Allies of former President Donald Trump are reportedly assembling thousands of potential candidates to serve in federal government positions under a potential Trump administration if the former president wins next year’s election.
According to Axios, the Heritage Foundation is working to screen thousands of potential candidates to serve in government positions under a Republican administration in 2025, significantly increasing the power and efficiency of the next president.
Axios columnists Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen described the screening process of potential candidates as the formation of a “pro-Trump army” that could consist of as many as 54,000 “loyalists” across the federal government if he is elected in 2024.
The “army” of Trump loyalists and Republican candidates is being assembled by the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025.”
The project’s website states, “Project 2025 is the effort of a massive coalition of conservative organizations that have come together to ensure a successful Administration begins in January 2025. With the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government.”
According to Axios, the screening process for potential government positions under a Republican president has already started with the help of artificial intelligence powered by Oracle, which The New York Times reported has been contracted to help with the project.
Project 2025 is intended to provide support for whoever the Republican nominee is for president in 2024. Heritage Foundation officials told Axios that the foundation has explained its plan to the campaigns of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, and Trump.
However, while the project is intended to benefit whoever the Republican nominee is, Axios reported that the Republican operation appears to be driven by Trump loyalists, especially with former White House aide Johnny McEntee as a senior adviser to Project 2025, and White House adviser Stephen Miller as one of the main architects of the project.
According to Axios, the Heritage Foundation’s project has received significant funding and has already published a 920-page policy book that was designed by over 400 contributors.
Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, told Axios that the team of government recruits being assembled under Project 2025 is “orders of magnitude” larger than any team previously assembled by the party currently out of power.
Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, explained, “Never before has the entire movement … banded together to construct a comprehensive plan to deconstruct the out-of-touch and weaponized administrative state.”
Project 2025 currently has roughly 80 partners, including organizations such as Turning Point USA, American Movement, and the Center for Renewing America. Many of the Heritage Foundation’s partner organizations for Project 2025 are led by highly influential Trump loyalists.
Despite inside sources indicating to Axios that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is working to thoroughly vet candidates for a potential Trump administration, the Trump campaign emphasized that Trump’s official “Agenda47” platform is the “only official” platform for Trump’s potential second term in the White House.
“The campaign’s Agenda47 is the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House,” the Trump campaign stated. “While the campaign is appreciative of any effort to provide suggestions about a second term, the campaign is not collaborating with them.”
Nevertheless, based on sources familiar with Project 2025, Axios reported that the Heritage Foundation currently has over 4,000 entries in its “Presidential Personnel Database.”
Axios noted that during Trump’s first administration, which began in 2017, the former president included many establishment Republicans in his Cabinet and in key government positions, which resulted in many public disagreements between Trump and his Cabinet members, as well as multiple high-level firings.
If Trump was able to defeat President Joe Biden in 2024, the former president would now have thousands of loyalists who would be fully screened and prepared to serve in legal, regulatory, judicial, defense, and domestic policy positions, according to Axios.
This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.
North Korea has issued military threats in response to South Korea’s ruling that the law barring the dissemination of anti-Pyongyang leaflets into the North was unconstitutional. It’s the first time Pyongyang has made threats since Seoul’s decision.
South Korea’s Constitutional Court declared the law unconstitutional in September, with seven out of its nine judges finding that the law restricted the nation’s constitutional value of free speech. The verdict led to the law’s immediate annulment.
“The decision that the ‘anti-leaflet law’ is unconstitutional in the puppet state is being enforced and the process of abolishing the related guidelines is in full swing,” the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Wednesday, as Pyongyang took a jab at South Korea.
“It is the position of the enraged revolutionary armed forces of our country that we must go beyond the conventional response and pour down with the fire shower of punishment not only on their leafleting bases but also on their puppet castles.”
Calling leafleting a “sophisticated form of psychological warfare used by belligerents to neutralize the other side” and a “de facto pre-emptive strike that precedes the start of war,” KCNA said: “there is no guarantee that a military conflict like the one that occurred in Europe and the Middle East will not occur on the Korean Peninsula when a hostile psychological warfare that viciously denigrates the existence and development of our country is carried out on our borders.”
The report also warned “the traitors [South Korea]” of consequences by attempting to draw a parallel to how “anti-DPRK leaflets sent by ‘defectors’ scum resulted in an exchange of fire in 2014 and the complete destruction of the North-South Joint Liaison Office in 2020,” using North Korea’s formal name.
“Until now, we’ve been able to put up with it because there was the anti-leaflet law, albeit a weak one.”
In March 2021, South Korea enacted legislation criminalizing the act of sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets across its borders. Violators would be subject to imprisonment for a maximum of three years or a fine of 30 million won (US$22,000).
Passed by the South Korean parliament during the administration of the progressive president Moon Jae-in, the contentious legislation argued that leaflet distribution to the North could provoke hostility and endanger the safety of border town residents in the South.
But the criminalization sparked a backlash from both international and domestic human rights organizations and media outlets. South Korean conservatives and international media opined that sending leaflets was a matter of free speech and a law restricting such an activity was unconstitutional. Dozens of human rights organizations filed a constitutional complaint concerning the prohibition, and sought an injunction against the newly enacted law.
Conservative activists and North Korean defector organizations in South Korea have periodically launched leaflet-laden balloons across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which separates the peninsula, denouncing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. This has incited the ire of Pyongyang.
A strict information cordon is maintained by the regime in an effort to prevent the spread of information it claims could corrupt North Koreans.
Defectors and conservative activists said the purpose of their endeavors is to give North Korean citizens access to information that contradicts the regime’s narrative, encompassing critiques of Kim, his family, and the policies implemented by the ruling Workers’ Party.
Ted Serios was a bellhop at the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue, though probably not the kind of employee they expected. When he worked as a valet, he had a habit of joy riding in the guests’ cars. When he manned cash registers, he took home a dollar or two. He ran into police now and then. He had a history of alcoholism, and erratic behavior and was declared schizophrenic during a brief stay at Chicago State Hospital.
He also claimed to have incredible powers.
Paranormal abilities, some said.
Image by Ted Serios as published in the new book “Ted Serios: The Mind’s Eye.” (The Jule Eisenbud Collection on Ted Serios and Thoughtographic Photography (Collection 23), Special Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County/Artbook D.A.P./TNS)
He would stare hard at a camera. He would convulse and growl and twist his arms and contort his expression and, by claiming to focus his thoughts, project an image from his mind onto undeveloped film. At least, that was his claim. “Get in there, baby,” he would whisper at cameras. “Come on, you son of a …” Then he’d collapse back in a chair, tired.
It was very dramatic, pretty easy to roll your eyes at.
Except, Serios would do this with Polaroid instant film, a relatively new process. And generate immediate results — foggy, abstracted dreamscapes of the Art Institute, Water Tower, Westminster Abbey, a bird’s-eye view of the Pentagon. Plenty of journalists, photographers and even magicians came forward to explain the whole thing was a scam, though 60 years later, it’s still difficult to prove conclusively Serios was a fraud.
Certainly, he had a little carny in his blood — his father, a Greek immigrant, toured the Midwest as a professional wrestler and settled the family in Chicago when Serios was a child. Other than several years in Denver where Serios’ supposed abilities were treated as a research lab cause celeb, Serios spent much of his life in Illinois; he died in 2006 at age 88, having lived in the small western town of Quincy on the Iowa border. He was a C-list media blip in the ‘60s and a campfire tale by the ‘90s. A 1999 Tribune article concluded with the author wondering where Serios was and if he was still practicing his “thoughtography”:
“So if you’re out there, Ted?”
Images by Ted Serios as published in the new book “Ted Serios: The Mind’s Eye”. (The Jule Eisenbud Collection on Ted Serios and Thoughtographic Photography (Collection 23), Special Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County/Artbook D.A.P./TNS)
Two decades later, the story has taken an interesting twist. Serios, and paranormal photography in general — common enough since the 19th century to have become a kind of quasi-genre of photography — is now admired by art historians and shown in major museums, not for the miraculous qualities of the images but for the work itself.
“I actually credit Ted Serios’s photographs for getting me interested in photography in the first place,” said Paul Roth, director of the Image Centre photography museum at Toronto Metropolitan University, which exhibited a collection of Serios’ work earlier this year. As a child, Roth saw Serios’ mind photos in a documentary on the paranormal, “and it really struck me how photography could be magical and full of enchantment, in so many ways, even if Ted never intended that. It’s a feeling we all take for granted now, of course. He seemed to show proof that you can travel inside your mind and actually throw thoughts on film, an extraordinary statement about photography itself, which has long been taken as literal proof of reality. Ted was the purest metaphor for that idea — he was like a county fairground version of how we think about the internet now.”
As the social media cliché goes: If there aren’t pictures, it didn’t happen.
Unless, of course, photography is more complicated than that.
The results of Ted Serios’ thoughtography have been part of exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris. This month, there’s even a book, “Ted Serios: The Mind’s Eye,” a companion to the Toronto show. Emily Hauver, who organized that exhibit, is a curator at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which began collecting Serios’ work in 2002. She said that although his photos weren’t intended as art, they were “right on trend” with the history of the medium. She notes they arrived about the time of Robert Frank’s “personal and poetic” black-and-whites from his book “The Americans,” and somewhat foretold the “dreaminess, distortion and ambiguity” of later photographers.
Moreover, the photos “are still relevant today in a culture where photography has become ubiquitous. How many of us send a photo to a friend that is intended to communicate entire thoughts?” Not to mention, she adds, Serios’ photos do look “like they could have emerged from the depths of someone’s unconscious mind.” Surrealist artists, after all, insisted their work arrived through an unconscious, automatic hand.
Serios just skipped the middleman.
Indeed, in a way, if unintentionally, he was broadening our understanding of photography to see beyond the range of the human eye. By the end of the 19th century, said Katerina Korola, an art historian at the University of Minnesota and teaching fellow at the University of Chicago, photography could show “the distinct phases of the horse’s gallop, crystalline structures found in human saliva, the interior of the body as revealed by X-rays.” Photography, she said, had revealed so much, that it gave “rise to speculations about what other hidden phenomena the photographic image might yet bring to light.”
Psychic photography was a stretch — but then so were X-rays once.
So, throughout the 1960s, Serios was studied by researchers at the Field Museum and the Art Institute, the Illinois Society for Psychic Research and National Guild of Hypnotists, the Borg-Warner Research Center in Des Plaines, University of Virginia Medical School, and, most extensively, University of Colorado Medical School. Later, he was profiled by Leonard Nimoy’s “In Search of …” paranormal TV series and became the basis of an unmade biopic by “X-Files” creator Chris Carter. He was also dismissed in a two-part expose by Popular Photography magazine, and dubbed a fake by the late magician James “The Amazing” Randi, who told the Tribune: “I always found Ted to be an affable con man.” But as Hauver and others note, no one came up with solid evidence of fraud.
Or proof that he was making photos with his mind.
By the early 1970s, Serios was telling reporters that he was sick of being a party trick.
“Was Ted smart enough to have faked this?” Hauver asked. “Did he do it to avoid jail time? Was it alcohol-related? A psychotic episode? If it was a scam, why didn’t he make money on it? Why did he eventually stop? I feel we will never get to the bottom of this.”
Ted Serios actually did intend to make money on it. Sort of. He got into the psychic photo business after a fellow bellhop at the Hilton tried hypnotizing and encouraging him to picture places far outside Chicago. The co-worker wanted Serios — who dropped out of school in fifth grade — to use his abilities to pinpoint the treasure of a 19th century pirate. When they practiced with a camera, Serios later said, they were shocked to see images appear on film — not exactly 19th century pirate gold, but something showed up.
He submitted himself to tests by the Illinois Society of Psychic Research, which brought its findings to Fate, a long-running (now-defunct) paranormal magazine based in Highland Park. Fate in turn introduced Serios to Jule Eisenbaud, a Denver psychoanalyst intrigued by the paranormal. When Eisenbaud was visiting Chicago on business, he met with Serios at the Palmer Hotel and ran Serios through several tests.
Eisenbaud held a Polaroid Land Camera a few feet from Serios’ head. He asked Serios to picture various images. Serios, who said he worked better drunk, put away a lot of beer. At first, the photos were blank. But after hours, Serios made an image of Water Tower. He went on to make several more images, including blurry Chicago marquees. Sometimes Serios generated images of himself staring headlong into the lens, but more often the photos were full of muted shadows, closer to suggestions of places and things.
Much of the time, Serios also rolled a piece of cardboard or plastic into a tube and pointed it at the camera — to better direct his thoughts, he insisted. Of course, though the tube wasn’t always used by Serios, it became the focus of naysayers, who assumed Serios managed to slip transparencies between its folds and, somehow, work his magic.
But Eisenbaud became a true believer.
He brought Serios to Denver and, in four years of tests, put him in jumpsuits, tied him to chairs, tested him naked, placed him in rooms far away from the camera and sometimes outside of the building. Eisenbaud even tested Serios in a Faraday cage to block electromagnetic fields, and created a mountain of documentation — much of which went to the University of Maryland collection — that often located the origins of some of the images that Serios produced, including Field Museum dioramas. But by the end of the 1960s, though, Eisenbaud’s tests generated a bestselling book (“The World of Ted Serios: ‘Thoughtographic’ Studies of an Extraordinary Mind”) and a burned-out subject.
Like an old Polaroid, Ted Serios gradually faded away.
What’s left are those photos.
Looming foreheads. Shadowy trestles. Nonsensical flashes of movement.
Nearly every one mundane — except for the method, and a splash of light. Not quite art photography. Not outsider art. Barely representational. If anything, they look like early photographic experiments. When I asked Blake Stimson, an art historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago, about early reactions to photography, he told me of scientists who thought of photos as “sun drawings” and of Walt Whitman, who saw photographers as poets who caught “sun falling around a helpless thing.” Sounds like Serios’s images. But so does the use of the paranormal in photography, from the “spirit photography” of the 19th century that claimed to insert ghosts of dead Civil War soldiers into family portraits, to more contemporary images that claim to capture the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot.
But that’s fakery.
Serios didn’t appear to tamper with the film itself after the image was captured. (Some insisted he worked with previously exposed film — though, again, could not prove it.) Serios wasn’t even the first to try to photograph human thoughts; Japanese and French photographs tried decades before he started as a bellhop. But Paul Roth sees a great deal in Serios’ images: the imperfectness of toy cameras and the images made by the cracks in camera shells. “The aesthetics of Ted’s photographs resonate in so many different ways today, it doesn’t really matter to me if Ted Serios was a fraud or a genius.
“I even find it unhelpful to try and decide if he was a fraud. As soon as you do, the joy is sucked from this story. Whatever yearning we have for other worlds — gone. I prefer to think of the tale of Ted Serios as a mystery wrapped in science — wrapped in a carnival.”
Several migrant families with children bussed to a newly-opened shelter at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn re-entered a bus shortly after arriving at the massive facility on Sunday, telling the city they did not like the accommodations.
City Hall confirmed some families did not want to come to settle at the shelter while acknowledging there was no other placement for migrants if they declined the site.
In video taken by local Brooklyn Assemblywoman Jamie Williams, migrant families who arrived to the defunct airfield via an MTA bus with children on Sunday did an about-face and went back on the bus, carrying their belongings.
After, a city worker ignored Williams’ question on why migrants were not being housed at the site.
“Families got off of the bus and saw the accommodations,” she said in a text message from the airfield. “When they realized they wouldn’t be staying at a hotel they refused to stay and demanded to be taken somewhere else. They were not told in advance that they would be going a tent city.”
In another video posting, the lawmaker can be heard urging workers to “tell the mayor that this is inhumane.”
“No woman or children should be having to be bussed around like this,” she said. “Let them know that this is not the place for you guys to be — in an isolated area.”
Mayoral spokesperson Kayla Mamelak said the lack of space has presented few options for migrants.
“With more than 65,600 migrants still currently in our care, and thousands more continuing to arrive every week, we have used every possible corner of New York City and are quite simply out of good options to shelter migrants,” the she stated.
Last week, Mayor Adams was expected to meet with White House officials to discuss the crisis but abruptly had to return to the city shortly after the FBI raided his campaign fundraiser’s home as part of an inquiry.
As first reported by the Daily News, some two-dozen families totaling 100 people were expected to be brought to the site on Sunday. It’s now unclear how many families have stayed.
Unlike conventional family shelters, migrants staying at Floyd Bennett Field were expected to live in so-called pods. The rooms were not wholly private and lacked a kitchen.
The mayor’s office did not return a request for comment on why migrants were brought back to the bus.
Adams’ announcement over the use of Floyd Bennett Field as a shelter was immediately opposed by Williams and Queens Councilmember Joann Ariola, who have cited the area’s designation as a floodplain as one reason the site was unsuitable. Ariola has since sued the city and state, asking a judge to shut down the site.
“This is a remote location, far from any transportation hubs, and lacking in any real infrastructure, and it is simply not suitable for habitation,” Ariola said in a statement. “We’ve been told that, of the handful that initially opted to stay, most of them are now requesting to be transferred as well.
This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.
Vietnam has been developing a reef in the Spratly islands in the South China Sea, expanding its reclaimed area more than four times in less than a year, satellite imagery shows.
Dredging and landfill has been carried out at Barque Canada Reef since the end of 2021 but gathered pace in the past year, according to satellite data obtained by Radio Free Asia.
As of early November 2023, the total landfill area of a main feature and two smaller ones amounted to nearly 1 square kilometer, or 247 acres, compared to 58 acres at the end of 2022. The presence of dredgers and barges points to continuing work at the reef.
It is still, however, much smaller than any of China’s so-called Big Three – Fiery Cross Reef, Mischief Reef and Subi Reef – artificial islands that Beijing developed and fully militarized.
The Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) think tank at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said Vietnam has accelerated reclamation work in the South China Sea, bringing the total of new land in the last 10 years to 540 acres by the end of 2022.
Apart from Barque Canada Reef, works are also being carried out on several other features such as Pearson Reef, Namyit Reef, Tennent Reef and Sand Cay.
Even with the new reclamation in 2023 it is still far less than the 3,200 acres of land created by China between 2013 and 2016.
Chinese think tank the South China Sea Probing Initiative has alleged that Hanoi may be “building a second airfield” on the Barque Canada. RFA could not independently verify this claim.
Until now Vietnam only has a runway on the Spratly Island, or Truong Sa Lon in Vietnamese, which was doubled in length several years ago to accommodate medium-sized military aircraft.
Big potential
AMTI’s Greg Poling said he was not aware of the rumors about the second runway and “can’t see anything at a glance that obviously looks like a runway” in the latest satellite images.
At the main feature in the northeast of the reef, dozens of ships and at least two large dredgers were visible in an image provided by the U.S. satellite imaging company Planet Labs on Nov. 2.
Video clips believed to be recorded by workers and circulated on social media show large barges bringing sand and construction materials to the reclamation area.
Several Vietnamese military sources, who wished to stay anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to foreign media, said that the Vietnamese government and army “put a great importance on the development” of Barque Canada Reef.
“The entire reef is roughly 50km2 [12,355 acres], it definitely has big potential,” a source told RFA.
Tom Shugart, adjunct senior fellow with the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, said that “another base and runway would give Vietnam a position on the other side of China’s Big Three islands, bracketing them to some degree.”
“It would certainly help them get better coverage and capacity within the area,” Shugart told RFA, adding “it’s hard to know much more until we see how big the facility ends up being.”
Vietnamese netizens have also taken a keen interest in the reef, which is also claimed by China, Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan. There are lots of discussions on internet defense forums about the necessity to build a long runway on the feature to strengthen Vietnam’s defense capability in the disputed waters.
Chinese netizens have also been talking about “lost opportunities” associated with the reef, called Bai Jiao in Mandarin, which is not only strategically located in the middle of the South China Sea but also is “ten times larger than Mischief Reef.”
Vietnam’s ‘Fishing Boat’ in the sea
Barque Canada Reef is called Bai Thuyen Chai (Fishing Boat Reef) in Vietnamese because of its shape resembling a shipping vessel.
Vietnam’s Navy claimed it first occupied Barque Canada in 1978 but had to withdraw soon afterwards because of “unsustainable conditions.” They came back ten years later to set up three outposts on the reef, which have now become permanent buildings with facilities for the stationed troops and visiting fishermen, and even a “cultural center.”
The outposts are not in the current reclamation areas.
Vietnamese authorities have been promoting sustainable development on the features in the South China Sea, including Barque Canada Reef.
An order from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development says 200m2 of green houses will be set up in 2023 on the Barque Canada for vegetable farming, and soldiers will be trained how to raise ducks.
In a directive issued on April 3, 2023, the Vietnamese government set the objective of “determining areas for reclamation and building artificial islands in order to develop the country’s economy and society.”
Hanoi currently controls 27 features in the South China Sea, according to AMTI.
The ongoing reclamation “represents a major move toward reinforcing its position in the Spratlys,” the think tank said.
A fantasy world of seashells and fins helped one Florida veteran find healing. Now she’s on a mission to “empower veterans, one splash at a time.”
Riverview-based artist Iona Parris, known to nearly 15,000 Instagram followers as the Seashell Queen, has been teaching therapeutic Military Mermaid classes through the Wounded Warrior Project.
“It feels wonderful to build that camaraderie together and have each other to lean on with all of us going through similar experiences,” Parris said.
Her students bond over shared history while swimming in mermaid tails and crafting with shells. They will be dressed in full mermaid regalia for a morning of photo opportunities and meet and greets at Fairgrounds St. Pete on Veterans Day.
Parris, 35, turned to seashells after returning from her first deployment in 2010. Parris had developed anxiety and PTSD during her time in the Air Force. Whenever she felt down, she would pick up a shell from the collection on her dresser and paint it with nail polish.
Parris started selling her shell art under the business name Seashell Queen Collection after she left the military. Her sister encouraged her to bring her pieces to art shows. To boost sales, she dressed like a mermaid.
By 2021, Parris’ work attracted an invitation to the Afro Mermaid Summit, where she met a whole pod of multicultural sirens in South Florida. They taught her how to swim both in and out of a tail. She realized how loving and supportive the mermaid community was.
“It wasn’t a competition. It was really about the love,” she said.
Back in Tampa Bay, Parris pitched a series of mermaid classes to the Wounded Warrior Project, where she helps disabled veterans as a peer mentor. The original suggestion was turned down. Then “The Little Mermaid” movie and Netflix’s docu-series “MerPeople” (which includes shots of Parris and the Afro Mermaids) came out in May.
Parris was able to secure funding for 10 mermaid students, including tails they could use. She hosted her first mermaid class in September. Since then, five more students have joined. The classes, which are free to attend and open to all genders, mostly take place in neighborhood pools.
Liz Dimmitt, CEO and co-founder of Fairgrounds St. Pete, said the Military Mermaids fit right in at the museum. Parris is one of over 70 artists with work on display. The immersive museum is anchored by a neon-soaked “Mermaid Star Motel” and is known to host mermaid-themed events.
“Mermaids and merfolk, they bring that magic to Florida and are part of our Florida lore,” Dimmitt said.
“We’re looking forward to honoring their service, but also their human resiliency and the special Florida stories they have.”
Meet the Military Mermaids
Iona Parris and the Military Mermaids will be meeting guests and taking photos at Fairgrounds St. Pete from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday. Veterans and active-duty military will receive free admission to Fairgrounds St. Pete from 10 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. The art and technology museum is located at 2606 Fairfield Ave S in St. Petersburg. Visit fairgrounds.art for more information on hours and artists.
For more information on Parris, visit seashellqueen.com or follow @officialseashellqueen on Instagram. Part of her proceeds from her art go back to Military Mermaids. To learn more about the mermaid classes, including how to sign up, visit militarymermaids.org.
Former President Donald Trump’s presence was felt at an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) match Saturday night, as the crowd erupted into chants of “USA.”
According to The New York Post, the former president, who is known for his enjoyment of boxing and mixed martial arts competitions, received a loud ovation from the boxing crowd as he entered Madison Square Garden in New York City Saturday night.
Trump arrived at UFC 295 just prior to the start of Saturday’s competition. The former president was accompanied by Tucker Carlson, Dana White, Kid Rock, and Donald Trump Jr.
A video shared on X, formerly Twitter, by the account “UFC on TNT Sports” shows the crowd’s wild reaction to Trump’s entrance with Carlson, White, and Rock.
According to The Daily Caller, Carlson’s presence alongside Trump at Saturday’s UFC match adds to recent speculation that the former Fox News host and conservative icon could be a potential vice president candidate for Trump’s 2024 White House bid.
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As Trump entered the Madison Square Garden arena, he was seen pumping his fist and waving to the enthusiastic crowd as Kid Rock’s “American Badass” played prior to the kickoff of Saturday’s matchup, which featured Czechian fighter Jiří Procházka and Brazilian fighter, Alex Pereira, competing for the Light Heavyweight title, according to The New York Post.
In another video shared by Barstool Sports’ Jack McGuire on X, UFC fans can be heard loudly chanting, “USA, USA, USA.” Alongside the video, McGuire wrote, “What a moment. Donald Trump & Tucker Carlson arrive at #UFC295 CROWD LOVES IT. USA CHANTS ERUPT!”
A recent poll by FiveThirtyEight shows that the former president continues to hold a massive lead over his Republican primary challengers with 55.6% of Republican primary voter support despite facing multiple legal challenges.
Maryanne Trump Barry, the ex-president’s sister and a retired federal judge, was found dead in her Manhattan apartment on Monday. She was 86.
Barry’s body was discovered at about 4 a.m., sources told ABC News. There was no signs of trauma or foul play.
Barry was a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit until she retired in 2019 amid a controversy over alleged fraudulent tax and financial transactions made by Trump family patriarch Fred Trump Sr. and her siblings.
She was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 and was then appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 1999 by President Bill Clinton.
The investigation into potential wrongdoing by Barry and the Trump family was closed without a conclusion when Barry retired in February 2019.
Donald Trump, 77, has now lost three of his four siblings, with the reclusive Elizabeth Trump Grau the only surviving one.
Fred Trump Jr. died of a heart attack at just 42 years old in September 1981. Robert Trump, the youngest of the five siblings, died in 2020 at 71.
Donald Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana, the mother of three of his grown children, also died in 2022.
Five U.S. Special Operators were killed in an MH-60 Blackhawk helicopter crash Friday in the Mediterranean Sea due to a “mishap” that occurred during a “routine” air refueling training mission.
“During a routine air refueling mission as part of military training, a U.S. military aircraft carrying five service members suffered a mishap and crashed into the Mediterranean Sea,” U.S. European Command said in a statement. “All five of the service members onboard the aircraft were killed.”
Prior to the updated statement from U.S. European Command, the military released a statement explaining that a military aircraft had “suffered a mishap” during a training operation in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The U.S. military emphasized that the “aircraft sortie was purely related to training” and had not been caused by any “hostile activity” in the region.
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Announcing the names of the five special operators killed in Friday’s helicopter crash, the Department of Defense reiterated that the helicopter crash had been caused by a training accident, stating, “The MH-60 Blackhawk was conducting aerial refueling training when the aircraft experienced an in-flight emergency resulting in the crash.”
The five special operators included Chief Warrant Officer 3 Stephen R. Dwyer, age 38, from Clarksville, Tennessee; Chief Warrant Officer 2 Shane M. Barnes, age 34, from Sacramento, California; Staff Sgt. Tanner W. Grone, age 26, from Gorham, New Hampshire; Sgt. Andrew P. Southard, age 27, from Apache Junction, Arizona; and Sgt. Cade M. Wolfe, age 24, from Mankato, Minnesota.
Each of the U.S. service members killed in Friday’s training accident belonged to the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which is based out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
In response to the tragic training accident, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin released a statement, saying, “We mourn the tragic loss of five U.S. service members during a training accident in the Mediterranean Sea late Friday evening. While we continue to gather more information about this deadly crash, it is another stark reminder that the brave men and women who defend our great nation put their lives on the line each and every day to keep our country safe.”
Austin explained that the U.S. service members who were killed in the training accident “represent the best of America,” emphasizing that the sacrifice and service of the special operators will not be forgotten. He added, “My prayers are with the patriots we have lost today and their families, loved ones, and teammates.”
We mourn the tragic loss of five U.S. service members during a training accident in the Mediterranean Sea late Friday evening.
My prayers are with the patriots we have lost and their families, loved ones, and teammates.https://t.co/vMdK92p5Zw
— Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) November 12, 2023
President Joe Biden also released a statement on X regarding the helicopter crash that occurred over Veterans Day weekend,
“Jill and I mourn the loss of 5 American service members who died when their aircraft crashed in the Mediterranean Sea during a training mission,” he stated. “We are praying for the families and friends who lost a precious loved one — a piece of their soul. Our entire nation shares their grief.”
A new poll shows that 72% of American voters would not be willing to volunteer to fight for their country if the United States faced a major conflict.
According to Newsweek, the new poll of 1,029 likely voters in the United States, conducted by Echelon Insights, a research institute, showed that the overwhelming majority of U.S. adults would not be willing to serve in the United States military if the country faced a major war.
The Echelon Insights poll obtained by Newsweek was conducted Oct. 23-26, following the brutal Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel on Oct. 7, which have led to concerns regarding the potential for escalated conflict in the Middle East and fears that the United States could be entangled in another war.
While 72% of voters indicated that they would not be willing to volunteer to serve in the U.S. military in the face of a major conflict, 21% said they would be willing to volunteer to fight for their country. Roughly 7% of voters answered that they were not sure whether or not they would be willing to fight for the United States.
READ MORE: Americans’ confidence in US military lowest in 26 years: Poll
Tom Shugart, a former Navy attack submarine commander and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Newsweek that the recent poll results require additional context.
“I’m very skeptical of that being accurate because I think the ‘why’ you’re in a war can dramatically change the answer to that question,” he said. “I was in the military before 9/11; a lot of society didn’t really think about the military very much [before then].”
David Eustice, CEO of Military Recruiting Experts, told Newsweek that an overview of American history shows that U.S. citizens “need to be convinced to get into [a] war.” He contrasted how Americans required a reason to support the Vietnam War, while the Afghanistan War “was immediate and had wide support because something happened to our country.”
Eustice added, “If we are convinced that it’s something that we need to do Americans generally will do it; less people joining is another matter and it’s very complex.”
A Daily Mail poll released early last month that was conducted by J.L. Partners showed 64% of 1,000 likely voters were willing to die defending the United States in the event of an invasion; however, the poll showed that 30% of Americans ages 18-29 would rather surrender than die fighting for the United States. The Daily Mail poll also showed that only 46% of Democrats would be willing to die fighting for their country.
In addition to fewer Americans being willing to fight for their country, a Gallup poll conducted in June showed that confidence in the U.S. military dropped to roughly 60%, which represented the lowest confidence in the military since 1997. The poll marked the sixth consecutive year of decline for confidence in the U.S. military.
