A Republican strategist went on MSNBC this weekend and did something the network's hosts probably didn't expect: he defended Jasmine Crockett.
Matthew Bartlett, appearing on MS NOW's "The Weekend" on Saturday, argued that Democratic staffers and the team behind "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" had "done Jasmine Crockett dirty" in a sequence of events surrounding a Texas Democratic Senate primary that has become a case study in friendly fire.
The controversy centers on state Rep. James Talarico, Crockett's opponent in the primary, who appeared on "The Late Show" on Tuesday. That appearance triggered a mess. Colbert accused CBS of blocking the interview from airing, citing what he described as the FCC's crackdown on the longstanding equal candidate time rule. CBS flatly denied it.
"THE LATE SHOW was not prohibited by CBS from broadcasting the interview with Rep. James Talarico."
So someone wasn't telling the truth. And in the wreckage of that contradiction, Bartlett argued, it was Crockett who got buried.
The story that circulated earlier in the week was simple: Trump was supposedly behind the suppression of Talarico's interview, wielding federal power to silence a Democratic candidate through broadcast regulators. It had all the ingredients the left loves. A villain. A victim. A chilling effect on free speech, as Fox News reports.
Bartlett wasn't buying it. He told Jonathan Capehart on Saturday:
"This notion [that] Trump [was] going to stop Colbert in order to stop Talarico — people kind of went with this narrative."
Then he landed his point:
"I'm not sure it's true. I think, candidly, they've actually done Jasmine Crockett dirty."
When Capehart pressed him on who "they" referred to, Bartlett pointed the finger at Colbert's media team and Democratic staffers connected to Talarico.
Here's the timeline that tells the real story. On Tuesday, Crockett told MS NOW's Jen Psaki that she "received a phone call" informing her CBS had been told "they could go ahead and move forward with the interview of James Talarico," provided that Crockett and the other candidate in the race, Ahmad Hassan, received equal time.
That sounds reasonable on paper. Equal time is a standard broadcast obligation when candidates are involved. But by Friday, Crockett said she had still not been invited to appear on Colbert's show.
So Talarico got his national television moment. Crockett got a phone call and a promise. And the promise evaporated.
Crockett herself seemed to grasp the dynamic, telling Psaki on Tuesday that the entire controversy probably gave her opponent "the boost he was looking for." Which is exactly what Bartlett argued. Talarico, he noted, got a nice little bump in fundraising from the whole episode. The victim narrative worked, just not for the person who was actually victimized.
What makes this worth watching isn't the specifics of a Texas primary. It's the pattern.
The left built a narrative around Trump suppressing the media to protect itself from accountability, then used that narrative to elevate one Democratic candidate at the expense of another. The supposed censorship story became the campaign ad. And when CBS publicly denied that the interview was ever blocked, nobody paused to recalibrate. The story had already done its work.
Bartlett summarized it cleanly:
"Everyone likes to be the victim. I'm not sure Talarico is the victim of Trump's suppression. I think Jasmine Crockett might be the victim of a false media narrative."
Talarico's campaign, for its part, declined to comment when asked about the situation. Silence is a choice.
There's a deeper irony here that conservatives should note. The FCC's equal time rule exists precisely to prevent broadcasters from tipping the scales in elections. It's supposed to be a safeguard. But in this case, the rule's invocation became the story itself, a vehicle for generating sympathetic coverage for one candidate while the other waited by the phone for an invitation that never came.
The rule didn't protect Crockett. It was used to frame a narrative around her opponent's appearance, generate outrage, drive donations, and then quietly ignored when it came time to actually provide her the platform she was owed.
Conservatives have long argued that the mainstream media and the Democratic establishment function as a single organism. This episode doesn't disprove that theory, but it does complicate it in an instructive way. The machine doesn't just target Republicans. When a Democratic primary gets competitive, the same apparatus can be turned on any candidate who isn't the preferred choice.
Crockett is no conservative. She's a reliable progressive vote in Congress. But reliability, it turns out, doesn't earn you loyalty within the party infrastructure. It earns you a phone call on Tuesday and silence by Friday.
A GOP strategist had to go on MSNBC to point it out. That tells you everything about who's actually paying attention.
Robert De Niro wants you to know that Donald Trump will never leave the White House. He has wanted you to know this since at least May of 2024. He wanted you to know it again in October of 2025. And now, in a forthcoming podcast appearance with Nicolle Wallace, he wants you to know it one more time.
Breitbart reported that the actor is set to appear on a podcast sponsored by MS NOW, the far-left news network, where he delivers a familiar refrain. According to a preview reported by The Wrap, De Niro once again insists that Trump will refuse to vacate the presidency when his second term ends in 2028.
"Let's not kid ourselves. He will not leave. It's up to us to get rid of him."
Wallace, for her part, tried to emphasize that such a movement should be "peaceful." A reassuring qualifier, given the temperature of the rhetoric preceding it.
This is not new material. De Niro has been delivering this warning on a loop since the 2024 election, and the quotes are almost interchangeable at this point. In May of 2024, the actor offered this:
"Elections? Forget about it. That's over. That's done. If he gets in, I can tell you right now. He will never leave. He will never leave. You know that. He will never leave."
Then, in October of 2025, he kept the streak alive:
"We can't let up. Cannot let up on him because he is not going to leave the White House. He does not want to leave the White House. He will not leave the White House. Anybody thinks he, oh, he'll do this, he'll do that, it's just deluding themselves."
And now, from the podcast preview:
"He will never leave. We have to make him leave. He jokes now about nationalizing the elections. He's not joking. We've seen enough already."
Four statements across two years, all saying the same thing, with the same evidence behind them. Which is to say: none.
There is a rather large problem with the theory that Trump will barricade himself in the Oval Office and refuse to yield power. He already lost an election and left.
Trump lost his first re-election bid to Joe Biden in 2020. He left the White House without hesitation when he lost. There is no indication that he won't do so again in 2028. The Twenty-Second Amendment exists. The transfer of power has a date on the calendar. None of this requires Robert De Niro to organize a citizen resistance movement from a podcast studio.
But facts have never been the point of this exercise. The point is the performance.
De Niro also went on to claim that Trump is somehow threatening polling places, suggesting citizens may need to physically show up on "the other side" to ensure people can vote safely. His exact words:
"We have to make sure that like what he's trying now, that all the polling places have people that can come there safely. That might mean citizens on the other side."
What Trump is "trying now" at polling places is never specified. No incident is cited. No evidence is offered. It is the kind of claim that sounds urgent precisely because it is vague, a shadow on the wall that the audience is invited to fill in with their own anxieties.
This is the engine of modern progressive fearmongering. You don't need proof. You need tone. You need a famous face saying "you know that" with enough gravity that the listener nods along without asking what, exactly, they know.
The broader pattern here is worth noting, not because De Niro is uniquely influential, but because he represents a type. The celebrity who mistakes volume for moral authority.
The cultural figure who, having spent decades in rooms where everyone agrees with him, genuinely cannot fathom that the democratic process might produce outcomes he dislikes and then self-correct on schedule.
Some even made the same "he'll never leave" claim in 2020. Trump left. The prediction failed. Nobody recalibrated. They simply moved the goalpost to 2028 and kept going.
This is not political commentary. It is a ritual. The conspiracy refreshes itself every cycle, immune to the fact that its core prediction has already been disproven by observable reality. The left spent years warning that democracy was about to end, watched it continue functioning, and concluded that they simply hadn't warned hard enough.
De Niro telling Nicolle Wallace that Trump "will never leave" is not brave. It is not insightful. It is a man reciting the same line to the same audience and receiving the same applause. The podcast drops Monday. The next one will sound identical.
A coalition of election integrity organizations filed an amicus brief on Tuesday pressing the Supreme Court to uphold what they argue is a straightforward requirement of federal law: mail ballots must be received by Election Day, not days or weeks after.
The brief, filed in Watson v. Republican National Committee, backs a lower court ruling that found Mississippi's practice of accepting mail ballots up to five business days after Election Day violates federal statute. The Honest Elections Project, the Center for Election Confidence, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections all signed on in support of the RNC's position.
Oral arguments are scheduled for March 23. A decision is expected by the summer, in time to shape the rules for the 2026 midterms.
The RNC originally sued over Mississippi's allowance for counting mail ballots that arrive up to five business days after Election Day, so long as they are postmarked by that date. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled in the RNC's favor, finding that federal law trumps the state's extended deadline and requires ballots to be in hand by Election Day.
The case now sits before the Supreme Court, and the stakes stretch well beyond Mississippi. Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., currently count ballots received after Election Day if postmarked on time. A ruling affirming the 5th Circuit's decision would force those jurisdictions to change their practices or face legal challenges.
Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told Fox News Digital:
"Counting ballots that are received after Election Day unnecessarily damages public trust in election outcomes, delays results, and violates the law."
He's right on the trust question, and the data backs it up. Americans have watched elections drag on for days and sometimes weeks past Election Day as late-arriving ballots trickle in and shift margins. That spectacle does not inspire confidence. It breeds suspicion, whether warranted in a given race or not.
The legal fight matters, but it's worth noting that the political ground has already shifted. Since the 2024 election, four Republican-controlled states, Kansas, Ohio, Utah, and North Dakota, have moved to require ballot receipt by Election Day. They didn't wait for the Supreme Court. They read the statute, recognized the problem, and acted.
That trend underscores something important: this is not a radical legal theory. It is the plain reading of federal law, supported by a Supreme Court decision from three decades ago in Foster v. Love. The novelty isn't in requiring ballots by Election Day. The novelty was in the 14 states that decided to ignore that requirement.
Supporters of the RNC's position acknowledge that curtailing acceptance of late-arriving ballots would not guarantee that election officials finish tabulating on election night. Close races will still take time to count. Nobody is pretending otherwise.
But there is a meaningful difference between counting ballots that are already in hand and waiting for new ballots to arrive through the mail. One is a logistical reality. The other is a policy choice that introduces uncertainty, delays finality, and opens the door to questions about the chain of custody. Even the U.S. Postal Service has warned that postmarks may not reliably reflect when a ballot actually entered the mail system.
Military and overseas ballots, governed by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, would likely remain unaffected by a ruling in the RNC's favor. That's a reasonable distinction. Service members stationed abroad face genuine logistical barriers that domestic voters do not.
The left will frame this case as voter suppression. They always do. Any rule that requires citizens to meet a deadline, prove their identity, or follow basic procedures gets cast as an obstacle to democracy rather than a safeguard of it.
But the argument here is simple enough that it fits on a bumper sticker: Election Day is a day, not a suggestion. Federal law sets it. States don't get to unilaterally extend it by accepting ballots that arrive nearly a week later and calling that compliance.
Snead said a favorable ruling would "protect the rights of voters and the integrity of the democratic process, and ensure that it is easy to vote but hard to cheat in future elections."
That formulation captures the conservative position precisely. Nobody is trying to stop anyone from voting. Mail your ballot early. Drop it off in person. Use the systems available to you. But do it by the deadline that Congress established. That is not suppression. It is the bare minimum expectation of a functioning election system.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments in March. By summer, we'll know whether Election Day still means what it says.
President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday evening that he was unaware of news reports describing a close personal relationship between DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her top advisor, Corey Lewandowski.
When a reporter asked whether the reports were "a bad look" and whether Noem would remain in her position, Trump kept it brief.
"I mean, I haven't heard that. I'll find out about it, but I have not heard."
The exchange followed a Wall Street Journal report last week that detailed the relationship between Noem and Lewandowski and reported that the White House has grown "uncomfortable" with their closeness. Both Noem and Lewandowski are married. Both have publicly denied reports of an affair.
According to the Journal's reporting via Mediaite, Lewandowski initially wanted to serve formally as Noem's chief of staff at DHS. Trump rejected the idea, citing reports of a romantic relationship between the two. Officials told the Journal that Trump has continued to bring up those reports.
The situation grew more visible last year when tabloid photos showed Lewandowski going back and forth between his apartment and Noem's, which were across the street from each other. After those photos surfaced, Noem moved into a government-owned waterfront house on a military base in Washington. The house is normally provided to the leader of the U.S. Coast Guard, which falls under DHS's purview during peacetime.
A DHS spokeswoman said Noem moved to the house for increased security and pays rent. Lewandowski also spends time at the property, according to the Journal. People familiar with the situation told the paper that the two have done "little to hide their relationship inside the department."
Washington loves a soap opera, and this story has all the ingredients the press corps salivates over: a cabinet secretary, a political advisor with a colorful reputation, tabloid photos, and a waterfront house that belongs to the Coast Guard. The personal details will dominate cable news for days.
But the real question isn't whether Noem and Lewandowski are romantically involved. The real question is whether the arrangement compromises the mission at DHS.
The Department of Homeland Security sits at the center of the most consequential policy fight in the country right now: securing the border and enforcing immigration law. That work requires focus, institutional credibility, and a secretary whose authority inside the building is unquestioned. An advisor who was denied a formal chief of staff role by the president himself but who nonetheless operates as a shadow power center inside the department is a structural problem, regardless of whatever personal dynamics exist.
If Lewandowski's influence at DHS exceeds his formal role, that matters. If career officials and political appointees inside the department are navigating around a relationship rather than through a chain of command, that matters more. None of that requires a tabloid photo to be concerning.
Trump's response on Monday was measured. He didn't defend the relationship. He didn't attack Noem. He said he'd look into it. That's a president keeping his options open, not a president who's made up his mind.
The Journal report landed hard enough that reporters are now asking the president directly, on camera, whether his DHS secretary will keep her job. That kind of pressure doesn't dissipate on its own. Either the White House moves to resolve the Lewandowski question, or the story keeps compounding.
Noem has one of the most important jobs in the federal government. The border mission is too critical and too politically charged to be shadowed by questions about who's really calling the shots inside the department. If Lewandowski's presence is a distraction, the fix is straightforward. If it's more than a distraction, the fix is even simpler.
DHS doesn't need a personnel soap opera. It needs a clear chain of command and a secretary whose authority runs through the org chart, not around it.
Barack Obama wants Democrats to know they have an expiration date. The former president, in an interview with YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen published this weekend, warned his party that older politicians risk losing touch with the voters they need most, and urged Democrats to elevate younger candidates ahead of the 2026 midterms.
It's a striking admission from the man who once embodied generational change, now 64 and conceding he can't keep up with his own daughters' cultural references.
"I'm a pretty healthy 64, feel great, but the truth is, half of the references that my daughters make about social media, TikTok and such, I don't know who they're talking about. There is an element of, at some point, you age out. You're not connected directly to the immediate struggles that folks are going through."
Obama said Democrats perform best when their candidates are "plugged into the moment, to the zeitgeist," rather than asking voters to look backward, Fox News reported. He described an "enormous, untapped power" among younger Americans that the party has failed to channel into actual candidacies.
Obama's advice would land differently if his party hadn't spent the better part of a decade ignoring the exact problem he's now diagnosing. This is the same party that cleared the field for Joe Biden in 2020 and then, in 2024, watched an 81-year-old president stumble through a debate with Donald Trump on June 27 in Atlanta before the gravity of his decline became impossible to spin away. Biden dropped out. Democrats scrambled to Kamala Harris, who was 18 years younger than Trump, but still lost.
The Democratic bench is thin because the party's leadership spent years standing on it.
Obama was 47 when he won the presidency in 2008. He ran on energy, youth, and the future. Now he's telling his party to find the next version of that. The question is whether anyone in the gerontocracy running the Democratic Party is listening, or whether they'll do what they always do: nod along, then refuse to leave.
If you want a case study in what Obama is describing, look at California's 43rd District. Rep. Maxine Waters is 87 years old. She has held her seat since 1991. She hasn't faced a serious primary challenge in over a decade in her solidly blue South Los Angeles district. That streak may be ending.
Last week, Myla Rahman, a nonprofit executive, Los Angeles native, and cancer survivor who is 34 years younger than Waters, launched a primary challenge. She plans to use Waters' 35 years in Congress as ammunition. Rahman told the California Post what many Democratic voters have been thinking:
"People are sick and tired of the same old thing."
Waters isn't alone. Democratic Reps. Brad Sherman and Mike Thompson, both from California, face challenges from younger rivals. In Massachusetts, Rep. Seth Moulton, 47, is trying to oust Sen. Ed Markey, 79, in the Democratic primary. That's a 32-year age gap in a single race.
What makes Obama's intervention so revealing is not what he said but how long it took him to say it publicly. Democrats have spent years treating the age question as a Republican attack line rather than a structural weakness. When Nikki Haley proposed mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 during her 2024 Republican presidential nomination bid, the left treated it as a sideshow. It was, in fact, a mirror.
The Democratic Party's leadership class has calcified. Committee chairs, caucus leaders, and Senate fixtures have clung to power well past the point of diminishing returns, not because they're irreplaceable, but because the incentive structures reward seniority over vitality. Waters is the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee. That title is a product of longevity, not proof of continued relevance.
Obama framed the solution in characteristically optimistic terms:
"That spirit, that energy, it's out there, and you can feel it, but it's bottled up. We haven't given enough outlets for young people to figure out, 'How do I become a part of that?' That's this enormous, untapped power that we have to get back to."
Nice sentiment. But energy doesn't get "bottled up" by accident. It gets bottled up by incumbents who won't retire, party committees that protect them, and a culture that equates loyalty with silence.
The former president was careful to hedge. He said he wasn't "making a hard and fast rule" about age. He spoke in generalities about connection and zeitgeist. What he did not do was name names. He didn't say Maxine Waters should step aside. He didn't say the party made a catastrophic error letting Biden run again. He didn't acknowledge that the very institutional loyalty he cultivated during his presidency helped create the logjam he's now lamenting.
Obama said he hopes to energize younger voters through his presidential center, scheduled to open later this year in Chicago. It's a worthy project. But the Democratic Party's youth problem isn't a branding issue that a building in Chicago can solve. It's a power problem. The people at the top won't leave, and the people at the bottom have no path up.
Trump won the 2024 election, fueled in part by a better-than-expected performance among younger voters. That should terrify Democrats far more than any Republican policy proposal. When a 79-year-old Republican is connecting with young Americans better than your party's entire apparatus, the problem isn't messaging. The problem is the messenger.
Obama is right that Democrats need younger candidates. He's been right about that since 2008. The question is whether his party treats this as a genuine reckoning or just another podcast moment that fades by Friday.
Myla Rahman filed paperwork. Seth Moulton is running. Somewhere in a solidly blue district, an 87-year-old incumbent is preparing to fight for her seat, as it belongs to her.
Obama lit the candle. His party has to decide whether to carry it or blow it out.
Eric Swalwell — congressman, former Intelligence Committee member, and now California gubernatorial hopeful — once fancied himself a poet. The results are about what you'd expect.
A sexually graphic poem penned by Swalwell during his sophomore year at Campbell University has surfaced, courtesy of a Daily Mail report. Titled "Hungover From Burgundy," the piece appeared in the university's literary magazine, The Lyricist, and reads like a fever dream scrawled on a dorm room napkin at 2 a.m.
The highlights — if you can call them that:
"And there beauty was, formless and magnificent — a flurry of limbs and nails. She chased and I ran, I chased and she ran."
"While I screamed, she bent her lips to mine. Kissing till veins imploded and exploded, till blood rolled down our chins, for bounded mouths cannot speak of parting."
"In the morning, I awoke beside beauty's shadow — her form sloppy and her legs pale. My scar lost, my lips cracked and dry. And we groaned simultaneously."
A Swalwell spokesman offered the campaign's only response to the Daily Mail:
"If you think Eric's poetry at 18 was bad, you should see his diary entries from when he was 12."
Points for self-awareness, at least.
The poem itself is embarrassing but ultimately harmless, the New York Post noted — most people's college creative writing deserves to stay buried. What makes this worth more than a laugh is context. Swalwell isn't some anonymous state legislator. He's a man who sat on the House Intelligence Committee, who lectures his colleagues on national security with the cadence of a man who believes he's the only adult in the room. And the trail of baggage he's hauling into this governor's race extends well beyond purple prose.
Start with the college writings that aren't erotic. The Daily Mail report also unearthed commentary Swalwell penned for his student newspaper that critics say expressed sympathy for Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted in the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, and Leonard Peltier, found guilty in the 1975 killing of two FBI agents. Activists have long argued that both were politically persecuted. Swalwell, at the time, was apparently sympathetic to that framing.
That might be a forgivable youthful indulgence — college kids flirt with bad ideas the way Swalwell's poetry flirts with coherence — except for one detail. Swalwell went on to become a prosecutor who led a hate crimes unit. Opponents have raised the obvious question: how does a man who expressed sympathy for convicted cop killers pivot to that role without anyone asking him to reconcile the two?
Nobody has provided a satisfying answer. Swalwell himself hasn't addressed it — he hasn't responded to requests for comment on any of this.
Then there's Christine Fang. Between 2011 and 2015, Swalwell had contact with a woman later identified by U.S. intelligence officials as a suspected Chinese operative tied to China's Ministry of State Security. Fang cultivated relationships with local and national politicians, helped raise funds for Swalwell's 2014 re-election campaign, and even assisted in placing an intern in his congressional office.
Federal investigators eventually gave Swalwell a defensive briefing in 2015. He cut off contact. The House Ethics Committee investigated and concluded in 2023 without taking action. Swalwell was not accused of wrongdoing.
Those are the facts — and they're the facts Swalwell's defenders always recite, as though a clean ethics report erases the underlying reality. A suspected foreign intelligence asset embedded herself in a congressman's orbit closely enough to fundraise for him and place staff in his office. Then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy removed Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee over national security concerns. That decision wasn't made lightly, and no ethics committee finding changes the substance of why it was made.
Swalwell's gubernatorial bid arrives at a moment when California is drowning in real problems — housing costs that punish working families, an energy grid held together by optimism, and cities that have spent a decade treating law enforcement as the enemy. The state needs a governor who commands seriousness.
What it's getting instead is a candidate whose public record includes sophomoric erotic poetry, college sympathy for cop killers, a suspected Chinese spy in his fundraising apparatus, and removal from one of the most sensitive committees in Congress. His campaign's instinct when confronted with any of it is to crack jokes about diary entries.
California voters will decide whether that's the résumé of a governor — or of a man who peaked as a mediocre campus poet and never quite figured out the difference between ambition and qualification.
Rosie O'Donnell quietly slipped back into the United States for a two-week visit — more than a year after she packed up and moved to Ireland because Donald Trump won re-election. She told almost no one.
Fox News reported that the 63-year-old actress disclosed the covert homecoming during an interview on SiriusXM's Cuomo Mornings, where she told Chris Cuomo she wanted to test the waters before potentially bringing her teenage daughter back for a visit.
"I was recently home for two weeks, and I did not really tell anyone. I just went to see my family. I wanted to see how hard it would be for me to get in and out of the country. I wanted to feel what it felt like. I wanted to hold my children again. And I hadn't been home in over a year."
She wanted to see how hard it would be to get in and out of the country. An American citizen, born in New York, returning to the United States — and she treated it like a reconnaissance mission.
O'Donnell moved to Ireland with her teenage daughter in January 2025, just before Trump's second inauguration. She framed it as survival — not protest, not politics, but existential necessity. She claims she doesn't regret leaving and that she did "what I needed to do to save myself, my child, and my sanity."
But here she is, sneaking back for two weeks to hug her other kids and gauge whether America is still habitable. The dramatic collapse under their own weight. If the country were genuinely dangerous for Rosie O'Donnell, she wouldn't have waltzed through customs without incident. If it weren't, then the original departure was exactly what it looked like — a tantrum dressed up as moral courage.
O'Donnell told Cuomo that being in Ireland changed her perspective on America:
"I've been in a place where celebrity worship does not exist. I've been in a place where there's more balance to the news. There's more balance to life. It's not everyone trying to get more, more, more. It's a very different culture. And I felt the United States in a completely different way than I ever had before I left."
A celebrity complaining about celebrity worship while conducting a media tour about her feelings. The irony writes itself.
O'Donnell's assessment of her brief visit home was bleak, at least by her telling:
"And I'm very happy that I'm not in the midst of it there because the energy that I felt while in the United States was — if I could use the most simple word I can think of — it was scary. There's a feeling that something is really wrong, and no one is doing anything about it."
This is a woman who left a country of 330 million people, relocated to the west coast of Europe, traveled to London for a performance of "Evita" in July, posed in front of the Sydney Opera House in October, and now sits for interviews about how terrified she is of America — while freely entering and leaving it at will.
The word "scary" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for someone whose experience was an uneventful two-week family visit.
O'Donnell has said her daughter blames Trump for forcing their family's move out of America, though she hasn't offered specifics about what exactly made the move necessary beyond her own political distress. No threats. No legal jeopardy. No concrete danger. Just vibes — and the conviction that the wrong person occupying the Oval Office constitutes a personal emergency.
Millions of Americans lived through eight years of Obama and four years of Biden without relocating to another hemisphere. They went to work. They raised their kids. They voted in the next election. That's what citizens of a republic do.
The bad blood between O'Donnell and Trump stretches back roughly 20 years, to when she criticized him while appearing on "The View." They've traded jabs ever since. Trump escalated the exchange in his characteristically unsubtle fashion, posting on Truth Social in July 2025:
"Because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!"
He followed up in September 2025:
"She is not a Great American and is, in my opinion, incapable of being so!"
O'Donnell fired back, correctly noting that a president cannot strip citizenship from a natural-born citizen under the Constitution:
"He can't do that because it's against the Constitution, and even the Supreme Court has not given him the right to do that. ... He's not allowed to do that. The only way you're allowed to take away someone's citizenship is if they renounce it themselves, and I will never renounce my American citizenship. I am a very proud citizen of the United States."
She's right on the law — citizenship for those born in the country is protected by the 14th Amendment, and no formal action was ever taken. No executive order, no legal proceeding. This was a social media feud between two people who've been feuding since the mid-2000s.
O'Donnell also told an Irish radio show that Trump "uses me as a punching bag and a way to sort of rile his base." That may well be true. It's also true that she has spent the better part of two decades volunteering for the role.
O'Donnell shared with the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph in October 2025 that she was applying for Irish citizenship — dual citizenship, she clarified, so she could remain an American while living abroad. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded to Fox News Digital with a four-word review:
"What great news for America!"
O'Donnell insists she loves Ireland — its politics, its people, its pace of life:
"I am also getting my citizenship here so I can have dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States because I enjoy living here. It's very peaceful. I love the politics of the country. I love the people and their generous hearts and spirit. And it's been very good for my daughter. But I still want to maintain my citizenship in the United States. My children are there. I will be there visiting and go to see them. And I have the freedom to do that, as does every American citizen."
Note what's happening here. She left America because she couldn't bear to live under Trump. She's applying for Irish citizenship because Ireland is peaceful and balanced. But she also insists she's a proud American who will never renounce her citizenship and will visit whenever she pleases.
This isn't exile. It's a vacation with a narrative.
Every four or eight years, a certain class of celebrity threatens to leave the country if the Republican wins. In 2016, the promises flowed freely. Almost none followed through. O'Donnell, to her credit, actually left — which puts her ahead of the pack on commitment, if nothing else.
But the move reveals something the cultural left never quite reckons with. Their attachment to America is conditional. It depends on who holds power.
When their side governs, the country is worth fighting for. When it doesn't, the country becomes unbearable — not because anything in their daily life has materially changed, but because the symbolism is wrong.
O'Donnell wasn't deported. She wasn't charged. She wasn't harassed at the border. She entered the United States, spent two weeks with her children, and left again without incident. The America she describes as "scary" welcomed her home and let her go, because that's what free countries do.
She'll be back. The question was never whether she'd return — it was how long she could sustain the performance.
New York State Assemblymember Alex Bores told the world he walked away from Palantir — and millions of dollars — because he couldn't stomach the company's work with ICE.
A Bloomberg News report tells a different story: Bores resigned in February 2019, just five days after Palantir's legal department notified him of potential disciplinary action over sexually explicit comments allegedly made to a colleague.
Five days. Not a principled stand. A hasty exit.
The New York Post reported that Bores, 35, is now running to replace retiring Rep. Jerrold Nadler in Manhattan's heavily Democratic 12th Congressional District — a race where his origin story as a tech worker who chose conscience over cash is central to his pitch. That pitch now has a credibility problem.
On January 23, Bores posted on X with the kind of moral clarity candidates love to project:
"I quit Palantir over its ICE contract, choosing principle over my career and millions of dollars."
He followed that with a second post framing himself as the target of corporate retaliation:
"They profited off of it, and are now using those funds to lie to New Yorkers and attack me."
It's a tidy narrative. A young software engineer stares down a powerful defense contractor, sacrifices a lucrative career, and emerges on the other side as a public servant. The kind of story Democratic primary voters in Manhattan devour.
Except Bloomberg's reporting — based on people familiar with the matter — suggests the timeline doesn't hold up.
According to the report, Bores worked at Palantir from 2014 to 2019. During his first year, he attended a client offsite meeting with Kimberly-Clark where an employee reportedly referenced tissue usage data and made what was described as an implicit reference to masturbation — noting that the top three reported tissue uses accounted for less than half of total usage, with the implication being obvious.
Years later, Bores allegedly recounted that anecdote to a colleague. A complaint was filed. Palantir's legal department sent Bores a notification of potential disciplinary action. Five days after that notification, he was gone.
Bloomberg's sources also reported that in his exit interview, Bores cited burnout and excessive travel — not ICE contracts — as his reasons for leaving.
Bores' spokeswoman, Alyssa Cass, pushed back aggressively. She called the Bloomberg report:
"A wildly overblown characterization from 'sources' within a company that has named Alex Bores public enemy #1."
Cass acknowledged the basics — that a complaint was filed and HR spoke to Bores about it — but disputed everything else. She told The Post:
"A complaint was filed, and HR asked Alex about it."
She added that:
"The matter was dropped."
As for the five-day timeline between the warning letter and his departure, Cass called it:
"Made up and the timeline proves it."
She said Bores had already secured another job offer before leaving Palantir. After his departure, he joined an AI-focused startup and later worked at fintech firm Promise Pay before launching a political career that landed him in the New York State Assembly in 2022.
Let's stipulate that retelling an off-color story from a client meeting may not be the scandal of the century. Workplace complaints exist on a spectrum, and the underlying incident — repeating a crude joke about tissue usage data — is hardly Harvey Weinstein territory.
But that's not the issue. The issue is that Bores built a campaign narrative around a noble resignation that appears, at minimum, to have been significantly more complicated than he let on. He didn't just omit context.
He actively constructed a heroic version of events and used it to fundraise, campaign, and position himself as a man of principle in a crowded Democratic primary.
If the Bloomberg timeline is accurate, Bores didn't quit Palantir to fight ICE. He quit Palantir because the walls were closing in — and then retrofitted the story into a political asset years later.
That's not a misjudgment. That's a fabrication strategy.
This is a familiar playbook on the progressive left: claim moral authority not from what you've actually done, but from the story you tell about what you've done. The résumé becomes mythology. The mythology becomes the campaign. And anyone who questions it is accused of acting in bad faith — in this case, supposedly on behalf of a vengeful corporation.
Bores has made artificial intelligence regulation and opposition to the ICE centerpieces of his congressional campaign. Both positions play well in a Manhattan district where the primary is the only election that matters.
But if the foundation of his candidacy — the reason voters should trust his judgment and his character — is a story that doesn't survive contact with a Bloomberg FOIA request, what exactly is he selling?
Financial disclosures show Bores and his wife hold between $2 million and $3.7 million in combined assets. He's not the scrappy idealist who gave it all up. He's a multimillionaire former tech worker who left one lucrative gig, moved through two more, and then decided to run for office with a convenient origin story.
The Post sought comment from both Palantir and Kimberly-Clark. Neither responded by publication time. Bloomberg's sources remain anonymous. The colleague who filed the complaint has not been identified.
That leaves voters in the 12th District with a straightforward question: Do you trust the man who told you one story, or the reporting that suggests it was another?
In a district that will almost certainly send a Democrat to Congress, the primary is everything. And in a primary, character is supposed to matter. Bores asked voters to believe he sacrificed millions for principle. Now they'll have to decide whether that sacrifice ever actually happened — or whether it was just another line on a carefully curated campaign page.
Manhattan Democrats deserve better than a candidate whose founding myth crumbles under basic reporting. Then again, they keep electing the ones whose myths crumble slowest.
Hillary Clinton stepped off a first-class ICE high-speed train at platform 22 in Munich's central station on Thursday, surrounded by aides and flanked by an armed German Federal police officer. The former Secretary of State had just completed the four-hour rail journey from Berlin — reportedly because a nationwide airline strike grounded hundreds of flights across Germany, including the ten hourly Lufthansa shuttles that normally run between the two cities.
The image writes itself: a former U.S. presidential candidate, once accustomed to Air Force jets and motorcades, climbing down from a Deutsche Bahn carriage because German unions decided Thursday was the day to walk off the job over retirement benefits.
Michaela Kuefner, Chief Political Editor at Deutsche Welle News, captured the scene:
"Hillary Clinton arrives by train from Berlin… No hassle from people asking about those files. No hot drinks because of a power failure in the bistro for half the trip."
No hot drinks. A power failure in the bistro car. It's the kind of detail that needs no editorial seasoning.
Clinton arrived ahead of the Munich Security Conference, which runs Friday through Sunday. But as Breitbart News reported, the real story isn't who's arriving by rail — it's the shadow that still hangs over this conference from last year, when Vice President JD Vance walked onto the same stage and delivered a speech that left Europe's diplomatic establishment in visible distress.
Vance, serving as President Trump's emissary, challenged European leaders directly on their own democratic commitments:
"For years we've been told everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values… But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials, threatening to cancel others, we have to ask if we are holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves because I fundamentally think we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values, we must live them."
Conference boss Christoph Heusgen — a top German diplomat — broke down in tears in response. The speech forced a conversation that European elites had spent years avoiding: whether the continent's increasingly heavy-handed approach to speech regulation and electoral intervention was compatible with the democratic values it claimed to defend.
That conversation clearly hasn't ended.
This year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio leads the U.S. delegation. According to the Associated Press, the conference "warily" awaits his arrival — a revealing word choice. U.S. officials indicated his speech is intended to be "less contentious but philosophically similar" to Vance's 2025 address.
Read that framing carefully. The AP treats an American official speaking plainly about democratic principles as something a European security conference must brace for. The wariness isn't about substance — it's about the discomfort that comes when someone says out loud what polite diplomatic circles would rather leave unsaid.
"Philosophically similar" is the key phrase. The administration isn't retreating from the core message Vance delivered. It's delivering it through a different voice, with a different tone — but the substance holds. Europe's allies are expected to live by the values they invoke when asking for American support. That's not contentious. That's the baseline.
What, exactly, brings Hillary Clinton to the Munich Security Conference in the current moment? The fact sheet doesn't say, and Clinton herself offered no public remarks upon arrival. She is there, presumably, in some unofficial capacity — a former Secretary of State still orbiting the international circuit that once defined her career.
There's an irony worth noting. Clinton arrives at a conference still reverberating from Vance's challenge to European democratic backsliding — the very kind of frank, uncomfortable diplomacy that the foreign policy establishment she represents spent decades avoiding. The old guard traveled to Munich to reassure. The current administration travels to Munich to recalibrate.
Meanwhile, Lufthansa told passengers with grounded domestic flights they could exchange tickets at no extra cost for Deutsche Bahn train passes. Hundreds of flights were cancelled in a single day because unions walked out over retirement benefits. Germany's infrastructure, once the pride of European efficiency, reduced Clinton and countless other travelers to four-hour rail commutes with no hot coffee.
The Munich Security Conference used to function as a comfortable annual ritual — Western leaders affirming their shared commitment to the transatlantic order, exchanging pleasantries, and returning home having changed nothing. Vance broke that pattern last year. Rubio appears poised to maintain it this year, not with provocation for its own sake, but with the simple insistence that words and actions align.
That shouldn't be a radical proposition. The fact that European diplomats greet it with tears and wariness tells you everything about how far the gap between rhetoric and reality has stretched.
Clinton rode the train to Munich. The world she helped build is the one being asked to account for itself when she gets there.
At least nine Democrats who served in the Biden administration are running for Congress or governor this cycle — and almost none of them want voters to know it.
Across campaign websites, launch videos, and promotional materials, Biden alumni are performing a coordinated vanishing act on the man who gave them their most prominent jobs. No photos. No name drops. No trace of the 46th president, except where absolutely unavoidable — and even then, wrapped in enough euphemism to make a press secretary blush.
The pattern is unmistakable. These aren't obscure staffers hoping nobody Googles them. These are ambassadors, cabinet secretaries, and senior White House officials who now treat their own résumés like classified documents, as Axios reported.
Start with Bridget Brink, Biden's ambassador to Ukraine, now running for a Republican-held House seat in Michigan. In her announcement video, she told voters she proudly served "under five presidents, both Democrat and Republican" — while photos of Obama and George W. Bush flashed on screen. The president who actually appointed her as ambassador? Nowhere to be found.
Michael Roth, Biden's interim leader of the Small Business Administration, is challenging Rep. Tom Kean Jr. in New Jersey. His website describes him as a leader "trusted by senators, governors, mayors, and a president." Which president? He'd rather not say.
Then there's Deb Haaland, Biden's Interior secretary, now running for governor of New Mexico. Her website refers to her cabinet tenure only as holding the position "for the past four years" — no mention of who put her there. In a revealing twist, her site does mention Trump, boasting about her work with him in getting seven House bills she introduced signed into law. Biden gets erased; Trump gets a highlight reel.
Xavier Becerra, Biden's Health and Human Services secretary, is running for governor of California. Biden appeared in neither his campaign launch video nor his website. Doug Jones, the former senator who served as Biden's "sherpa" guiding Ketanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court nomination, left Biden off his website and kickoff video for his Alabama governor's race.
A national Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity, explained the calculus plainly:
"Joe Biden's lingering unpopularity is proving to be a serious drag on Biden alums running in swing districts across the country."
The strategist went further:
"They're unable to talk about their most recent and often most high-profile job experience without alienating general election voters."
Read that again. These candidates cannot mention the most significant line on their résumé without hurting their chances. That is the Biden legacy, distilled to a single strategic verdict.
The reversal from recent history makes the silence louder. In the 2018 midterms, Democratic candidates tripped over each other to associate themselves with Barack Obama. Biden himself was a sought-after surrogate on the campaign trail. Haaland said at the time that she wouldn't have had the courage to run if she hadn't worked for Obama's campaigns.
Obama was an asset. Biden is an anchor.
Ryan Vetticad, a former presidential management fellow at the Department of Justice, now running for a House seat in Illinois, was asked about leaving Biden out of his campaign materials. His response was diplomatic but unmistakable:
"It's not the priority for me."
He elaborated:
"There's a lot of things that Democrats did wrong in the 2024 cycle, so I want to chart a new way forward."
"Chart a new way forward" is the kind of language you use when the old way led somewhere catastrophic. Vetticad isn't wrong about 2024. He's just not willing to say the quiet part any louder than he has to.
Only one candidate among the group leaned into his Biden service. Christian Urrutia, running for a House seat in New Hampshire, highlighted his work at the Pentagon under Biden on his website, arguing that "people are hungry for folks that are authentic." The key detail: his seat is viewed as solidly or likely Democratic. He can afford the association because he doesn't need swing voters.
In competitive districts, Biden's name is poison. In safe blue seats, it's merely irrelevant. Neither scenario reflects well on the former president's political standing.
The implications stretch beyond the midterms. Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg — both Biden administration alumni — are cited as potential 2028 presidential candidates. If midlevel appointees running for House seats can't afford the Biden association, the problem compounds exponentially for anyone seeking the presidency on the strength of that same administration's record.
A former Biden White House official dismissed the whole pattern as "a manufactured, press-driven narrative." A Biden spokesperson declined to comment at all. These are not the responses of people who believe the narrative is wrong. They're the responses of people who have no good answer for it.
Meanwhile, Republicans are doing exactly what you'd expect. Rep. Mike Lawler of New York wasted no time tying his Democratic challenger, Cait Conley, to Biden on social media, calling her "the director of counterterrorism on the Biden National Security Council during the fall of Kabul and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan." Conley did not respond to a request for comment.
The candidates can scrub their websites. They can film slick launch videos that mention every president except the one who hired them. But opponents have Google, and voters have memories. The Biden record doesn't disappear because a web designer omitted it.
Doug Jones, at least, tried to split the difference. He told Axios he was "proud of the work I did for my friend President Biden," then added that "as the campaign evolves, so too will our website and future materials." Translation: the website will eventually mention Biden — once the campaign calculates the least damaging way to do it.
This is what a historically unpopular presidency looks like in its aftermath. Not a single one of these candidates is running on Biden's record. Not one is making the case that his administration improved the lives of the voters they're courting. The silence is the review.
Democrats salivate at the prospect of major gains in November. They may even get them. But they'll do it by pretending the last Democratic president doesn't exist — which tells you everything about what that presidency actually delivered.