As President Donald Trump prepared to give the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy to the 2024 Navy football team on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance was notably absent — and not even Trump knew where he was.
“We’re proud to be joined by a proud Marine Corps veteran vice president, JD Vance,” Trump said during a lengthy speech as he presented the award and lauded several members of his Cabinet.
That’s when he seemed to notice his second-in-command’s absence: “JD? Where’s JD? What the hell happened to JD? Cause he was just here.” The president then joked: “He must have gotten a call from China. He’ll be here.”
(Image: Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP)
The absence of the vice president was noted as Trump presented the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy to the 2024 Navy football team, which won the annual tournament between the three major military academies in the U.S. Ironically, it came after Vance dropped the College Football Playoff National Championship trophy he presented to the Ohio State football team.
The 2024 Midshipmen became the sixth team to win 10 games in a season, joining the teams from 1905, 2004, 2009, 2015 and 2019. This year, the team’s 21-20 victory over Oklahoma in the Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl marked the first time Navy defeated a team from the SEC in a bowl game since 1954.
In the 1955 Sugar Bowl, the Mids beat Ole Miss 21-0 to clinch the title. Navy’s 2024 Armed Forces Bowl victory was the first win against any SEC team since 2004, when Navy defeated Vanderbilt 29-26.
This season, Navy came out on top during the highly regarded 125th Army-Navy Game, defeating the Army Black Knights 31-13. Navy also won other games against the Army and against the Air Force Academy, ultimately leading to the team being awarded the coveted Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy.
Navy clinched two Service Academy victories this year by a combined 45 points, tying the 2019 Navy team for the biggest combined CIC margin of victory by any of the three Service Academies since 2007, when Navy beat Air Force and Army by a combined 46 points.
The team’s win over Army gave Navy victories over two ranked opponents in the same season, marking the first time that has happened since 1958.
The Mids defeated Rice 20-7, then Michigan 20-14. Then, on Sept. 21, 2024, Navy defeated Memphis 56-44. The team was predicted to finish 11th in the American Athletic Conference, but it ended the year tied for third with Memphis with a 6-2 record.
And that was in spite of Navy playing one of the toughest schedules in the league. So, on Tuesday, members of the team and other Navy officials met Trump at the White House, marking just one of many events on the president’s roster on Tuesday.
Earlier in the morning, a clip of the longer interview with the network’s Rachel Campos-Duffy aired, during which Trump claimed that his lofty tariffs would eventually be the only source of taxes for Americans — there would no longer be a need for federal income tax.
“There’s a real chance,” Trump told Fox News. “There is a chance that the money from tariffs could be so great that it would replace. You know, in the old days, about 1870 to 1913, the tariffs were the only form of money. And that’s when our nation was relatively the richest. We were the richest.”
Trump added that, during the 1880s, there was a committee formed to “get rid of money.” There was no such committee, however. Then, income tax was introduced in 1913, which he blamed for the Great Depression.
Trump was also expected to sign a few executive orders on Tuesday, but it wasn’t clear when — they were scheduled for 2:30 p.m., but he still hadn’t signed them by after 4 p.m. He was also slated to meet with the team and confer the trophy at 3:30 p.m., but he didn’t enter the room of the White House by well after 4 p.m.
The memorandum Trump was slated to sign is aimed at stopping undocumented migrants from obtaining Social Security benefits, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a briefing at the White House hours earlier.
“The memorandum will direct the administration to ensure ineligible aliens are not receiving funds from the Social Security Act programs,” she said. It will also expand the SSA’s fraud prosecutor program to at least 50 U.S. attorney offices and establish a Medicare and Medicaid fraud prosecution program in 15 U.S. attorney offices.
The memorandum will require the SSA inspector general to investigate earnings reports for any individuals 100 years of age or older who have mismatched Social Security records as the administration seeks to combat identity theft.
“These taxpayer-funded benefits should be only for eligible taxpayers,” she said. However, there’s no widespread evidence of fraud that’s been found or that undocumented migrants have been obtaining Social Security benefits — which they don’t have access to.
- Source: NEWHD MEDIA
