous debate disaster. “And eff you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I have known him for years.”

Network executives were so terrified of what Scarborough—known inside 30 Rock as the most unpleasant person to work there since Keith Olbermann—might say after Trump was nearly assassinated in Pennsylvania, they temporarily suspended his show. Joe erupted in rage, claiming on-air that MSNBC executives lied to him. When Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, came under fire for sleeping with his nanny, slapping his ex-girlfriend, and running a pervy law firm, Scarborough arranged a friendly interview in which he dismissed the allegations as right-wing “tabloid stories” and asked Emhoff how he stayed “centered” and “disciplined” through it all. In the days since the election, Scarborough has expressed disbelief at the high cost of butter and disparaged Latino men who voted for Trump as racist misogynists.

Jen Psaki

She joined MSNBC as a host in 2022 after leaving her job as White House press secretary in the Biden administration, which makes sense because there’s basically no difference between the two jobs. After becoming a “journalist,” Psaki continued to insist that Biden was perfectly healthy and fit to serve another term in office, contrary to the available evidence. She “interviewed” MSNBC analysts such as Robert Gibbs, the former Obama press secretary, and Ben Rhodes, the former Obama adviser who bragged about manipulating “clueless” reporters. In August, Psaki was questioned by members of Congress about her role in the administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and admitted she made no attempt to “challenge or question” the information she relayed to the press, much of which turned out to be inaccurate.

Jacob Soboroff

Most people have never heard of the MSNBC/NBC News immigration “reporter” (whose real estate mogul father is the former commissioner of the LAPD) and former Michael Bloomberg aide. Some might remember seeing a video of Soboroff having the time of his life amid a crowd of chanting liberals at the Democratic convention this summer. The so-called journalist—who technically works for supposedly objective NBC News—grinned ecstatically while holding up cardboard cutouts of Tim Walz’s face and attempting to converse with Rachel Maddow, who revealed that her MSNBC colleagues “got out of their seats and started stamping and clapping” during Walz’s utterly forgettable speech in Chicago.

Soboroff’s 2020 book attacking the Trump administration’s immigration policies was adapted into an Errol Morris documentary, Separated, released earlier this year. Despite being fêted at lefty film festivals, NBCUniversal has mysteriously delayed airing the documentary until December, without explanation. Perhaps it’s because Soboroff and MSNBC are being sued for $30 million by a Georgia doctor whom Soboroff and others smeared on multiple MSNBC shows in 2020 as “the uterus collector,” claiming the doctor went on a hysterectomy spree at an immigration detention center, removing women’s uteruses willy-nilly.

Soboroff and three MSNBC stars—Maddow, Wallace, and Chris Hayes—were cited in the doctor’s lawsuit for making what a judge determined to be “verifiably false” statements. Mahendra Amin, a gynecologist who has treated immigrant detainees, sued NBCUniversal after multiple MSNBC personalities falsely accused him of performing medically unnecessary “mass hysterectomies.” Soboroff and his NBC News colleagues based their reporting on claims made by a “whistleblower” nurse, which she admitted were based on hearsay and were ultimately proven false. Emails, text messages, and conference call transcripts uncovered in the discovery process revealed that MSNBC journalists and executives expressed doubts about the veracity of the so-called whistleblower’s claims but reported them anyway.

Chris Hayes 

When he first showed up on MSNBC as a guest host for Maddow, viewers were struck by his strong physical resemblance to the host he was replacing. NBC staff whispered that he was “the male Rachel, but he can’t anchor.” Despite these shortcomings, Hayes quickly emerged as Maddow’s pet project, first getting a show on the weekends and eventually moving to an 8 p.m. show as Maddow’s lead-in.

In his earnest attempts to mimic Maddow’s snobby, highbrow, intellectual pretentiousness, Hayes the Favorite frequently beclowns himself. The radio host Mark Levin called MSNBC a “freak show” for broadcasting a bizarre and potty-mouthed rant by Hayes in which the awkward star stood before the camera and furiously denounced Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) for signing several bills banning sex-change treatments and surgeries for minors. Hayes screamed that it’s “none of [DeSantis’s] g—— business!” if he, as a parent, wanted his child to have “gender-affirming care.” On Memorial Day weekend 2012, Hayes employed faux-intellectual gibberish to libel fallen troops, saying that he didn’t want to refer to them as “heroes” because he felt “uncomfortable about the word ‘hero’ because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.” Last week, Hayes nodded solemnly as Sherrilyn Ifill, a former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, claimed without evidence that Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, was “known to be a white supremacist.” Democratic operative Michael LaRosa, a former MSNBC producer, sounded off in response to the segment. “This shit has to stop,” he wrote. “Conversations and demonization like this are a big part of the reason we got our asses kicked.”

Fast-forward to election night, when anyone hate-watching MSNBC got the chance to watch Hayes lash out condescendingly at Trump voters and soothe distraught MSNBC viewers by claiming that “America didn’t give itself over to Trumpism.” For years, NBC News staff were baffled why such a terrible anchor occupied the prime 8 p.m. slot. Was it because MSNBC was just throwing in the towel because Tucker Carlson over on Fox was such a force? Tucker was fired, yet Chris remained. Was it because the all-powerful Maddow insisted that her lookalike Favorite be her lead-in? Maddow “semi-retired,” yet Chris remained. Now, as MSNBC enters the post-election, low-rated wilderness of backstabbing, blaming, and circular firing squads inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, will Chris remain yet again?

Further Reading: What I Learned at the MSNBC ‘Democracy’ Festival

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House Democrats are frustrated with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) for her public comments on her party’s campaign failures, saying she’s undermining the leadership of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.), Axios reported.

“She needs to take a seat,” a senior Democratic lawmaker told Axios.

A member of the Congressional Black Caucus said Pelosi is not being “respectful” of Jeffries even though the minority leader “has been tremendously graceful and respectful of her.”

“I understand that this is a difficult transition for her, not being the leader, but she is not,” the lawmaker continued. “She needs to understand what her new role is.”

Pelosi, in an interview last week with the New York Times, said “there may have been other candidates in the race” if Biden had “gotten out sooner.” She also said Harris “would have done well in [an open primary] and been stronger going forward.”

“Making scattershot comments is not just unhelpful, it’s damaging,” the senior lawmaker said.

Pelosi’s comments fueled tensions inside the Democratic Party, as the Biden and Harris campaigns point fingers at each other for Republicans’ election sweep last week, according to Axios.

“How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the f—?” a former Biden staffer said of the Harris campaign, while a person close to Harris’s team described “the 107-day Harris campaign” as “nearly flawless” and Biden’s campaign as “the opposite.”

The post ‘She Needs to Take a Seat’: House Democrats Frustrated With Pelosi, Say She’s Undermining Jeffries’s Leadership appeared first on .

The Department of Homeland Security is rolling back progressive internal policies in anticipation of a second Trump presidency, according to internal agency documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

One example, described as “superfluous signaling” by one senior career staff member, is a memo entitled “Commitment to Nondiscrimination in Department of Homeland Security Activities.” That memo, which will no longer be released, largely focused on behavior that is already outlawed in the federal government, such as forbidding any “reliance on generalized stereotypes involving any individual characteristic.”

“It’s not clear why this memo was ever even written,” said one senior DHS official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We can’t discriminate against anyone, but I guess this is what they prefer we do instead of deportations. But now I guess they don’t want to piss anyone off.”

The changes at DHS suggest that some career officials there will cooperate somewhat with the upcoming Trump administration’s agenda. One senior career staff member said that many of his colleagues are in a “wait and see” position but are also careful not to antagonize President-elect Donald Trump’s political appointees.

Staff at the agency say the memo is part of a broader effort to ingratiate itself with new leadership. Withholding the memo, one senior official said, is just one step among many that the agency is expected to take as new appointees are predicted to roll back a number of Biden-era policies.

Those appointees include former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Tom Homan, who has pledged to dramatically overhaul the agency. Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, an immigration restrictionist, proclaimed last month that “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

DHS career staff have felt demoralized since 2021, with liberal political appointees instituting a number of new policies that restricted the conduct of those tasked to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. Staff from far-left non-profits, which often called for the abolition of ICE itself, were regularly put in charge of critical immigration programs.

In one recent case, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service official was caught promoting illegal immigration on social media channels such as TikTok and YouTube. It does not appear that the individual, who serves as an attorney for the agency, was punished.

Both Republicans and internal DHS staff say personnel decisions such as those are partially to blame for the historic levels of illegal immigration that occurred under the Biden administration. The record number of border crossings—which totaled more than eight million—since 2021 has been cited as a reason why Vice President Kamala Harris lost in her bid against Trump.

Both Homan and Miller have said they plan to prioritize deportations on day one of Trump’s second term, a change from the Biden administration. Within the first year of Biden’s presidency, deportations plummeted 90 percent.

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Kamala Harris’s stunning defeat in the 2024 election left many Democrats searching for an explanation. Some blamed the racism and misogyny of Latino men, while others suggested (correctly) that Democrats were hopelessly out of touch with normal Americans. But no one has even considered the most obvious reason why Harris lost: She hired Ian Sams, the Forrest Gump of political failure.

Sams joined the Harris campaign in August 2024 and served as “top spokesperson” for the candidate. The bald, bespectacled 35-year-old became a liberal folk hero by going on Fox News and bashing Donald Trump. The Washington Post wrote a glowing profile of Sams that described how the “avid golfer and country music fan” was “greeted with cheers” at Harris campaign headquarters after raising questions about Trump’s health during an interview with Fox News host Neil Cavuto. Trump responded by calling Sams “a below average guy, with memorized FAKE NEWS sound bites.” Axios also published an affectionate report on the “unassuming” Harris aide “who’s getting under Trump’s skin.”

Did it work? Of course not. Sams has repeatedly proven himself to be incapable of winning. All he does is lose. Prior to joining the Harris campaign, Sams worked in the historically unpopular Biden administration, where he oversaw the White House response to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation in Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. Remember that? Hur’s report, published in February 2024, concluded that Biden was too senile to be convicted because a jury would likely consider him to be a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Sams promptly attacked Hur for his “gratuitous and inappropriate criticisms,” even though most Americans were already well aware that the 81-year-old president was unfit to serve another term. Biden dropped out of the race in July.

This wasn’t even the first time Sams lost a campaign with Kamala Harris. Sams was the national press secretary on Harris’s failed primary campaign in 2020, which ended disastrously in 2019 before the actual voting started. That campaign is universally regarded as one of the most inept political campaigns in modern history, and contributed in no small part to Harris’s defeat in 2024. Sams distinguished himself as a uniquely incompetent spokesman during the primary, posting an image that was widely mocked as one of the dumbest photoshop jobs of all time.

Around the same time, Sams lashed out at BuzzFeed editor Katherine Miller for her “problematic” criticism of Harris’s debate performance. “This kind of stuff is just a really horrible look for you guys,” Sams texted Miller’s boss, Ben Smith. “Frankly, it’s whiteness manifest.” Smith responded with a brutally accurate assessment of Sams’s competence. “Do you seriously not have real problems?” he wrote the angsty spokesman.”This text makes me think you are totally, totally unready for an actual presidential campaign.” (Fact check: He was, and still is, totally unready.)

Sams is also a veteran the Hillary Clinton’s disastrous 2016 campaign. He served as communications director for the states of Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Clinton would go on to lose three of those five states. Sams tried really hard, though. He even debased himself by modeling a “Grillary Clinton” apron on the campaign website.

After losing the 2016 election, Sams served as communications director for Tom Perriello, a Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia. Perriello lost the Democratic primary to Ralph “Coon Man” Northam, who would go on to win the general election in 2017. More than a year into his term, Northam faced calls to resign after a photo from his medical school yearbook showed Northam wearing either black face or a Ku Klux Klan hood. In retrospect, the Perriello campaign’s inability to uncover the photo was yet another colossal failure that occurred on Sams’s watch.

We wish Sams the best of luck in his future endeavors, whatever they may be. His remarkable capacity for failing upward is an inspiration to all. Maybe the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee will hire him to oversee the party’s efforts to regain control of the House in 2026.

Editor’s note: The Washington Free Beacon‘s definitive list of 2024 election winners and losers neglected to include Ian Sams among the losers. It was a careless omission for which we sincerely apologize. 

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Howard Law professor Sherrilyn Ifill, who was floated as a possible Supreme Court pick for President Joe Biden, called Fox News host Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, an “eminently dangerous” “white supremacist.”

“This is someone who, you know, is known to be a white supremacist, known to be an extremist, whose platform, whose book, is basically about his opposition to the advancement of black officers to the top brass,” Ifill told MSNBC host Chris Hayes on Thursday. “There’s no evidence that this man has ever run anything. The fact that he is a veteran is simply insufficient.”

After serving in the Army, which included deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Hegseth was the executive director of Vets for Freedom from 2007 to 2010. He was also the CEO of Concerned Veterans for America from 2012 until 2015.

Hayes said Hegseth “would deny strenuously he’s a white supremacist.”

“So did Trump,” Ifill responded.

Ifill’s name was included in a 2022 Politico article listing Biden’s potential replacements for then-Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer after Breyer announced his retirement. After Biden pledged to nominate a black woman to the Court, Ifill, the former head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, received support from members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Biden eventually chose Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for the seat.

Biden also tapped Ifill for his Supreme Court Reform Commission, which in 2021 evaluated potential reforms for the Court, such as adding justices and introducing term limits. She serves as the inaugural Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Esq., endowed chair in civil rights at Howard Law School.

“At this moment of democratic crisis in our country, we must return to the 14th amendment and its powerful and pragmatic conception of a post-Civil War America grounded in the values of equality, justice and a reimagined vision of citizenship,” Ifill said following her appointment to the chair. “That vision includes a clear-eyed confrontation with the stubborn persistence of white supremacy and its ongoing threat to the promise of our new country.”

Hayes during his interview with Ifill brought up a controversy surrounding Hegseth’s tattoos.

“He has tattoos that garnered the attention of essentially National Guard commanders when he was going to be sent on the mission to guard the 2020 inauguration of Joe Biden and was pulled from that, he says because he was identified as an extremist, in part because of those tattoos. He thinks it’s crazy,” Hayes said.

Hegseth has a tattoo of the Jerusalem cross—a large cross with four smaller crosses in the corners—and another of the words “Deus vult,” which is Latin for “God wills it.” Such tattoos are Christian symbols, with Jerusalem crosses being especially common among Catholics.

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The financial entanglements between MSNBC host Al Sharpton and the Kamala Harris campaign, revealed this week by the Washington Free Beacon, are a “black eye” for the liberal network and media industry, according to a journalism group considered the “gold standard” of media ethics.

“This kind of entanglement harms the credibility of the journalist, the news organization, and journalism overall, and credibility is difficult to restore,” Rod Hicks, the director of ethics and diversity at the Society of Professional Journalists, told the Free Beacon. “While Sharpton may not consider himself a journalist, many viewers do.”

Hicks was responding to two separate donations the Harris campaign made to Sharpton’s National Action Network on Sept. 5 and Oct. 1. Days later, Sharpton aired a video segment on his MSNBC show PoliticsNation of Harris wishing him a happy 70th birthday. Sharpton conducted a favorable interview with Harris on Oct. 20 as part of her final campaign pitch to voters. He did not disclose in those segments or any of his other appearances on MSNBC that Harris’s campaign gave a sizable remittance to his nonprofit.

Sharpton’s “apparent conflict of interest is part of a troubling trend among network news anchors who inform the public while engaging in unethical behavior,” said Hicks, who added that news organizations’ failures to disclose conflicts of interest “builds distrust among their audiences and places a black eye on both their network and the profession.”

It comes both as Americans’ trust in news organizations has reached historic lows and as MSNBC hemorrhages viewers in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory. Just 31 percent of Americans have a “great deal” of trust in the mass media, according to a Gallup poll conducted last month, compared with 36 percent who have “no trust at all.” MSNBC’s primetime viewership fell 53 percent in the wake of the election, the New York Times reported.

MSNBC and its parent company Comcast have not responded to repeated inquiries this week about the Harris campaign’s donations to National Action Network, which Sharpton founded in 1991. The nonprofit paid Sharpton $650,000 in 2021, and $940,000 the same year for private jets and limo services. Sharpton also earns a seven-figure salary from MSNBC, which he joined in 2011.

Tim Graham, the director of media analysis at the Media Research Center, said it marks a “new low” for Sharpton, who has long been accused of using National Action Network to pressure corporations to make donations in exchange for his public support.

“MSNBC has never shown a shred of interest in ethics from the beginning of their affiliation with Sharpton,” said Graham. “This should make all journalists realize that MSNBC is not an honest or ethical ‘news’ network.”

Former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly called the arrangement “irresponsible, unethical, and not allowed.”

“I’m dying from the conflict of interest,” Kelly said on her SiriusXM show. “It’s so egregious—MSNBC is going to have to respond.”

MSNBC has punished employees before for violating its conflict of interest policies. In 2010, then-MSNBC president Phil Griffin suspended Joe Scarborough for two days over $4,000 in campaign donations the former congressman made several years earlier. Griffin suspended liberal host Keith Olbermann that same year over donations to Democratic congressional candidates.

But Griffin’s successor, Rashida Jones, has not made a similar move against Sharpton. That could be because of Jones’s ties to Sharpton and National Action Network. Sharpton’s group gave Jones its “Chairman’s Award” in 2021 and 2024. And Jones introduced Sharpton at a National Action Network gala on Sept. 30 to mark Sharpton’s 70th birthday.

“I am extremely honored to be here to honor Rev,” said Jones, who concluded her speech with a hug and kiss for Sharpton.

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Senate Democrats were “caught flat-footed” by Republican campaign ads targeting left-wing support for biological men’s participation in women’s sports, according to Axios.

In the wake of Republicans’ election sweep, Senate Democrats held private “listening sessions” with outgoing Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D.) to reflect on their campaigns’ failures, Axios reported. In two separate meetings, senators voiced frustration over the party’s failure to effectively counter the GOP’s messaging on transgender issues.

Speakers included Sens. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Jon Tester (Mont.), who lost their reelection bids, and Jacky Rosen (Nev.) and Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), who narrowly won reelection.

Republicans spent more than $77 million on ads targeting transgender issues in Senate races across 10 states since July, according to AdImpact. One ad targeting Brown accused him of voting for “allowing trans biological men in girls’ locker rooms” and “sex change surgery for kids.”

“Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you,” said one Trump campaign ad that aired across the swing states.

“Week by week when that ad hit and stuck and we didn’t respond, I think that was the beginning of the end,” former Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell told the Associated Press Thursday.

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Republican Sen. Katie Britt (Ala.) is putting Columbia University, UCLA, and other schools on notice that the incoming GOP congressional majority plans to crack down on anti-Semitic demonstrations proliferating on college campuses.

Britt wrote an open letter to Jewish students on Friday stating that the rising anti-Semitism at universities was not “acceptable” and that she and her colleagues would not “stand by and allow this to happen.”

“I want to make clear to each and every Jewish student on an American campus: I and my colleagues won’t stand for this. While your administrators may not have your backs, we do,” Britt said.

“Many university administrators stood aside and watched their campuses become breeding grounds for the hatred of Jews—and in some cases actively helped,” Britt said, adding that her office would work with Jewish students on “holding these schools accountable.”

Britt’s letter comes as Republicans have vowed to combat anti-Semitism on college campuses, which has skyrocketed since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. A report by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last month found that many universities “utterly failed to impose meaningful discipline for antisemitic behavior that violated school rules and the law.” President-elect Donald Trump warned that schools “must end the antisemitic propaganda or they will lose their accreditation and federal support.”

The House report documented numerous failures by school administrators to penalize illegal activity and anti-Semitism by anti-Israel demonstrators on campus. Columbia University neglected to take action against anti-Israel protesters who illegally barricaded themselves inside a university building. UCLA failed to prevent demonstrators from setting up a checkpoint barricade that blocked Jewish students from walking through campus.

Last week, anti-Israel activists at the University of Rochester hung hundreds of “wanted” posters around campus that accused specific faculty members—many of whom are Jewish—of supporting “war crimes” in Gaza.

The display prompted an outcry from the university’s president and federal lawmakers, who denounced the posters as an attempt to intimidate Jewish students and faculty members.

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Donald Trump’s visit to Washington on Wednesday had all the hallmarks of his first term. There was the cable-news pageantry of Trump Force One’s arrival in and departure from D.C. There was a cordial and reassuring meeting in the Oval Office between Trump and President Biden. There was the reelection of Speaker Mike Johnson within the House GOP and an orderly transfer of leadership to a new generation of Senate Republicans. And there was mounting shock, disbelief, and alarm within the bipartisan political class at Trump’s selections for secretary of defense, director of national intelligence, attorney general, and secretary of health and human services.

Four years of the somnolent, garbled, and often out-of-sight Joe Biden, accompanied by the vacant and aloof Kamala Harris, had dulled the senses. By dawn Thursday, some of us were beginning to recall the unrelenting nature of Trump’s first administration: a near-constant gale of news, hot takes, controversies, scandals, policies, personalities, and surprises. Reporters, commentators, wonks, bureaucrats, and elected officials are left searching for ballast. The situation is unlikely to change in the coming months. Why? Because the Trump whirlwind has returned.

There are, however, some important differences between the current moment and eight years ago. In 2016, Trump was a political neophyte. He was the first president without government experience or a military background. He had won a plurality of the vote in a lengthy, bitter, and divisive Republican primary, then won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote.

Trump’s victory wasn’t just a shock to the system. It often seemed like a shock to him. He had few committed allies in Congress or inside the Beltway. He junked the initial transition plan for an improvised reality television show where job prospects appeared in the lobby of Trump Tower on the way to audition for the president-elect. Trump toyed with Mitt Romney as secretary of state, then chose Rex Tillerson. He put Omarosa in charge of communications for the Office of Public Liaison.

Fast-forward eight years. Not only is Trump older. He is more experienced. He understands the presidency and its powers. He steamrolled the opposition in the primaries and, most significantly, is on track to win the popular vote in the general election. His reconfiguration of the GOP gives him a large pool of talent from which to draw. There is less debate today over what the Make America Great Again movement stands for, who belongs to it, how it wants to pursue national renewal. The Republican Party is unified and will control all three branches of government.

As I write, the most striking aspect of the second Trump transition is its speed. Since naming Susie Wiles as his chief of staff last week, Trump has filled out his White House team and cabinet much more quickly than before. His criteria for hires are plain: loyalty, strong communications skills, and affiliation with MAGA. The transition shares a sensibility with the campaign. It is slick, professional, brash, and confident enough to take risks.

The risky moves have names. The Donald Trump-Elon Musk mind-meld may provoke, or may have already provoked, complications and backlash. Pete Hegseth would be a telegenic disruptor at the Defense Department—and quite possibly a one-man recruitment machine—but is he prepared to lead the largest and most unwieldy organization in the United States? Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will face strict scrutiny before the Senate approves their nominations to be, respectively, director of national intelligence, attorney general, and secretary of health and human services. The Senate has a constitutional role and responsibility to provide advice and consent to the president. It is, as they say, the federal government’s human resources department.

And the Senate may not deem Gabbard, Gaetz, and Kennedy worthy of confirmation. Indeed, their nominations may not come to a vote. Recall that George W. Bush nominated former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik to be secretary of homeland security in 2004. The nomination was withdrawn shortly thereafter. Barack Obama nominated Tom Daschle and Bill Richardson to cabinet posts in 2008. Not only did both men eventually withdraw, but also the man Obama nominated to replace Richardson—former Republican senator Judd Gregg (N.H.)—removed himself from consideration, as well. Former governor Gary Locke (D., Wash.) ended up with the job of secretary of commerce.

Institutional Washington—and I belong in this category—was tempted to forget during the Biden years that Trump and MAGA always have intended to overturn the established order, to give the middle finger to the permanent structures of government and the credentialed elites who live in and around the nation’s capital, and to enact their agenda despite howls of outrage. The past week, then, has been both a reminder of the past and a preview of the future. When Donald Trump is president, the unconventional happens. The chattering classes wail. Guardrails are tested. Politics matters. Everything is up for grabs. And no one is ever bored.

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