Donald Trump wants to crush The Swamp. The leaks, the sneaks, and the secrets are all there. Our writers, David Gardner, Farrah Tomazin, and Sarah Ewall-Wice, are sifting through the ooze so you don’t have to. Don’t miss out.
In this week’s news from the ooze… Ritchie Torres, Marcelito Pomoy, Lord Grantham, Erin Elmore, Brenna Flynn, Amy Coney Barrett, Barron Trump, Abraham Williams, John Ratcliffe, Romero Britto, Dan Scavino, Marco Rubio, and The Trumpettes.
Yoga-Loving Tulsi’s Very Awkward Position
Tulsi Gabbard’s position as Donald Trump turned the heat on Latin America has raised eyebrows and suspicions in Washington.
Trump’s Director of National Intelligence was in full Sun Salutation Lunge pose doing yoga on a twilight beach in photos she posted on social media on January 1, as the countdown to the operation to snatch Nicolás Maduro ticked down.
“My heart is filled with gratitude, aloha and peace,” the former Democratic congresswoman for Hawaii wrote alongside the happy snaps, taken by her husband Abrahama Williams in her home state at, according to his Instagram, sunrise.
It was posted around the time Special Forces first planned to capture Maduro. According to Trump, they had to stand down because the weather wasn’t “perfect.” It is almost unthinkable that the Director of National Intelligence would not have known about the preparations—making her comment about “peace” all the more intriguing.
Two days later, with U.S. forces zeroing in on Caracas, Trump’s inner circle clustered in a makeshift “situation room” at Mar-a-Lago to watch events unfold, but Gabbard, the head of the entire U.S. intelligence community, was nowhere to be seen.
Nor did Gabbard appear in the aftermath when Trump fronted the press flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, whose agency she oversees.
Gabbard’s office didn’t respond to The Swamp in time for publication when asked where she’s been or what role she played in Maduro’s capture.
She did, however, post a rather lukewarm and very belated pat on the back to Trump on Tuesday, saying “kudos” to U.S. forces on X for the “flawless execution” of the Maduro mission and retreading the usual talking points about borders and drug cartels.
It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.
Gabbard’s absence could have two reasons, say D.C. insiders. One is that the Iraq war veteran made her feelings public on the issue of intervention in 2019 when she said the U.S. “should stay out of Venezuela.” In 2020, she was again warning against foreign interventions.
Then, last October, she told a conference in Bahrain that the “endless cycle of regime change or nation-building” was over thanks to Trump. To that end, she probably didn’t want to be involved. Or she wasn’t invited.
Either way, some wonder if Gabbard’s prospects going forward are bleak. For an administration that treats visibility as a loyalty test, the omission was glaring. Her low profile gets even more noticeable given the documented friction between Trump and Gabbard.
While the military veteran has aligned herself with Trump politically in recent years, Venezuela wasn’t the first time she has broken with him on foreign policy. She publicly criticized Trump’s 2020 assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, warning it could provoke a wider war. She also found herself at odds with the president last year over Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Those views earned her credibility with anti-interventionists, but may have cost her trust inside an administration now selling Maduro’s capture as both righteous and inevitable.
It’s also possible, of course, that the administration believes war is for manly men and having Gabbard in the photo would fly in the face of Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “No girls allowed” rule.
Donald Trump Jr. and a Lucrative Gamble on a Caracas Kidnap Plot
When Donald Trump Jr. took jobs in the prediction-market companies Kalshi and Polymarket, he could never have forecast finding himself caught in the middle of a betting scandal that imperiled his father’s top-secret attack on Venezuela.
Trump the Elder proudly announced on Saturday morning that his mission to extricate Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, took the dictator by surprise and went off without a hitch.
But it seems that at least one person knew about the raid in advance—because they made a profit of over $400,000 with a wager that Maduro would be ousted from power by January 31.
Jokers claimed online that Donald himself—or perhaps his youngest son, Barron Trump—placed the bet. There is, of course, absolutely no suggestion that anyone in the Trump family or inner circle sought to profit from insider knowledge.
But it is an embarrassment for Trump’s money-hungry namesake son, who joined Polymarket’s advisory board in August 2025 while also investing in the company through his investment firm, 1789 Capital.
“Polymarket cuts through media spin and so-called ‘expert’ opinion by letting people bet on what they actually believe will happen in the world,” Trump Jr. said at the time. He is also a strategic advisor to another prediction company, Kalshi.
In this case, many believe the gambler had more than a crystal ball to work with. A new account invested more than $30,000 on Maduro being ousted a few days before the overnight raid on Saturday.
By the time the news emerged that the Venezuelan leader and his wife had been kidnapped from their bedroom and were on their way to New York, the trader had profited to the tune of $436,759.
It’s still not known who was behind the Maduro betting, but Trump argued that members of Congress were not informed in advance of the strike because he feared the news would leak and risk the not-so-surprise mission.
No doubt there were many on a need-to-know basis. It was reported that both the Washington Post and New York Times knew in advance but held off on reporting the information so as not to endanger service members and Trump admitted tipping off oil execs before the go ahead. Hardly watertight.
There’s nothing illegal about insider trading in prediction markets, so those in the know ahead of the strikes could cash in. Now, New York Rep. Ritchie Torres wants to put a stop to that.
The Democratic lawmaker is introducing a bill to make it illegal for government officials to bet on political prediction markets based on nonpublic material the ban would apply to federally elected officials, including members of Congress, as well as political appointees and executive branch employees who obtain such info in the course of their official duties.
Naturally, that would include the president and his family. But not their pals waiting for brunch at the Mar-a-Lago omelet bar.
Caviar and Carnage: Welcome to 2026 M-A-L-Style
If MAGA rang in 2026 as a brand, it would come in two flavors: gold-plated excess and blood-on-the-table chaos. Down in Palm Beach, Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve bash unfolded exactly as you’d expect. There was a caviar station by the pool—because nothing says “we love working-class voters” like fish eggs under chandeliers—while Don Jr. double-dipped the night as a birthday celebration.
Dan Scavino’s fiancée, Erin Elmore, popped up on the big screen in a nostalgic The Apprentice Season 3 cameo, reminding guests that reality TV is still the beating heart of Trumpism. Filipino singer Marcelito Pomoy wowed the First Lady with his ability to sing in both baritone and mezzo-soprano, while the Trumpettes, a female fan club set up in 2015, soaked up the champagne in style. “President Trump’s larger-than-life NYE celebration was sheer perfection!” quipped founding member Toni Holt Kramer.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, Butterworth’s hosted a New Year’s Eve bash with a very different vibe. The shindig was open to the public for $150 a ticket and doubled as a belated one-year anniversary for the right-wing watering hole, which opened in October 2024 as a modest venture between Uber legal counsel Alex Butterworth, chef Bart Hutchins, Julian Gagnon, and former Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam. That, of course, was a month before Donald Trump’s election victory turned the Capitol Hill eatery into MAGA’s favorite hangout. The New Year’s shindig/first anniversary bash was so lit that Kassam ended up with a bleeding hand, which he vaguely recalls cutting on a champagne bottle.
The State of the Art
The Swamp owes Erin Elmore, Director of Art in Embassies at the U.S. Department of State, an apology. We thought that maybe the colorful picture she posted on Instagram was painted by a child, perhaps a relative of hers or fiancé Dan Scavino.
But we are reliably told it is the new State Dept. logo, created by “Brazilian-born and Miami-made” artist Romero Britto, who has painted luminaries such as King Charles and Queen Camilla, Elton John, and Sly Stallone. And of course, Donald Trump. Silly us.
The Trump Ban ACB Might Raise Eyebrows At
Donald Trump’s newly expanded travel ban quietly kicked in this week—and tucked inside it is a detail the White House has made zero effort to explain: a blanket ban on all international adoptions from every one of the 39 affected countries. That means Americans are now barred from adopting children from Nigeria, Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, and dozens of other nations, regardless of humanitarian need, existing family ties, or years-long adoption proceedings. Paperwork almost completed? Too bad. The administration hasn’t announced this shift, defended it, or even acknowledged it. It has simply happened by bureaucratic stealth. Had this policy been in place years ago, some of the most prominent figures in Trump-aligned America would be telling very different family stories. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, for instance, adopted two children from Haiti, telling the Library of Congress Book Festival last year: “Haiti was then the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It was also close enough to the States… as opposed to some place like China or Russia, which would have been far more inaccessible.” Under Trump’s new rules, such adoptions would never have been allowed. Adding to the absurdity: the State Department’s website still insists that intercountry adoption is one of its “highest priorities.” Apparently, just not in practice. In Trumpworld, even babies are collateral damage.
And MAGA Ever After…
It seems life after the Trump White House is going well for Taylor Budowich, who is officially off the market. The former White House deputy chief of staff proposed to his girlfriend of two years, Brenna Flynn, last week in Carmel, California, setting the moment to Instagram like a perfectly staged lifestyle shoot. Think windswept coastline, soft light, and just enough romance to make the algorithm swoon. Budowich followed up his grand proposal with what was initially billed as a birthday celebration for Flynn, which seamlessly morphed into a full-blown surprise engagement party. If there was ever a reminder that in Trumpworld, even private milestones double as content, this was it. For those keeping score, Budowich is no minor figure in MAGA media circles.
He joined Trump’s inner circle in 2021 and was a key player in plotting his 2024 comeback, leading the MAGA Inc. super PAC and Securing American Greatness, a nonprofit group that collects “dark money.” After leaving the White House in September, Budowich returned to the private sector where he’s now the president of The Sovereign Advisors, a Washington-based public affairs and crisis communications firm, and recently scored a gig at the U.S.-China Commission, a bipartisan commission created by Congress to monitor the relationship between the two super powers focusing on the economy, trade and national defense. Flynn, for her part, is a freelance stylist and head of marketing for luxury menswear brand Stefano Ricci North America whose silk ties retail for $350. MAGA populism strikes again.
John Kerry’s Special Relationship
John Kerry wasn’t a fan of the British show Downton Abbey until he was in pain with a bad back while Secretary of State. Unable to sleep, he went into his den and turned on an episode of the upstairs-downstairs soap at 3 a.m. “Sir, I have to tell you I was still there at noon,” the one-time presidential candidate told the show’s star, Hugh Bonneville, who plays Lord Grantham. Trump tells a similar story about Fox News.
