DAVID MARCUS: Memo to Bono: Please shut up and go away

I regret to inform you that Bono, the aging Irish pop star and front man for the band U2, is at it again, lecturing us poors as he always does. This time, it’s about supposedly fascist efforts by the Trump administration to arrest and deport illegal immigrant criminals.

This week, the band, which hasn’t produced a relevant song since the invention of the iPod, released the single “American Obituary,” meant to be a searing protest anthem against President Donald Trump, but actually a ditty just as flaccid as all of Bono’s mailed-in outrage-of-the-day efforts.

Take this profound line:

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Did it happen near a tree? Did she know how to ski? And does Dr. Seuss know that Bono is raiding his notebooks?

This prancing clown has taken an incredibly fraught and complicated situation in Minneapolis, where a federal agent shot and killed Good, and made it seem like murder. However, Bono doesn’t bother to mention that Good was hitting the officer with her car when she was shot.

Not exactly a minor detail.

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No, instead of anything remotely resembling the truth, Bono is stoking anger in America at the behest of the billionaires who sign his checks, produce his musak, and hate Trump with the power of a thousand SpaceX launches.

Honestly, it has been enough. For 40 years Bono has parroted every lefty billionaire’s cause, been wrong about most of them, flown around on private jets while complaining about carbon emissions and just generally been annoying.

At every Clinton Global Initiative Gala, there’s Bono. Every conference on global warming, every scam “feed the children” campaign run by the UN that mostly enriches African warlords, yep, there’s Bono.

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It is not a stretch to say that Bono’s primary job and role in the universe for decades now has been to be the poster child of global liberalism, with all the smarmy smugness that comes with it.

He’s sure as hell not a contemporary musical artist in any meaningful sense of the word. People attend his shows to hear songs from the 1980s, not new releases.

Remember when Apple forced everyone to own the latest U2 album by having it automatically download on devices?

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That happened because nobody actually wanted the latest U2 album. If people wanted it, they would not have given it to us, they’d have made us buy it.

This tells us something very important about the incentive structures that exist for our celebrities, and perhaps, why so many of them, the vast majority, in fact, regularly spout off lefty talking points.

Compare the treatment of Bono to his Brit pop star contemporary Morrissey, whose upcoming album “Make-up Is A Lie”  took years for any record label to release, even with extremely high demand, because it confronts Islamic terrorism and defends Western values.

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Morrissey has famously never bent the knee to the record industry when told what to say or when to shut up. Bono lives on that knee, lives off of that knee, and is likely too set in his ways to ever stand up again.

What message does this send to every musical performer, actor or filmmaker in the world? It says, “Push the progressive Soros agenda or else.” You can be rich and famous or you can challenge the left’s holy truths, not both.

Bono is now trying to airlift in as Gen Z’s Bob Dylan, to be the toast of the campus protests and an important and significant musical artist again. But it’s just so obvious that he is going through the motions with fake moral outrage and a new cheesy ballad.

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In the name of love, I am imploring Bono to just finally shut the hell up. We can all make our political judgments with or without you, and honestly, after decades of your puerile pontifications, the latter would be preferable.

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The protest music of the 1960s was important because it was organic. It was of a piece with the sounds of that culture itself. Bono’s neoliberal rehashing bears no resemblance to the fiery anger, the Palestinian flags, and the Black Bloc Antifa crews of 2026 anti-government agitation.

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His song is nothing but a puff piece.

For whatever reason, for 40 years, Bono has been made the pope of pop culture, its moral arbiter and yardstick. He has always been terrible at it, and it is time for his tepid rule to end.

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DR MARC SIEGEL: RFK Jr and David Kessler are right to take on Big Food

Former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may seem like unlikely bedfellows, but not when you consider that they share a common enemy: ultra-processed foods. 

Both have openly declared war on these highly addictive, unhealthy products, which range from 4,000 to 10,000 ingredients, making them difficult to regulate.

Both believe that at the heart of the enormous health crisis (people in the U.S. get half of their calories from ultra-processed foods) is the 1958 law that allows food manufacturers to decide what’s safe for people to eat — the “Generally Recognized as Safe,” or GRAS, designation — a self-fulfilling prophecy that allows food makers to “innovate to meet consumer demand.” 

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It’s seen by critics as a surefire recipe for addiction, backed by the Consumer Brands Association.

RFK Jr. says ultra-processed food manufacturers have hijacked the GRAS “loophole” to use questionable ingredients. This so-called self-regulation is the equivalent of a race car company deciding the proper speed limit for a public highway.

There is increasing evidence that ultra-processed foods are linked to obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, dementia, heart disease and precancerous colon polyps. Kessler told me this past week he would like to see these products studied further to better define their downstream “metabolic effects” on major organs. The results of these studies would provide further ammunition to fight these unhealthy products.

What do I mean by ultra-processed foods? These include cereals, snacks, sweetened beverages, cookies, frozen foods, sauces and hot dogs and also food products made with artificial flavors, colors, preservatives and chemicals designed to improve texture and shelf life. They are often high in added salt and hyper-concentrated sugars, including high-fructose corn syrup.

Artificial colors and exotically engineered flavors draw you in, and sugar addiction keeps you there. As Kessler outlined in his book, “Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine,” and as Secretary Kennedy knows well as a former opioid addict, ultra-processed foods can act on the brain in ways similar to certain drugs. A dependency can form because of the dopamine response triggered by these high-calorie foods and their interaction with opioid receptors.

 According to the World Health Organization, nearly 1 billion people worldwide are obese, and ultra-processed foods are a big part of the problem.

This problem isn’t confined to the United States. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly 1 billion people worldwide are obese, and ultra-processed foods are a big part of the problem.

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What is the answer? The first step is Kessler’s petition to the FDA to reconsider the health risks of “refined processed carbohydrates” and revoke their GRAS status. The effort is gaining traction as Kennedy considers taking action to close the GRAS loophole.

Kessler told me that if the petition gains traction, he will next ask for bipartisan hearings before Congress, where food manufacturers can attend and testify about their products under a legislative spotlight.

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But what may help most of all is the spotlight Kennedy and the MAHA movement are placing on whole food alternatives, foods that look, smell and taste like food and food that comes from the ground and is grown, fished or hunted, not products engineered in a lab as part of a profit-driven manufacturing process.

Since food can be medicine, imagine how many billions of dollars could be saved in healthcare costs with a slimmer, more vital population that is less reliant on chemically engineered foods and on a sick-care system to keep it alive.

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Five important reasons why the Trump economy is about to really blast off

If you’re struggling to make sense of the economy today, you’re not alone. Many so-called experts completely whiffed their forecasts, while positive economic data — the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 50,000 points — seemingly contradicts negative survey responses. But understanding five key elements reveals we’re about to be off to the races.

First, 2025 was a year of transition for the economy. Under Democrat President Joe Biden, particularly his last two years in office, job growth was disproportionately due to government hiring. Similarly, government purchases played an outsized role in growing overall economic activity, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP).

President Donald Trump turned off those spigots, slamming the brakes on government spending growth and firing a record number of bureaucrats at the federal level. Shrinking the unproductive public sector while growing the private sector is a welcomed change, but it initially shows us as a negative in many economic metrics.

Shrinking the federal workforce and cutting wasteful government spending subtracts from the overall job numbers and GDP, respectively. Just as Biden was able to boost these figures with government largesse at taxpayer expense, now cutting the bloat drags down the headline numbers. Nevertheless, it’s a positive change.

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The second element is the distinction between inflation and prices. You can think of inflation as how fast you’re driving down the highway, and prices as the mile markers on the side of the road. Your speed (the inflation rate) can stay constant at 60 miles per hour, and the mile markers (prices) will keep going up, at a rate of one per minute.

But now let’s say your speed drops by half, to 30 miles per hour. The mile markers keep going up, but now it’s only once every two minutes. This is like prices going up more slowly when the inflation rate drops. If you come to a complete stop, your speedometer hits zero, and the mile markers don’t go up at all. That’s zero inflation.

But notice that the mile markers aren’t going down even when there’s no inflation. That’s nearly where we’re at today, with real-time inflation metrics like Truflation showing an inflation rate well below 1%, about as good as it gets outside of a recession.

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The problem today is not the rate of inflation but how bad inflation was for the four years under Biden, which caused prices to skyrocket. People are not mad about inflation right now, but that prices aren’t coming back down. To make that happen, we need Congress to make serious cuts in both spending and to bureaucratic red tape.

Even if Congress doesn’t act, the good news is that income growth is helping solve the problem, albeit more slowly, and that’s the third element which has changed significantly in the economy.

Under Biden, wages grew substantially, but prices rose much more rapidly. The average American’s weekly paycheck, adjusted for inflation, shrank 4% during those four years. But with inflation so much lower now during the Trump administration, the average American’s weekly paycheck buys about 2% more than when he was inaugurated.

That tells us two very important facts: things are getting better, but we also haven’t regained all the lost ground from the Biden years.

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Emblematic of these two facts is the fourth element to understand, which is federal finance. Because the economy is growing faster, tax receipts to the Treasury are up 11.8% this fiscal year, compared to the same months in the prior fiscal year — which were the last four months of the Biden administration.

Shrinking the unproductive public sector while growing the private sector is a welcomed change, but it initially shows us as a negative in many economic metrics.

On the spending side of the ledger, outlays rose just 1.9%, causing the federal deficit to fall 17.0% — tremendous progress in just a year! Again, this doesn’t mean the government’s finances are sunshine and rainbows, but they’re not doom and gloom either. We’re not where we want to be yet, but we are absolutely improving.

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That brings us to the final element: investment. Between tax and regulatory cuts along with Trump’s trade negotiations, trillions of dollars in investment are pouring into the country. That will mean more factories, higher productivity and wages, more products and services, higher tax receipts to the Treasury and even lower inflation, if not lower prices.

That’s all incredibly bullish and paints a picture of an economy that has just rounded the turn and will soon blast down the straight. After years in the doldrums, the finish line of prosperity is fully in sight.

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I was a child and believed gender transition would heal my pain; it became a new trauma

In medicine, there are moments when speed is not only appropriate but lifesaving. A patient in cardiac arrest cannot wait for medical attention. A child victim of a car wreck cannot afford debate around pulling her from the car. Doctors are trained to move quickly in true emergencies, where delay costs blood and oxygen. Speed in those moments is a true expression of care. 

What I’ve had to wrestle with in detransition is how my gender dysphoria was treated with such unrelenting urgency that it became a manufactured emergency.

At age 11, I discovered the darkest corners of the internet. In these chatrooms, I was sexually groomed by adult strangers who used my love for art against me. I made friends with other little girls on art forums around the same time, many of whom had similar experiences. One such girl began identifying as transgender. She told me she felt like “a boy trapped in a girl’s body.”

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We both liked to cosplay, wearing costumes and makeup to help us look like our favorite characters. Sometimes, we brainstormed characters of our own, coming up with all sorts of names and faces. Trans identity was very similar to this ritual, except the characters were ourselves. It let us take our hard experiences —i n my case, loss of innocence — and turn them into something neat. 

When medical professionals got involved and affirmed our pretend with medicine, “neat” became “streamlined.” The culture began to shift dramatically, and everywhere I turned, I was told that the discomfort I felt in my own skin was not the product of instability at home or adolescence or even trauma. It was proof I was transgender, and I needed to convince everyone around me, lest I die.

I was a child. I didn’t have the tools nor the mental capacity to interrogate these claims. What unsettles me now, at age 23, isn’t how I “bent gender” through costume like the rock star Prince. It’s how quickly adults with credentials validated bunk narratives and led me to medicalize my biological sex as a teen.

I was convinced the hormones and surgeries doctors gave me were carefully considered, evidence-based and even lifesaving. Yet, anyone who has followed the stories of detransitioners knows that the risks are substantial: internal bleeding, chronic pain, tissue death, infertility, loss of sexual function, challenging pregnancy. These are not rare events, either. Most people who traverse this path experience myriad side effects, unsurprising, given we’re amputating healthy body parts and shocking our endocrine systems with hormone surgery.

On February 11, the Texas Supreme Court heard oral arguments in part of my case against the providers who facilitated my medical transition. One of my attorneys articulated what has felt obvious to me for years: Accountability for doctors does not vanish because a patient “wanted it.”

My experience was no exception. My drain-free “top surgery” resulted in massive complications, forcing me to seek help in the emergency room while my original surgeons completely dismissed me. It was there, lying under the fluorescent lights, that clarity began to break through the fog. The surgery that had been presented as the solution to my distress had become its own trauma.

The emergency I had been warned about was never my original body. The emergency was what had been done to it. 

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For years, aesthetic alterations in the name of “gender-affirming care” were seen as therapeutic treatments. Surgeons began removing body parts and “creating” new ones without sustained, if any, exploration of underlying causes. What was this child’s home life like? Are they on too many medications? What could we do to treat their depression that isn’t as drastic as surgery? These questions were too often bypassed in favor of easier affirmation. 

We know the tides are turning for the general public. Still, many activists struggle to admit they’re losing grip. Media coverage often includes a familiar refrain that major medical institutions still recommend “gender-affirming care.” The implication is that dissent must therefore be fringe. But that consensus is fracturing. International reviews, evolving guidelines and legal scrutiny tell a more complicated story than headlines suggest.

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Both the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the American Medical Association have issued statements signaling concern about gender surgeries on minors, an acknowledgment that should have come long before irreversible practice became normalized. 

While mainstream medical institutions seem to be reconsidering their stances, top Democrat officials have reintroduced the so-called Transgender Bill of Rights. The timing is striking. We already have civil rights protections in this country, protections based on sex, race, color and creed. 

Equal protection under the law does not require redefining medicine or compelling doctors to ignore blatant risk. When sweeping new federal guarantees are proposed in the middle of mounting medical malpractice cases, it begins to look less like necessity and more like virtue signaling.

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On Feb. 11, the Texas Supreme Court heard oral arguments in part of my case against the providers who facilitated my medical transition. One of my attorneys, John Ramer, articulated what has felt obvious to me for years: Accountability for doctors does not vanish because a patient “wanted it.” During arguments, it was difficult to miss that even the defense doesn’t believe its own words.

Like most people, I don’t take joy in the process of litigation. I didn’t set out to become a plaintiff or to get rich quick. But when an industry moves at emergency speed absent an emergency and irreversible interventions are offered to adolescents facing temporary pain, someone has to make the call to let time run its course. 

True emergency medicine saves lives because it responds to objective danger. The physicians who treated my mastectomy complications in the emergency room were swift and conscientious. What’s happened in pediatric gender “care” is different. A generation of young people was told that discomfort requires surgical intervention; and their parents, teachers, and medical professionals were told that any form of hesitation would be lethal.

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I was taught that compassion meant affirming every belief I held about my body. What I’ve learned now is that compassion sometimes means restraint. It means asking hard questions. It means protecting children from decisions they cannot yet comprehend. 

The law now has an opportunity to examine what medicine rushed past. Speed can be merciful. But when speed overrides caution, reflection and evidence, it is no longer care. 

DAVID MARCUS: To burnish Trump’s legacy, we need to stop naming things after him

In 1839, not long before President Donald Trump’s favorite president, Andrew Jackson, died, an admirer offered him an ancient Roman sarcophagus, thought to have once held the remains of an emperor. 

Jackson declined the offer, saying, “My republican feelings and principles forbid it.” There may be a lesson here.

Since Trump returned to the White House just over a year ago, it seems like every single day something new is being named after him. The Kennedy Center, the Institute of Peace building, a new class of battleship, the Palm Beach airport and, who are we kidding, eventually the White House ballroom.

Meanwhile, a giant banner featuring Trump’s stern features was placed on the Department of Justice this week, not the first public building to be adorned with the visage of the president glaring down at us.

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It all seems to have gone a bit too far, but not for the reasons generally cited. Instead, the pure quantity of Trump-branded government buildings is starting to diminish the meaning and impact of all of them.

To be clear, there is no risk of a major political backlash from voters as Trump’s name and image get plastered around Washington like posters for a Dave Matthews Band concert. People who hate him call it “Dear Leader” fascism, and people who love him take selfies. Everyone else just shrugs and says, “Well, that’s Trump.”

Culturally, the question of whether naming everything after yourself is crass or unseemly is subjective and a matter of personal taste. As a priority to voters, it falls somewhere below good taste in music.

And, after all, every city has its John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. boulevards, though, in fairness, they were killed, which is a major advantage if your goal is getting stuff named after you.

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No, the real question is whether this avalanche of eponymous enterprises are burnishing, or diminishing, the president’s legacy, and in the far-seeing eyes of history, very often, less is more.

I get it. Trump spent his whole life making buildings grow out of the ground so he could slap his name on them, big as life and usually in gold. It is an admirable and very human impulse to leave something lasting.

The president was very good at leaving his mark. Trust me, I lived in New York City for 20 years, and you really can’t miss it. But now it turns out that all of that glass and steel is flimsy and impermanent compared to Trump the man, who, say what you will, will be spoken of and debated for centuries.

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It is not in flinty metal or in the cold plastic of physical reality where Trump’s true legacy must now be forged. Rather, it is in the invisible fire of the future, where the man, not the buildings, will be judged.

Trump has the immortality shot with his bold vision not just in America but around the globe. He stands to be the most consequential figure of the early 21st century. We don’t need to name every county courthouse and 1-95 rest stop after him.

Throwing your name up everywhere in giant fonts is actually exactly the kind of eccentric behavior that gets mocked for thousands of years. Like Caligula threatening to make his horse a consul of Rome, it will be used by many to suggest narcissistic mania in Trump, because it already is used that way.

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Trump is never going to be the modest Abe Lincoln type with the shawl and aw shucks, “Nobody will remember my speech,” attitude. That’s cool, his braggadocio is fun. But I don’t want to live in a world where I check my Trump watch to see if it’s time for a Trump burger on my way to Trump airport.

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As it turned out, “Old Hickory” Andrew Jackson would be buried in a plain pine box, though the ancient treasure he declined is still housed by the Smithsonian. And instead of paying homage to him through a marble masterpiece, we keep little pictures of him in our pockets.

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More importantly, our current commander in chief still draws on Jackson’s strength and values to this very day, fancy Roman sarcophagus or not.

The more things we name after Trump, the less it means, and the more it feels forced, when it needn’t be. Nobody, including Trump, has to convince us that he is a figure of historical magnitude. Seeing that advertised again and again starts to make it all seem a little bit cheapened.

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BROADCAST BIAS: Idea of giving politicians equal time sends Colbert into a fury

Is the concept of “equal time” outdated on today’s broadcast networks? The Federal Communications Commission put regulations on the books in 1934 requiring equal air time for political candidates during an election season. But that doesn’t extend to cable, or to streaming, or to the booming podcast world. You could get technical and claim the broadcast networks often come to people today via cable or satellite connections, not an antenna.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr recently suggested late-night comedy shows and daytime talk shows like ABC’s “The View” could be evaluated for potential violations of the old equal-time rules. On Monday, Feb. 16, “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert gaudily announced that he invited Texas state Democrat Rep. James Talarico for an interview, but lawyers told him “in no uncertain terms” that he couldn’t do this, so he posted a Talarico interview on YouTube instead. When that YouTube video drew over 8 million views, it was painted by liberal journalists as a great victory over President Donald Trump. But Trump never objected to this interview.

Colbert had to unfurl the nightly rant about being a courageous dissident and all that rot: “Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV, OK? He’s like a toddler with too much screen time. He gets cranky and then drops a load in his diaper.”

Then, surprisingly, CBS put out a statement that suggested Colbert was a liar, that the interview was not banned: “The show was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal time rule for two other candidates, including Rep. Jasmine Crockett.” On Tuesday, Colbert sputtered. “They know damn well that every word of my script last night was approved by CBS’s lawyers.”

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Colbert wasn’t in danger of having to invite Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn. He might have to interview Crockett – who appeared on the show last year, before she was a candidate. This whole stunt could be painted as a campaign booster for Talarico, who raised millions of dollars off the appearance. 

Then came the weirdness of CBS News covering this spat, giving both sides equal time and weight. On Wednesday’s “CBS Mornings,” reporter Elaine Quijano ran the opposing views, and then added another liberal view: “Monday was the first known time a late night talk show changed its programming since the FCC issued its new guidance. Anna Gomez, the only Democratic-appointed FCC commissioner, worries that decision could enable censorship.”

The “PBS News Hour” also turned to Gomez for an attack on Trump and Carr: “Anything they don’t like, they want to control and they want to censor.” Defunded PBS still sounds bitter.

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The supreme irony in this entire kerfuffle is that Colbert represents the exact opposite of equal time. Overall, Alex Christy of NewsBusters reported that from September 2022 through Thursday, Colbert has brought on 230 liberal or Democrat guests, to only one Republican – and that Republican was former Rep. Liz Cheney after she was drummed out of office in a primary. So, let’s wink and say 231 to zero.

CBS could easily change the name of its late-night comedy show to “The People’s Republic of Colbert.” Anyone who wants to end their day by listening to a long interview with Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders is not looking for giggles. But that’s what viewers found on January 20. Colbert announced with fanfare that this was the 19th time he’d platformed Sanders.

This is not a “bona fide news interview,” if we’re going to use FCC lingo. It’s the lamest kind of “Sunset Semester” socialism session. “Define oligarchy for us” isn’t even a question. It’s a prompt.

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But Colbert also put this ball on the tee for Bernie:  “This is a red-letter day for you. Here you are administering the oath of office to Mayor Mamdani and I just—you’ve been fighting, you’ve been carrying the banner of democratic socialists for a long time. What was that like to swear in the first Democratic Socialist mayor of a major city?” He found it “extremely gratifying.”

When that YouTube video drew over 8 million views, it was painted by liberal journalists as a great victory over President Donald Trump. But Trump never objected to this interview.

It was the same situation with Talarico – two Democrats talking like Democrats. Colbert nudged: “It’s not the first time you’ve caused some drama. ‘FCC opening probe into The View after appearance by Talarico.’ Do you mean to cause trouble?”

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Overall, the late-night “comedy” show guest count in 2025 was overwhelmingly stacked: 99% of the political guests are liberals or Democrats. It’s the same on “The View.” In 2025, Whoopi & Co. interviewed 128 liberals or Democrats to two Republicans or sort-of conservatives. Again, that’s being generous. The two are now former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was fulminating against Trump, and Cheryl Hines, who was forced into defending her husband, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

These are the shows that are the most passionately painting themselves as brave upholders of Democracy when they practice nothing of the sort. Only one side is worth hearing, and the other side is only worth smearing. 

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Mayors pushing for guaranteed income decry the dismantling of federal aid programs

The Mayors for a Guaranteed Income coalition decried the dismantling of federal aid programs in a news release published on Tuesday.

“At a time when key federal aid programs are being dismantled, state leaders are picking up the slack and bolstering economic stability for residents,” founder of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income Michael D. Tubbs said.

President Donald Trump has cut federal programs and seeks to dismantle the Department of Education. The Trump administration froze more than $10 billion in federal childcare and social services funding to five Democratic-led states amid concerns taxpayer dollars were improperly diverted to noncitizens, according to a report released in January.

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The organization said that state leaders are helping Americans struggling to “make ends meet” as the “affordability crisis” continues. The mayors claimed that state leaders are “bolstering economic stability for residents” through guaranteed income programs. 

“With data from nearly 30 city-led and county-led pilots, we have proof that guaranteed income policies help struggling families meet their basic needs, build savings for emergencies, seek better employment, and experience reduced stress,” Tubbs said in the statement. He went on to say, “As the affordability crisis continues to put pressure on household finances, this is a solution that lifts families up.” 

Guaranteed basic income programs have become a trend across the U.S. in recent years, with more than 100 pilots launched since 2018. Mayors for Guaranteed Income grew into a coalition of 150 mayors pushing pilot programs, offering low-income participants up to $1,000 a month with no strings attached. The group has pushed pilot programs that have been adopted by municipalities across the country. 

Most notably, Cook County, Illinois, the second-largest county in the U.S., established a permanent guaranteed basic income program after the success of a previous pilot version. The program launched in 2022 with the aid of federal COVID-19 relief funds.

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“Guaranteed income policies, which provide recurring, unconditional cash payments to people in need, have been tested at the local level in hundreds of cities and counties across the nation,” Mayors for Guaranteed Income stated in the new release.

The group explained further that based on the evidence, its counterpart organization Legislators for a Guaranteed Income reported more than 20 bills in 11 states being proposed to establish some form of statewide guaranteed income program.

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More than 60 bills that would implement cash-based policies similar to guaranteed income have been floated in another 15 states.

Tubbs also founded the Counties for a Guaranteed Income and Legislators for a Guaranteed Income. He was the former mayor of Stockton, California from 2017 to 2021. 

“With data from nearly 30 city-led and county-led pilots, we have proof that guaranteed income policies help struggling families meet their basic needs, build savings for emergencies, seek better employment, and experience reduced stress,” Tubbs said in the statement. He went on to say, “As the affordability crisis continues to put pressure on household finances, this is a solution that lifts families up.” 

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JOHN YOO: Supreme Court tariff ruling should end complaints that justices favor Trump

The Supreme Court just struck down President Donald Trump’s worldwide tariffs. Contrary to immediate takes on the opinion, Learning Resources v. Trump does not mark a permanent reduction in presidential power. If he chooses, Trump could restore many of his tariffs over the next year under different laws. But Learning Resources should put to bed the left’s attacks on the court and the Constitution, while also highlighting the need for cooperation between the president and Congress in managing foreign affairs.

Writing for a 6-3 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts reaffirmed two basic constitutional principles. First, he wrote that the Constitution vests the power to impose tariffs and taxes in Congress alone. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution states that “Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposes and Excises,” and “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.” Second, Congress can delegate that power to the president. Congress has enacted a series of trade laws that have. There was no real disagreement among any of the justices on these two fundamental points.

Where the justices divided is whether Congress had given the president the power to impose the unique, worldwide, immediate tariffs that he imposed last year. On Liberation Day, April 2025, Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) to set targeted tariffs not only on Canada, Mexico and China, but also a universal tariff of at least 10% on all imports. Roberts, joined by a rare coalition of three conservative justices (himself, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett) and three liberal justices (Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson), held that IEEPA did not grant the executive the power to impose tariffs.

The majority unduly narrowed the reach of IEEPA. IEEPA grants the power to the president, in the event of an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to American national security, foreign policy or the economy from abroad, to investigate, block, “regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit” economic transactions with another country.

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Trump declared that the large trade deficit created a national emergency; the court did not touch this aspect of the president’s tariff orders. Instead, the court held that because Congress did not include the specific word “tariff” in IEEPA’s list of powers, it had not granted this power to the executive.

“The President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it,” Roberts writes. “IEEPA’s grant of authority to ‘regulate … importation’ falls short. IEEPA contains no reference to tariffs or duties.”

This reading pays no attention to the way that the United States has used IEEPA and its predecessor statute, the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. The government, and the lower courts, have long understood the power to “regulate” trade to include the power to impose a complete embargo on hostile nations, such as Cuba, Iran and North Korea.

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IEEPA’s reference to the powers to “regulate” and “prevent” “importation” of foreign goods is quite sufficient to justify the president in imposing tariffs. Indeed, if sufficiently high, tariffs are simply a tool to “prevent or prohibit” such “importation.”

Nevertheless, Learning Resources will not prevent Trump from succeeding in the end. The decision only says that the administration cannot impose tariffs under the IEEPA statute. But Congress has enacted several trade laws that clearly grant the president the power to impose tariffs.

Going by the nicknames of Section 232, Section 301, and Super 301, among others, these laws allow the executive to impose reciprocal tariffs in response to high tariffs on American goods, to sanction unfair trade practice by other countries, or to address a surge of imports in a specific product. And trade law still allows tariffs on specific countries that pose a national security threat to the United States. The Supreme Court did not touch those powers, and, as Trump made clear in his press conference, he intends to re-enact as many of his tariffs as possible under these other laws.

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Beyond the technical reading of trade statutes, and its impact on Trump’s economic policies, Learning Resources bears deeper lessons on our constitutional order.

First, the decision belies the attacks from the left that the Supreme Court – particularly its conservative majority – simply rubber stamps the Trump administration’s policies. Here, two of Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court, Gorsuch and Barrett, joined Chief Justice Roberts, himself appointed by President George W. Bush, in striking down the Trump tariffs.

The government, and the lower courts, have long understood the power to “regulate” trade to include the power to impose a complete embargo on hostile nations, such as Cuba, Iran and North Korea.

They were joined by the three justices appointed during the Obama and Biden administrations. These justices did not decide the case because they agree or disagree with tariffs or like or dislike Trump. They simply voted because of the way that they read the IEEPA statute’s lack of the word “tariff.”

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Second, Learning Resources denies the left’s cries of wolf that the United States is falling under an authoritarian regime. Learning Resources demonstrates, again, that the separation of powers continues to work.

Congress alone has the power to impose tariffs and taxes as part of its overall power of the purse. It can delegate that power to the president; and it has. But when existing statutes are silent, Congress retains the constitutional power to set tariff rates. Trump did not claim a right to impose tariffs unilaterally under his executive power; he continuously argued that Congress simply had given him that power in IEEPA. Even if he reimposes tariffs, he will have to use other trade laws enacted by Congress. Using delegated powers according to the terms set out by Congress does not amount to authoritarianism.

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Lastly, Learning Resources points the way for future cooperation between the president and Congress. The dissenters –Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh – argued that the court should have read IEEPA broadly in order to allow the president to conduct foreign policy and protect the national security. While the president bears the constitutional responsibility to address foreign threats and advance the nation’s interests abroad, the Constitution vests in Congress the means of international economics.

In order to achieve the nation’s interests in restoring dominance in the Western Hemisphere or fending over the rising threat of China, the president and Congress will have to cooperate to ensure that economic policy plays a harmonious role in a full-spectrum American approach to the world.

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DAVID MARCUS: Hospitals stop transing kids now that the myth has fallen apart

In what would have been a stunning announcement just a few years ago, Langone Medical Center, a New York City giant in the healthcare industry, has announced it will stop providing surgery and hormone treatments for children confused about their gender.

This comes after years of the medical establishment insisting that surgery on minors is very rare and “needed” only in extreme cases.

Last year, Harvard School of Public Health published an article titled “Gender-affirming Surgeries Rarely Used on Transgdender Youth,” which conveniently did not include the actual number of children who have had such procedures.

This was in the article written by the co-author of the cited study: “Our findings suggest that legislation blocking gender-affirming care among TGD youth is not about protecting children, but is rooted in bias and stigma against TGD identities and seeks to address a perceived problem that does not actually exist.”

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Follow that? The people who don’t want to chop up kids based on their gender delusions don’t actually care about kids, the people who really care about kids are the ones wielding the scalpels, even while claiming the procedures are rare.

It’s the old, “It’s not happening, you’re crazy. Okay, it happens, but very rarely. Okay, it happens a lot, but it’s a good thing.”

Far less rare, though, are hormone therapies for children, such as puberty blockers, which Langone will also cease to provide. Importantly, they will continue to provide mental health services for gender dysphoria, which is, of course, the proper way to treat someone who thinks they are trapped in the wrong body.

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The catalyst here, for Langone and other major medical centers nationwide, is not just the threat of legislation and regulation, which most have cited. It is also a recent court decision in New York in which a detransitioner won a $2 million lawsuit against the doctors who removed her breasts as a child.

The verdict was a shot across the bow of every clinic in the country that uses surgeries, or potentially even hormones in transgender treatment for kids. They could be sued into total oblivion.

But honestly, it’s a fair test. A doctor performing unalterable surgery on a child because they are as confused as the kid about how gender works should pay a price.

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The mere fact that people do come to regret trans surgery is itself proof that it should not be within a mile of children.

Even the old hostage-taking argument that if we don’t medically alter trans kids they will commit suicide, with activists and doctors asking frightened parents if they want a trans kid or a dead kid, turned out to be a lie.

In fact, last year, at a Supreme Court hearing on banning trans treatments for kids, activist and attorney Chase Strangio made just that damning admission when Justice Samuel Alito asked him if the literature clearly shows greater suicide in trans kids.

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Strangio flat out admitted it did not, saying, “There is no evidence in some – in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide.”

As our society emerges from this bizarre trans fever dream, and returns to the ancient and clear fact that men are men and women are women, it is becoming clear just how flimsy every aspect of it has been.

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The American people were never given a rational explanation for how suddenly men could become women, because there isn’t one. Credentialed experts just declared it and to question it made one a bigot.

MAJOR MEDICAL ORGANIZATION URGES DELAYING YOUTH GENDER SURGERIES

If, as the medical establishment insists, transgender medical treatment of kids is so rare as to not be an issue, then there should be no problem in ending the programs and finding better treatment options until a child reaches maturity.

The left’s argument isn’t about what makes sense, or even what is best for the children. This is really about affirming the delusions of adults who want the whole world to play pretend with them.

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Some positive news here is that the backlash to Langone’s sensible decision has thus far been fairly muted. At least for now, the proponents of transgender for everyone, as President Donald Trump puts it, are decidedly on the back heel.

But this is no time to give up. Saving kids from medical procedures based on delusions is a great first step, but what we really have to do is ensure the delusions are not encouraged in the first place.

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Trump’s economic wins cancel out Biden’s losses in latest jobs report

The “experts” were wrong yet again as the January jobs report smashed expectations with every metric beating forecasts. 

Payrolls were up a whopping 130,000, almost twice what the economy needs to cover population growth. Even better, the labor force grew by almost 400,000 as more people decided to look for work and the number of people saying they were employed jumped by more than half a million. That was enough to force the unemployment rate back down to 4.3%.

There was more good news on the workweek. Hours worked rose, which predicts future hiring. It’s also a result of people exchanging multiple part-time jobs for better-paying full-time work. Sure enough, we saw a 450,000 drop in part-timers who couldn’t find full-time work, while the dreaded U-6 underemployment (which even includes people who’ve given up on finding a job altogether) crashed by 600,000 people.

Even manufacturing rose, hopefully breaking a trend that started three years ago in the middle of the Biden administration. Construction jumped by 33,000 last month, driven by factory development. This trend could continue as factory building surges under President Donald Trump.

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One of the biggest gains was average hourly earnings, which grew 5% annualized. That’s close to twice official inflation — it’s actually six times inflation according to Truflation’s current numbers. 

That’s a stark contrast to the Biden years when prices outpaced wage growth. Under President Joe Biden, the average American’s weekly paycheck, adjusted for inflation, actually shrunk 4%. Trump’s made half of that back in his first year alone.

Previous economic data pointed to a lot of labor market weakness, at least on paper, because of factors like deportations and federal government layoffs — which are counted as jobs. There’s also Biden’s zombie cronies — private businesses that got government-backed loans for projects that were never going to be economically viable or profitable — going bust, and slower federal spending compared to the Biden spending orgy. Meanwhile, the factors that boost jobs, like Federal Reserve rate cuts and trillions of dollars in new factories, all take time.

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Well, this job report says we’re going from the pain to the gain. The private sector added a whopping 172,000 jobs while government shrunk by 42,000. You have to go all the way back to 1966 — an incredible six decades ago — to find a time when the federal bureaucracy was smaller than it is today.

That’s not to say it’s all rosy. There was a much-anticipated massive downward revision of almost 900,000 jobs from the notorious Bureau of Labor Statistics, covering the 12-month period ending with March 2025, so that’s the last 10 months of Biden and the first two months of Trump. It turns out that during Biden’s last year, job growth was overestimated by more than a million fake jobs.

The culprit is the BLS’s so-called birth-death models of company formation that use data from the COVID-19-era explosion of millions of fake businesses set up to steal federal money they were handing out like candy, from the Somali-run “Quality Learing Center” on down.

The other concern is AI. For a year we’ve been warning about a two-speed job market where blue-collar jobs grow from deportations and investments in new factories but white-collar work, especially at the entry level, gets slammed as AI draws closer to replacing cubicle jobs in finance, consulting, IT, journalism and more.

In fact, January finance lost 22,000 jobs — down almost 50,000 since last May. IT was roughly flat this month, but down 90,000 since its post-COVID peak. Journalists lost 12,000 last month — down 300,000 since the post-COVID peak.

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There was more good news on the workweek. Hours worked rose, which predicts future hiring. It’s also a result of people exchanging multiple part-time jobs for better paying full-time work. 

Meanwhile, construction was up 33,000 last month — driven by factory construction. Manufacturing added 5,000 and will hopefully gain steam in the months and years ahead as those factories are completed and hire workers to make products.

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This kind of Robin Hood job market is a welcome change from 40 years of blue-collar slaughter where bad trade deals and automation fired workers in manufacturing.

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Still, considering most American jobs are white collar, there’s millions at risk, if only in the short run. Technological improvement always ends up creating more jobs in new industries than it eliminates, but the losses show up first, and AI-induced layoffs should start to become apparent later this year.

Overall, the job market is picking up, and it should accelerate with onshoring factories, investment, and Fed rate cuts. The question becomes: can the onshoring and rate cuts soak up AI displaced workers? If not, then we need more from Congress — specifically, cutting tax burdens and regulatory red tape for small business that employs 62 million Americans — half the population — and could employ tens of millions more if bureaucrats get off their backs.

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When an ‘A’ means average, even Harvard has a problem — and they know it

Last year, the average GPA for Harvard University’s Class of 2025 was 3.83. That’s not a typo.

At Harvard, one of the world’s most selective colleges, the average student graduating in 2025 had a 3.83 GPA on a 4.0 scale. That meant that the typical student received an A or A-minus in nearly every class they took.

Harvard has plenty of company. Yale’s average GPA was a similarly laughable 3.7 in 2023, with nearly 80 percent of grades in the A to A-minus range. Public universities boosted grades by 17 percent between 1990 and 2020. And, in K-12 schooling, grades keep going up even though test scores haven’t.

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This phenomenon is known as grade inflation, and it’s a big problem. Colleges claim that they’re teaching students critical, essential skills. That’s how they justify those pricey tuition bills and hefty taxpayer subsidies. But how seriously can we take such claims when they’ve ceased setting a consequential bar for student work?

A meaningful education rests on high expectations and a sense of shared purpose. When students receive A’s for mediocre work, hard work starts to seem like a sucker’s bet. The result is that students and teachers drift into convenient cosplay, with professors pretending to teach and students pretending to learn. That’s how you wind up with students reporting that they haven’t been tasked with writing anything more than five pages. With students increasingly delegating their essays to AI and grumbling if they’re asked to read more than 10 pages a week for a class. With Harvard students breaking down in tears when told they may have to start attending class. Professors at elite colleges have grown reluctant to ask students to read whole books. Even film professors have largely given up on assigning complex films because they don’t think students will bother to sit through them. The number of students who qualify for disability accommodations, such as extra time on tests, has risen exponentially at elite schools.

This is what happens when standards and expectations collapse. Tougher grading isn’t a one-off fix to this problem, but it’s a healthy start.

That’s why it’s promising to finally see Harvard take grade inflation seriously. Last week, a faculty committee proposed capping A’s at 20 percent of grades per class. Since A’s constitute the lion’s share of grades issued at Harvard, such a cap would be a stark corrective. The university’s faculty appear to be tentatively supportive of the recommendations, which they’ll vote on later this spring.

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Faculty support may surprise some readers. After all, aren’t professors the ones inflating the grades? Yep, they sure are. But what outsiders may not appreciate is that these same faculty frequently say they feel like they have no alternative.

The same professors who give students A’s that they don’t deserve will quietly lament that they feel powerless to do anything else. It’s a collective action problem: There’s no incentive for an individual faculty member to try to hold the line. To do so is to invite tearful pleading from students, accusations of bias, and even angry texts from tuition-paying parents. Easy grades make students happy and a professor’s life easier.

Tough grading is also a recipe for lousy ratings on student course evaluations, which can come back to haunt faculty when it comes to tenure and promotion. That’s why so many professors would breathe a sigh of relief if Harvard “forced” them to grade more rigorously.

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There’s reason to question how successful Harvard is going to be. Two decades ago, Princeton University tried something similar, only to eventually give up due to student complaints that they were handicapped when competing against peers from rival colleges for jobs and graduate school admission. Indeed, Harvard students are already kvetching: Eighty-five percent oppose the proposal, with one student explaining, “It would create so much pressure where life wouldn’t be worth that much to live.” It may only be feasible for colleges to tackle grade inflation if they operate in concert.

Still, it’s heartening to see Harvard finally taking the issue seriously.

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It’s no coincidence that, after decades of studiously ignoring the problem, Harvard is finally taking action. While there’s plenty to second-guess about how the Trump administration has gone after Harvard and its peers, the pressure has sparked a new urgency about long-ignored problems. The administration’s proposed higher ed “compact,” issued last October, had its problems but also did much to elevate issues like grade inflation.

A quarter-century ago, Harvey “C-Minus” Mansfield, the iconic Harvard political theorist, started giving students two grades — one he thought they deserved and another “based on Harvard’s system of inflated grades.” It’d be a terrific turn if Harvard recommitted to rigor, if only so that professors who want to provide honest feedback no longer feel obliged to operate in the shadows.

I left California and I’m never going back — here’s why no parent should raise kids there

Last year, I left California to start my first full-time job elsewhere. At the time, I thought my move was temporary. Now, though, I’m sure: aside from a miraculous piece of divine intervention, I’m not moving back.

Of course, I’m not the only one. Young professionals like me are fleeing the state in droves, driven by the hope of better jobs, more affordable housing and better family environments elsewhere. 

For some reason, the prospect of paying over $2,000 each month to live in a 500-square-foot studio apartment for the rest of one’s life isn’t alluring to many. That’s especially true for a state like California, where it has become increasingly hard to find a job, any job, even as a college grad. California now suffers the nation’s highest unemployment rate — meaning it has the highest percentage of people who are looking for work but can’t find it.

As someone California-born and raised, those facts alone didn’t drive me to leave. I’m confident I could have found an in-state job and, as sad as it is to say, resigned myself to a lifetime of apartment living.

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So, if not the economy, what drove me to make my “temporary” move permanent? In part, the state’s absurd move under Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom to brand itself as Woke Central — but, more importantly, the horrific message it sends to kids. 

As someone who wants a family one day, I can’t imagine raising kids in Newsom’s California. 

At age 5, my child could begin receiving sex-ed instruction from her public school teacher.

In middle school, she would be required by law to take a pro-LGBTQ sex-ed class covering contraception, abortion, gender identity and other issues absent any religious discussion whatsoever. As a resource, she’d be encouraged to read “S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Sexuality Guide to Get You Through Your Teens and Twenties,” a book including graphic descriptions of anal sex and bondage. 

At just 11 years old (or even younger), she could be secretly “gender transitioned” by her teachers without my knowledge (thanks to a 2024 law signed by Newsom). 

In high school, she would be forced to take yet another sex-ed class that, depending on her school, could be taught by Planned Parenthood itself.

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Of course, some of that could be avoided by either opting out or homeschooling (though each year, the state seems to make it even harder to do either). 

What’s more problematic is what you can’t opt out of: the state-sponsored culture of death that pervades the atmosphere.

As someone who wants a family one day, I can’t imagine raising kids in Newsom’s California. 

Newsom, like former Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris before him, seems to be crafting a presidential campaign centered on so-called “reproductive rights” — and he’s using California as his testing ground.

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Described by Planned Parenthood affiliates as a “champion” for their cause, Newsom has dedicated himself to making California a sanctuary state not just for illegal aliens, but for child murder. 

Newsom recently told Louisiana Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill to “go f— yourself” when she attempted to extradite a California “doctor” who faces criminal charges for shipping deadly chemical abortion pills into Louisiana.

Last fall, Newsom announced $140 million in emergency funds for abortion facilities across the state to help keep them open following their loss of federal funding.

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And in January, state legislators announced they’d be handing abortion vendors another $90 million.

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While California does not require abortion reporting, estimates suggest that the state saw roughly 183,240 abortions in 2024 alone, with a full 31% of pregnancies — almost one in three — ending in abortion. That’s drastically higher than the nationwide abortion rate, which different sources place at between 17 and 25%.

A number that high, in which the lives of nearly one in three babies are intentionally ended by abortion, reflects a culture that devalues life and considers it disposable.

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At just 11 years old (or even younger), she could be secretly “gender transitioned” by her teachers without my knowledge (thanks to a 2024 law signed by Newsom). 

That same culture shows itself in California’s “assisted suicide” program. The state reports that 1,281 individuals received prescriptions for assisted suicide drugs in 2023, up from 293 in 2016, the first year of the program. The rate of other suicide is also up (though that’s true throughout the U.S.). Meanwhile, embryos — preborn children — created via IVF are being lost or destroyed all over the state even as Newsom allows an explosion of IVF tourism, buying babies and a U.S. footprint.

California’s woke agenda is bad, but in most cases, it can be avoided. What can’t be avoided is the state’s promotion of a culture that treats life as negotiable and disposable. That kind of environment is no place to raise a kid.

FBI DIRECTOR KASH PATEL: We have made America safer in just one year

On February 20, 2025, I had the honor of being confirmed as the ninth director of the FBI.

In that time, much has happened. Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, the FBI and our partners at the state, local and federal level have helped deliver one of the safest periods America has seen in decades.

When I sat before the Senate for my confirmation, I promised to refocus the FBI on its core mission: crush violent crime and defend the homeland, strengthen transparency and rebuild public trust. One year in, my team and I have worked every day to turn those words into action. We delivered historic results.

From 2024 to 2025, the FBI saw a 197% increase in arrests, from 34,000 to 67,000. We disrupted 1,800 gangs and criminal enterprises, a 210% increase. Agents seized more than 2,100 kilos of deadly fentanyl — enough to kill 150 million Americans — up 31%. That mission also extended overseas, where my trip to Beijing resulted in a historic agreement to shut off the flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals at the source, directly targeting the supply chains poisoning American communities. Arrests tied to Nihilistic Violent Extremism, including offenders who prey on children, rose 490%. More than 6,200 child victims were located, up 22%. Espionage arrests increased 35%. We captured six of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives in one year — two more than the entirety of the prior administration — a group collectively on the run for more than 50 years, including Ryan Wedding. Nationwide, the murder rate fell by a record 20%, a level not seen in a century.

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President Trump let good cops be cops while giving us the resources needed to execute the mission. The results speak for themselves.

But the success of this administration and this FBI goes well beyond the numbers. Over the last year, quiet but consequential transformations have taken place inside the Bureau — changes many Americans may never see on cable news or social media, but which have paid significant dividends.

From day one, we reoriented the FBI to meet modern threats with four clear priorities: Crush Violent Crime, Defend the Homeland, Restore Public Trust and enforce fierce organizational accountability. Under the prior administration, violent crime barely cracked the top 10 FBI priorities. Today, it is a central focus, which is why violent crime arrests doubled to more than 30,000 in 2025.

Shifting resources to defending the homeland helped us capture some of the most wanted criminals in the world: Nicholas Maduro, wanted by the Department of Justice for narco-terrorism; Mohammad Sharifullah, an alleged key ISIS operative in the Abbey Gate suicide bombing in Kabul; and Zubayr Al-Bakoush, a key coconspirator in the 2012 Benghazi attack that killed four Americans: Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. We also disrupted and stopped three separate terror plots during the holiday season, preventing potential mass-casualty attacks and ensuring Americans could celebrate safely.

To restore transparency and oversight, we produced more than 40,000 pages of documents to Congress in our first year alone, a level of disclosure that represents more than double the combined document production of my predecessors.

We reduced the Bureau’s dependence on bloated Washington, D.C., bureaucracy and put safety and security resources back into Main Street America. We moved 1,000 agents out of the National Capital Region into field offices across the country, with 1,000 more intelligence and support personnel to follow this year. We also ignited the advanced training facility at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, including the first-ever law enforcement counter-UAS training program.

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We restructured operations so that field offices no longer report through a single bottleneck at headquarters. Dividing offices into regional structures increased accountability and responsiveness to the public. We eliminated units that failed the mission, including the politicized CR-15 squad, removed personnel who acted unethically, and rebuilt leadership around results.

The FBI is now faster and more responsive, with a heavier focus on technology. We established the Director’s Strategic Information Center (DSIC), a fully overhauled information hub focused on proactive threat identification and 24/7 monitoring of critical incidents to dramatically improve response times. We also launched a Technology Working Group, led by Dan Bongino, to help strengthen national security infrastructure through artificial intelligence and enhanced biometric coordination with interagency partners. Rather than continuing a patchwork approach, we engaged private-sector partners to rebuild core systems and expanded the FBI’s leadership role in the National Counterintelligence Task Force to better coordinate efforts against hostile intelligence actors targeting the United States.

After decades of delay and excess, President Trump facilitated the deal to shut down the Hoover Building project. We canceled a minimum $5 billion taxpayer-funded plan that would not have opened for at least a decade and instead moved toward utilizing the existing Ronald Reagan Building, providing a safe and modern headquarters at a fraction of the cost to the American people.

Perhaps most importantly, we made it a top priority for field leaders to work hand in hand with state and local law enforcement. Last year, we created a series of Homeland Security Task Forces — historic partnerships with state officials focused on removing violent criminals from American streets. In Virginia, that effort resulted in nearly 600 arrests in just one month. We replicated this model in Memphis and Washington, D.C., under the President’s Task Force. In those two cities alone, violent crime is down 30%, while homicides are down nearly 70% in D.C. and 50% in Memphis. We also established the first-ever Law Enforcement Partner Engagement Council (LEPEC), giving local law enforcement a permanent seat at the table inside the FBI.

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By the numbers, President Trump’s FBI delivered a record year. But the institutional changes implemented over the last year go far beyond statistics, arrests, or headlines. We have rebuilt and remade the FBI into an organization designed to better serve the American people and keep the country safer for decades to come, alongside our partners at the Department of Justice who continue to prosecute bad actors and hold them accountable.

As for us, we will continue to put the Mission First.

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I need an expensive asthma drug to live. Trump’s RX plan helped me and many others

When President Donald Trump announced “TrumpRx” in early February, a weight I’ve carried my entire adult life suddenly lifted from my shoulders. The website offers life-saving medications at much lower prices than normal, based on the president’s promise to give Americans the same prescription drug costs as patients in other developed countries. I can personally attest that such equal treatment — a policy known as “most favored nation” pricing — is urgently needed for people who struggle with chronic disease.

I’ve had debilitating asthma since I was a child. I’ve been able to manage it thanks to a prescription drug which blocks lung inflammation and keeps my airways open. The few times I’ve gone off the medication, I’ve ended up in the emergency room, unable to breathe. That nearly happened four years ago in what I thought was the worst possible place — on the other side of the world, unable to contact my doctors or go to my pharmacy.

My family and I were in Italy, on a trip to honor my mother. She had recently been diagnosed with cancer and my brother and I scheduled the trip in between her chemo treatments, when she would be well enough to travel. She had always wanted to go there with us. But in our rush to get two families and three little kids packed, I accidentally grabbed a nearly empty inhaler.

I realized my mistake a few days into the trip, when I looked at the inhaler and saw that I only had two doses left. I wasn’t just worried about my health, though, of course, that was paramount. I worried how I’d afford the drug if I even found it in Italy.

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I’ve organized my professional life around access to insurance that covers my medication, given its longstanding retail price of $600 for a month’s supply. For 25 years, I’ve grappled with denied coverage letters, premium tier prescription charts and the constant worry that we would have to cut back on necessities to get my medication. At the time, in Italy, I was already paying a few hundred dollars a month for the drug — a lot, but a bargain compared to its normal price.

But I had no choice. I had to get my medication. After a few minutes of searching, I found an Italian pharmacy across town. I walked there immediately, trying to control my racing thoughts of what might happen. I knew that if I couldn’t get the drug, I couldn’t get safely back to the U.S.

Fifteen minutes later, in tears, I walked out, drug in hand. It cost me only 30 euros or about $35.

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At first, I was both relieved and grateful. But by the end of the day, I was scratching my head. Why was it $600 in the U.S. while Italians could get it for next to nothing? In the days that followed, I discovered that the answer is beyond complicated.

It’s affected by everything from a lack of price transparency to the meddling of middlemen who jack up costs. It’s also true that foreign countries have been negotiating the prices of prescription drugs for decades, forcing Americans to cover the enormous cost of pharmaceutical development while they pay far below market prices.

Whatever the reason, the system doesn’t work for Americans. Brand name prescription prices in the U.S. are more than four times higher than prices in other wealthy countries. As many as 18 million Americans have struggled to buy the prescriptions they need in recent years.

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I’m now using a generic version of the drug that costs significantly less. But that doesn’t change the fact that I, like many other Americans with chronic disease, have paid through the nose for decades on end, only to find the medication I needed in Italy for what seemed like pennies.

I wasn’t just worried about my health, though, of course, that was paramount. I worried how I’d afford the drug if I even found it in Italy.

Trump is fighting to fix this broken system. Before launching TrumpRx, he reached 16 deals with pharmaceutical companies to charge most-favored-nation prices. As a lifelong conservative, I’m typically uncomfortable with this kind of government intervention in the market. But other countries have already intervened and people like me have paid the price.

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If pharmaceutical companies need the extra money, they should take it up with other countries that negotiated them down first. Then they could recoup their costs on the backs of others, not simply by charging more in the U.S. Bottom line, there’s no good reason why 340 million Americans should pay so much more than hundreds of millions of people who live in Europe and Asia.

I will always be grateful that my medication was so affordable in Italy back in 2022. It may very well have saved my life. But I’m even more grateful that President Trump is finally lowering prices for every American here at home.

Under oath, Meta’s Zuckerberg showed why Big Tech can’t police itself

Wednesday was a historic day as Mark Zuckerberg took the stand and faced a jury under oath to answer allegations that Meta knowingly designed and promoted products that hooked young users — including children — despite internal warnings about the risks, marking the first time he has testified before a jury in such a case.

While Zuckerberg’s testimony was often characterized by sidestepping and dodging questions — to the point that the judge instructed him to answer directly — he can’t deflect his way out of this one. The evidence in this social media trial speaks for itself.

The plaintiff’s attorney, Mark Lanier, focused on three central themes in his questioning: 1) addicting users; 2) allowing underage users access to the platform; and 3) making business decisions that put profits over safety.

Zuckerberg was presented with a 2015 email in which the CEO stated his goal for 2016 was to increase users’ time spent on the platform by 12%. Zuckerberg argued that Meta’s growth targets reflect an aim to give users something useful, not to addict them, and stated that the company does not seek to attract children as users.

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When asked whether he believes people tend to use something more if it’s addictive, he dismissed the premise. “I don’t think that applies here,” he said.

But it absolutely does apply. Meta’s entire business model is built on user engagement. Social media appears “free,” but a child’s time, attention and data are the product being sold. More hours with eyes glued to the screen mean more advertisements to sell. The user is the product. The incentive is to keep users engaged as much as possible.

As confirmed earlier in the trial by addiction expert Dr. Anna Lembke of Stanford University, social media meets the clinical criteria for addiction, according to her expert testimony.

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Lanier also questioned Zuckerberg extensively on Meta’s age-verification policies. He showed an internal Meta email from 2015 estimating that 4 million children under 13 were using Instagram — approximately 30% of U.S. children ages 10 to 12. One in three preteens.

Zuckerberg said the company removes identified underage users and includes terms about age requirements during the sign-up process. Lanier responded, “You expect a 9-year-old to read all of the fine print? That’s your basis for swearing under oath that children under 13 are not allowed?”

Zuckerberg added that some children “lie about their age in order to use the services.” During this exchange, he also said, “I don’t see why this is so complicated … we have rules, and people broadly understand that.”

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Waving his hand and saying “we have rules” is not an adequate defense. These are minors. It is the company’s responsibility to ensure the platform is effectively age-gated; otherwise, its stated age policy is meaningless.

In practice, age verification on most social media platforms relies largely on self-reported birthdates. A child can enter a false age, click to accept the terms and conditions and gain access within minutes. Critics argue that without meaningful safeguards, age restrictions amount to little more than an honor system.

Age of access is a key issue in this trial. The plaintiff, K.G.M., who got on Instagram at age 9, alleges that her social media use as a child and teenager led to body dysmorphia, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, addiction and depression. Her age when she began using the app — during a period of significant brain development between ages 10 and 12 — is central to the harms she alleges.

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Instagram should never have allowed her on the platform at age 9, the plaintiff argues. Whether the jury ultimately agrees remains to be seen, but the case places responsibility for those decisions squarely on Meta’s leadership.

Lanier ended his questioning by unrolling — with the help of six others — a 50-foot collage of every selfie K.G.M. had posted on Instagram, many with beauty filters. He asked Zuckerberg whether Meta ever investigated her account for unhealthy behavior. Zuckerberg did not answer.

Earlier, Lanier pressed Zuckerberg about his decision to allow beauty filters that mimicked plastic surgery after 18 internal experts warned they were harmful to teenage girls and could contribute to body dysmorphia, according to internal documents. Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, ultimately reversed a temporary ban and allowed the filters on the platform. Plaintiffs contend that decision exposed vulnerable young users to tools linked to body dysmorphia and other mental health struggles.

Zuckerberg defended the decision by saying that after lifting the ban, Instagram did not create its own filters or recommend them to users. He added, “I think oftentimes telling people that they can’t express themselves like that is overbearing.”

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What a spin. Removing plastic surgery filters that harm young girls is, in his words, “overbearing.” Many parents would call it putting reasonable safeguards in place.

While Zuckerberg has publicly said Meta cares about children’s safety — telling Congress in 2024 that “Our job is to make sure that we build tools to help keep people safe” and that “We are on the side of parents everywhere working hard to raise their kids” — the internal evidence presented at trial suggests otherwise.

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Though he would not admit in court that he knew his products were addictive or targeted teens, he didn’t need to. The jury — and the public — can weigh his answers against the internal documents and decide for themselves. 

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MIKE DAVIS: Chicagoland, where teachers can support Charlie Kirk’s killing, but not ICE

This is the tale of two teachers in the leftist dump that is Chicagoland. One teacher supported Charlie Kirk’s assassination, as leading school-choice advocate Corey DeAngelis discovered for the world to see. She still has her job. Another teacher made a social media post supporting ICE. He no longer has his job. This situation is an indefensible disgrace. ​​There is a cancerous spread of Chicago’s radical leftist politics into the once-idyllic suburbs.

On Sept. 10, 2025, Tyler Robinson sat perched atop a roof on a Utah college campus. He allegedly aimed his rifle and fired, putting a bullet through the neck of the legendary Charlie Kirk, a model husband and father. Why? Robinson, who had a transgender lover, despised Kirk’s political views. Among those views was the commonsense belief that biological males should not compete in sports while masquerading as females and competing with biological females. Kirk sought dialogue with all sides; indeed, he was at Utah Valley University that tragic day to engage in it. Robinson, by contrast, is a leftist domestic terrorist. He has no interest in dialogue; rather, he believes that assassinating those with whom he disagrees is the proper course of action. Robinson hopefully will receive the death penalty if convicted for his barbaric act.

Lucy Martinez is a teacher at Nathan Hale Elementary School in Chicago. Like many radical leftists, Martinez attended one of the farcical “No Kings” protests that occurred across the country. Martinez, however, did far more than protest President Donald Trump, the object of the demonstrations. She was filmed pointing a fake gun to her neck. While doing so, she shouted “Bang, bang!” This protest occurred in October, the month after Kirk’s assassination. It does not take a rocket scientist to understand what Martinez was doing. She was mocking Charlie Kirk’s assassination, just as many so-called professionals — including doctors, nurses, lawyers and even a former official with the Carolina Panthers — had done. The difference between Martinez and other degenerates, however, is that she still has her job. There was little outrage in the community over her abhorrent conduct.

ICE is the federal agency tasked with enforcing our immigration laws. These brave men and women jeopardize their lives to rid our nation of illegal aliens, many of whom are violent — and all of whom are criminals. Radical leftists have doxed ICE agents and their families because these Marxists desire open borders and the resulting destruction of America. These Marxists have led anti-ICE protests across the country, most recently in Minneapolis. The Grammy Awards contained several anti-ICE diatribes, including one artist who profanely attacked ICE.

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James Heidorn was a physical education teacher at the Gary Elementary School in West Chicago, one of the aforementioned once-idyllic Windy City suburbs. He has a different view of ICE; that is, he supports the agency. Heidorn expressed his view with a simple post on Facebook: “GO ICE.” Nothing more. He expressed support for a law-enforcement agency. The reaction, however, was nothing like that which occurred after the Martinez fiasco. Outrage erupted from parents in the community. Illinois state Sen. Karina Villa, a pro-illegal alien leftist, railed against the post as hurtful. West Chicago Mayor Daniel Bovey held a listening session where people could come and whine about the post. All because a teacher expressed support for law enforcement.

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Heidorn got placed on leave after his post which, again, merely expressed support for a law-enforcement agency. Heidorn has since resigned. What if Heidorn had posted “ABOLISH ICE” instead? How about “ICE IS HORRIBLE!” There is no doubt that the school would have done nothing to him. In other words, this school — a government institution — would be just fine with a teacher who criticizes law enforcement. A teacher who supports law enforcement, however, is placed on leave and subject to an investigation. That teacher is now unemployed.

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Martinez was never placed on administrative leave after celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder. Neither Villa nor any other leftist senator expressed outrage. The mayor did not hold a listening session. Instead, Martinez continues merrily along, entrusted with dozens of young, impressionable minds. These are the consequences for a teacher who supported an assassination. And the claim that she merely mocked it, and that mockery is different from support, is risible. Political violence must be condemned, for it tears at the very fabric of the Republic. Martinez’s conduct warranted termination because no one who supports murdering political opponents belongs anywhere near a classroom of young children. Anyone who supports the conduct Robinson is accused of is an utterly sick individual who needs profound help.

The education landscape in Chicagoland is simple and sad. A teacher can support the assassination of a political opponent and face no consequences. Another teacher can support law enforcement, face excoriation from local leaders, and lose his job. Chicago is a crime-infested hellhole, and it will remain so as long as the mentality of these leaders controls the machinery of government. This is clearly now spreading to the suburbs too. Heidorn deserves to be in a classroom; Martinez belongs nowhere near one. Yet, the opposite is reality. That reality illustrates Chicago’s leftist insanity.

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DAVID MARCUS: How Stephen Colbert conned Dem donors and burned Jasmine Crockett

Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico’s campaign is $2.5 million richer this week and a bit closer to victory after Stephen Colbert, host of “The Late Show” on CBS, made up a ridiculous lie about being censored by President Trump.

It took a few days for the dust to settle, but now that we have a clear picture of what happened, it is about as bad as it can be. In fact, it would likely be a fireable offense if the ratings challenged Colbert was not already slated to get the ax in May.

According to Colbert’s version of events, which is falling apart faster than a house of cards in a wind tunnel, he was told by CBS lawyers on Monday, just minutes before he was set to interview Talarico, that he could not air the conversation. Why? Because of the Trump administration Federal Communication Commission’s new rules on equal time.

A petulant Colbert went on to tell his audience that he wasn’t even supposed to mention being censored to them, but, putting on his free speech super hero cape, he would do the interview anyway, defying his bosses and release it on YouTube.

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The only problem with all of this is that, according to both CBS and the FCC, nobody told Colbert the interview could not air. He just made it up. All that happened was that CBS lawyers told him if he had Talarico on, he might also have to give equal time to his Demcorat primary opponent, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas.

It is not clear why Colbert would have any issue with having Crockett on, unless perhaps he and his friends in high places think the preppy White Bible school boy is more electable than the sassy Black finger-snapping lady.

Talarico was fundraising off of Colbert’s lie within minutes and raked in $2.5 million. Oh, and did I mention that early voting in Texas started on Tuesday, the day after this duplicitous debacle?

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It truly was remarkable to watch. Even by Wednesday, when they knew quite well Colbert had not been censored, CNN had an entire panel that argued the Trump administration’s pressure on CBS had backfired because of the fundraising and the 5 million YouTube views the video got.

But there was no pressure on Colbert from the Trump administration. As FCC Chairman Brendan Carr told Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham, “CBS was very clear that Colbert could run the interview that he wanted with that political candidate. They just said, you may have to comply with equal time… But instead of doing that, they claimed that they were victims.”

All that the FCC has said, without taking any action, is that it may enforce equal time rules for talk shows, something it has not done in the past, but given how skewed late night comedy and daytime talk have become, it is worth considering.

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“The View,” ABC’s mid-morning girl gaggle, had 128 liberal guests in 2025 and only two conservatives, one of which was actress Cheryl Hines, who is actually not conservative, just married to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

Put bluntly, the reason that the equal time rules have not been enforced on talk shows is that they never had to be, because Johnny Carson, Tom Snyder and Phil Donahue didn’t turn their shows into nonstop political ads. Obviously, that has changed.

Colbert has been very clear that he purposefully uses his “comedy show” to push a political agenda, in this case, to the benefit of James Talarico and the detriment of Jasmine Crockett, who is now in the awkward position of defending the Trump administration.

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However, wherever one comes down on the equal time rules, it is crystal clear that Colbert is just flat-out, stone-cold lying when he says they were used to ban his interview from the air. Sadly, it is a lie many Democratic voters may take to their deathbeds.

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There were two big victims to Colbert’s perfidy, the first being Crockett, who may be discovering that she is a little too Brown and uppity for the rich White men who still control liberal media and politics.

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The second victim was the average citizen, who was separated from their money based on Colbert’s lies to fill the coffers of Talarico.

Thankfully, we only have about two more months to deal with Colbert’s nonsense and lies, at least on CBS late night. After that he can go to YouTube and interview anyone he pleases, just as he could have on Monday night.

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Democrats turn their backs on DHS and ICE when America needs them most

As the debate over the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill continues, one truth is becoming increasingly clear: Democrats are refusing to stand with the very law enforcement officers tasked with protecting our communities. Instead of supporting DHS and ICE in carrying out their mission, they are pursuing a dangerous crusade to weaken enforcement and undermine the rule of law.

My Democratic colleagues are attempting to strip DHS enforcement authority, diminish operational capacity, and restrict cooperation with state and local law enforcement. At a time when border security and interior enforcement are critical to public safety, they are choosing politics over protection.

I refuse to accept that. I stand firmly with the courageous men and women of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). These professionals carry out a difficult and often dangerous mission to safeguard our communities. They deserve our respect, our gratitude and the resources necessary to do their jobs effectively.

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The DHS bill before us reflects those priorities. This is the same bill that both Republicans and Democrats negotiated in a bipartisan manner, and the same bill Republicans were ready to pass to ensure full-year funding for the department.

Instead of supporting DHS and ICE in carrying out their mission, Democrats are pursuing a dangerous crusade to weaken enforcement and undermine the rule of law.

The bill, as it stands now, provides the tools required for interior enforcement, enabling ICE agents to identify, detain and remove individuals who break our laws and pose risks to the public. But it’s important to understand that this legislation goes far beyond immigration enforcement. It includes vital funding for the various missions carried out every day by agencies like FEMA, TSA, Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard and so many more. The 260,000 individuals who work to counter cyberattacks, secure our borders and coastlines, and protect critical infrastructure—just to name a few.

Recent events here in West Virginia illustrate how effective enforcement can work when there is cooperation. In a statewide operation earlier this month, ICE agents partnered with state and local law enforcement to arrest more than 650 individuals illegally present in the United States, including those with serious criminal histories. This operation took place successfully with minimal disruption to the public. Furthermore, the operation stands in stark contrast to the unrest and disorder we have seen in other parts of the country—like Minnesota—where local cooperation has broken down and enforcement actions have been met with chaos and confrontation.

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Shutting down or hamstringing an agency of DHS’ size and importance does not make oversight easier. It does not strengthen accountability. And it certainly does not solve a single challenge we face at our borders or inside our communities. Instead, it jeopardizes our national security and weakens the very institutions responsible for upholding the rule of law.

Democrats have pushed repeatedly for provisions that would erode enforcement authority, restrict ICE operations, and block cooperation between federal, state, and local law enforcement. In doing so, they are not standing with DHS — they are actively working to undermine it.

That is why the demands coming from Democrats in this debate are so troubling. Rather than ensuring our national security personnel have what they need, Democrats have pushed repeatedly for provisions that would erode enforcement authority, restrict ICE operations, and block cooperation between federal, state, and local law enforcement. In doing so, they are not standing with DHS — they are actively working to undermine it.

West Virginians deserve better than political gamesmanship when it comes to homeland security. They deserve leaders who will stand unequivocally with the men and women of DHS and ICE, not wage an ideological campaign against them.

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I will continue fighting to ensure that ICE has the resources, the authority and the support it needs to do its job. Weakening enforcement is not compassion. It is neglect. And it is the communities we represent—from small towns in West Virginia to cities across the country—who will bear the consequences.

Protecting West Virginians will always be my priority. That starts with standing firmly behind DHS and ICE — and rejecting efforts to weaken them.

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MARK HALPERIN: Trump strategy super session plots midterm survival as history stalks GOP

Tuesday night at the Capitol Hill Club, just steps from the House office buildings and a world away from cable news hysteria, the senior Trump political command gathered its core team to talk midterms. It was not a rally. It was not a pep talk. It was a working session — about two hours, a chicken-and-steak buffet, roughly 75 to 100 people in the room, many of them Cabinet secretaries and their top aides, almost all political veterans.

The mood, according to one attendee, was not panicked. Not shaken. But not sanguine, either. Just focused. The kind of focus that comes from knowing that, at the moment, the patterns of history are not on your side.

Midterms are almost always brutal for a president’s party. Since World War II, the president’s party has lost House seats in all but a handful of elections. The average loss is measured not in single digits but in dozens. The modern political era is replete with examples: 1994 for Bill Clinton, 2010 for Barack Obama, 2018 for Donald Trump himself. The gravitational pull of backlash is real.

Which is why Tuesday night’s meeting mattered.

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Susie Wiles, the president’s chief political architect and one of the most disciplined operators in either party, hosted and spoke briefly. Then pollster and strategist Tony Fabrizio took over, presenting roughly 25 slides of data — demographics, issue salience, message testing and a summary of what breaks through and what falls flat.

The headline: The economy will be THE issue at the polls this November.

Not immigration. Not foreign policy. Not Epstein or the border. Not investigations or indictments or Jan. 6 retrospectives. The economy.

Fabrizio’s data showed that certain messages resonated with key voters: banning stock trading for members of Congress; promoting greater transparency in health insurance pricing and claims reimbursement; lowering prescription drug costs; and protecting the Trump tax cuts. Housing affordability, especially for younger voters, looms large — a kitchen-table issue with generational bite, though one the administration has yet to solve, either politically or through policy.

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Notably, taking credit for closing the border does not resonate nearly as much as Republicans might assume. It’s not that voters oppose border enforcement; many simply see it as baseline governance rather than a life-changing economic intervention.

The persuadable universe is also narrower than partisans often imagine: men, moderates, true independents and Hispanic voters. These are the movable pieces on the board.

The battlefield, at least for now, is defined. There are 36 targeted House races and seven key Senate races that will determine the balance of power.

When addressing the group, Fabrizio was not pessimistic, but nor was he sentimental. He urged the team to prioritize specialized podcasts and social media over national news interviews. Paid media, he argued, should be highly targeted — digital, demographic and data-driven — rather than sweeping broadcast or even cable buys. Facebook remains king for voter reach, followed by Instagram and TikTok. The information ecosystem is fragmented and specific; campaigns that pretend it is still 2004, with its homey, conventional mainstream vibe, are wasting money.

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The battlefield, at least for now, is defined. There are 36 targeted House races and seven key Senate races that will determine the balance of power. The Senate math, as presented, is favorable to Republicans unless something dramatic shifts. One striking assertion: the only way Republicans lose their Senate majority is if Democrats take 50 House seats — a wave scenario of historic proportions, made difficult because redistricting has placed the vast majority of House seats safely in the hands of one party or the other, barring a massive tsunami.

After Fabrizio came James Blair, the White House’s political czar, armed with an ice-cold bucket of galvanizing history. It is rare — exceedingly rare, he told the assembly — for a president’s party not to lose a significant number of seats in a midterm.

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Blair pointed to the recent special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District as a tale both cautionary and instructive. The race appeared headed for a loss until a late, aggressive push on messaging and grassroots organizing saved the seat for Republicans and generated lessons about what works — and what does not. 

You cannot argue voters into believing wages are up, he said. They have to feel it. Economic statistics do not automatically translate into economic security, nor do they take precedence over personal bank accounts and family budgets. And some good, old-fashioned opposition research painting Democratic candidates as out of step with the electorate can do wonders.

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Perhaps the most candid moment of the evening came when Team Trump acknowledged a central reality of this presidency: Donald Trump will do what he wants to do. He will say what he wants to say. He will not be governed by slide decks, message matrices or pleas from Republican candidates and strategists. The rest of the political apparatus, therefore, must be relentlessly data-driven and on message — two separate but related campaigns running in parallel: one instinctual and improvisational, the other disciplined and empirical.

The Trump high command expects Democrats to run largely on a “Stop Trump” message. History suggests that is not a foolish approach. Opposition parties in midterms often succeed by nationalizing the election as a referendum on the president. But referendums cut both ways. If voters decide the question is not “How do you feel about Donald Trump?” but “How do you feel about your cost of living?” the terrain shifts.

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Ironically, for all the caricatures of chaos, arrogance and impulse that surround Trump world, the Capitol Hill Club meeting was a sober, methodical session. Cabinet secretaries such as Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Sean Duffy attended, along with senior aides — not to posture or network, but to listen.

No one in the room thought the midterms would be easy. No one suggested the president’s party was immune to natural political rhythms and swings. But neither did they prepare for inevitable defeat.

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The White House officials acted as an alert and cohesive team — one that understands the rules of the game and believes it can bend them.

In Washington, that counts as confidence.

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MORNING GLORY: What will President Donald Trump decide to do with Iran?

A major battle with Iran appears imminent.

Ought it to be called a war, a battle or a strike?

That depends on what the United States and Israel decide to do and what President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu call it.

It also depends on whether Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, orders the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran’s proxy forces in Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, as well as terror cells around the world, to mount counterattacks that kill Americans, Israelis or people in our Gulf allies.

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Whatever the president and the prime minister order, the ayatollah can trigger massive escalation with any counterattack that results in American or Israeli casualties.

In June 2025, Israelis called their attacks on Iran and Iran’s missile fusillades against the Jewish state “the 12-day war.” Americans called their B-2s’ obliteration of Iran’s nuclear weapons program an “operation”: “Operation Midnight Hammer.”

Operations and strikes occur in both battles and wars. What the United States has assembled in and around Iran is a concentration of military forces so immense that everything is on the list of possibilities awaiting President Trump’s order: a discrete one-day operation, numerous strikes over days or weeks, or an intense days, weeks or months-long “battle” to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and missile factories as well as facilities crucial to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and perhaps political leadership, or a war against the Islamic Republic along the lines of the wars conducted against Serbia in 1999 and against Libya

The NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia/Serbia (Operation Allied Force) lasted for 78 days, starting on March 24, 1999, and ending on June 10, 1999. The campaign was launched to stop actions against the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo and concluded with the withdrawal of Yugoslav/Serbian forces from the region. Over 1,000 Serbian military personnel were killed and at least 500 civilians.

NATO’s air campaign against Libya and its dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, lasted for approximately seven months, from March 23 to Oct. 31, 2011, and included 7,000 bombing sorties from the air. A study of that air campaign concluded about 8,000 combatants on both sides died and Human Rights Watch concluded 72 civilians died in the bombings. Qaddafi himself was captured and killed on Oct. 20, 2011.

A second Libyan civil war began on May 16, 2014, when Khalifa Haftar launched Operation Dignity, later escalating with the formation of rival governments in Tripoli and Tobruk. The conflict concluded with a ceasefire signed on Oct. 23, 2020. That ceasefire is precarious and fighting between factions erupts periodically.

TRUMP VOWS TO ‘KNOCK THE HELL OUT OF’ IRAN IF NUCLEAR PROGRAM IS REBUILT AGAIN AFTER HIGH-STAKES MEETING

President Trump has laid down four red lines for Iran and Iran has violated all four: The regime is reported to have resumed efforts to enrich uranium and reach toward a nuclear weapon, to continue to build more and larger ballistic missiles, to fund its proxy forces across the Middle East and, of course, to continue to murder its citizens.

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Ayatollah Khamenei and his senior military commanders continuously taunt and belittle President Trump and the American military as well as Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel. The classic “wounded beast” lashing out is playing out before our eyes, and all the honeyed talk from Iran’s diplomats crumbles under the weight of the regime’s leadership’s poisoned rhetoric.

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There is, of course, genuine risk to our troops and to our allies in Israel and the Gulf States. That is why when President Trump orders the American military to attack, it should be with overwhelming and sustained force. The president has given Iran opportunity after opportunity to stand down and stop its crazed behavior. Iran is incapable of doing that. Iran’s generals have not organized action against the theocrats pushing them and their troops to ruin.

Fanatics don’t reason, and the United States cannot afford to allow the world to see it deterred by the words and shaking fists of a second- or third-rate military equipped with bluster and ballistic missiles.

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SEN TOMMY TUBERVILLE: Bring back the ‘Miracle on Ice’ spirit to Team USA

Every four years, Americans of all backgrounds — Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, urban or rural — come together to cheer on the U.S. Winter Olympic team. The 2026 Olympics in Milan are in full swing and Americans are once again coming together to cheer on our nation’s athletes who have worked their entire lives to reach the pinnacle of their sport.

For generations, Americans tuned in to the Olympic Games with pride, eager to cheer on fellow American patriots who competed not only for medals, but for the nation itself. Back then, every American loved and was proud of our country — regardless of political disagreements — because they understood what it means to be an American. 

Unfortunately, that seems to have changed today. I have been extremely disappointed to see some American athletes expressing “mixed emotions” about representing the United States in this year’s Olympic Games because of their views on politics and — you guessed it — President Donald Trump.

SANDERS CALLS OLYMPIC SKIER ‘PROUD AMERICAN’ DESPITE HAVING ‘MIXED EMOTIONS’ ABOUT REPRESENTING US

One freestyle skier recently suggested he was representing only his friends and family rather than the country as a whole. Another athlete referred to herself as “woke” and said it has been a “hard time” for the LGBTQ community under this administration. A few members of the USA women’s ice hockey team felt the need to weigh in on ICE officers enforcing the law and deporting criminals.

Throughout U.S. history, representing the United States meant something bigger than personal branding or selling the world on your personal political agenda. Since our nation’s founding 250 years ago, America has been a shining beacon of democracy, freedom and individual opportunity. The United States is a global leader when it comes to civil rights. If you work hard, you can achieve the American dream, no matter what you look like or where you come from. That spirit of gratitude and national pride once defined our Olympic athletes as well. 

Throughout the 20th century, American Olympians understood the enormous responsibility it is to represent the United States. In 1936, Jesse Owens stunned the world by winning four gold medals in track and field in Nazi Germany. He didn’t even have to speak — his actions on the field were a clear rebuke of the Nazi propaganda and disgusting racism happening in Germany at the time. That same year, the working-class boys on the University of Washington rowing team, immortalized as “The Boys in the Boat,” defied the odds by capturing gold and once again demonstrated how putting your head down and working can sometimes send a stronger message than shouting into a microphone. 

Decades later, at the height of the Cold War, the 1980 U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team, comprised mostly of college students, defeated the seemingly unbeatable Soviet Union in what became known as the “Miracle on Ice.” These young athletes were not motivated by wealth or personal fame. They played for love of country, love of sport and the opportunity to represent the United States during one of the tensest periods in our nation’s history. I’m sure all of these young men didn’t agree on everything — but their shared patriotism brought them together on the ice. Their victory brought hope to millions of Americans and embodied what this country is all about: grit, determination and hard work.

‘MIRACLE ON ICE’ STAR RIPS AMERICAN OLYMPIAN OVER REMARKS ABOUT REPRESENTING TEAM USA

Those moments are remembered not because of the medals won, but because of the intense patriotism displayed by the athletes who understood the responsibility of representing their country. They understood that stepping onto the Olympic stage meant carrying the hopes and pride of millions back home. They embraced the responsibilities and challenges that came with it and proudly wore the American uniform. 

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Today’s Olympians benefit from resources previous generations could only dream about. When I was growing up, the Olympics were for amateurs. But many of today’s Olympians are professionals who are blessed with elite training facilities, advanced sports science, college sports development pipelines, lucrative sponsorships and other financial incentives. The United States invests heavily in preparing our athletes for success, providing opportunities unmatched by most of the world. Despite all of these privileges, some of the U.S. Olympians on this year’s team seem to have forgotten what an enormous privilege it is to be an American.

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Before I became a U.S. senator, I spent nearly 40 years coaching. I used to tell my players this all the time: if you were lucky enough to be born in the United States, you have already won the lottery. But the only thing this country owes you is an opportunity. The rest is up to you. This is especially true for our Olympic athletes. Representing your country on the world stage is one of the highest honors in athletics. Getting to wear the red, white and blue is a privilege, not a right.

If you aren’t proud to represent this country, you shouldn’t be on our Olympic team. If standing on the podium and hearing our national anthem blasted over the speakers doesn’t bring you to tears, you don’t deserve to wear our great flag. And if you hate this country so much, no one is stopping you from moving somewhere else. Americans will always celebrate athletic excellence. But what has historically made U.S. Olympians truly inspiring is their willingness to put personal differences aside and represent the values that make this country great. I hope to see a change in attitude from our U.S. Olympians, a renewed sense of pride in this country and a return to the unity that once defined the American Olympic spirit. 

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STEVE FORBES: Don’t crush homeowners to pay for NYC’s out-of-control budget

New York City finds itself, once again, at a political and fiscal crossroads. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has unveiled a $127 billion preliminary budget for fiscal year 2027, warning of a $5.4 billion shortfall and asserting that, absent new revenue tools from Albany, the city may have to raise property taxes — possibly by as much as 9.5 percent — on millions of residential and commercial properties. 

This is a grave mistake — not merely for its economic consequences, but for what it signals about governing philosophy in the nation’s largest city.

Property taxes are the most regressive form of taxation in local government. Unlike a tax on incomes or profits, property levies are indiscriminate: they hit long-time homeowners on fixed incomes, working-class families striving to build equity and small business owners who are the backbone of local communities. These levies are not tied to one’s ability to pay, but to a valuation often disconnected from cash flow. For a city already straining under affordability pressures and an elevated cost of living, this is a recipe for further exodus and economic stagnation. 

FREE BUSES, REAL COSTS. INSIDE MAMDANI’S SOCIALIST DREAM TO SHAKEUP TRANSIT FOR NEW YORKERS

To be sure, Mayor Mamdani frames this as a “last resort” or even a strategic lever to pressure Albany to raise taxes on the wealthy and on profitable corporations. But calling it a “last resort” does not mitigate its harm. Mayors and governors negotiate hard — that’s politics. But the collateral damage from a property tax hike would be felt in neighborhoods across all five boroughs: rents edged upward as landlords pass costs through to tenants, small business margins hollowed out and families forced to choose between property ownership and financial survival.

It’s worth recalling that New York City has not raised property taxes in any significant way since the Bloomberg era in the early 2000s, a moment of crisis that demanded extraordinary action. This current proposal comes not in response to an unprecedented calamity, but a political impasse. It is precisely the kind of fiscal brinkmanship that punishes ordinary citizens for elected officials’ inability to craft more responsible solutions.

Proponents of the hike will suggest that property taxes are the only lever left, since the city cannot unilaterally raise income or corporate taxes without Albany’s blessing. But that is an abdication of responsible budgeting, not a defense of it. A mayor who claims to inherit a “historic” budget gap that was sharply reduced — with assistance and careful revenue calibration — undermines the crisis narrative. Indeed, Governor Kathy Hochul has already committed substantial state aid to the city, cutting the gap and undermining the argument that dramatic, city-wide tax increases are imperative. 

Rather than squeezing more out of homeowners and Main Street merchants, City Hall should be scrutinizing wasteful and non-essential spending, streamlining operations, and finding efficiencies within the $127 billion bureaucratic behemoth. The budget reflects priorities — and if spending choices fail to reflect prudence in lean times, that is a political decision, not a fiscal necessity.

‘ZOHRANOMICS’: NYC MAYOR ZOHRAN MAMDANI’S SOCIALIST MATH DOESN’T ADD UP

Another troubling dimension is the broader economic signal this tax hike would send. New York City already competes fiercely with other global cities for business investment, talent and jobs. Other states with far more competitive tax regimes — including zero income tax states — have lured residents and corporations away from New York for decades. A new, steep property tax increase only reinforces the narrative that economic prosperity in New York comes with a punitive price tag, accelerating demographic and business departures in a state that can least afford it. 

More fundamentally, this episode highlights a deep misunderstanding of what good governance requires: balance, creativity and fairness. True leadership doesn’t simply balance books on paper; it balances the economic health of a city with the vitality of its workforce and the sustainability of its middle class. That means resisting the impulse to raise taxes as the first line of defense and instead engaging in genuine spending reform and economic growth strategies that don’t crush taxpayers.

Yes, cities must sometimes make tough choices. But pitting property owners and small businesses against the perceived wealthy is a false dichotomy. A thriving New York — one with robust job creation, resilient communities and inclusive opportunity — is not built by relentless tax increases. It is built by unleashing economic potential, encouraging investment and ensuring that governance is efficient and fiscally disciplined.

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New Yorkers know this instinctively. They are hardworking people who have endured years of rising costs and economic pressures. They simply want the city to spend wisely, and leadership must respect that.

Mayor Mamdani should go back to the drawing board and work with the City Council, stakeholders and the state to find pro-growth solutions. Raising property taxes — not to mention wealth taxes — should not be on the table — least of all as a bargaining chip in political negotiations. Let us pursue growth, reform and opportunity — not tax hikes that risk sending New York backward.

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Creators of JFK Jr TV series respond to Kennedy heir denouncing show as ‘grotesque’

The producer of a new series detailing the love story between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy is speaking out against backlash from a member of the Kennedy family.

FX’s nine-part series “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette” premiered on Hulu Thursday. It follows the life of JFK Jr. and Bessette from when they first fell in love to their death in 1999.

Jack Schlossberg, grandson of former President John F. Kennedy, publicly denounced the show, calling it a “grotesque” way to make money off his uncle’s legacy.

“For the record, I think admiration for my Uncle John is great,” he said in a video on his Instagram story Thursday, according to Entertainment Weekly. “What I don’t think is great is profiting off of it in a grotesque way.”

JOE BIDEN, JOHN KERRY AMONG HIGH-PROFILE ATTENDEES FOR JFK’S GRANDDAUGHTER’S PRIVATE FUNERAL

Schlossberg has also revealed that the Kennedy family was not consulted about the show’s production.

“The right to privacy, which includes the ability to control your own name, image and likeness, doesn’t survive death in the state of New York,” he said. “For that matter, he’s considered a public figure, so there’s not much we can do.”

Fox News Digital has reached out to Schlossberg for comment but did not immediately hear back.

JFK’S GRANDSON JACK SCHLOSSBERG DOUBLES DOWN ON ATTACKS AGAINST RFK JR, WARNS OF ‘DANGEROUS’ AGENDA

Executive producer Brad Simpson responded to Schlossberg’s criticisms, insisting the show is a “sincere” reflection of his uncle’s life.

“What I hope is that when people watch the show, they will see our sincerity. They will see that we’ve approached this with love, and that we were trying to celebrate the life of Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr,” Simpson told The Hollywood Reporter (THR).

“I can understand why somebody could have a reaction before they see it, but I would say, ‘watch the show,’ because I think they’re going to be surprised at how sincere it is,” Simpson said.

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Actress Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, also responded to Schlossberg’s comments.

“I don’t know what it’s like to have a TV show or a book or movie written about my family, and I understand the sensitivities,” Pidgeon told THR. “He has every right to share how he feels about it.”

DAVID MARCUS: If Democrats do him dirty, Stephen A Smith could be the next RFK Jr

As sports media star Stephen A. Smith teased talk of a presidential run in 2028 this weekend, there is one thing that he and those advising him must surely know: The Democratic Party does not nominate outsiders.

This is a lesson that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., learned in both 2016 and 2020 as his populist socialist movement was blocked at every turn by party leaders. To his credit as a politician, Sanders and the socialists, after a decade of work, have now all but taken over the party.

The more relevant example to Stephen A’s would-be grab for the golden ring in 2028 is not Sanders, it is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose mistreatment by the DNC led him to endorse President Donald Trump in 2024.

Smith, tellingly, told CBS News that he wants “to be on the debate stage,” when Democrats compete for the nomination starting next year. This is exactly the ask that RFK Jr. made two years ago when he was, not so cordially, told to kick rocks.

STEPHEN A SMITH DEFENDS POLITICAL COMMENTARY APPROACH, SAYS IT ‘ENCOURAGES’ DIALOGUE FROM BOTH SIDES

What Kennedy intuitively understood and what Smith seems to as well, is that a heterodox, actual centrist on a presidential primary stage is a nightmare for what we used to call the Party of Jefferson and Jackson.

Central to the Democrats’ national narrative is the increasingly strained idea that figures like Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger or even former Vice President Kamala Harris, are somehow centrists compared to Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and the Squad.

Owing to a compliant news media, this story has been working, even if it’s a lie. Immediately after being elected, Spanberger raised taxes and threw her support behind a slew of progressive bills. But hey, she looks and sounds kind of normal.

STEPHEN A SMITH SAYS TRUMP RIGHT TO SECURE BORDER, SAYS ‘EMERGENCY EFFORTS WERE NECESSARY’ AFTER BIDEN’S TERM

Part of the reason this ruse works is that it goes unchallenged within the party itself. But that all goes out the door the moment that the combative Smith steps into the fray.

Without Smith there, a so-called centrist might get away with a weak non-answer on men in womens’ sports, for example. But can you imagine Stephen A, with his arsenal of insults and pained facial gestures just letting that slide?

When it comes to President Donald Trump, the Democrats’ whole identity is predicated upon his allegedly being a criminal authoritarian. But Smith doesn’t see it that way. He calls balls and strikes, and that kind of common sense makes hair-on-fire progressives look downright silly.

THE DEMOCRAT JAMES CARVILLE THINKS IS WORTH WATCHING IN 2028 WILL SURPRISE YOU

Democrats have a real problem here, because if they use their usual backroom self-dealing tricks to deny Smith a place on the debate stage, he can do exactly what RFK Jr. did, and say, “I gave it a shot, but these people are crazy. At least I can talk with Republicans.”

When Kennedy pulled that trigger, he brought with him to Trump’s side an army of Make America Healthy Again moms across the nation who may well be the biggest reason Trump lives in the White House today.

Smith also has influence over a key demographic: the original manosphere, that of sports talk radio and media. Forget about the alt-right influencers on social media. Every 27-year-old dude with a FanDuel account knows and respects Stephen A.

‘ROCK STAR’ NEWSOM STEALS THE SHOW AT DNC SUMMIT AS DEMOCRATS HUNT FOR 2028 CONTENDER TO TAKE ON TRUMP

In fact, there was a moment in the 2024 race when political sharps knew it was over. It was when the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ internal polling showed that President Joe Biden’s double-digit lead over Trump among members, flipped into a 20-plus-point Trump lead with Harris atop the ticket.

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That kind of shift, that fast, almost never happens. So how do the Democrats get Teamsters back? Well, Teamsters drive trucks a lot, and guys who drive trucks a lot also tend to listen to sports radio a lot. Smith, literally, speaks their language.

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Interestingly, back in 2015, the first public figure who I heard say that Trump would win, not that he had a chance, but would win, was Mike Francesa, the pope of New York City sports radio. Later, I realized these hosts talk to working-class guys all day for their job, so, of course, it gives them insights into voters.

Democrats are in a tricky spot here. They really can’t allow Smith to shine and expose just how far left they have lurched. But if they do him dirty, he is not without leverage. In fact, he very well could give one whopper of a speech for the nominee at the 2028 Republican National Convention.

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Green rhetoric, polluted water: The Left’s DC sewage failure is a disgrace

As the Washington, D.C. region thaws this spring, the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday will bring renewed attention to the capital’s monuments, parks and waterways — symbols of national continuity and civic pride. Along the Potomac River, however, the thaw will also bring something else: the unmistakable stench of raw sewage.

Following a catastrophic failure in a major sewer line, hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated wastewater spilled into the river, making it one of the largest sewage releases in U.S. history. The environmental damage is immediate, visible and inescapable.

President Donald Trump announced that he would call in FEMA to assist with cleanup and response efforts — a move that should be applauded. Whatever one’s politics, federal intervention signals recognition that this is not a minor bureaucratic mishap but a major environmental crisis. In contrast, the governors of Maryland and Virginia and the mayor of Washington, D.C. — all Democrats, some with ambitions for higher office, who routinely champion aggressive climate policies — have been silent. For leaders who speak often about environmental justice and public health, their silence has been striking.

OBAMA-ERA GREENHOUSE GAS RULES GONE AS EPA’S ZELDIN SIGNS ‘SINGLE LARGEST DEREGULATORY ACTION’ IN HISTORY

One might expect such a disaster, unfolding just miles from the seat of federal power, to dominate the national environmental conversation. Instead, it has struggled to break through the noise. There have been no sweeping reckonings about aging infrastructure, no sustained outrage cycles and no urgent moral declarations from the climate establishment.

The muted response is especially striking when set against the intensity of reaction to a very different development in environmental policy the same week as sewage spilled into the river surrounding the nation’s seats of power.

This week, the Trump administration announced its decision to rescind the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” the legal determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. The response from progressive leaders and advocacy groups was swift and dramatic. Former President Barack Obama warned that undoing the finding would make Americans “less safe, less healthy, and less able to fight climate change.” Major media outlets framed the move as a fundamental assault on science and environmental protection.

The juxtaposition is revealing. A historic sewage spill into a major American river — an event with clear, measurable consequences for ecosystems and public health — has barely registered in the national discourse. Meanwhile, a regulatory shift whose effects will unfold gradually and remain contested has been treated as an existential emergency.

Over time, federal emissions rules have produced an expanding system of “off-cycle credits,” which reward automakers for technologies that reduce emissions under specific testing conditions rather than across a vehicle’s full life cycle. One of the most visible results is the now-ubiquitous stop-start feature that shuts off a car’s engine at red lights and restarts it moments later.

The feature is widely disliked by drivers, but its popularity with regulators has little to do with consumer experience. Mechanics and automotive analysts have increasingly raised concerns that repeated forced shutdowns and restarts place additional strain on engines, batteries and starter systems. That strain leads to higher maintenance costs, more frequent mechanical failures and shorter vehicle lifespans — outcomes that run counter to the environmental goal of reducing resource consumption over time.

Like paper straws that disintegrate before a drink is finished, these measures offer the appearance of environmental action while shifting costs and inconvenience onto consumers. Once embedded in regulatory frameworks, however, they are rarely subjected to the same scrutiny that accompanied their adoption.

EPA ADMINISTRATOR ZELDIN: WE FINALLY DEMOLISHED THE DEMOCRAT CLIMATE INSANITY

This pattern reflects a broader tendency in progressive environmentalism: “Following the science” often means invoking scientific authority to justify new mandates, but far less often using evidence to reassess whether those mandates are working as intended. Regulatory success becomes a matter of compliance and symbolism rather than measurable environmental improvement. Environmental concern turns performative — focused on visible lifestyle controls — while less ideologically convenient problems receive less attention.

The silence surrounding the Potomac sewage spill underscores the point. Infrastructure failures do not lend themselves to moral theater. They implicate governance, maintenance, budgeting and long-term competence — areas where responsibility is harder to shift and political rewards are limited.

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Public trust depends on consistency and proportionality. When policymakers devote enormous energy to marginal regulatory changes while downplaying acute environmental crises under their own jurisdiction, skepticism is not cynicism — it is common sense.

Environmental science should guide priorities, not serve as a selective rhetorical tool. If leaders want Americans to accept costly and disruptive regulations in the name of environmental protection, which they routinely do, they owe the public proof that all environmental harms are treated with equal seriousness.

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Hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage in a river should command at least as much urgency as tailpipe rules.

As the nation approaches a milestone anniversary meant to celebrate progress and stewardship, the contrast is difficult to ignore. Real environmentalism means fixing broken pipes and maintaining infrastructure, not just rewriting regulations. It means accountability for local failures as well as federal debates. And it means recognizing that sometimes the most immediate environmental threats are not abstract carbon models, but raw sewage flowing through the capital of the United States.

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