Donald Trump wants to crush The Swamp. The leaks, the sneaks, and the secrets are all there. Our writers, David Gardner, Farrah Tomazin, Sarah Ewall-Wice, and Laura Esposito, are sifting through the ooze so you don’t have to. Don’t miss out.
In this week’s news from the ooze: Sonny Joy Nelson, Claudia Tenney, Usha Vance, King Charles III, Thomas Massie, Abigail Jackson, Joe Wilson, Stephen and Katie Miller, Ed Gallrein, Queen Camilla, and Karoline “Machine Gun Lips” Leavitt.
Mom’s the Word for Trump’s Midterm Chances
Donald Trump’s plea to MAGA moms to bear more children is causing a crisis at the White House and Pentagon at a crucial time.
Trump called himself the “fertilization president” and urged a procreation push to uphold a long tradition of autocrats who seek to build a society in their own image. But the policy is backfiring, with key administration staffers taking maternity leave in the lead-up to the Republican Party’s make-or-break midterm elections.
As The Swamp regulars will already know, Karoline “Machine Gun Lips” Leavitt has already left on leave to pop out another baby, who is due any day. Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson also quietly departed last week for maternity leave.
The temporary departures couldn’t come at a worse time for Trump. He will miss his trusted spokespeople as his administration appears to be falling apart at the seams, with Trump targeting women for the axe in his Cabinet.
Assistant to the president Sonny Joy Nelson has also announced she’s expecting a baby boy this October.
And let’s not forget Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, is preparing for baby number four, likely sometime this summer, as suggested by the timing of the couple’s pregnancy announcement on New Year’s Eve. That leaves Usha Vance also expecting her fourth child with Vice President JD Vance in late July.
Not only are they having babies, but they’re all eligible to take advantage of the Trump Accounts launched last year, giving every baby born between 2025 and 2028 a $1,000 federal seed deposit regardless of parents’ income (this is the grifter presidency, after all).
The Pentagon has already named Joel Valdez to step in as acting press secretary while Wilson is away. But who’s got what it takes to keep the briefing room humming while Leavitt is on maternity leave for baby number 2? While the frontrunner appears to be Anna Kelly, a former beauty pageant queen serving as Leavitt’s principal deputy, there’s no shortage of other spinners circling the briefing room.
Take, for instance, Kush Desai, Leavitt’s fellow deputy and former journalist-turned-message enforcer. A Dartmouth grad and ex-Daily Caller reporter, Desai has the résumé of a classic GOP comms operative: RNC, Iowa, convention work, rinse, repeat. Then there’s assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers and regional press secretary Liz Huston — all plausible stand-ins if Team Trump wants someone already steeped in the art of defending the indefensible. Rogers is a former RNC and Fox News alum, while Huston came from the slightly less combustible world of nonprofit comms before entering the White House blast zone. Then there’s the foul-mouthed Abigail Jackson, yet another Leavitt deputy, who once tried to flex against Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty with a meme of a cartoon penguin holding a basketball with a caption “getting f***** dunked on liberal.” Pretty classy for a Notre Dame alum who boasts about being guided by her Catholic faith. But let’s be honest: if this White House is picking a temporary podium warrior, why not go with Kelly, who was crowned Miss State Fair of Virginia in 2019, where, per a gloriously earnest local profile, she championed ending the “apathy epidemic” and boosting youth political engagement. Now her main political engagement strategy seems to involve insisting every inconvenient headline is fake news. It’s a perfect tiara-to-talking-points career arc.
Marco Rubio was handling media duties on Tuesday afternoon. Maybe Trump will give him that job, too. At least he won’t be going on maternity leave.
Take Note, and Call Trump Bill
MAGA Republicans are once again trying to immortalize Donald Trump — this time by putting his face on a brand new $250 bill to mark America’s 250th birthday. Not content with having Trump plastered across government buildings or etched on a $1 commemorative coin, a GOP bill doing the rounds on Capitol Hill is seeking to direct the Treasury Department to print a new $250 Federal Reserve note featuring Trump’s face.
South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson introduced the “Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act” last year, complete with an AI-generated mock-up of the new note plastered with Trump’s face. But with America250 celebrations looming, the bill is now one of a growing pile of Trump-themed gestures from Republicans all seemingly competing in an increasingly crowded race to please Dear Leader. Among the other contenders are Texas Rep. Brandon Gill, who introduced the Golden Age Act, which would replace Benjamin Franklin with Trump on the $100 bill; and New York Rep. Claudia Tenney, who’s pushing to make June 14 — already Flag Day and Trump’s birthday — a federal holiday known as “Trump’s Birthday and Flag Day.”
Coat Check
Days after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner devolved from awkward networking event to active crime scene, there is apparently still unfinished business: the coats. In what may be the least glamorous post-shooting update ever sent to Washington’s political-media elite, attendees received an email informing them that the Hilton is still holding roughly 100 checked coats, plus countless abandoned umbrellas. “Guests can present their claim tickets at the Bell Stand in the lobby,” the note helpfully advised. The dinner’s coat check was abruptly transformed into an evidence zone after the shooting, leaving thousands of guests unable to retrieve jackets, handbags, umbrellas and, in some cases, even spare shoes (a lady can never be too prepared, right?) If no one claims them soon, Washington’s forgotten outerwear may be just one step away from an unceremonious second life at a Goodwill thrift shop.
The Royal Wee
A special throne was laid on for King Charles and Queen Camilla in case they needed a rest stop on their final visit on their triumphant U.S. visit last week. They saw some Shenandoah scenery, attended a Front Royal block party, and toured a horse farm. But, unlike the White House, there wasn’t a bathroom handy and, let’s face it, the royal visitors, aged 77 and 78 respectively, don’t have the retentive powers they may once have enjoyed. So a Virginia gas station was singled out for a “comfort break.” If it was anything like most gas station bathrooms The Swamp has used, let’s hope Charles brought his own toilet seat (as he is rumored to do on tours abroad).
A Massie Waste of Time and Money
The race to unseat Rep. Thomas Massie in a safe red district is turning out to be one of the most expensive ever, but money will never get in the way of Donald Trump’s demand for loyalty. More than $21 million has been spent on ads or reservations to date, making it the second most expensive House primary on record. Ed Gallrein is gunning to replace Trump’s GOP foe in two weeks, with him and outside groups spending more than $12 million on anti-Massie ads, but it remains to be seen whether any of it will work, as Massie has remained ahead in the polls. Is it a sign that Trump’s power over the voters is perhaps slipping?
Gilty Pleasure
Is this another sign that Trump’s hold over Washington is on the wane? When an opulent 22,000 square feet mansion in the exclusive Langley Farms section of McLean couldn’t attract a buyer to meet the $18.5 million purchase price, the owners spent $100,000 covering up all the flashy gold paint, turning the ballroom into a reading room, taking down the mirrored ceilings, and removing the name logo of the estate from the entrance columns. Six months later, the home has sold for $22 million.
An Evening of Etiquette
Last week, former Trump aide Alison Cheperdak joined the New York Young Republican Women’s Caucus for a kind of MAGA finishing school. For $50 a head, the young ladies of the GOP learned the ins and outs of poise, protocol, and decorum from a former White House press assistant staff secretary. After Trump’s first term, Cheperdak rebranded as an etiquette expert, founding Elevate Etiquette to teach “modern manners” and cultivate “grace, confidence, and connection.”
Cheperdak has said her time in the White House shaped her sense of composure, writing in a personal essay, “The White House sharpens you. It demands discretion. It teaches you that tone, timing, and judgment matter as much as credentials.” That the Villanova alum now runs a business devoted to manners after serving in an administration that ended with a rageful—and notably unpolished—mob storming the U.S. Capitol appears, in her telling, entirely beside the point. When she isn’t molding MAGA minds at the Auction House bar on New York’s tony Upper East Side, Cheperdak teaches White House interns the art of etiquette. The Swamp wonders what the lesson plan looked like the day after Trump threatened to annihilate an entire civilization on Truth Social.
