President Donald Trump on Saturday went after Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for her Somali heritage, urging her to leave the country in a social media post, reprising an attack he used several times throughout his time in office.

“She should go back!” he wrote on Truth Social, alongside a video of Omar speaking to a crowd. It was not immediately clear when the event was, but the video of Omar speaking has been circulating among right-leaning social media accounts for at least a couple weeks.

Omar was born in Somalia, fled a civil war in the country when she was 8, and arrived in the U.S. after spending four years in a Kenyan refugee camp in 1995. She became an American citizen in 2000.

Trump’s MAGA allies, including Laura Loomer, were quick to amplify his post across their social media channels.

This isn’t the first time in recent weeks that the president has suggested Omar should be removed from the country.

“You know I met the head of Somalia, did you know that?” he told reporters at the Oval Office in September. “And I suggested that maybe he’d like to take her back. He said ‘I don’t want her.’”

Trump also called out Omar multiple times during his first term, in one instance accusing her of “telling us how to run our country” during the final months of the 2020 campaign.

Her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But the four-term lawmaker told a radio host Friday that she isn’t concerned by rhetoric around her immigration status.

“I have no worry, I don’t know how they’d take away my citizenship and like deport me,” she said on The Dean Obeidallah Show. “But I don’t even know like why that’s such a scary threat. Like I’m not the 8-year-old who escaped war anymore. I’m grown, my kids are grown. Like I could go live wherever I want if I wanted to. It’s a weird thing to wake up every single day to bring that into every single conversation, ‘we’re gonna deport Ilhan.’”

💾

© Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) ripped the Heritage Foundation on Friday, as conservatives clash over the organization’s continued embrace of Tucker Carlson in the wake of his friendly interview this week with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

“Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats,” McConnell, the former Republican Senate majority leader, wrote in a post on X. “But maybe I just don’t know what time it is…”

In the interview, Carlson said Republican supporters of Israel have been “seized by this brain virus.” And Fuentes told Carlson that “organized Jewry” poses the main obstacle to keeping the country together.

But Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president, defended Carlson in a video posted to X Thursday, and even spoke out against deplatforming Fuentes while adding he disagrees with and abhors “things that Nick Fuentes says.”

The real enemy force, Roberts contended, is “the vile ideas of the left.”

In a post on X Friday, Roberts sought to clarify his stance on Fuentes, denouncing among other things, "his vicious antisemitic ideology, his Holocaust denial, and his relentless conspiracy theories that echo the darkest chapters of history." But counsel, and not cancellation, is the best way to respond, he said.

"Our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place," Roberts wrote. "Join us — not to cancel — but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation, and be confident as I am that our best ideas at the heart of western civilization will prevail."

But McConnell, who has spent the past several months sinceleaving leadership working to safeguard his foreign policy and ideological worldviews within the Republican Party, panned the conservative think tank’s stance.

“The ‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it defends,” he said.

The Heritage Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But McConnell isn’t the only Republican senator taking aim at Carlson for his interview.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) also went after the former Fox News host while speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual summit Thursday in Las Vegas. Cruz has long clashed with Carlson over Israel, including on an episode of Carlson’s podcast in July.

"If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil," said Cruz.

💾

© Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

It’s far from the first time the world’s richest man has lobbed broadsides at the administration.

© Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is deploying the state’s National Guard to Austin ahead of this weekend’s planned No Kings rally in the Texas capital, he announced Thursday, as top Republicans around the country vilify the protests as Antifa-linked and led by the radical flank of the Democratic Party.

“Violence and destruction will never be tolerated in Texas," Abbott said in a statement Thursday. “Today, I directed the Texas Department of Public Safety and Texas National Guard to deploy all necessary law enforcement officials and resources to ensure the safety of Austin residents."

In addition to the National Guard, Abbott is surging Texas Rangers, state troopers and Department of Public Safety personnel to Austin, whom he said would be “supported by aircraft and other tactical assets.”

His announcement was sharply criticized by Democrats. “Sending armed soldiers to suppress peaceful protests is what kings and dictators do — and Greg Abbott just proved he's one of them,” Texas House Minority Leader Gene Wu said in a statement.

More than 2,600 No Kings protests are set to occur across the country on Saturday, according to organizers, including on the National Mall in Washington and in Austin. Its organizers include the ACLU, College Democrats of America and the campaign finance group End Citizens United. The first wave of No Kings protests in June was overwhelmingly peaceful and went on almost entirely without incident.

Abbott’s deployments come as Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, decry the planned protests as “hate America” gatherings, involving radical “pro-Hamas” elements, that have pressured otherwise amenable Senate Democrats to refrain from signing onto Republicans' continuing resolution to end the government shutdown.

Democrats, including Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who is set to speak at Saturday’s D.C. rally, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, criticized the Republican rhetoric and encouraged disaffected Americans to attend the rallies.

“In two days, be a part of the largest peaceful protest in modern American history,” Clinton wrote on X. “Join No Kings this Saturday at an event near you to push back on Trump's power grabs and make it clear—we don't do monarchs here.”

💾

© Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

Kamala Harris’ autopsy of the 2024 election is leaving storefronts at a historic rate.

Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher, announced Monday that the former vice president’s book had sold 350,000 copies across the country in its first week on sale, putting it on track to be the year’s top-selling memoir. Just three celebrity memoirs — from Britney Spears, Taylor Swift and Prince Harry — have bested the week one total since 2023, the publisher said.

“In addition to being one of the most interesting books ever written about the experience of running for President of the United States, the success of 107 DAYS proves what a galvanizing and inspiring cultural figure Kamala Harris is,” Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, said in a statement.

But “107 Days,” the former vice president’s account of the frenetic 15 weeks following her elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket and culminating in Donald Trump’s November victory, hasn’t exactly ingratiated Harris to other leaders in her own party.

Top Democrats, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have all bristled at jabs Harris wrote into her book describing the first hours of her campaign and the process by which she selected a running mate.

And the media blitz surrounding her book release, which has seen Harris attempt to walk back some of her criticism and refuse to rule out another presidential run, has only further alienated Democrats still sore over losing the White House to Trump in last year’s election.

But it was Harris’ criticism of former President Joe Biden, her boss in the White House, that drew the most attention. In her memoir, Harris wrote that the White House communications shop under Biden saddled her with unpopular policy priorities and amplified negative stories about her office. She wrote that in hindsight, refraining from pushing him to drop out of the presidential race earlier was reckless.

Still, Harris said on "The View" last week that the two have stayed in touch.

“It’s a good relationship and it’s a relationship that is based on mutual respect, having been in the trenches together, and admiration,” she said. “And it’s sincere.”

💾

© Mario Tama/Getty Images

Barack Obama has waded into the national spotlight for a second time this week, scolding media companies for caving to Trump administration complaints by suspending Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show and adopting the cancel culture they once denounced.

Obama said Thursday that the Kimmel decision is part of an alarming attack on the First Amendment in the aftermath of the killing of Republican activist Charlie Kirk.

“After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like,” Obama wrote on X.

Obama doesn’t routinely comment on the news of the day. His social media post came just days after he delivered a pointed message about Kirk at a forum in Erie, Pennsylvania, saying that the killing of the Turning Point USA founder should be condemned but Americans should be free to criticize his views.

His social media post came hours after Disney announced it was suspending Kimmel.

“This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent — and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating to it,” Obama wrote, linking to a New York Times report that detailed the Washington Post’s firing of Karen Attiah, a columnist who said she was let go for her social media activity following Kirk’s killing.

Kimmel came under fire from White House officials for comments he made during a Monday broadcast of his show that appeared to align Kirk's suspected killer with the MAGA movement.

Democrats have panned the comedian’s suspension, which came after Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatened consequences if the network failed to take action against the comedian in a Wednesday podcast with conservative commentator Benny Johnson.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr told Johnson, threatening “additional work for the FCC.”

Key Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, are now calling for the FCC chair's resignation.

The FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Obama’s comments. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told POLITICO that the notion of government encroaching on free speech had no involvement in Kimmel's suspension, but was the result of a decision by a private company.

"Low-ratings loser Jimmy Kimmel is free to spew whatever bad jokes he wants, but a private company is under no obligation to provide him a platform to do so," she said in a statement.

At the event in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, Obama himself mourned the loss of the Turning Point USA founder while making it clear that he disagrees with much of what Kirk stood for. And he faulted the current administration for the bleak state of American political discourse.

“When I hear not just our current president, but his aides, who have a history of calling political opponents vermin, enemies who need to be targeted, that speaks to a broader problem that we have right now,” Obama said.

💾

© Pool photo by Julia Demaree Nikhinson

Democratic governors are urging President Donald Trump to back off his threats to deploy National Guard troops in cities led by his political opponents across the country.

A letter signed by most of the nation’s Democratic governors argues that Trump’s deployment of soldiers ostensibly to aid in civilian law enforcement is unnecessary and illegal.

“Whether it’s Illinois, Maryland and New York or another state tomorrow, the President’s threats and efforts to deploy a state’s National Guard without the request and consent of that state’s governor is an alarming abuse of power, ineffective, and undermines the mission of our service members,” they said in the letter, organized by the Democratic Governors Association.

Trump has deployed troops to Washington and Los Angeles and threatened to send them to Chicago and other cities led by Democrats in what he has portrayed as an effort to address violent crime, though the soldiers have done little in the way of law enforcement and overall criminality has declined in the U.S.

Trump made Washington the face of his crime crackdown in mid-August, taking control of the district’s police force and sending in the National Guard. The president has also floated plans to send the National Guard to Chicago, telling reporters at the Oval Office on Monday that it is “a killing field” and “disaster.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday announced a contrasting plan to send additional California Highway Patrol officers to several cities in the state to assist local law enforcement in addressing auto theft and drug crimes. Trump sent troops to Los Angeles in response to protests over the administration’s deportation agenda in June.

Chicago officials are preparing for the possible arrival of federal troops by dusting off plans they used for last year’s Democratic National Convention.

Four governors — Josh Green of Hawaii, Ned Lamont of Connecticut, Katie Hobbs of Arizona and Tim Walz of Minnesota — did not sign the letter.

“Every American deserves to feel safe in their neighborhood and community,” the governors wrote. “But instead of actually addressing crime, President Trump cut federal funding for law enforcement that states rely on and continues to politicize our military by trying to undermine the executive authority of Governors as Commanders in Chief of their state’s National Guard.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson in a statement accused the Democrats of “doing publicity stunts,” and said their communities would be safer if they focused on combating crime instead of attacking the president.

“They should listen to fellow Democrat Mayor Muriel Bowser who recently celebrated the Trump Administration’s success in driving down violent crime in Washington DC,” she said.

© J. Scott Applewhite/AP

China is a major consumer of Iranian crude oil, with imports reaching a record 1.8 million barrels per day in March.

💾

© Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Still, there's no one better than the commander in chief to bring Beijing to the negotiation table, the Interior secretary said.

💾

© Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images