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No 'going back' for Elon Musk after calling for Trump impeachment, says Steve Bannon

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No 'going back' for Elon Musk after calling for Trump impeachment, says Steve Bannon

President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference with Elon Musk in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, May 30, in Washington.

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Elon Musk “crossed the Rubicon” when he echoed sentiments on his social media platform X, calling for President Trump to be impeached, says former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

Trump and Musk have been locked in a very public fight this week after Musk has spent days bashing the “big, beautiful bill” — a multi-trillion dollar spending bill key to unlocking the president’s agenda currently in the Senate. In return, the president threatened to cut the federal government’s contracts with Musk’s companies, including SpaceX.

Bannon told Morning Edition that “there’s no going back” for Musk after his feud with the president. The right-wing populist podcaster was an early Trump backer. Bannon served as the 2016 Trump campaign’s CEO and then went on to become chief strategist and senior adviser to the president.

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Bannon went to prison last year for refusing to testify in a congressional investigation of Trump. He also has pleaded guilty to crimes in New York state. In January, Bannon told NPR he believed Trump would listen to the MAGA populist movement that helped him secure two presidencies over the billionaires backing his inauguration – Musk among them.

NPR reached out to Musk for comment but has not yet received a response.

Bannon discussed the public feud between Trump and Musk with NPR’s Steve Inskeep.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Steve Inskeep: Do you believe it is good for Trump to have this very public breakup?

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Steve Bannon: Whether it’s good or not, it’s a reality. The president’s done gone out of his way to make sure that Elon had every opportunity, all the support, admiration, resources. [Trump] took him and his son and some of his children into his family [for] Christmas, all that. Elon asked for an extension to stay and the president denied it. And I think that was the beginning of this friction. And as I’ve said before, since December, this was inevitable. And so I just think the president needs to deal with it as a national security issue now.

Steve Bannon speaks during the Semafor World Economy Summit 2025 at Conrad Washington on April 23 in Washington, DC.

Steve Bannon speaks during the Semafor World Economy Summit 2025 at Conrad Washington on April 23 in Washington, DC.

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Inskeep: I think that that one thing you said there I had not specifically heard before. You believe that Elon Musk had asked for an extension of his time as a special government employee?

Bannon: Yeah, I think it’s Marc Caputo at Axios, said that Elon had asked for an extension or some sort of workaround to the limitation of his time. And it was denied. And the president said it was time to kind of move on. And also, remember, the president is sitting there saying, like, where’s the trillion dollars? You said you were going to get a trillion dollars of waste, fraud, abuse. And quite frankly, he hasn’t turned up any fraud. So there’s been a lot of tension. And Elon Musk, like the 11 year old child he is, didn’t take it very well.

Note: Axios reported on June 3 that Musk sought to remain working as a “special government employee” beyond his statutorily allowed 130-day contract but was denied. NPR has not independently confirmed this.

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Inskeep: Is Trump really going to follow your advice to cancel his government contracts, his companies government contracts?

Bannon: Steve, look, I think that this is not personal now. I think we have as a country a national security issue here. We have an individual that The New York Times has said has a massive drug problem, and that has not been refuted. We have an individual that has a deep financial and business relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. And we know he’s asked for private briefings of top secret information. He’s also somehow involved in this invitation to President Xi Jinping to come to the inauguration. You have someone whose legal status is in question. You can’t deport people from all over the world because the Third World countries that came here at the invitation of the Biden regime and we’ve a white South African who may be here illegally were here. It’s just not right.

Note: Musk has held U.S. citizenship since 2002, according to PolitiFact. The Washington Post reported in October 2024 that Musk worked illegally in the U.S. in the late ’90s; Musk denied his work was unauthorized. The New York Times reported last month that Musk used ketamine, ecstasy, and psychedelic mushrooms during his campaigning for Trump last year. NPR has not independently confirmed the NYT’s reporting.

Inskeep: As dramatic as all of this seems right now, Bill Ackman, another billionaire in the trump coalition, said publicly they should make up. Elon seemed to agree with that. Politico is now reporting that there’s a call of some kind scheduled with the president. Is it possible this whole thing was all just a social media tempest and it’s going to blow over?

Bannon: He crossed the Rubicon. It’s one thing to make comments about spending on the bill. There’s another thing about what he did. You can’t sit there and first or try to destroy the bill. You can’t come out and say kill the present most important legislative occurrence of this first term, number one. Number two, he crossed the Rubicon by this outrageous comparison to the Epstein files about saying President Trump should be impeached, replaced by JD Vance. This is so outrageous. It has crossed the line. He’s crossed the Rubicon and there’s no going back.

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Note: Trump is currently serving his second and final constitutionally allowed term as president. Trump told CNN Friday that he won’t speak to Musk “for a while.”

This digital story was edited by Treye Green. The radio version was edited by Reena Advani and produced by Barry Gordemer, Julie Depenbrock and Nia Dumas.

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks at the Reagan Library on Sept. 9, 2025, in Simi Valley, Calif. Barrett discussed and signed copies of her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.

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Even as the Supreme Court was handing down one legal thunderbolt after another last week, the justices were quietly releasing their annual financial reports. Justice Samuel Alito was the only sitting justice to request an extension, which he has done for 15 years. The disclosures do not give a complete account of the justices’ total income and wealth, but they give insights into their concertgoing, guest professorships and even their involvement in youth sports.

In addition to their salaries, much of the justices’ reported income came from their book deals. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson led the pack earning more than $1.1 million last year for a total of roughly $4 million since her memoir, Lovely One, was published in 2024.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy also reported income from published books. Earnings from their books ranged from $849,000 for Barrett, to $300,000 for Gorsuch and $88,000 for Sotomayor, whose books include her 2013 autobiography and five children’s books. Justice Clarence Thomas, who previously earned $1.5 million for his 2007 memoir, listed no publisher payments last year, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of 13 co-authors of a 2016 legal treatise, also received no payments last year. Kavanaugh is said to be working on a memoir but he listed no payments for the anticipated book. Alito does have a book coming out in the fall, but with his financial report still outstanding, there is no data on how much he was paid for the work in 2025.

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The only two sitting justices who have not written books are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan.

Many justices also earned income from teaching at law schools. Roberts reported income from New England Law, located in Boston, and Gorsuch reported teaching income from George Mason University in Virginia. Thomas taught classes at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Barrett and Kavanaugh taught at Notre Dame Law School. Barrett graduated from the school and began teaching there 23 years ago; Kavanaugh has family connections to Notre Dame.

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.

A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.

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City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”

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Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.

Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.

“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.

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Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.

Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.

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“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.

@fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @Bogs4NY via X

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The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.

Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.

“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.

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Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”

He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.

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Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.

On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

The Justice Department sent letters warning election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting, a spokesperson for the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday.

The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”

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“The Department sent these letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner with their obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare, but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson are among those who said they received the letters from the Justice Department.

The letters say state election officers “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” noncitizen voting. They further specify that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a statewide voting registration list or who facilitates noncitizens’ receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability.

“An intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation” of federal law, the letters said.

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Henderson wrote on social media that the threats constitute “truly bizarre behavior.”

“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts.”

The letters are the latest move in the Justice Department’s campaign to assert more federal control over state elections.

While some states have complied with the administration’s demands that they hand over voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for resisting. So far, 11 different federal courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s efforts to seize voter rolls.

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