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At an event in Las Vegas last month, Donald Trump offered some rather candid comments about his perspective on Venezuelan oil. “We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them,” the president said. “Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”

As the Republican characterized it, the United States is entitled to a foreign country’s natural resources, not as the result of a diplomatic agreement but because we launched a military attack on it.

The White House has been credibly accused for months of treating Venezuela more as a U.S. colony than as an independent foreign nation, and those public comments certainly didn’t help. Trump nevertheless repeated the rhetoric again Tuesday while speaking to the United Nations General Assembly. MS NOW reported as part of the network’s liveblog coverage:

Trump hailed the oil deal struck between the U.S. and Venezuela last month, after American forces captured then-President Nicolás Maduro in January. Under the agreement, the U.S. will have majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s oil reserves, a deal that the White House said “secures our energy dominance for the next century — all at zero cost to the United States.”

“When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60% of the oil in the world,” Trump said. “So, it’s perhaps the biggest deal.”

He added, in an apparent summary of the White House’s position, “‘To the visitor belong the spoils,’ you’ve all heard that.”

Trump: “In January, at my direction, the United States military conducted a massive military operation penetrating deep into the Venezuelan capital … it was a war. To the victor belong the spoils.”

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-09-22T14:53:53.728Z

In case this isn’t obvious, the Republican president might not have fully appreciated the implications of his misplaced boast. To hear Trump tell it, the U.S. attacked a country, captured its leader, took control of its government, and is now helping itself to that sovereign country’s resources.

It’s the kind of position that makes us sound less like a global superpower and more like pirates.

All of this coincides with new reporting from The Financial Times, which noted that the Trump administration has so far failed to reveal how much money the U.S. has collected and where, exactly, all of the money is.

Under the circumstances, this seems like a subject the president should try to avoid and might hope people would forget. Trump, however, decided to brag about it at the U.N.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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After MS NOW, CNN and Politico sued the Trump administration on Monday over the president banning their reporters from White House grounds, Trump’s communications team sent congressional Republicans talking points Monday night in defense of the president’s decision.

According to the document obtained by MS NOW, the White House wants Republicans to argue that “no president has been more transparent or offered more of his time to the press” and that the First Amendment does not grant reporters access to the White House.

“The First Amendment protects their right to publish; it does not entitle certain outlets and members of the press to a hard pass, briefing room seat, or place in the press pool,” the talking points say.

The White House did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment on the talking points.

The White House argues to congressional Republicans that Trump’s ban isn’t unprecedented, drawing a false equivalence with previous press restrictions from Democratic administrations — such as the Biden administration updating its credentialing rules in 2023. 

That update — which required reporters to live near Washington, D.C., have gone to the White House within the last six months, and have a press pass with the Supreme Court or Congress — led to hundreds of reporters who didn’t meet the criteria losing their hard passes. 

But the Biden administration didn’t ban those reporters from the White House. Most of those reporters simply chose not to renew their hard passes, and the White House still allowed those reporters to apply for a day pass. Only one person — who did not meet all of the news criteria — was denied a hard pass.

The White House links to a press release it issued Monday detailing some Democratic controversies with the press titled “White House Access Is a Privilege — Not a Right.”

The talking points were included in an email titled “White House Highlights,” which was sent to GOP offices in the House and Senate, according to a House GOP aide and a senior GOP Senate aide.

Among other talking points supplied to Republicans are these arguments:

• “No member of the public or the press has a freestanding constitutional right to access the White House complex.”
• “Fabricating facts or reporting verifiable falsehoods from inside the White House complex is an intentional breach of professional decorum and it is severely disruptive to the mission and purpose of the White House.”

Despite the claims of “fabricating facts or reporting verifiable falsehoods,” the talking points do not identify any specific report by MS NOW, CNN or Politico as an example of such conduct, and Trump has said his ban isn’t because of any particular story.

Gabe Rottman, the vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told MS NOW that while the White House is correct that the president and his communications staff have “a fair amount of discretion in how it manages press access to the White House grounds,” the circumstances are different when decisions are based on viewpoints.

Rottman said, based on existing case law, one thing was “abundantly clear”: The White House can’t bar press access based on viewpoints and the content of reporting.

He said the president’s own statements, both on Truth Social and during a press conference on Friday, had provided “all of the evidence one would need to determine that the ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico from physically entering the White House at all is because the White House perceives their coverage as as overly negative.”

“That’s what’s called under the First Amendment ‘viewpoint discrimination,’ and it is anathema to the U.S. Constitution,” Rottman said.

In a lawsuit that MS NOW, CNN and Politico jointly filed on Monday in the D.C. District Court, the media organizations note that the White House grounds are a “nonpublic forum,” as established in Ateba v. Leavitt, and because it’s a nonpublic forum, the government can’t discriminate based on viewpoints.

Additionally, when the Secret Service revoked the White House press passes of reporters from these media organizations, the government agency was breaking the code of federal regulations, which states that the Secret Service’s granting of these press passes must be “guided solely by the principle of whether the applicant presents a potential source of physical danger to the President and/or the family of the President so serious as to justify his or her exclusion from White House press privileges.”

Trump himself has also referred to the ban as a “ban on the free press.” And in explaining his motive, Trump said, “there’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” and that “if they want to write them, that’s fine, but I don’t have to let them into my — into the people’s house.”

And when reporters pressed Trump on whether there was a particular reason or story that had triggered his ban, he said no.

“It’s really just cumulative stories over the last two years,” Trump said, further claiming without evidence that the organizations “purposely write negative news” and do so “because they want to try and diminish the Republicans.”

The talking points also include a quote from President Trump, which he issued on Truth Social on Monday, about the ban.

“The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish,” Trump wrote. “It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Below is the talking points the White House sent to congressional Republicans in their entirety:

Taking on the Fake News Media Bias: “The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW! Thank you for your attention to this matter.” – President DONALD J. TRUMP

• No President has been more transparent or offered more of his time to the press. In addition to working around the clock to serve the American people, President Trump also makes time to bring them into the conversation and answer reporters’ questions on a near daily basis.
• The First Amendment protects their right to publish; it does not entitle certain outlets and members of the press to a hard pass, briefing room seat, or place in the press pool.
• For years, Democrat Administrations have restricted, punished, and locked out the press.
• No member of the public or the press has a freestanding constitutional right to access the White House complex.
• Fabricating facts or reporting verifiable falsehoods from inside the White House complex is an intentional breach of professional decorum and it is severely disruptive to the mission and purpose of the White House.
• Read More: White House Access Is a Privilege — Not a Right

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Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.

* Iowa wasn’t expected to be one of the nation’s most important battlegrounds this year, but it’s clearly become one. In fact, there’s fresh evidence that the state, which has become a Republican stronghold in recent years, is shifting in a blue direction.

The latest Marist poll shows Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek and leading Republican U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson among registered voters, 50% to 42%. The same statewide survey found Rob Sand, Iowa’s Democratic state auditor, with an even larger advantage over Republican Zach Lahn, 54% to 42%. Most other recent polling in the state has shown both races as much closer contests.

Nevertheless, it is against this backdrop that Hinson took new steps to distance herself from the White House this week, insisting that she wants to see the war with Iran “brought to a successful and immediate end.” It’s a politically convenient move that is sharply at odds with the GOP congresswoman’s recent legislative record.

* With six weeks to go before Election Day, the mess surrounding Missouri’s congressional district map is still messy. Roll Call reported late Monday, “A federal appeals court on Monday reinstated a Republican-preferred congressional map for Missouri, setting up a likely third Supreme Court fight over the district lines for the Show-me State. The ruling from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit found that, because the state used a map drawn by legislators in 2025 for the August primary, the state must use it for the November election.”

* George W. Bush has generally steered clear of the political arena, but the former president is poised to host a fundraiser in Dallas with outgoing Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas in support of six GOP Senate candidates in battleground states. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, however, was excluded from the list of beneficiaries.

* In Michigan’s closely watched U.S. Senate race, the latest Suffolk University poll in Michigan finds former Democratic state health official Abdul El-Sayed ahead of former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, 47% to 40%.

* Amid recent chatter that Republicans might have to give up on North Carolina’s Senate race, Semafor reported that a key super PAC aligned with the party, Old North Action, had planned to invest $6.5 million in campaign ads in the state, but it recently decided to drop that ad buy. Recent polls have consistently shown former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper leading former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley.

* And speaking of the RNC, Whatley’s successor, incumbent RNC Chair Joe Grutens, told Fox Business on Tuesday morning, “This is not your grandparents’ Democrat [sic] Party. … They want to get rid of July 4.” For the record, I’m not aware of any Democratic officials or candidates who’ve endorsed the elimination of Independence Day.

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In a social media post Sunday, President Donald Trump announced a major update to the “triumphal arch” he intends to build in Washington. The president declared that the 250-foot structure will now also be a “top grade military complex” that launches drones and houses snipers on its roof. That’s quite a shift from previous design plans, which imagined the arch as a tourist attraction with visitors able to purchase tickets to a planned observation deck.

The surprise transformation of the proposed arch’s intended purpose is likely grounded less in military needs than in flailing legal stratagems. But combining a fixation on aesthetics with the threat of violence is nothing new for this president. Trump’s vision of a utopia has become inseparable from the tropes of dystopia as he works to transform America into a beautiful police state.

Combining a fixation on aesthetics with the threat of violence is nothing new for this president.

None of the agencies working on the arch have confirmed Trump’s claim that the change comes at “the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes.” The president’s assertion, however, closely resembles the administration’s arguments in ongoing lawsuits attempting to halt construction of a massive White House ballroom. It’s not hard to see Trump pre-emptively shifting the supposed necessity for the arch now to head off potential delays down the road.

If such a request from the Pentagon does exist, it will likely make its way into court filings in the coming days. A group of veterans filed a lawsuit in February hoping to halt the arch, which they said would “dishonor their military and foreign service and the legacy of their comrades and other veterans buried at Arlington National Cemetery.” The federal judge handling the case previously ordered the administration to give the court 14 days notice before any construction begins. In the meantime, the administration has charged ahead: Construction is planned to begin in November despite reservations from local officials.

Unsurprisingly, the president seems not to have considered how off-putting his announcement would sound. It’s bad enough that even the National Park Service admitted that the arch would detract from other Washington landmarks. Even worse are the optics of placing an arch classically meant to celebrate conquests between two monuments reflecting on the horrors of war. Turning one of the main routes for commuters and travelers from Virginia to enter Washington into a towering security checkpoint, where drones can be launched at a moment’s notice and snipers monitor entry below, feels like the kind of thing that would make citizens feel less safe.

But the Trump administration has happily melded violence and aesthetics as part of its governing ethos. The Ultimate Fighting Championship bout held on the White House lawn this summer was billed as a tribute to the nation’s founding and treated the hypermasculine violence on display as its own form of aspirational aesthetic. Two men pummeling in each other in a cage for entertainment and the glory of America perfectly encapsulates the shallow nationalism Trump has hoped to instill with his various vanity projects.

The “triumphal arch” decision likewise serves as a counterpart to the National Guard’s continuing deployment to Washington. One of several deployments launched nationwide last year, the occupation is the last one standing thanks to federal control of the city. While many of those surges were to help suppress protesters rallying against Trump’s immigration policies, the Washington deployment was launched to supposedly deal with a “crime emergency” in the capital as part of the “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force.”

There’s little separating Trump’s aesthetic vision for the country from the brutality it’s meant to at some points help mask and at other times accentuate.

In the year since first arriving in the capital, National Guard members have been seen patrolling the city with very large guns, while also taking part in beautification projects and snow removal. Normalizing the presence of armed soldiers on the streets through trash cleanups and other public works feels like the tactic of an occupying force attempting to win the hearts and minds of the conquered. (One wonders if the “Star Wars” universe’s Galactic Empire ever deployed its Imperial Stormtroopers to plant flowers while also hunting down dissidents.)

In truth there’s little separating Trump’s aesthetic vision for the country from the brutality it’s meant to at some points help mask and at other times accentuate. The authoritarianism he’s wielded to muscle through his projects has made his arch and ballroom into monuments to the blunt application of power. It’s unsurprising then that Trump has failed to recognize the dissonance of placing snipers alongside a massive statue of an angel watching over the city he is attempting to make his own fiefdom.

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In the wake of spooky incidents of artificial intelligence agents defying their creators’ commands and rules, the great fear of the day is the prospect of rogue superintelligence that turns on humankind — and extinguishes it. But a recent incident in which the United States reportedly almost sparked a war with China based on false intelligence generated by AI reveals that there is a far more immediate threat to worry about: the fallibility of humans.

CNN, citing four sources familiar with the episode, reported that this spring a special operations command analyst put together an urgent intelligence report claiming that “a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.” The implications of the report pushed the U.S. to serious action — members of the U.S. military were “preparing to board the ship” and “military planes were in the air.” But at the last minute officials dug a little further into the report and found that a chatbot the analyst had used had “inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying.” (U.S. Special Operations Command Pacific and the Pentagon did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.)

The U.S. was astonishingly close to a military confrontation with the world’s second most powerful country based on what appears to have been an AI hallucination. That we got so close to accidentally triggering a global war should drive home the point that the imminent threat surrounding AI isn’t some runaway malevolent superintelligent entity like Skynet from the “Terminator” franchise. It’s humans misusing AI.

CNN reported that “across the U.S. military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the U.S. collects and selecting targets for strikes to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and supply chains.” AI is probably useful for some of these data crunching tasks. But at the same time, we know chatbots are entirely unreliable in their abilities to distinguish between things that are true and untrue, which is of course the entire point of the enterprise of gathering intelligence. The problem here was with how the military used AI and failed to check sources, not AI itself. (CNN reported that it’s unclear if the chatbot used was a commercial one or one internal to the military.)

AI isn’t being used to intelligently assist human effort, but rather cheaply substitute for it in tasks where it is inappropriate to do so.

In low-stakes scenarios, the inability of AI to reliably ascertain facts is mostly just a nuisance. For example, companies might decide that using chatbots to provide customer service to people seeking information on merchandise they bought from a website is worth the costs of some customers and workers receiving inaccurate information, because they work well enough most of the time while reducing costs. (My suspicion is, however, that the rising presence of shoddy AI in our daily lives is contributing to the rising negative sentiment surrounding it.)

But there are many scenarios in which the accuracy of information is paramount — and yet people are using AI with unwarranted trust in these scenarios anyway.

Journalism is about reporting the truth — and yet prominent journalists have used AI-hallucinated quotes. The law requires a careful reading of the law and appraisal of precedent, and yet due to AI, lawyers have cited hallucinated cases and judges have issued opinions using fake quotes and incorrect case outcomes. The purpose of education is to learn, yet both students and teachers are delegating the tasks of writing papers and grading them to AI. Perhaps my favorite recent example is that a new book intended to shed light on AI’s relationship with truth turned out to be filled with AI-fabricated quotes.

What we see in these examples are the ways AI isn’t being used to intelligently assist human effort, but rather cheaply substitute for it in tasks where it is inappropriate to do so. None of this is to say that defense analysts or journalists or students or lawyers should never use AI, but rather that they have to be disciplined and judicious about doing so.

One would think this is common sense, but a combination of naivete about new technology, sloth and pressure from the capitalist class to reduce labor costs seems to have pushed many of us over the edge into self-sabotage.

In the case of the reported near-clash with China, ultimately a human did help us get back on track. But CNN’s report suggests that we got far too close to a potential catastrophe than we should have, and that something was wrong in the chain of action.

Human agency is also at play when it comes to the superintelligence scenario. AI frontier labs are deliberately working on creating scenarios that make dangerously powerful and uncontrollable AI more potent. A humanity-wrecking super-intelligence isn’t an inevitability, but would be the product of human engineering — and hubris.

As AI becomes more and more advanced, and people are inclined to delegate more of their mental work to it, one wonders if we will slowly lose our remaining instinct for skepticism of our machines. I think of the Soviet duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, who in 1983 broke protocol when he declined to tell his superiors that early warning systems detected incoming missiles from the U.S. because his intuition told him that the system was malfunctioning. His experience told him that the apparent nature of the attack looked implausible and that other radars didn’t show evidence of an attack. And he was correct — there was a malfunction.

That judgment likely saved us from a global nuclear catastrophe. But what happens when humans train themselves to delegate their judgment to unfathomably powerful machines that have no such powers? I don’t think we want to find out.

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A federal judge on Monday dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought by Stefan Passantino, a former lawyer for onetime White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, against MS NOW legal analyst and law professor Andrew Weissmann.

In a 15-page order, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan granted Weissmann’s motion for judgment on the pleadings in the case Passantino brought over based on a September 2023 social media post in which the legal analyst suggested Passantino “coached [Hutchinson] to lie” during her closed-door depositions before the House Jan. 6 committee.

AliKhan ruled that Passantino failed to show that Weissmann was negligent because Hutchinson’s testimony gave Weissmann reasonable grounds to say Passantino had “coached” her to lie.

The ruling effectively ends the lawsuit in federal district court.

Weissmann and a spokesperson for Passantino did not immediately respond to requests for comment from MS NOW on Monday.

Passantino, who served as a senior lawyer in the first Trump administration, represented Hutchinson during her first three closed-door interviews with the Jan. 6 committee. Hutchinson later changed attorneys and provided additional testimony to investigators about her interactions with Passantino. She became well-known after her testimony at a televised Jan. 6 committee hearing in June 2022.

Hutchinson told the committee that Passantino had never explicitly instructed her to lie and had told her not to lie. But she also testified that he advised her that saying she did not recall certain events was an acceptable response and that “the less you remember, the better.”

The Jan. 6 committee later said it had obtained evidence that a lawyer advised a witness she could claim not to remember facts she actually recalled. Multiple news organizations subsequently identified Passantino as that lawyer.

Weissmann, a former prosecutor on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, wrote on X in September 2023 that another lawyer was Hutchinson’s “good lawyer,” adding in parentheses: “Not the one who coached her to lie.” Passantino sued days later, alleging Weissmann’s post “deeply damaged his 30-year reputation and caused him to lose significant business and income.”

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