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Can you pass the MAGA moral purity test?
The White House’s Presidential Personnel Office is ticking off Republicans with some of its policy hires – or rejections.
While President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dead set on slashing government jobs via the Department of Government Efficiency, some in the GOP are frustrated that PPO is rejecting political appointees with apparently sterling MAGA credentials. They feel that PPO is flexing its muscles over both agency heads and Republican senators.
Both groups have made requests for specific hires only to see their chosen candidates rejected by PPO, oftentimes with virtually no explanation, multiple high-level spurned applicants told Cockburn. One rejected candidate, for instance, had served as a close aide to a newly appointed cabinet official in their previous post for several years.
There has been plenty of coverage about the loyalty tests that would-be political staffers have to pass prior to getting a job in the second Trump administration. Less has been written about who is making those decisions.
Multiple RNC veterans claimed to Cockburn that, at the Department of Defense, for example, Nick Solheim was “running… transition stuff” from the outside. Solheim co-founded American Moment, a nonprofit which has helped so-called “New Right” Republicans get jobs in the second Trump administration; Solheim’s American Moment co-founder, Saurabh Sharma, is an official in PPO. Within the DoD itself, Dan Caldwell is reported to have a key role in personnel selections, despite his close ties to Kochworld – which Trump has declared to be on a blacklist. Solheim declined to comment.
The Trump White House pushed back on the gripes of the rejected applicants. “Every single appointee in this administration is hired at the pleasure of one person – President Donald J. Trump,” said White House spokesperson Liz Huston. “Never before in history has an administration hired such a huge number of qualified, capable and America First patriots in such little time. We’ve broken records by selecting over 2,000 appointees in less than two months including incredible MAGA warriors like Russ Vought, Tom Homan, Sean Parnell, Harmeet Dhillon, Kash Patel, Kari Lake, Brent Bozell and Jay Bhattacharya.
“Unfortunately not everyone who comes recommended meets the criteria to join the administration.”
AP’s Tulsi SNAFU
Contentious news wire deletes erroneous story about DNI’s comments on Trump-Putin
Ahead of crunch talks today between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, the Associated Press reported that Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had told the press in India that “Trump and Putin are ‘very good friends.’”
A-ha! Trump is a Russian stooge, and the proof is coming from within his own administration. Just one problem, of course: Gabbard never said this.
“This story was updated on Mar. 17, 2025, to delete erroneous reporting that U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘are very good friends,’” the AP added to the bottom of its write-up. “Gabbard was talking about Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.” Then it deleted the original story and replaced it with a revised version. Oops!
“AP has removed its story about U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard saying President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘are very good friends’ because it did not meet our standards,” an AP spokesperson told Cockburn. “We notified customers and published a corrected story with an editor’s note to be transparent about the error.”
The timing could hardly be worse for the global wire service, which currently finds itself embroiled in a small-scale war with the Trump administration. The White House had started restricting the AP’s access to events because the outlet refused to update its style guide to rename the Gulf of Mexico to “the Gulf of America.”
Top Trump officials aren’t letting the AP off easily. “The @AP is total trash,” Alexa Henning, Gabbard’s Deputy Chief of Staff, wrote on X. “This is why no one trusts the maliciously incompetent and purposefully bias media. If this isn’t a clear example of pushing a solely political narrative, then nothing is.”
“Every dollar we earn helps us produce fact-based journalism,” AP brags on its site. Sure…
On our radar
CEASEFIRE NO MORE The Israeli Defense Forces resumed bombing in the Gaza Strip overnight, killing hundreds, after Hamas’s failure to return October 7 hostages.
TRUMP AND PUTIN TALK Presidents Trump and Putin were set to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine this morning. “Many elements of a Final Agreement have been agreed to, but much remains,” Trump posted on Truth Social ahead of the call.
LEAVITT DECRIES DEPORTED ‘HEINOUS MONSTERS’ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt branded the Venezuelan deportees dispatched to prison in El Salvador as “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators” from the briefing room podium Monday, a couple of hours after hosting controversial MMA fighter Conor McGregor there.
Cat fight
Texas moves to ban ‘furry’ subculture from high school
So this is what they meant by Project 2025: an emboldened GOP in Texas has tabled a bill that would outlaw the “furry subculture” in the Lone Star State’s public schools. According to the Dallas Morning News, the Forbidden Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education would ban Texan students “from barking, hissing, meowing and wearing leashes, fur or tails at school. They would also not be permitted to use litter boxes or use licking as a means of grooming.”
Cockburn does not spend all that much time in Texas – and so it is not immediately apparent to him how widespread the “furry” trend is down there, and how many high-schoolers will be left howling at the Moon. The subculture, his nieces tell him, originated in the science fiction and comic book communities in the 1980s, but has grown a little more popular (if that’s the right word) in the internet era.
The bill’s author, State Representative Stan Gerdes, described furry subculture as “unhealthy role playing” and “radical.”
“The bill makes exceptions for mascots, school plays and Halloween,” the DMN is quick to clarify. No risk to pending productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then.
The bill has the backing of Governor Greg Abbott, who last week asserted to a group of Austin pastors that the furry trend “alive and well.” Cockburn hopes the Governor isn’t barking up the wrong tree.
And Gerdes is readying himself for the attack dogs ahead of the bill’s hearing, a date for which has not yet been set. “I fully expect the subculture to show up in full furry vengeance at the committee hearing,” he said in a statement. Hopefully they put some newspaper down.
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