Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made headlines Monday after swiftly shutting down a reporter’s question regarding President Donald Trump’s nomination of Air Force Lieutenant General Dan “Razin” Caine to replace General Charles “CQ” Brown as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The exchange took place at the Pentagon during a meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Defense Minister, Prince Khalid bin Salman.
During the press briefing, a reporter challenged Hegseth on Caine’s qualifications, asking, “Why did you select an underqualified retired lieutenant general to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?”
Hegseth wasted no time dismissing the premise of the question. “I’m going to choose to reject your unqualified question. Who’s next?” he responded, moving on to the next topic.
It’s simple Dan Caine is the man to meet the moment!
President Trump announced his decision to replace Brown and nominate Caine as his successor on Friday.
The announcement was made on Truth Social, where Trump thanked Brown for his four decades of service before introducing his choice for the next leader of the Joint Chiefs.
“I want to thank General Charles ‘CQ’ Brown for his over 40 years of service to our country, including as our current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader, and I wish a great future for him and his family,” Trump wrote.
Trump praised Caine’s qualifications, highlighting his role in dismantling the ISIS caliphate during Trump’s first term.
“General Caine is an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience,” Trump stated.
Trump credited Caine for the rapid defeat of ISIS, a mission that many military leaders had predicted would take years.
“Many so-called military ‘geniuses’ said it would take years to defeat ISIS. General Caine, on the other hand, said it could be done quickly, and he delivered,” Trump said.
Trump’s announcement also took aim at the previous administration, noting that despite Caine’s extensive military credentials, he was overlooked for promotion under President Joe Biden.
Trump’s return to the White House has encouraged more Americans to join the military.
In December 2024, nearly 350 soldiers were recruited per day, shattering a 15-year record. In January 2025, the army also continued to shatter records, breaking the Biden administration’s appalling downward trend.
“Our Recruiters have one of the toughest jobs – inspiring the next generation of #Soldiers to serve.
“Congratulations and keep up the great work!” The U.S. Army posted on X.
.@USAREC had their most productive December in 15 years by enlisting 346 Soldiers daily into the World's greatest #USArmy!
Our Recruiters have one of the toughest jobs – inspiring the next generation of #Soldiers to serve.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth lauded the development, saying “America’s youth want to serve under the bold & strong “America First” leadership” of Donald Trump.
BREAKING: In December 2024, the @USArmy had its best recruiting number in 12 years.
In January 2025, the Army hit its best recruiting number in 15 YEARS.
BOTTOM LINE: America’s youth want to serve under the bold & strong “America First” leadership of @realDonaldTrump.
When Hegseth was appointed, he promised to dismantle woke policies in the military that discouraged brave men from enlisting. Trump also promised to rid the military of 15,000 transgender soldiers by declaring them unfit to serve.
“They would be medically discharged, which would determine that they were unfit to serve,” The Times reported.
Trump and Hegseth’s promise to end the transgender ideology angered the Left, which claimed it would discourage nonbinary individuals from joining an already understaffed military.
“It would also lead to a ban on trans people joining the military and would come at a time when almost all branches of the American armed forces are failing to meet recruitment targets.”
Nonetheless, Hegseth said removing woke ideology from the military would encourage the traditional military demographics to join, which has now been proven true.
“There aren’t enough lesbians in San Fransisco to man the 82nd Airborne Division,” Hegseth said. “…and in trying to cater to that, they lost the boys in Tennessee and Kentucky and Oklahoma. The traditional dudes who did it because they wanted, they loved their country, or they wanted the adventure, or they wanted to try tough things….”
He said most potential recruits took a wide berth at the military because they did not want to get involved in wokeism. “…if I wanted to do the woke cr*p, I could go to the local community college or local college. I don’t need it here.”
Under Biden, the military made many sacrifices, including introducing a program that assisted potential recruits in overcoming academic and physical fitness barriers, of course, without “sacrificing quality for quantity.” However, attempting to attract non-traditional demographics who need to be accommodated to serve already sacrifices the military’s preparedness and readiness. Hegseth and Trump promised to prioritize the military’s preparedness instead of identity.
In addition, the military carried out various outreach programs, which involved drag queens to attract potential non-binary recruits. Nonetheless, Biden’s military fell flat on its face in achieving recruitment targets, recording a 41,000 deficit in 2023.
However, it took the Trump administration barely two months to break a 15-year record without conducting recruitment campaigns. The only thing Trump did was rid the military of the destructive woke ideology that discouraged traditional recruits in favor of potential non-binary recruits in order to feel more welcoming.
Trump and Hegseth’s strategy seems to be working, and in a few years, the military will likely be turning down potential recruits due to over-enrolment.
President Donald Trump has held firm on a number of campaign promises to the American people, issuing a slew of Executive Orders (EO) in his first weeks in office, reshaping the future of our nation.
Immigration & The Border
Trump promised to fight the influx of illegal immigrants to the U.S., ending the Biden administration’s “catch-and-release” policy and restarting construction on the border wall. Within days of his second term in office, Trump issued orders designating the flood of immigrants as an “invasion,” ended birthright citizenship to children born of parents in the country illegally, and declared an emergency at our southern border, according to The Christian Post.
Reversal Of DEI, Fighting The Climate Oligarchy
In one order, Trump rescinded almost 80 EOs from the Biden administration, particularly those related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and climate change. He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization. The Paris agreement is one of countless annual “agreements” that elected officials make to claim they’re doing something to “fight climate change.” Such agreements have existed for decades and led to absolutely no impact on the so-called “climate crisis.”
Energy Independence
The soaring cost of energy, thanks in large-part to the pro-climate lobby and the war between Russia and Ukraine, was another area Trump promised to tackle. On Jan. 20 he signed the EO “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential.”
“The State of Alaska holds an abundant and largely untapped supply of natural resources including, among others, energy, mineral, timber, and seafood. Unlocking this bounty of natural wealth will raise the prosperity of our citizens while helping to enhance our Nation’s economic and national security for generations to come,” the order stated. “By developing these resources to the fullest extent possible, we can help deliver price relief for Americans, create high-quality jobs for our citizens, ameliorate our trade imbalances, augment the Nation’s exercise of global energy dominance, and guard against foreign powers weaponizing energy supplies in theaters of geopolitical conflict.”
No More Weaponization Of Federal Government
Trump pardoned countless pro-life activists in his first week in office, ending a Biden-era trend of Christians being targeted by what many felt was a weaponized Department of Justice. Along with these pardons, Trump issued an EO stating that the “prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Another EO noted that the “previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.” As a result, Trump signed the EO entitled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”
Tackling Gender Insanity
Over the last four years, progressive lawmakers and activists have sought to destabilize American minds by pretending there are more than two genders: male and female. In an EO titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” Trump ordered that sex be defined as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.” The order also stated that all inmates be housed in prisons aligned with their sex, and not their self-identified “gender identity.”
He then ordered that ” it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”
Military Support
Trump further signed a slew of orders related to the U.S. military, including one that reinstates more than 8,000 servicemembers who lost their jobs for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine. The military will also return to a merit-based social hierarchy where people will be promoted based on their success, not their gender or skin color.
Election Interference
“Holding Former Government Officials Accountable for Election Interference and Improper Disclosure of Sensitive Governmental Information” is the title of another of Trump’s EO, this time focused on ” (i) the former intelligence officials who engaged in misleading and inappropriate political coordination with the 2020 Biden presidential campaign; and (ii) John R. Bolton.”
“In the closing weeks of the 2020 Presidential campaign, at least 51 former intelligence officials coordinated with the Biden campaign to issue a letter discrediting the reporting that President Joseph R. Biden’s son had abandoned his laptop at a computer repair business. Signatories of the letter falsely suggested that the news story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign,” the EO notes, before detailing the importance of data from the intelligence community that is “accurate, crafted with professionalism, and free from politically motivated engineering to affect political outcomes.”
President Donald Trump has a knack for making deals.
In another impressive show of diplomatic power, Donald Trump announced on Monday that his 25% tariff on Mexico worked exactly as it was intended.
After a call with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico will deploy 10,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to combat fentanyl trafficking and illegal immigration.
The 30 day respite from the tariff will allow for high-level negotiations between the two countries on a more robust border plan, with discussions headed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Trump is moving so fast with his repeated wins that Democrats can’t even keep up.
Senator Chuck Schumer tried desperately to put a negative spin on the Trump Tariffs over the weekend, arguing that they’ll ruin Super Bowl Sunday by raising the prices of beer and guacamole.
I guess the Super Bowl guacamole and Coronas won’t be affected. Thank goodness.
Don’t believe anything Democrats and the media tell you. They tried to say that the Trump Tariffs would cripple our nation.
The election of Donald Trump was only the beginning of a chance that the U.S. now has to tack back toward a normal and sane kind of politics. The country lurched so hard to the left over the past 15 years–and beyond into actual clinical insanity–that one election is not going to reset the board overnight. It will be years, perhaps a generation or longer, before “woke” is really rooted out of nearly every business, civic, and cultural institution.
The hardest left voters and agitators truly believe they are “on the right side of history.” They truly believe that only they are moral, and that everyone to the right of them is fully and incurably immoral. Their minds work in black and white, all-good and all-bad. In psychiatric literature, this kind of thinking is called “splitting.” One “splits” another person into an all-wonderful or all-evil caricature of a whole human person. Splitting is a prominent feature of conditions like borderline personality disorder, a character disorder that includes emotional instability, histrionic emotions and accusations, and the false idea that one is a perpetual victim of others.
To a close approximation, we can diagnose the U.S. as having a longstanding case of borderline personality disorder, at least the left half of the country.
So it should be no surprise that on his second day in office, President Donald Trump and his wife Melania were the subject of an attempted humiliation from the pulpit. Preacher Mariann Budde stood at the lectern of the National Cathedral and excoriated Trump as he sat there, accusing him of frightening “trans kids” and illegal aliens. Naturally, Budde features what you might call the “modern mental illness presentation” affected by leftist women. Short, angry gray hair, deliberately awkward glasses, and the put-on “gentle mouse” voice used to cover over a vicious and hysterical rhetorical attack.
Check it out:
Woke pastor attacks Trump and Vance to their faces for scaring "LGBTQ kids" and illegals.
Budde claims there are “gay lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families. . .some who fear for their lives.”
“And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation,” she added.
This type of rhetoric is just insane. It’s not a difference of opinion. It’s insanity, if we define insanity as a complete disconnection from the objective real world. The hack even even went on CNN after to defend her comments.
Frankly, it is impossible to believe that Mariann Budde genuinely believes that Donald Trump is a threat to the lives and continued state of being alive to “LGBTQ” people. But she is willing to claim that she believes this, which is at least as disturbing as the possibility that she takes her own hysteria seriously.
As it enters its final days, Joe Biden’s administration is targeting millions of Americans with a ridiculous regulatory rule.
As per Fox News, the federal government is seeking to implement tough restrictions on smokers by limiting the amount of nicotine in each cigarette. The theory behind the proposal would be that a lower amount of nicotine would lower the addictiveness of smoking for new smokers, but raises questions as to whether smokers would merely light up more often throughout the day to compensate. After all, if the amount of nicotine per cigarette were cut in half, why wouldn’t smokers just smoke twice as much? Which budget constraints wouldn’t allow every smoker to do that, it’s still an obvious unintended consequence.
“The proposed rule, ‘Tobacco Product Standard for Nicotine Level of Certain Tobacco Products,’ is displaying in the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Reducing Outdoor Contaminants in Indoor Spaces (ROCIS) system as having completed regulatory review on January 3,” a spokesman for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told Fox News. “As the FDA has previously said, a proposed product standard to establish a maximum nicotine level to reduce the addictiveness of cigarettes and certain other combusted tobacco products, when finalized, is estimated to be among the most impactful population-level actions in the history of U.S. tobacco product regulation.”
BREAKING: Biden administration working to effectively ban cigarettes.
Given the administration is set to be dissolved in a matter of days, concerns have been raised that the proposal is rushed, without scientific analysis and a restriction on civil liberties. Such a move could also open up a black market as smokers seek stronger cigarettes for a lower cost.
Boosting business for Chinese counterfeiters and black market dealers.
It’s not the first time that the Biden administration has targeted smokers. In 2024, the federal government scrapped an attempt to ban menthol cigarettes outright, citing “feedback” as a reason for the policy shift – though other credible sources such as Barron’s reported that it was out of fear that it would reduce his share of the black vote.
The president also checked his watch, saying he wanted to “get this damn thing done” while holding a press conference on the attack.
“The Sugar Bowl is back on. Kick off is going to take off very shortly. If I don’t get this damn thing done we’re gonna be in real trouble,” Biden said as he checked his watch.
During a press conference on the t*rror attack, Biden says he needs to “get this damn thing” done because the Sugar Bowl is starting.
He’s annoyed he has to update the country on a t*rrorist attack because he wants to watch football.
Last week, President-elect Donald Trump issued a fiery statement condemning the New Year’s Day terror attack, calling it a “disaster” which was was a result of the Biden-Harris administration opting to go after political opponents.
Trump’s post read: “They are incompetent and corrupt, having spent all of their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, ME, rather than focusing on protecting Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself. Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen to our Country.”
“The CIA must get involved, NOW, before it is too late. The USA is breaking down – A violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy is taking place all across our Nation.”
“Only strength and powerful leadership will stop it. See you on January 20th. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World! This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership. The DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors have not done their job. They are incompetent and…
— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) January 2, 2025
President Joe Biden has awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom to a man who appeared in a photo with the would-be assassin of Donald Trump.
José Andrés, who was among 19 people awarded the medal, was photographed with Ryan Wesley Routh – the man arrested on suspicion of attempting to assassinate the Republican on his Florida golf course in Sept. 2024.
The background, which features an array of miniature Ukrainian flags, suggests the photo taken some time after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2022 but likely before Routh’s Sept. 2024 arrest.
It is not known if Routh and Andrés had any connection prior to the photograph. The chef, credited with popularizing the concept of tapas dining, received the award for his humanitarian work with the World Central Kitchen.
🚨Biden just gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jose Andres, who appears in photos with Trump’s would-be assassin. pic.twitter.com/jZoWh8se1z
Americans are flocking to Republican states in large numbers while Democrat-controlled jurisdictions are seeing the fewest new arrivals, according to a U-Haul’s annual Growth Index.
South Carolina, which is controlled by the GOP in eight of the state’s nine executive offices, in addition to its governorship, State House, and State, topped the list with arrivals accounting for 51.7% of all one-way U-Haul traffic in and out of the state throughout 2024. Texas, having topped the list for three successive years, fell to second, while North Carolina rounded out the top three.
Liberal states saw the fewest new arrivals. California, for the fifth year in a row, ranked bottom of the 50 states, behind Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.
“Migration to the Southeast and Southwest continues as families gauge their cost of living, job opportunities, quality of life and other factors that go into relocating to a new state,” said U-Haul International president John ‘J.T.’ Taylor. “Out-migration remains prevalent for a number of markets across the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast — and particularly California.”
U-Haul tracked the number of people moving into every state in 2024:
Social media users offered their own insight into the data.
I've lived all around the country. I've lived at least one year in NYC, Boston, Providence, CT, Atlanta, SC, Chicago, Tulsa, Scottsdale, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Austin, and Miami. I live in NC now and I honestly believe I live in the best town in the USA. It's the best place…
I have a theory behind the ‘why’, and it has to do with total fertility rate and its decline over the years.
The U.S. total fertility rate has been below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman since 1971. In 2022, the TFR was around 1.66, one of the lowest in modern…
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell has suggested that U.S. military veterans are more likely to be terrorists than those who have crossed the border illegally into the United States.
Unsurprisingly, O’Donnell’s comments were met with massive backlash.
“The simple fact is, this country has suffered more deadly terrorism at the hands of American-born citizens who are veterans of the United States military than people who have crossed into this country at the southern border,” O’Donnell said.
“It is very clear from the evidence that if you want to worry about terrorism in this country, the United States Army is a much bigger problem than the southern border.”
Watch:
O’Donnell’s remarks came on the heels of the recent terror attack in New Orleans that left at least 15 dead and dozens injured.
42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, armed with a Glock and a .308 rifle, reportedly rammed a truck into crowds in the city’s French Quarter on New Year’s Day.
The FBI confirmed the attack as suspected terror event after an ISIS flag was discovered on the truck
O’Donnell used historical examples, including Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, to argue that American veterans are more dangerous to America than illegal immigrants.
“Timothy McVeigh parked a truck outside that building loaded with explosives in an act of homegrown American terrorism,” O’Donnell said, referencing the 1995 bombing.
“Timothy McVeigh’s hatred of the American government was not tamed in any way by his service in the American military. So, too, with America’s latest terrorist attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve.”
O’Donnell also slammed President-elect Donald Trump for his response to the attack.
“When Donald Trump sees the type of terrorist attack that occurred in New Orleans, he doesn’t remember Timothy McVeigh and, instead, he blames the criminals that he imagines are crossing the southern border,” he said.
He continued by asserting:
“No one who has ever crossed the southern border, in the history of the existence of the southern border, has killed more people in this country than Timothy McVeigh, who was born in Lockport, New York, the northwest part of the state, into a White Roman Catholic American family with roots in this country that go back farther than Donald Trump’s roots in this country.”
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