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.
January's Consumer Price Index came in below expectations, dropping annual inflation to 2.4% — the lowest reading since May and a sharp decline from December's 2.7%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a modest 0.2% seasonally adjusted monthly increase for all urban consumers, beating economists' forecasts of 2.5%. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, fell to its lowest point in nearly five years.
Florida's Voice reported that the Trump administration wasted no time framing the numbers as vindication. White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai delivered a statement that doubled as a victory lap:
"Today's expectation-beating CPI report proves that President Trump has defeated Joe Biden's inflation crisis: overall inflation fell, and real wages grew by $1,400 in President Trump's first year in office."
That $1,400 figure — the real earnings gain for private-sector workers over the past year — sits at the center of the administration's case. Real average hourly earnings climbed 1.2% across all private-sector workers and 1.5% for middle- and lower-wage employees. Under the Biden administration, workers lost nearly $3,000 in real earnings, according to White House figures. The reversal is not subtle.
The numbers aren't abstract. They map onto the parts of the economy that working Americans actually feel.
Energy prices dropped 1.5%. Gasoline fell 3.2%. Used vehicles — a category that became a symbol of Biden-era sticker shock — declined 1.8%. Beef, eggs, and coffee all saw reductions in January. Prescription drug prices remained steady last month and declined over the course of 2025.
The sector-level wage data tells its own story:
These are not Silicon Valley knowledge workers or government-sector employees padding their resumes with DEI certifications. These are the people who build things, extract things, and make things — the backbone of the physical economy. When their real wages rise, it means the policy environment is rewarding production, not just consumption.
For months, critics warned that Trump's trade posture would ignite a new inflation spiral. The January data offers a clean rebuttal: no broad spikes have materialized. Energy is cheaper. Goods are cheaper. The categories most exposed to supply-chain disruption moved in the right direction.
This is worth sitting with for a moment. The entire economic case against the administration's trade agenda rested on the assumption that tariffs would function as a consumer tax, driving prices higher across the board. January's CPI doesn't just fail to confirm that theory — it contradicts it. The economy absorbed the policy shift and kept cooling.
That doesn't mean tariffs carry zero cost in any category. But the doomsday framing — the breathless cable-news segments, the op-eds treating every tariff announcement as a prelude to Smoot-Hawley — looks increasingly disconnected from the data.
Desai pointed to two areas where the administration sees continued momentum. Housing inflation, which has been the stickiest component of CPI for years, continues to cool. And prescription drug prices actually fell over the year — a trend the White House credits to its Most Favored Nation drug pricing deals and the Great Healthcare Plan.
"Housing inflation notably continues to cool, while prescription drug prices actually fell in 2025, with even more price relief ahead for American patients thanks to President Trump's Most Favored Nation drug pricing deals and the Great Healthcare Plan."
Housing and healthcare are the two categories that erode middle-class purchasing power faster than anything else. If both trend lines hold, the downstream effects on household budgets could be substantial — and politically potent heading into the midterms.
The White House didn't stop at celebrating the present. Desai turned the data into a direct message aimed at the Federal Reserve:
"With inflation now low and stable, America's economy is set to turbocharge even further through long-overdue interest rate cuts from the Fed."
The phrase "long-overdue" is doing deliberate work. The administration's position is clear: the Fed held rates higher than the data justified, and every month of delay costs borrowers — homebuyers, small businesses, anyone carrying variable-rate debt — real money. With inflation now sitting comfortably below economists' expectations, the case for continued restraint thins considerably.
Whether the Fed acts on that signal is another matter. But the political ground has shifted. A central bank that holds rates steady while inflation undershoots forecasts isn't being prudent. It's being stubborn.
Strip the rhetoric away, and the administration's argument reduces to a simple contrast: $3,000 lost under Biden, $1,400 gained under Trump. One presidency bled purchasing power from working families. The other restored it in twelve months.
Critics will note these are White House figures, not independently audited calculations. Fair enough. But the BLS data is the BLS data. Inflation fell. Real wages rose. Energy got cheaper. Food got cheaper. The trend lines all point in the same direction, and they all point away from the previous administration's record.
Americans don't need a press secretary to tell them whether their paycheck stretches further at the grocery store. They already know. The CPI report just confirmed what the checkout line has been saying for months.
California Governor Gavin Newsom landed in Munich, Germany this weekend to attend the Munich Security Conference — appearing on a climate panel and meeting with Denmark's foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen — while back home, his state staggers under the weight of devastating wildfires, roughly 116,000 homeless residents, rampant drug overdoses, and a proposed billionaires' tax that is already driving wealth out of the state.
This is the second international trip in as many months. The Daily Mail reported that last month, Newsom attended the World Economic Forum in Davos. Before that, a visit to Brazil to announce a climate partnership. His office says the governor has "stepped up as the leading US presence on the global stage."
The governor of a state. The global stage.
Newsom isn't hiding the ball anymore — if he ever was. At the Munich climate panel, he told attendees that President Trump was "temporary," adding:
"He'll be gone in three years."
That's not diplomacy. That's a campaign stump speech delivered on foreign soil. Eric Schickler, a professor of political science at UC Berkeley, told the San Francisco Chronicle what everyone already knows:
"This is a standard strategy that you use when you're running for president, especially if you're running as a governor."
Newsom isn't the only Democrat treating Munich like an early primary stop. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer — both described as potential 2028 nominees — were also scheduled to attend. The Munich Security Conference has apparently doubled as a Democratic beauty pageant.
Meanwhile, Newsom's rhetoric abroad grows sharper with each trip. His official statement before departing framed the whole excursion as a counter to Washington:
"While Donald Trump continues to demonstrate that he is unstable and unreliable, California is leaning in on the partnerships that make California stronger, Americans safer, and our planet healthier."
His office added that the trip comes as the Trump administration "undermines alliances and retreats from climate leadership." The framing is unmistakable: Newsom isn't governing California. He's auditioning to govern America — and using foreign capitals as his backdrop.
The Munich trip follows a revealing episode at Davos last month. Newsom claimed he was denied access to the US headquarters at the World Economic Forum following pressure from the Trump administration. His response, posted on X:
"How weak and pathetic do you have to be to be this scared of a fireside chat?"
The White House Rapid Response account offered a different read on the situation:
"The failing Governor of California (rampant with fraud) watches from the corner cuck chair as @POTUS delivers a true masterclass in Davos. Embarrassing!"
Newsom defended the Davos trip by leaning into California's economic heft:
"Give me a category and California outperforms. Fourth largest economy in the world, so we can punch above our weight. We can come here with formal authority and a little moral authority."
He continued:
"And I tell you, we need a little moral authority in our body politic in the United States of America today."
Moral authority. The governor presiding over 116,000 homeless people and a wildfire recovery effort that has drawn bipartisan frustration.
The crises Newsom keeps flying away from aren't abstractions. They are Californians without homes, without answers, and increasingly without patience.
The Los Angeles wildfires devastated communities, and Newsom's rebuilding plan has faced significant pushback. Spencer Pratt — the reality star who announced a run for Los Angeles mayor — captured a frustration shared well beyond celebrity circles when he posted on X:
"Nobody actually believes that giving the STATE money will help fire victims rebuild their homes."
He followed up:
"We have all seen billions of federal dollars fall into Newsom's bottomless money pit, without a single dollar seen by the intended recipients."
When a reality television personality is making a more compelling case for government accountability than the state's elected opposition, something has gone sideways.
Then there's the proposed billionaires' tax — a one-time levy of 5% on net worth, covering stocks, bonds, artwork, and intellectual property, with billionaires given five years to pay. It hasn't been voted on or signed into law yet, but the signal alone has been enough.
Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and tech investor David Sacks have all made moves to leave the state. California currently has roughly 200 billionaires. The question is how many it will have once Sacramento finishes telling them they're ATMs.
The tax targets net worth, not income — a distinction that matters enormously. This isn't a higher marginal rate on earnings. It's the state claiming a percentage of what people own. The flight of capital isn't a mystery. It's a rational response.
There's a particular kind of politician who believes that looking important is the same thing as being effective. Newsom's international itinerary — Brazil, Davos, Munich — reads like the calendar of a man who has decided that his state's problems are less interesting than his own ambitions.
Consider the math. California's governor is flying to Europe to talk about climate leadership while his state's wealthiest residents pack their bags. He's meeting with foreign ministers while wildfire victims wait for rebuilding funds. He's telling foreign audiences that the sitting president is "temporary" while 116,000 Californians sleep without permanent shelter.
Newsom wants the world to see him as America's shadow president — a serious man doing serious work on the global stage. But you don't earn moral authority by claiming it at a podium in Munich. You earn it by solving the problems in your own backyard.
California's crises will still be there when the governor lands. They always are.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio departed for Germany on Thursday to lead the U.S. delegation at the 2026 Munich Security Conference, one year after Vice President JD Vance stood on the same stage and told European leaders their biggest threat wasn't Russia or China — it was themselves.
Fox News reported that Rubio's message before boarding was blunt.
"The Old World is gone. Frankly, the world I grew up in, and we live in a new era in geopolitics, and it's going to require all of us to re-examine what that looks like and what our role is going to be."
That's not diplomatic throat-clearing. That's a warning — delivered plainly, without apology, to a continent that has spent the better part of a decade pretending the post-Cold War order would sustain itself indefinitely.
To understand what Rubio is walking into on Saturday, you have to understand what Vance walked into last year. At the 2025 Munich Security Conference, the Vice President delivered a speech that reportedly left European leaders stunned. He accused European governments of drifting toward censorship and argued that the continent's greatest danger was internal democratic decay — not external military threats.
"What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America."
President Trump called the speech "brilliant" and noted that Europeans are "losing their wonderful right of freedom of speech." The speech drew significant attention from conservatives and backlash from European officials — though notably, none of the critics were willing to go on the record.
The administration hasn't let the rhetoric remain rhetorical. The State Department has targeted the European Union's Digital Services Act as "Orwellian" censorship. New visa restrictions have been implemented aimed at foreign officials accused of censoring Americans online. These aren't talking points. Their policy.
The conference this year features a curious guest list on the American side. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are all attending.
Think about that lineup for a moment. A failed presidential candidate, a socialist congresswoman from the Bronx, and a governor who can't keep the lights on in his own state — all flying to Munich to represent... what, exactly? The opposition? The resistance? A shadow government pitching itself to foreign leaders?
There's one Secretary of State, and he's Marco Rubio. The rest are tourists with diplomatic pretensions.
Rubio arrives in Munich not as a freshman diplomat finding his footing, but as the most versatile official in the administration. He has served as acting national security advisor, acting archivist of the United States, and acting administrator of USAID — all while running the State Department. The man's portfolio makes most Cabinet secretaries look part-time.
White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales framed the Munich trip within the administration's broader record:
"The President and his team have flexed their foreign policy prowess to end decades-long wars, secure peace in the Middle East and restore American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. The entire administration is working together to restore peace through strength and put America First."
The "Western Hemisphere" line isn't throwaway. Earlier this year, the U.S. military captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Rubio was at Mar-a-Lago with President Trump, monitoring the operation. That's the kind of credibility you carry into a room full of European defense ministers who struggle to meet their NATO spending targets.
There's been speculation about the dynamic between Rubio and Vance on the world stage — the kind of palace intrigue narrative the press loves to construct. The facts tell a different story.
This week alone, Vance signed a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement with Armenia and a strategic partnership with Azerbaijan. Earlier in February, both Vance and Rubio held a bilateral meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Vance led a delegation — which included Rubio — at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Milan.
Wales put it simply:
"President Trump has assembled the most talented team in history, including Vice President Vance and Secretary Rubio, who are working in lockstep to notch wins for the American people."
Working in lockstep doesn't mean doing the same job. Vance laid the intellectual groundwork at Munich last year. Rubio builds on it this year with a different style but the same core message: Europe must reckon with its own failures before demanding American resources.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos last December, President Trump said something that should have set off alarms across every European capital:
"I don't want to insult anybody and say I don't recognize it. And that's not in a positive way. That's in a very negative way. And I love Europe and I want to see Europe do good, but it's not heading in the right direction."
That wasn't a diplomatic slight. It was a diagnosis. And it's one that European leaders have studiously avoided confronting because confronting it would require them to admit that their immigration policies, their speech codes, their defense freeloading, and their regulatory overreach are self-inflicted wounds — not externalities imposed by Washington.
Rubio understands the cultural connection. He told reporters before departing:
"We're very tightly linked together with Europe. Most people in this country can trace both, either their cultural or their personal heritage, back to Europe. So, we just have to talk about that."
That's the posture — not adversarial, but honest. America isn't walking away from Europe. It's demanding that Europe walk toward reality.
The Munich Security Conference draws hundreds of senior decision-makers from around the world every year. Under the first Trump administration, Vice President Mike Pence attended twice. Under Biden, Kamala Harris attended three times. Previous secretaries of state — Kerry, Blinken, Clinton — have all addressed the body.
But none of them went to Munich with the leverage this administration carries. A captured dictator. Peace agreements in the Middle East. Nuclear cooperation deals were signed days before arrival. A State Department actively confronting European censorship regimes rather than enabling them.
Rubio's speech Saturday will land in a room where the old assumptions about American patience have already been dismantled. The question isn't whether Europe will listen. It's whether Europe can afford not to.
Donald T. Kinsella lasted less than a day as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York. Sworn in on Wednesday morning by a board of federal judges, he was out by Wednesday evening — removed by the White House without explanation.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the move on X with characteristic directness:
"Judges don't pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution. You are fired, Donald Kinsella"
Fox News reported that Morgan DeWitt Snow, the Deputy Director of Presidential Personnel, delivered the formal notification to Kinsella. The court that appointed him pushed back the next day. The White House has not publicly commented further.
The Northern District of New York has been without a Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney for some time, and the vacancy created a cascading series of legal disputes that set the stage for this week's confrontation.
In January, U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield ruled that the Department of Justice had taken improper action to keep John Sarcone III in the acting U.S. Attorney role past the 120-day statutory limit for attorneys the Senate hasn't confirmed. The ruling, reported by NBC News, declared that Sarcone was serving illegally. He subsequently demoted himself to first assistant attorney while awaiting an appeal.
That left a vacancy — and the federal court moved to fill it. The judges turned to 28 U.S.C. § 546(d), which empowers a district court to appoint a U.S. Attorney "to serve until the vacancy is filled."
They selected Kinsella, whom the court described as "a qualified, experienced former prosecutor" with "years of distinguished work on behalf of the citizens of the Northern District of New York."
He didn't make it to sundown.
What makes this dispute genuinely interesting — and not just another Beltway turf war — is that both sides are pointing to the same section of the Constitution and arriving at opposite conclusions.
Blanche cited Article II for the proposition that the President picks U.S. Attorneys. The court cited Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 right back, noting that the Constitution "expressly provides" for Congress to vest the appointment of officials like U.S. Attorneys "in the Courts of Law." The court's Thursday statement laid this out in detail:
"The Court exercised its authority under 28 U.S.C. § 546(d), which empowers the district court to 'appoint a United States Attorney to serve until the vacancy is filled.' The United States Constitution expressly provides for this grant of authority in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, which states in part: 'the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment' of officials such as United States Attorneys 'in the Courts of Law.' By the end of the day, Deputy Director of Presidential Personnel, Morgan DeWitt Snow notified Mr. Kinsella that he was removed as the judicially-appointed United States Attorney, without explanation."
So both sides invoke Article II. Both claim the text supports their position. The question is whether the executive branch can unilaterally remove someone the judiciary appointed under a statute Congress wrote for exactly this scenario.
There's a principle worth watching here that transcends the particulars of a single U.S. Attorney vacancy in upstate New York.
The 120-day limit exists for a reason — it's supposed to prevent the executive branch from parking unconfirmed appointees in powerful roles indefinitely, avoiding the Senate confirmation process the Founders designed. Judge Schofield's January ruling enforced that limit. The court's appointment of Kinsella was the statutory mechanism kicking in after the executive branch failed to fill the seat through proper channels.
The administration's position — that the President's appointment power supersedes a judicial appointment made under a congressional statute — raises a structural question that federal courts may ultimately have to resolve. Whether Kinsella's removal triggers a legal challenge remains to be seen. As of Friday, the fact sheet records no indication of one.
What's clear is the administration's posture: executive appointment authority is not something it intends to share, even temporarily, even when the vacancy exists because the Senate confirmation process stalled.
Kinsella himself has said nothing publicly. The White House hasn't responded to Fox News Digital's inquiry. The only parties on record are Blanche — via a social media post — and the court, via a carefully worded statement that reads less like a press release and more like the opening brief in a separation-of-powers case.
The court's closing line was pointed:
"The Court thanks Donald T. Kinsella for his willingness to return to public service so that this vacancy could be filled with a qualified, experienced former prosecutor, and for his years of distinguished work on behalf of the citizens of the Northern District of New York."
That's not a thank-you note. That's a marker laid down — a federal court telling the executive branch, on the record, that the man it removed was qualified and that his appointment was lawful.
The Northern District of New York still doesn't have a U.S. Attorney. The vacancy that started this fight remains. And the constitutional question at the center of it — who fills the gap when the President doesn't — now sits in the open, waiting for someone to litigate it.
Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host now serving as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has filed a slip-and-fall lawsuit against her hometown of Rye, New York, and Con Edison after tripping over a piece of plywood embedded in gravel on a public road. She's seeking $250,000 in damages.
The Daily Mail reported that the incident occurred on August 28 on Boston Post Road in Rye — about a mile from Pirro's five-bedroom home. According to her statement to Rye police, Pirro was looking both ways before crossing the street when she caught a protruding block of wood that had been left amid gravel laid by Con Edison workers around a steel plate covering an underground gas main.
"Next thing I know I am face planted on my right side."
Pirro told responding officers she suffered blood on her lips and hands, broken glasses, and an open scrape on her knee. Two men nearby helped her to the sidewalk, where she sat on the grass to reorient herself.
The Rye Police Department returned the next day and photographed the scene. The responding officer noted the wood was "speculated to be a part of construction work on the road."
The amended complaint, filed in Westchester County, paints a more serious picture of the injuries. Pirro's attorneys wrote that she sustained:
The suit claims she was "confined to bed and badly bloodied" and "continues to experience pain and suffering." Her attorney in the case is Al Pirro, her ex-husband, who was pardoned by President Trump during his first term after a series of tax-related crimes. That's a detail that will generate its own headlines, but it's legally unremarkable. Ex-spouses practice law. Pardoned attorneys still hold bar cards.
Both Con Edison and the Rye Corporation Counsel declined to comment, citing pending litigation.
Here's where it gets uncomfortable for Pirro: she appeared on Fox News Sunday on August 31 — three days after the fall — with no visible bruising on her face. The lawsuit describes injuries to the "head, eye, face, and shoulder areas." Television cameras are unforgiving. The absence of visible damage doesn't disprove the claims, but it does create a gap between the legal narrative and the public record that any competent defense attorney will drive straight through.
Slip-and-fall lawsuits are a dime a dozen in American courts. They are also, fairly or not, the punchline of every tort reform argument conservatives have made for decades. A prominent conservative figure filing a $250,000 negligence claim over a piece of wood in the road will hand the left a talking point they didn't earn — and that's worth acknowledging plainly.
The underlying facts of the case aren't inherently unreasonable. If Con Edison workers left debris embedded in a gravel patch on a public road, and the city failed to inspect or remediate the hazard, someone has liability. Infrastructure negligence is real. Utility companies cut corners. Municipal oversight lapses. These are the kinds of hazards that tort law exists to address.
But $250,000 for a fall that left no visible bruising within 72 hours? Pirro is 74 years old, and falls at that age can produce injuries that don't always photograph well — soft tissue damage, persistent pain, and shoulder impingement.
The medical reality may well justify the claim. But the legal filing reads like it was drafted for maximum leverage, not maximum credibility. The phrase "serious personal injuries" is doing a lot of heavy lifting when the most specific documented evidence is a scraped knee and broken glasses.
None of this diminishes Pirro's record. Three terms as Westchester County district attorney. A career on the bench. Confirmed as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia on August 2. She has earned her position through decades of legal work, and a personal injury claim doesn't change that calculus.
What it does is remind everyone — left, right, and center — that the American tort system looks the same no matter who's filing the paperwork.
Conservatives have long argued that frivolous or inflated personal injury claims clog courts and drive up costs for municipalities and businesses. Whether this particular claim is frivolous will be decided by the facts. But the framing — a powerful federal prosecutor suing her quaint hometown and a utility company over a stumble — will test how consistently the right applies its own principles on litigation culture.
Pirro has every legal right to file this suit. The question isn't whether she can. It's whether she should have.
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.
When the Supreme Court splits 5-4, and the liberal bloc wins, Brett Kavanaugh is on their side more than half the time.
Newsweek reported that data from the Supreme Court Database, as cited by SCOTUSblog, shows that since the 2020-2021 term, Kavanaugh has joined the liberal majority in 52 percent of 5-4 cases where a liberal justice was in the majority.
Neil Gorsuch sits at 43 percent. Amy Coney Barrett comes in at 22 percent.
All three were appointed by President Trump during his first term. Only one routinely hands liberals the fifth vote they need.
The raw percentages deserve a closer look, because they reveal something more than a single justice drifting left. They reveal distinct judicial personalities among the three Trump appointees.
Kavanaugh joins the liberal majority at the highest rate — 52 percent — but rarely joins them in dissent. His rate of siding with the liberal bloc in losing 5-4 causes is just 7 percent. That means Kavanaugh isn't a philosophical fellow traveler with the left. He's a swing vote — someone who moves to the liberal side when it's going to win, not when it's going to lose. He's not joining lost causes. He's joining winning coalitions.
Gorsuch, by contrast, presents a different profile entirely. He joined the liberal majority in 43 percent of these close cases but sided with the liberal dissent in 40 percent of them. Across all 5-4 decisions, Gorsuch joined the liberal justices roughly 44 percent of the time.
His breaks from the conservative majority appear more ideologically driven — a libertarian streak that occasionally lands him in unexpected company regardless of which side prevails.
Barrett is the most reliable of the three. She sided with the liberal majority in just 22 percent of these cases and joined the liberal dissent 20 percent of the time. Consistent, predictable, and firmly planted on the right side of the bench.
Adam Feldman, a recurring columnist at SCOTUSblog, put it plainly:
"This pattern is striking but the results are clear: When liberals win narrowly, Kavanaugh is the conservative justice most likely to be part of the winning coalition."
Conservatives fought for a generation to build a 6-3 Supreme Court. The Federalist Society pipeline, the brutal confirmation battles, the political capital spent — all of it aimed at producing a court that would interpret the Constitution as written, not as progressives wished it read.
A 6-3 majority should be commanding. But a 6-3 majority with a reliable swing vote is functionally a 5-4 court — and Kavanaugh's pattern suggests that on the cases that come down to a single justice, the conservative supermajority shrinks to a coin flip.
This isn't about demanding lockstep agreement. No serious person expects nine justices — or even six — to rule identically on every case. Judicial independence matters, and cases that reach the Supreme Court are genuinely difficult. The easy ones get settled lower down.
But the pattern matters because 5-4 decisions are, by definition, the ones where the legal arguments are closest and judicial philosophy carries the most weight.
These are the cases where the composition of the court is supposed to matter most. And in those cases, Kavanaugh sides with the liberal outcome more often than not.
A Marquette Law School poll conducted January 21 to 28 — surveying 1,003 adults with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points — found that Kavanaugh carries the lowest net favorability rating among Supreme Court justices.
Just 21 percent of U.S. adults view him favorably, while 28 percent hold an unfavorable opinion, putting his net favorability at minus 7.
Other justices also received negative net favorability ratings, but Kavanaugh sits at the bottom. That's a remarkable position for a justice whose confirmation fight turned him into a cause célèbre for the right. Conservatives rallied around him during one of the ugliest confirmation processes in modern memory. The left savaged him. And now neither side seems particularly pleased with what they got.
The left will never forgive him for existing on the court. The right increasingly wonders what it purchased with all that political capital.
There's a crucial distinction between a justice who reaches unexpected conclusions through originalist reasoning and a justice who gravitates toward the majority coalition. Gorsuch's breaks from the right, whatever you think of them, tend to follow a discernible libertarian logic — they happen win or lose.
Kavanaugh's breaks happen overwhelmingly when the liberals are already winning. That 52-to-7 split between joining liberal majorities and liberal dissents isn't a sign of independent thinking. It's a sign of coalition management.
The current term runs through June, and the cases still to be decided will test whether this pattern holds or shifts. But for conservatives watching the court they spent decades building, the data from the past several terms sends an uncomfortable signal.
A 6-3 court means nothing if the sixth vote keeps walking across the aisle.
Senate Democrats voted Thursday to block a House-passed bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, tanking the motion 52-47 and all but guaranteeing a partial government shutdown by Saturday. Funding for TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard will lapse without further congressional action — and Democrats made clear they have no intention of acting without concessions on immigration enforcement.
Only one Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, crossed the aisle to vote for advancing the measure. Senate Majority Leader John Thune voted no for procedural reasons, preserving his ability to bring the bill back to the floor later. The motion needed 60 votes. It wasn't close.
When Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama tried a fallback — unanimous consent on a simple two-week stopgap — Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut killed that too.
More than 260,000 federal employees now face a partial shutdown because Senate Democrats decided that leverage over ICE operations matters more than keeping the lights on at the agencies Americans depend on for airport security, disaster relief, and maritime safety.
Democrats aren't hiding the ball here. This is about ICE — specifically, about using the threat of a shutdown to force restrictions on immigration enforcement.
According to The Hill, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer framed the blockade in dramatic terms:
"Democrats have been very clear. We will not support an extension of the status quo, a status quo that permits masked secret police to barge into people's homes without warrants, no guardrails, zero oversight from independent authorities."
"Masked secret police." That's the language of a party that has abandoned any pretense of good-faith negotiation and is instead auditioning for cable news segments. Schumer isn't describing a verified agency protocol — he's painting a picture designed to justify an extraordinary tactic: shutting down homeland security funding during an era when the agencies in question have finally been resourced to do their jobs.
Last week, Democrats unveiled a 10-point plan for what they called reforming immigration enforcement operations. Among the demands:
Some of these sound reasonable in isolation. Body cameras and identification standards are ideas with bipartisan support in other law enforcement contexts. But packaged together and wielded as a precondition for funding the entire Department of Homeland Security, they become something else entirely: a legislative straitjacket designed to hamstring enforcement operations that Democrats spent years pretending to support.
Here's the part that deserves attention. Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso made a point on the floor that Democrats have not credibly answered:
"What we see are Democrats flip-flopping on funding the government. This was a bipartisan bill. Democrats helped negotiate it."
He's right. Just last month, Democrats signed off on the Homeland Security appropriations bill. Sen. Patty Murray — ranking member of the Appropriations panel — defended it publicly at the time, arguing that blocking the measure wouldn't even affect ICE and CBP operations in Minnesota, the flashpoint that has since consumed the Democratic caucus.
Now Murray stood on the Senate floor Thursday and declared:
"It is clear to just about everyone in every part of the country that ICE and CBP are out of control and must be reined in."
A month ago, she defended the bill. Now she's blocking it. The bill didn't change. The politics did.
What changed the politics was the fatal shootings of two individuals in Minneapolis last month and, specifically, the Jan. 24 emergence of video footage showing two federal officers shooting and killing Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse. According to reporting, Pretti was holding his phone and his glasses while kneeling on the ground when the first shots were fired. Another officer had already confiscated a concealed pistol that Pretti was licensed to carry.
The shooting demands an investigation. If the facts are as described, serious questions about the use of force deserve serious answers. No conservative argument for strong enforcement requires defending officers who shoot a kneeling, disarmed man. Accountability and enforcement are not in tension — they're prerequisites for each other.
But Democrats aren't pursuing accountability. They're pursuing leverage. There is a vast distance between demanding a transparent investigation into a specific shooting and holding hostage the funding for every TSA agent, every FEMA responder, and every Coast Guard crew member in the country.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire — described as a key moderate — made the strategy explicit:
"I'm not going to vote for a CR until we see some progress on reforms. It's not acceptable that we have a federal agency killing American citizens in the streets and we're not taking any action."
Shaheen previously voted in November to end what was described as a record-breaking 43-day government shutdown. Apparently, shutdowns are unconscionable when Democrats want them to end and perfectly acceptable when Democrats want something in return.
The White House didn't stonewall. Earlier this week, it sent a one-page letter offering concessions, followed by legislative text to Democratic negotiators. On Thursday, White House border czar Tom Homan announced the administration was ending its surge deployment of ICE officers in Minnesota — a direct response to the political pressure point Democrats had been hammering.
Schumer's response to Homan's concession was revealing:
"We need legislation to rein in ICE and end the violence." "Without legislation, what Tom Homan says today could be reversed tomorrow on a whim from a Donald Trump."
Murray was equally dismissive, telling The Hill that the White House proposal didn't address major concerns:
"They did not address our major concerns. We're going through it right now and intend to offer a counteroffer."
The administration offered concessions. Democrats moved the goalposts. The administration pulled back a surge deployment. Democrats said it wasn't enough. At some point, a reasonable observer asks whether the goal is reform or whether the goal is the shutdown itself — a way to manufacture a crisis they can blame on Republican governance.
It's worth remembering the backdrop here. ICE and CBP received tens of billions of dollars through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by President Trump. These agencies are better resourced than they've been in years — because the law demanded it. Democrats who voted against that law are now demanding oversight of the spending it enabled, which is a convenient inversion: oppose the funding, then claim the funded agencies are "out of control."
Meanwhile, TSA agents, FEMA personnel, and Coast Guard members will continue working in some limited capacity during a shutdown — but the full scope of that limitation is still being assessed by Senate appropriators. These are the people who screen your bags, respond to hurricanes, and patrol American waterways. They're collateral damage in a fight over whether ICE agents in Minnesota need to wear standardized uniforms.
Thune's procedural vote preserves the ability to bring the bill back quickly. Democrats say they'll offer a counteroffer. The White House has shown willingness to negotiate. But the clock runs out Saturday, and Democrats have now blocked both the full funding bill and a two-week bridge.
Asked what the White House is willing to do to rein in ICE officers, Shaheen offered a telling answer:
"Nothing that I've heard."
That's not an indictment of the White House. It's an admission that Democrats aren't listening. A one-page letter of concessions, legislative text, and the withdrawal of a surge deployment apparently don't register as "something."
Senate Democrats helped write this funding bill. They defended it a month ago. Now they've blown it up, blocked the backup plan, and told 260,000 federal workers that the real priority is rewriting immigration enforcement on their terms — during a shutdown, under duress, with Saturday's deadline as the hammer.
That's not governing. That's hostage-taking with better press coverage.
Cardi B kicked off her Little Miss Drama Tour at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, California, on Wednesday night with a message for Immigration and Customs Enforcement: try something.
"B—h, if ICE come in here, we gon' jump they a–es."
The 33-year-old rapper, born Belcalis Marlenis Almanzar, told her audience she had bear mace backstage and declared that federal agents wouldn't be taking her fans. She asked how many Mexicans or Guatemalans were in attendance, sang a brief snippet of "La Cucaracha," then launched into her hit "I Like It" as if threatening federal law enforcement were just another part of the setlist.
The Department of Homeland Security didn't let it slide.
"As long as she doesn't drug and rob our agents, we'll consider that an improvement over her past behavior."
DHS posted the response on its official X page, quote-retweeting coverage of the rapper's comments. No ambiguity. No diplomacy. Just a clean shot referencing a chapter of Cardi B's past she's spent years trying to reframe.
In 2016, Cardi B went on Instagram Live and described — in explicit detail — how she lured men to hotels during her time as a stripper, drugged them, and robbed them. Her own words:
"And I drugged n****s up and I robbed them. That's what I used to do. Nothing was muthaf—in' handed to me, my n—a. Nothing!"
When those comments resurfaced in 2019, she addressed them on social media but never quite disavowed the conduct. Instead, she framed it as survival:
"I made the choices that I did at the time because I had very limited options. I was blessed to have been able to rise from that, but so many women have not. Whether or not they were poor choice at the time, I did what I had to do to survive."
She added that she never claimed to be perfect and described her admissions as speaking her truth — "things that I felt I needed to do to make a living."
This is the person now positioning herself as a moral authority on immigration enforcement. A woman who openly admitted to committing felonies against individuals is now threatening violence against federal agents whose job is to enforce laws Congress passed. The irony doesn't need decoration.
What Cardi B did on that stage wasn't brave. It was cheap. Telling a crowd of fans in a deep-blue California venue that you'll fight ICE costs nothing. There's no risk. There's no courage in performing defiance for an audience that already agrees with you in a state whose political leadership has spent years obstructing federal immigration enforcement.
But the performance matters — not because it changes policy, but because it reveals how normalized hostility toward law enforcement has become in certain cultural corridors. Threatening federal agents is now an applause line. Bear mace as a prop gets cheers, not concern. A rapper with an admitted criminal past gets to cosplay as a civil rights champion, and nobody on the left blinks.
Imagine the reaction if a country music star told a crowd in Nashville they'd assault ATF agents. The think pieces would write themselves. The double standard is the point.
The framing Cardi B leaned into — that ICE is some occupying force coming to snatch innocent people from concerts — only works if you refuse to acknowledge what ICE actually does. These are the agents who dismantle human trafficking networks, arrest violent criminals who've re-entered the country illegally, and enforce the immigration laws that exist precisely because a nation without borders isn't a nation at all.
When a celebrity with a massive platform tells fans to physically attack those agents, she isn't protecting anyone. She's putting her own audience at risk of federal obstruction charges. She's encouraging confrontation that could get someone hurt. And she's doing it from behind a security detail that would absolutely call law enforcement if someone rushed her stage.
That's the contradiction the left never addresses. The people who scream loudest about abolishing enforcement are always the ones most insulated from the consequences of lawlessness.
The department's response was notable for its brevity and its bite. No lengthy press release. No hand-wringing about artistic expression. Just a single sentence that reminded the public exactly who was lecturing them about morality — and what she's admitted to doing.
It's the kind of directness that government agencies have historically avoided, and it landed precisely because it refused to treat celebrity posturing as serious policy discourse. Cardi B made a threat. DHS made a point.
The rapper will sell tickets off this. The clip will circulate. Her fans will call it iconic. But somewhere in Palm Desert on Wednesday night, a woman who drugged and robbed men told a crowd she'd assault federal officers — and half the country was supposed to cheer.
DHS didn't cheer. They remembered.