Rene Burgess

Believer, Leader, Husband, Father, Small Business Owner, retired Army Colonel, soccer fan & official,

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

“The Deal with Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all!” President Donald J. Trump 🇺🇸

[Mr. Star Spangled MAGA @4thOfJuly365]

I know how Elon Musk became a trillionaire, but I don't know how Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Nancy Pelosi became millionaires.

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

On what planet is this an attack on Republicans?

We have majority support for the bill.

In this rare circumstance, we should put it on the floor and keep debating it until it passes.

That’s not an attack on Republicans.

That’s a plan of attack against voter fraud.

[Rene Burgess @rayburge3]

I love this President!

[Pete Hegseth @PeteHegseth]

Thank you Mr. President.

The @DeptofWar will make this happen!

[Secretary Kennedy @SecKennedy]

Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?

You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.

I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.

In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.

I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.

Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.

Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months).

His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.

Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.

[JD Vance @JDVance]

A while ago, probably in 2017, I appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox show to talk about God knows what. Afterwards a name I barely knew sent me a DM on twitter and told me I did a great job. It was Charlie Kirk, and that moment of kindness began a friendship that lasted until today.

Charlie was fascinated by ideas and always willing to learn and change his mind. Like me, he was skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016. Like me, he came to see President Trump as the only figure capable of moving American politics away from the globalism that had dominated for our entire lives. When others were right, he learned from them. When he was right--as he usually was--he was generous. With Charlie, the attitude was never, "I told you so." But: "welcome."

Charlie was one of the first people I called when I thought about running for senate in early 2021. I was interested but skeptical there was a pathway. We talked through everything, from the strategy to the fundraising to the grassroots of the movement he knew so well. He introduced me to some of the people who would run my campaign and also to Donald Trump Jr. "Like his dad, he's misunderstood. He's extremely smart, and very much on our wavelength." Don took a call from me because Charlie asked him too.

Long before I ever committed (even in my mind) to running, Charlie had me speak to his donors at a TPUSA event. He walked me around the room and introduced me. He gave me honest feedback on my remarks. He had no reason to do this, no expectation that I'd go anywhere. I was polling, at that point, well below 5 percent. He did it because we were friends, and because he was a good man.

When I became the VP nominee--something Charlie advocated for both in public and private--Charlie was there for me. I was so glad to be part of the president's team, but candidly surprised by the effect it had on our family. Our kids, especially our oldest, struggled with the attention and the constant presence of the protective detail. I felt this acute sense of guilt, that I had conscripted my kids into this life without getting their permission. And Charlie was constantly calling and texting, checking on our family and offering guidance and prayers. Some of our most successful events were organized not by the campaign, but by TPUSA. He wasn't just a thinker, he was a doer, turning big ideas into bigger events with thousands of activists. And after every event, he would give me a big hug, tell me he was praying for me, and ask me what he could do. "You focus on Wisconsin," he'd tell me. "Arizona is in the bag." And it was.

Charlie genuinely believed in and loved Jesus Christ. He had a profound faith. We used to argue about Catholicism and Protestantism and who was right about minor doctrinal questions. Because he loved God, he wanted to understand him.

Someone else pointed out that Charlie died doing what he loved: discussing ideas. He would go into these hostile crowds and answer their questions. If it was a friendly crowd, and a progressive asked a question to jeers from the audience, he'd encourage his fans to calm down and let everyone speak. He exemplified a foundational virtue of our Republic: the willingness to speak openly and debate ideas.

Charlie had an uncanny ability to know when to push the envelope and when to be more conventional. I've seen people attack him for years for being wrong on this or that issue publicly, never realizing that privately he was working to broaden the scope of acceptable debate.

He was a great family man. I was talking to President Trump in the Oval Office today, and he said, "I know he was a very good friend of yours." I nodded silently, and President Trump observed that Charlie really loved his family. The president was right. Charlie was so proud of Erika and the two kids. He was so happy to be a father. And he felt such gratitude for having found a woman of God with whom he could build a family.

Charlie Kirk was a true friend. The kind of guy you could say something to and know it would always stay with him. I am on more than a few group chats with Charlie and people he introduced me to over the years. We celebrate weddings and babies, bust each other's chops, and mourn the loss of loved ones. We talk about politics and policy and sports and life. These group chats include people at the very highest level of our government. They trusted him, loved him, and knew he'd always have their backs. And because he was a true friend ,you could instinctively trust the people Charlie introduced you to. So much of the success we've had in this administration traces directly to Charlie's ability to organize and convene. He didn't just help us win in 2024, he helped us staff the entire government.

I was in a meeting in the West Wing when those group chats started lighting up with people telling Charlie they were praying for him. And that's how I learned the news that my friend had been shot. I prayed a lot over the next hour, as first good news and then bad trickled in.

God didn't answer those prayers, and that's OK. He had other plans. And now that Charlie is in heaven, I'll ask him to talk to big man directly on behalf of his family, his friends, and the country he loved so dearly.

You ran a good race, my friend.

We've got it from here.

[Mandy @MarindaVannoy1]

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed the GOP is full of geriatric, spineless old jellyfish who can never seem to get anything done?

[@Chicago1Ray 🇺🇸 @Chicago1Ray]

BOOM 💥

🚨 Scott Presler ~ I will tell you this; if the Senate does not Pass the Save America Act

i will use all of the energy, hustle & organizing we used to elect these Senators, as tools to defeat them in their upcoming elections

Can I get a thumbs 👍 up for Scott Presler

[Anna Paulina Luna @realannapaulina]

The Senate is preparing a group of bills they are going to try to move in the House. They need these bills for their re-elections this Nov & yesterday they again failed at passing the SAVE AMERICA ACT. No members should be supporting their bills until they deliver on voter ID.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

So, I did exactly what you asked and I sat down and read ALL 261 pages of your bill.

It does support mass amnesty and I'll tell you exactly where:

Pages 162-170... The Dream Act:

You grant conditional lawful permanent resident status to ILLEGAL ALIENS who:

>Have been continuously present in the U.S. since January 1, 2021
>Entered before age 18
>Meet education, employment, or military service requirements
>Pass criminal background checks

On top of this, in Sec. 2102(b)(3)(B), DACA recipients get fast-tracked to conditional green card status.

...which is literally mass amnesty

BUT THE BILL GOES EVEN FURTHER!!!

On pages 204-217, you present the Dignity Program:

This is a separate track for illegal aliens who don't qualify for the Dream Act.

If you are an illegal aliens who:

> Was continuously present since December 31, 2020
>Pay a $1,000 upfront "restitution" fee
>Submit biometrics, pass a background check
>No felony convictions

You get work authorization + travel authorization + deferred removal for 7 years

After completing the 7-year program (paying $7,000 total in fees, staying employed, obeying laws, paying back taxes):

We grant you:
> "Dignity Status" which is essentially a lawful nonimmigrant status, which is renewable any number of times
>Work and travel authorization

But the most important bit that you're hiding here is that it totally suspends deportation of anyone who qualifies for this.

This would effective end ALL MASS DEPORTATIONS in the United States immediately.

You are a liar, you are a fraud, everything you stand for is fake... did YOU read your own bill?

Because I just did, and you are a damned LIAR!!!!!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Bullseye

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

The only thing that stops violent men from raping you and your society are other men who are equally willing to be violent in stopping the rapists. The West has decided that the highest virtue is to quietly comply with the destruction of your civilization because to do otherwise is bigoted toward the rapists. It really is that simple.

[@Chicago1Ray 🇺🇸 @Chicago1Ray]

(RP) if you want more members of Congress to join Anna Paulina-Luna in calling for the removal of John Thune

"This Is (💯%) on John Thune, he's actively obstructing and blocking these efforts... We won't vote an anything in the House, unless it has Voter ID on it"

REMOVE THUNE

[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

This is fantastic.

[Michelle Maxwell ™ @MichelleMaxwell]

This is so BEAUTIFUL 🇺🇸❤️🇺🇸

She had her prom dress made from her late father's military uniform🙏

[FBI Director Kash Patel @FBIDirectorKash]

🚨 This afternoon, a former managing assistant U.S. Attorney who supported Jack Smith’s politicized investigation of President Trump has been charged with stealing the confidential investigation documents.

Carmen Lineberger allegedly emailed the confidential material to her own personal email, disguising them as dessert recipes to conceal them from record searches.

Lineberger is charged with four felony counts in the indictment.

This FBI will not hesitate to bring to account those who violated the trust of the American public in an investigation that should’ve never been brought to begin with.

[Kaitlin Bennett @KaitMarieox]

Once again reminding everyone that the Internet is not real life. Trump support is alive and well among voters.

[Mandy @MarindaVannoy1]

As a natural born female, I feel uncomfortable, disgusted, and unsafe sharing a private space with a clearly delusional, insane man, and I downright refuse to let my daughter do so.

Keep men out of women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and sports!

[TreVeyon Henderson @TreVeyonH4]

Open the eyes of our hearts Lord. Let us desire to see you for who you truly are and what you truly desire.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, For they shall see God.”
Matthew 5:8