Fox Host Suddenly Gets Amnesia About Trump’s Plan to Deport Citizens

Fox News host Will Cain inexplicably claimed Monday that he had never heard Donald Trump say he wanted to deport U.S. citizens—even though the president has now floated the idea several times.

During an interview, Florida Representative Maxwell Frost spoke about the stakes of the Trump administration’s removal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man with no criminal record who was deported to El Salvador due to an “administrative error” on thin allegations of gang membership. 

“It’s not just about him, it’s about the fact that in the Oval Office, Donald Trump brought up that he wants to do the same thing to ‘homegrowns,’ homegrowns being U.S. citizens,” Frost said. The Florida Democrat was referring to a disturbing remark Trump made last week during a press conference with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. 

But Cain said he couldn’t remember, insisting he had never heard Trump say any such thing. 

“Donald Trump’s made a statement about wanting to deport American citizens? Do you have that in front of you? I’ve not seen that statement,” Cain said. “Can you please quote where that comes from, that he’d like to deport American citizens?”

“He said it in the Oval Office, he said he wants to go for homegrowns next, people born and raised in the United States—” Frost said, before Cain interrupted him. 

“Do you have anything? Do you have anything beside your word on that?” Cain said. “I’ve not seen, I’ve not seen that, so. Beyond your word, do you have a source of that? I would love to see that clip or that transcript of him saying he wants to deport American citizens.”

“There is a clip online, I encourage people to just google ‘Donald Trump homegrown,’” Frost said.

Crucially, the instance Frost cited wasn’t the first time Trump made a remark about deporting U.S. citizens to foreign prisons: the president had said in March that he loved the idea, and in February, he said he’d deport U.S. citizens to El Salvador “in a heartbeat.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the president was enthusiastic about the idea, and was looking into “legal pathways.” Spoiler alert: There are none.  

During his meeting with Bukele, Trump had flat out said that he’d asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into the legality. So, it’s a little less than plausible that Cain, who hosts his own show on Fox News every weekday, hasn’t heard about the president’s pitch to deport U.S. citizens. 

Online, some theorized that Cain was simply attempting to demonstrate his aptitude for Defense, as the Pentagon may be preparing to undergo some reshuffling…

… while others pointed out how ridiculous it was to pretend not to know about a story his own news agency covered. 

Republican Representative Derrick Van Orden seems to think Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s time serving in the Army National Guard justifies leaking national security information over text, not once but twice.

“I don’t want to hear from any healthy American that was of fighting age on 9/11 who did not join the military and deploy to combat talking shit about @PeteHegseth,” Van Orden wrote on X Monday. “You had your chance to serve our Nation when She needed you and you did not. Stand down, the Warriors will take it from here.”

A “warrior” would probably know better than to share sensitive information about a U.S. military attack in multiple group chats or bring along his spouse to classified meetings with foreign military officials. People aren’t mad at the 44-year-old defense secretary because they haven’t served in the military; they’re mad because he’s causing utter chaos as the Pentagon’s lead and putting the country’s national security at risk while he’s at it.

But Van Orden is a staunch Trump loyalist, and he’ll clearly use whatever weird excuse he can come up with to defend the president’s wildly inexperienced defense secretary, even as other GOP members begin to to turn on him.

“The military should always pride itself on operational security. If the reports are true, the secretary of defense has failed at operational security, and that is unacceptable,” Republican Representative Don Bacon told Axios about Hegseth Monday. X users in Van Orden’s comments shared similar concerns.

“​​I served 13 years … then after 9/11 came back in and did another 9 years including 3 Iraq tours,” podcast host Fred Wellman wrote, in response to Van Orden. “I am a Ranger qualified having gone to the school and graduated unlike Pete. He’s a piece of shit. He is endangering our troops lives and you are too for defending the indefensible. Also … get f*cked with this ‘Warriors’ bullshit. You aren’t a warrior … you’re an asshole who talks and talks.”

The market plunged Monday as Donald Trump continued to level lame attacks against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank more than 1,000 points, the yield on a 10-year Treasury note rose to 4.89 percent, and the ICE U.S. dollar index—which measures the dollar against foreign currencies—sank more than 1 percent to its lowest level since March 2022, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Even Big Tech companies were struggling in the market Monday, with Nvidia, Apple, and Tesla all taking hits.

CNBC’s Kelly Evans pointed out in The Exchange newsletter that typically when the market sinks, as it did during the Covid-19 pandemic, the dollar goes up and Treasury yields drop. Now, the opposite is true—meaning that the costs of imported goods will be even higher than the boosted prices caused by Trump’s tariffs on nearly every country in the world.

And Trump is only exacerbating the problem by continuing to poke at Powell.

Last week, Trump started mocking Powell after the central banker refused to lower interest rates to offset the president’s destabilizing “reciprocal tariff” policy. Powell had also warned of the possibility of rising inflation and stagnated growth. Kevin Hassett, the National Economic Council director, claimed that the White House was reviewing having Powell removed—though the Fed chair has previously stated that the president cannot remove him.

Trump continued to chide Powell on Monday for denying his calls to lower interest rates. “With these costs trending so nicely downward, just what I predicted they would do, there can almost be no inflation, but there can be a SLOWING of the economy unless Mr. Too Late, a major loser, lowers interest rates, NOW,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Senator Ron Johnson may now be a 9/11 truther. 

The Republican and senior senator representing Wisconsin told right-wing commentator Benny Johnson on the latter’s podcast Monday that he has questions about the official story of the September 11, 2001, attacks. 

Specifically, the senator echoed a conspiracy theory about the collapse of Building 7, suggesting that the building on the World Trade Center complex fell as the result of a controlled demolition and attacking the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s investigation into the collapse.  

“I don’t know that you can find structural engineers other than the ones that had the corrupt investigation inside NIST that would say that thing didn’t come down in any other way than a controlled demolition,” the senator said. 

“Within these agencies, a lot of them are going to cover their tracks and cover things up and destroy a lot of evidence,” the senator noted, alleging a government cover-up. “It’s gonna be very frustrating for the American public because this is their information. They deserve the truth. It’s been hidden from them way too long.”

The senator said he expects there to soon be congressional hearings on the attacks, and praised the podcaster for “opening up the aperture on 9/11.” 

“I know you and I are both considered conspiracy theorists, but that’s exactly how they keep this stuff covered up,” the senator said. 

The senator was narrowly reelected in 2022, facing a tough Democratic challenger in Mandela Barnes, then Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor, but this isn’t the first time he has embraced an unfounded conspiracy. He embraced and even assisted Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, claiming that Democrats used fake electors, in a classic case of projection.

He also downplayed the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, calling the rioters “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law.” As a senator of a battleground state whose Senate term is up in 2028, the same year as Trump, Johnson may want to watch his words, lest he be ousted. 

Republicans are quietly pushing to slash Medicaid to fund Donald Trump’s tax cuts and immigration spending.

The effort has been subtle and behind the scenes, and disguised as a way to eliminate Medicaid  fraud and protect the program’s most vulnerable recipients. But several Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, are desperately trying to revive a yearslong fight to eliminate the expanded Medicaid eligibility requirements included in Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which gives millions of low-income adults health coverage.

“The change has been easy to miss, because so many other stories are dominating the news—and because the main evidence is a subtle shift in Republican rhetoric,” The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn wrote in a recent piece. “But that shift has been crystal clear if you follow the ins and outs of health care policy—and if you were listening closely to House Speaker Mike Johnson a week ago, when he appeared on Fox News.” 

Speaking to Fox News, Johnson stuck to MAGA’s well-rehearsed safety-net program script. 

“We have to root out fraud, waste, and abuse.… When you have people on the program that are draining the resources, it takes it away from the people that are actually needing it the most and are intended to receive it,” Johnson said. “You’re talking about young, single mothers, down on their fortunes at a moment—the people with real disabilities, the elderly. And we’ve got to protect and preserve that program. So we’re going to preserve the integrity of it.”

The Louisiana Republican made a similar argument when he pushed for a budget resolution in February that would cut at least $880 billion from a funding pot that includes Medicaid to pay for Trump’s tax cuts. At the time, he argued Medicaid is “not for 29-year-olds sitting on their couches playing video games.”

But there are millions of low-income people on Medicaid—which provides health coverage to one in five Americans—who need health coverage regardless of their age, gender, or marital status, and many of them are GOP constituents. Nearly three dozen House Republicans represent districts with more people than average receiving coverage through Obama’s expansion, according to a data analysis from health nonprofit KNN. 

In Johnson’s own district in Louisiana, 38 percent of the population relies on Medicaid, the analysis found. The House speaker will clearly not be stopped by anything, not even the health of his constituents, in his never-ending tirade against universal health care.

The Trump administration is trying to figure out how to get American women to have more babies, according to The New York Times.

They are exploring options like reserving 30 percent of Fulbright scholarships to applicants who are parents and/or married, giving mothers that $5,000 “baby bonus” that Trump promised during the campaign season, and even a government-funded program to better educate women on their own menstrual cycles so that they know when they should be trying for a baby. The administration has not yet settled on its final plan, according to the Times report.

“The President wants America to be a country where all children can safely grow up and achieve the American dream,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “As a mother myself, I am proud to work for a president who is taking significant action to leave a better country for the next generation.”

The impetus for this right-wing pronatalism is undeniably Project 2025 and the white ethnonationalists at the heart of it. Vice President JD Vance has also made childbearing a focus point, noting at the 2025 March for Life that he wanted more “babies in the United States of America” and more “beautiful young men and women” to parent them. He also infamously described the Democratic Party as full of “childless cat ladies” who are anti-children.

An NPR report that a search is underway for a new secretary of defense is being met with vehement denials from the White House. 

In a post on X, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the news that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s job was in trouble, calling the story “total FAKE NEWS based on one anonymous source who clearly has no idea what they are talking about.”

“As the President said this morning, he stands strongly behind [Hegseth],” Leavitt’s post said. 

President Trump was asked by a reporter at the White House Easter egg roll Monday morning, prior to the report’s publication, if he had confidence in Hegseth, to which he replied, “Why would you even ask a question like that?

“Ask the Houthis how much dysfunction there is. There’s none. Pete’s doing a great job. Everybody’s happy with him. We have the highest recruitment numbers I think we’ve had in 28 years,” Trump said. “No, he’s doing a great job. It’s just fake news.

“They just bring up stories. I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people, and that’s what he’s doing, so you don’t always have friends when you do that,” Trump added. 

Hegseth is under fire for sharing details about U.S. airstrikes against targets in Yemen in a private Signal chat last month that included his wife and brother, at around the same time he shared the war plans in another group chat with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

According to other reports, the Pentagon has been in disarray for the past month, not just because of “Signalgate” but also due to other sensitive leaks and mass firings. On Friday, three top Pentagon employees were fired over a leak investigation in the department. If the NPR report is true, the president may be getting fed up with Hegseth’s constant flow of bad news. Perhaps his narrow confirmation was a sign that Hegseth shouldn’t have gotten the job. 

MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared to mock Pope Francis’s death on Monday, calling him “evil.”

“Today there were major shifts in global leaderships,” Taylor Greene wrote on X, alluding to the death of one of the world’s most influential religious leaders without naming him directly. “Evil is being defeated by the hand of God.”

She did not issue any clarification after coming under fire for the post.

This is par for the course for a far-right congresswoman who has expressed that she thinks Catholic bishops are “destroying” the country and that the Catholic Church as a whole is “controlled by Satan.”

American conservatives have maintained a fraught relationship with Pope Francis, as the first Latin American pope was often critical of the Trump administration and its policies.

Vice President JD Vance met with Pope Francis Sunday, just hours before the progressive pontiff passed. Coincidence? Yes—but good luck telling that to the internet, which won’t stop joking that Donald Trump’s antagonistic ally had something to do with it.

During his 12-year papacy, the pope was an advocate for the rights of LGBTQ+ people and Palestinians and a staunch critic of Trump’s MAGA agenda. He even openly spoke against Vance, who tried to refashion Catholic teaching to justify Trump’s massive deportation scheme.

Suffice it to say, the internet is now suggesting that Vance made quick work vanquishing the Vicar of Christ.

Not everyone was accusing him of doing something, just asking questions.

But people on X certainly had their theories. Specifically, that Vance might be the Antichrist.

Others weren’t quite as convinced.

To be sure, not everyone was suggesting that Vance had carried out some kind of unholy hit. But he certainly didn’t help things.

Some suggested there could be evidence of an emerging trend that Vance has a bad touch.

Pope Francis’s death report, released Monday afternoon by the Vatican, indicated he died of a cerebral stroke, which caused him to fall into a coma and suffer “irreversible cardiocirculatory collapse,” The New York Times reported. He had long suffered from chronic lung disease and developed double pneumonia earlier this year.

This story has been updated.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele wants to exchange Venezuelan deportees from the United States being unlawfully held in prison for political prisoners being held in Venezuela.

He made the terrifying proposition to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro via X Sunday evening.

“Mr. @NicolasMaduro, you have said on numerous occasions that you want the Venezuelans back and free,” Bukele wrote. “Unlike you, who have political prisoners, we don’t have political prisoners. All the Venezuelans we have in custody were detained as part of an operation against gangs like the Tren de Aragua in the United States.”

Last month, Donald Trump invoked the rarely used Alien Enemies Act to unlawfully deport more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants—the majority of whom have no criminal record—based on unfounded claims that they were part of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua Gang. He also ignored a court order telling him to stop the deportation. The deportees are now being held in CECOT, a notorious prison in El Salvador that has no contact with the outside world.

Bukele happily agreed to hold the Venezuelan deportees captive in exchange for a $6 million payment from the U.S. government. In complete disregard for the lives of innocent Venezuelans, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” is now proposing to trade human beings he was paid to lock up for a handpicked group of people he wants in El Salvador.

“The only reason they are imprisoned is because they opposed you and your electoral fraud,” Bukele said of the political prisoners he wants released. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that includes the repatriation of 100% of the 252 Venezuelans who were deported, in exchange for the release and delivery of an identical number (252) of the thousands of political prisoners that you hold.”

Among those he wants released include the son-in-law of former Venezuelan presidential candidate Edmundo González, lawyer and activist Rocío San Miguel, journalist Roland Carreño, four political leaders seeking asylum in the Argentine embassy, and nearly 50 detained citizens of various nationalities.

Venezuela’s chief prosecutor, Tarek William Saab, said in a statement that Bukele’s proposal was “cynical” and called the 44-year-old dictator a “neofascist.”

“The treatment received by Venezuelans in the United States and El Salvador constitutes a serious violation of international human rights law and constitutes a crime against humanity,” Saab said in the statement.

Bukele’s alarming idea for a swap comes as the Trump administration is desperately trying to deport more Venezuelan immigrants through the Alien Enemies Act. It looks like Bukele will do everything he can to capitalize on Trump’s stupidity and benefit his own authoritarian government.