Trump Makes Government More Efficient by Inventing Stupid New Agency

Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he wants to invent a totally redundant federal statutory body.

“For far too long, we have relied on taxing our Great People using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Through soft and pathetically weak Trade agreements, the American Economy has delivered growth and prosperity to the World, while taxing ourselves. It is time for that to change,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Tuesday.

“I am today announcing that I will create the EXTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE to collect our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that come from Foreign sources. We will begin charging those that make money off of us with Trade, and they will start paying, FINALLY, their fair share. January 20, 2025, will be the birth date of the External Revenue Service. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

For a guy interested in shrinking the size of government, Trump sure keeps adding to it. The U.S. already has a way of setting and collecting tariffs, but to Trump’s credit, it never had a stupid name before. After the secretary of the treasury establishes regulations, U.S. Customs and Border Protection—housed within the Department of Homeland Security—is responsible for administering the tariffs at U.S. ports of entry. The money is then deposited into the General Fund of the United States.

Trump has promised to enact 25 percent tariffs on all Mexican and Canadian goods on his first day in office—an economic show of force he clearly thinks could result in the annexation of Canada—and another 10 percent tariff on imports from China.

While Trump is at it, he could invent several other badly named governmental bodies to carry out his administration’s insipid agenda. Here are some humble suggestions:

1. Consumer Product Danger Commission: Determines whether products are getting too woke.
2. Environmental Defenselessness Agency: Ensures that the U.S. government can do whatever it wants to protected lands for the sake of endless production and accumulation of capital.
3. Anti-Social Security Agency: Destabilize Social Security by cutting payroll taxes. Hell, maybe take the whole thing private?

In any case, this whole thing feels eerily similar to his pitch to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” A purely aesthetic change that Trump imagines will build his legacy as a powerful leader—and not a global laughingstock.

From New York to San Francisco, Donald Trump’s return to the White House has greenlighted a corporate cultural regression, instantaneously allowing companies to backtrack on years of climate goals and diversity and inclusion efforts with the anti-woke politico on the horizon.

Wall Street brokers and tech bros alike are celebrating the switch, claiming that they no longer feel the need to culturally consider women, minorities, or disabled people while they talk, reported the Financial Times.

“I feel liberated,” one top banker told the paper. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.… It’s a new dawn.”

Those working in New York’s financial sector also feel that they can ditch their social causes. A number of major Wall Street banks and money managers have quit industry groups focused on climate change and cutting carbon emissions, feeling that they instead can go full-throttle on making money without facing social repercussions.

“Most of us don’t have to kiss ass because, like Trump, we love America and capitalism,” another Wall Streeter told the pink page.

Another major corporate shift has effectively left behind DEI initiatives. That began when the Supreme Court ruled on the diversity program in 2023, but the “trickle became a flood” after Trump’s election victory, with companies such as Harley Davidson, Ford, Molson Coors, Walmart, and McDonalds peeling back on their corporate diversity commitments, according to the Financial Times.

“They don’t want to be caught out promising and not delivering,” Richard Edelman, chief executive of public relations group Edelman, told the paper. “Companies are still committed to diversity and they’re committed to inclusion, they just don’t want to guarantee outcomes.”

Silicon Valley is also seemingly all in on Trump’s forthcoming presidency, with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos slated to attend the forty-seventh president’s inauguration next week alongside his Cabinet selections, according to NBC News.

The trio have courted Trump’s favor in the weeks since Trump won the presidential election, caving—in their own ways—to the climate of the forthcoming administration. Meta and X have heavily reduced their content-moderation policies, allowing disturbing language to circulate openly on their platforms, while Bezos canceled The Washington Post’s (which he owns) plans to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy.

A coalition of top tech heads, including Zuckerberg, Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, all pledged $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, according to the Financial Times.

Donald Trump’s defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, refused to answer a series of important questions during his confirmation hearing Tuesday.

“I have read multiple reports of your regularly being drunk at work, including by people who worked with you at Fox News,” Senator Mazie Hirono asked Hegseth. “Do you know that being drunk at work is prohibited for service members under the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice)?”

“Senator, those are multiple false reports peddled by NBC News—”

“I’m not hearing the answer to my question,” Hirono said while Hegseth tried to speak over her.

“You recently promised some of my Republican colleagues that you stopped drinking, and won’t drink if confirmed, correct?” she continued. Hegseth confirmed it to be “absolutely” true.

“Will you resign as secretary of defense if you drink on the job, which is a 24/7 position?” Hirono followed up.

Hegseth started to answer the question indirectly, prompting Hirono to repeat the question. Hegseth again deflected. “I’m not hearing an answer to my question, so I will move on,” Hirono said again calmly.

Hegseth has been accused by former co-workers of being drunk on the job, even reportedly once yelling, “Kill all Muslims” while inebriated at a work event.

Hirono then moved on to questions about using police and the military against protesters.

“In 2020, then-President Trump directed former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to shoot protesters in the legs in downtown D.C., an order Secretary Esper refused to comply with. Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?” asked Hirono, referring to the Black Lives Matter protests that summer.

“I was in the National Guard unit that was in Lafayette Square during those events—”

Hirono interrupted, asking her question again: “Would you carry out an order to shoot protesters in the legs, as directed to Secretary Esper?” Hegseth continued talking while she talked.

“You know what, that sounds to me that you will comply with such an order; you will shoot protesters in the leg,” Hirono replied. “Moving on!”

Steve Bannon, former adviser to Donald Trump and architect of the MAGA movement, has turned his ire against yet another supplicant snake from Silicon Valley: Mark Zuckerberg.

During an episode of his War Room podcast Monday, Bannon took aim at the CEO of Meta, who recently announced a slate of changes to the company’s platforms designed to delight the president-elect. Bannon was less than impressed.

“The corporations are all down there right now with their little million-dollar checks, and they want to come to the, you know, they want to come to the inauguration. They want to wear black tie and pal around and go to all the receptions. That’s all fine. That’s part of an American tradition,” Bannon said. “But those corporations, and particularly the tech corporations, there’s some comments I have in the New York Post today with the great Miranda Devine, talking about Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg can’t be trusted—at all!”

Bannon said he’d gone “absolutely bonkers” when Zuckerberg had been allowed in the Oval Office during Trump’s first term, especially considering that the Meta chief had later “put up $450 million of his own money to steal the 2020 election.”

In fact, Zuckerberg and his wife donated at least $400 million to two nonprofit organizations, which doled out grants to state and local governments so they could adapt to Covid-19-era election restrictions in 2020. Zuckerberg later attempted to distance himself from these donations, saying that he intended to “be neutral and not play a role one way or another—or even appear to be playing a role.” This was only after Trump had threatened him with jail time.

“These guys are supplicants now because President Trump is coming in with the American people, have his back. But after six months—a year of hard fighting and resistance at the administrative state and deep level, and the corporations, is Zuckerberg and these guys can be counted on? Only thing they can be counted on is to look after their own self-interest. That’s it,” Bannon said.

While Zuckerberg’s attempts to shift his company rightward and obey in advance by removing some hate-speech restrictions and third-party fact-checking from his sites indicate a serious sycophantism, it seems that Bannon has no time for those who are new to this, not true to this.

That might explain why he recently went after another technocrat clinging to Trump’s coattails, Elon Musk, whom he derided as a “truly evil guy.”

In Devine’s New York Post op-ed published Sunday, Bannon called Zuckerberg “the worst of the worst.”

“He had the biggest platform and went out of his way to try to crush the truth. Remember what he did to the laptop and anything from the pandemic?” Bannon said, referring to Zuckerberg’s decision to “demote” stories about Hunter Biden while waiting for fact-checkers to assess the validity of the story—a decision that the technocrat has since said he regrets. He’s since gotten rid of fact-checking altogether, making it even easier for misinformation and propaganda to spread across his social media platforms.

“He’s been dead wrong on everything,” Bannon continued. “He’s immature and lacks the judgment to have that much power and that much control.”

During Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing to serve as secretary of defense, Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand called out Hegseth’s comments on women serving in the military.

Hegseth claimed during the hearing, held by the Senate Armed Services Committee, that his problem is not with women—his problem is with military standards that had been changed to accommodate women in different military units. But Gillibrand demanded that Hegseth elaborate.

“Please give me an example, I get you’re making these generalized statements,” Gillibrand said.

“Commanders meet quotas to have a certain number of female infantry officers or infantry enlisted and that disparages those women who are incredibly capable of meeting that standard,” Hegseth responded.

Gillibrand did not wait for Hegseth to finish before correcting him.

“Commanders do not have to have a quota for commanders in the infantry. That does not exist,” Gillibrand said emphatically. “It does not exist. And your statements are creating the impression that these exist, because they do not. There are not quotas.”

Only two months ago, Hegseth spelled out his views on women serving in the military on the Shawn Ryan Show.

“I’m straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” Hegseth said at the time.

Only a few days later, Hegseth was nominated by Donald Trump to serve as defense secretary, and he has since tried to backtrack on that statement. Presumably, Trump did not have a problem with his views when he announced the nomination, having been a fan of Hegseth’s for many years.

Trump has stood by his choice of Hegseth, even as allegations of sexual and financial misconduct have surfaced. While Democrats are trying to make sure the public doesn’t forget about Hegseth’s troubling past, Trump and Senate Republicans seem to be behind his nomination all the way.

Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, refused to answer whether or not he’d undergo an expanded FBI background check, at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

“I assume you’d be willing to submit to an expanded FBI background check that interviews your colleagues, accountants, ex-wives, former spouses, sexual assault survivors, and others?” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal asked the embattled defense secretary nominee.

“Senator, I’m not in charge of FBI background checks,” Hegseth replied tersely.

“But you would submit to it and support it?”

“I’m not in charge of FBI background checks,” Hegseth repeated before taking a sip of water.

Hegseth has submitted to an FBI background check, but it disturbingly did not include interviews with his ex-wives or any of the women who accused him of sexual assault, according to several people who spoke with NBC News. A more thorough background check could shed more light on allegations that Hegseth has vehemently denied at his hearing—sexual assault, alcoholism, financial fraud, and more. It makes sense that Hegseth pleaded the Fifth.

The MAGA fight to dissolve the Education Department is on.

North Carolina Representative David Rouzer introduced legislation in the House on Monday to eradicate the agency. H.R. 369, titled “To provide for the elimination of the Department of Education, and for other purposes,” was subsequently referred to the House Committee on Education and Workforce.

Ridding the country of its national education system will follow through on one of Donald Trump’s boldest and most Project 2025–inspired campaign promises. Other components of Trump’s agenda are quietly dependent on generating extra cashflow that the elimination of the Department of Education could (barely) muster. A major plan is extending Trump’s 2017 tax plan, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations and could add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit.

Republicans in favor of the extension have mused over several potential cuts to help offset that massive expenditure, including nixing the Department of Education. That would save some $200 billion from the deficit—while simultaneously dismantling the nation’s education system, which already is drowning under the pressure of historically low teacher salaries and scant resources, particularly in low-income regions. The federal government provides 13.6 percent of funding for public K-12 education across the nation.

Trump himself has said that his Department of Education plan involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to parents, who famously have all the time in the world to oversee educational curricula while simultaneously working jobs and raising their children.

During a rally in Milwaukee in October, the MAGA leader promised that his vision for the nation’s educational system would involve very limited oversight from any government, including the states’.

“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the soon-to-be forty-seventh president said at the time. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary, and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’”

He also openly admitted that the plan would, unfortunately, be to the detriment of a great swath of states—particularly poorer ones in the middle of the country.

Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing for defense secretary Tuesday was interrupted three separate times less than 10 minutes into his personal statement. Four protesters were removed from the room.

“You are a misogynist.… Not only that, you are a Christian Zionist!” the first protester yelled while Hegseth spoke of his vision for the Defense Department.

Another protester wearing pink was dragged out, followed by two more. Senator Roger Wicker called for security to remove them.

Donald Trump posted a furious rant Tuesday over the release of Jack Smith’s damning report detailing the president-elect’s alleged efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.

In the sweeping 170-page report, which summarized Smith’s investigation and interviews with more than 250 individuals, the former special prosecutor dismissed allegations that he was politically influenced as “laughable.” He asserted that if not for Trump’s election in November, “the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial” on the charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.

Trump melted down in a rant on Truth Social posted in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

“Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his ‘boss,’ Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another ‘Report’ based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were,” Trump wrote, referring to the now-defunct bipartisan House committee that investigated the January 6 riot.

“Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide,” Trump added. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”

Of course, the voters don’t determine guilt; a jury does.

House Republicans have previously claimed that the committee hid evidence undercutting Cassidy Hutchinson’s claim that Trump lunged for the steering wheel of his SUV to try and steer himself toward the Capitol on January 6—a claim that no one else backed up, including the driver of the SUV. The driver did say that Trump was “insistent on going to the Capitol.” House Republicans have also alleged that essential testimony about Trump’s activities that day were deleted. Despite the fact that those responsible for the investigation have insisted this claim is false, Trump has repeatedly claimed the deleted files would have exonerated him.

Trump wasn’t quite done: He also seemed pissed about the timing of the report.

“To show you how desperate Deranged Jack Smith is, he released his Fake findings at 1:00 A.M. in the morning,” Trump wrote in a separate post. “Did he say that the Unselect Committee illegally destroyed and deleted all of the evidence.”

Special counsel Jack Smith did not hold back in his final report on the investigation into Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

While much of it contains information already made public, such as the fake electors schemes from Trump’s cronies and the pressure placed on then–Vice President Mike Pence, Smith made some powerful statements regarding the criminal charges against the president-elect. For example, Smith flat-out said the evidence would have been enough to convict Trump, had he not been reelected.

The Department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a President is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Office stands fully behind. Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the Presidency, the Office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.

Smith spelled out Trump’s culpability, calling out his efforts to subvert the election, nullify the result for Joe Biden, and put himself back in the White House.

“As alleged in the original and superseding indictments, substantial evidence demonstrates that Mr. Trump then engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power,” the report states.

Smith defended himself from attacks from the right, who claim that his investigation was politicized or influenced by the Biden administration.

“While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters,” Smith wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland in a letter included with the report. “I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters.”

Smith also called out Trump’s attempts to attack and undermine the investigation, noting that a “significant challenge” for the counsel’s team was Trump’s “ability and willingness to use his influence and following on social media to target witnesses, courts, prosecutors.” Ultimately, Smith’s office sought a gag order for the case.

“Mr. Trump’s resort to intimidation and harassment during the investigation was not new, as demonstrated by his actions during the charged conspiracies,” Smith said.

The report arrives less than a week before Trump is sworn into office, and came after a last-ditch appeal from the president-elect to his favorite judge, Aileen Cannon, to prevent its release. She declined late Monday night, and the report was subsequently released.

Read the full report here.