Karoline Leavitt Crashes When Asked if Trump Is Abusing His Power (2025)

Donald Trump’s administration is planning to shutter U.S. embassies around the world, continuing to dilute American soft power in its latest effort to shrink the federal workforce.

A memorandum that was part of a broader budget for 2026 that is due to the Office of Budget Management Tuesday outlined a plan to close 10 embassies and 17 consulates, according to Punchbowl News. This includes U.S. missions in Eritrea, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Scotland, and South Sudan, as well as five outposts in France and two in Germany.

In Canada, U.S. consulates in Halifax and Montreal would be significantly downsized, according to the document. The consolidation of U.S. embassies in Canada comes as relations have rapidly deteriorated after Trump announced steep tariffs on aluminum, steel, cars, and autoparts.

The memo stated that the targets for downsizing “were evaluated based on feedback from regional bureaus and the interagency, consular workload, cost per [U.S. direct hire] billet, condition of facilities, and security ratings.”

The State Department is also planning to “reduce or eliminate” its footprint in Mogadishu, Somalia, due to a “non-permissive environment,” according to the memo. Trump claimed in a post on Truth Social Monday that the U.S. would continue to “support the Somali People” against the Houthis attempting to “embed” there. The American mission in Mogadishu is the only U.S. outpost in the country.

State Department officials also pitched closing the America’s Diplomatic Support Center in Baghdad because it was “by far” the most expensive.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has yet to sign off on the reductions, but the recommendations were reportedly made by José Cunningham, who has served as the undersecretary for management at the State Department since April 5.

Last month, Politico reported that the Trump administration was planning to cut the State Department’s budget by nearly half, zeroing out the funding for programs to promote democratic processes and counter drug trafficking, and shuttering up to three dozen embassies. This proposal would shrink the department’s budget from $54.4 billion in 2025 to $28.4 billion in 2026.

At a rally in Nampa, Idaho, on Monday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a message for her colleague, Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

“How can anyone possibly make an objective vote on health care, energy, or war when their own money is tied up in pharmaceutical, oil and gas, or defense company stocks? You can’t. And we saw it just happen with Trump’s corrupt and disastrous and rushed tariff scheme, Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd at the Fighting Oligarchy rally with Senator Bernie Sanders.

“We saw Marjorie Taylor Greene buy that dip,” Ocasio-Cortez added to boos from the audience. “I got one question for her: How much did you make? How much did you make off of people’s despair? How much did you make off that panic? How much did you make off of that suffering?”

According to a public disclosure Monday, Greene bought between $21,000 and $315,000 in stocks last Tuesday and Wednesday in 17 companies including Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, and Palantir, just hours before President Trump announced he was partially pausing some of his tariffs and deepening a possible ethics violation. Trump later bragged about how much money his friends made off of the pause, blatantly admitting to market manipulation.

“I hope we see now that it was all about manipulating the markets so that he could quietly enrich his friends who bought the dip before reversing it all in the morning,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is ignoring the obvious illegality of President Donald Trump’s outrageous request to exile U.S. citizens to foreign prisons.

During an interview Monday night, Fox News host Jesse Watters asked the attorney general whether Trump’s pitch to outsource the imprisonment of U.S. citizens was even legal.

“Now, the president was musing about sending some of the most horrible people in this country down to that megaprison, you know, people that push ladies into subways and hit old ladies with baseball bats to the head. Is that legal to do, is that something you’re allowed to do?” Watters asked.

“Well, Jesse, these are Americans who he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country, and crime is going to decrease dramatically because he has given us the directive to make America safe again,” Bondi replied. “These people need to be locked up as long as they can, as long as the law allows, we’re not gonna let ’em go anywhere. And if we have to build more prisons in our country, we will do it!”

Bondi’s answer is lacking, well, an actual answer—probably because deporting U.S. citizens is not legal. Trump’s plan to exile Americans who are incarcerated to foreign countries not only violates multiple federal codes on the keeping of U.S. prisoners, it would also potentially violate the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

Bondi’s canned answer came just hours after Trump said during a press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele that he had specifically asked her to look into the legality of sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador to be imprisoned. Trump made no mention of building additional prisons in the U.S., but said that the U.S. would be willing to financially support the construction of more prisons abroad.

Clearly, Bondi is waging a political battle as much as a legal one, despite her promises that she would not act merely as an operative for Trump. Bondi must know that committing a “most heinous” crime does not actually disqualify citizens from their legal rights—but when faced with Trump’s despotic plot, the attorney general declined to offer an answer in accordance with U.S. law.