President Trump took to Truth Social on Saturday to torch television host Bill Maher, calling a prior White House dinner with the Real Time host a waste of time and lumping him in with the rest of late-night television's anti-Trump lineup.
The post came in direct response to Maher's Friday broadcast, where the host criticized Trump over a Truth Social post about China, Canada, and ice hockey. Trump wasn't having it.
"Sometimes in life you waste time! T.V. Host Bill Maher asked to have dinner with me through one of his friends, also a friend of mine, and I agreed. He came into the famed Oval Office much different than I thought he would be."
What followed was a detailed — and characteristically vivid — account of a dinner that took place at the White House at the end of March 2025, one that Maher himself had requested through a mutual friend.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Trump painted a picture of Maher as a man utterly out of his element in the Oval Office. According to the president, Maher was rattled from the moment he walked in — asking for a vodka tonic within seconds of arriving.
"He was extremely nervous, had ZERO confidence in himself and, to soothe his nerves, immediately, within seconds, asked for a 'Vodka Tonic.' He said to me, 'I've never felt like this before, I'm actually scared.' In one respect, it was somewhat endearing!"
Trump acknowledged the dinner itself went well — quick, easy, even pleasant. And he noted that Maher's first show after the meeting reflected that.
"Anyway, we had a great dinner, it was quick, easy, and he seemed to be a nice guy and, for his first show after our dinner, he was very respectful about our meeting — But with everything I have done in bringing our Country back from 'OBLIVION,' why wouldn't he be?"
That's the part worth paying attention to. Maher left the White House and told his audience exactly what he saw. On the April 11 episode of Real Time, he described Trump as "gracious and measured" — someone entirely different from the caricature cable news constructs nightly.
"Trump was gracious and measured and why he isn't that in other settings, I don't know and I can't answer, and it's not my place to answer. I'm just telling you what I saw and I wasn't high."
Maher even acknowledged the disconnect between the man he met and the online persona, noting that Trump had posted negative comments about him the night before the dinner — then welcomed him warmly in person.
"The guy I met is not the person who the night before the dinner shit tweeted a bunch of nasty crap about how he thought this was a bad idea and what a deranged asshole I was."
"But when I got there, that guy wasn't living there."
So Maher saw the real thing. Said so publicly. And then — like clockwork — drifted right back to the script.
This is the part that matters more than any dinner anecdote. Maher had a firsthand experience that contradicted the dominant media narrative about the president. He admitted it on air. He told his audience he wasn't lying.
And then he went right back to mocking the president on the next convenient pretext — in this case, Trump's Monday Truth Social post joking that China would terminate all ice hockey in Canada and eliminate the Stanley Cup.
Trump made clear the hockey comment was a joke. He said so explicitly in his response:
"I jokingly stated in a TRUTH that, 'The first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup.' Well, he went on and on about the Hockey statement, like 'What kind of a person would say such a foolish thing as this,' as though I were being serious when I said it"
This is the cycle. A media figure encounters Trump in person, finds him nothing like the monster they've been selling their audiences, says so — and within months is right back to treating every post as a psychiatric exhibit. The gravitational pull of the entertainment-media ecosystem is stronger than any single honest moment.
Maher himself said it best in April: "You can hate me for it, but I'm not a liar." The problem isn't that he lied then. It's that honesty had a shelf life.
Trump's sharpest line landed at the end. After recounting the dinner, the hockey joke, and Maher's apparent desire to return to the White House — even requesting an invite to the Christmas Party — Trump delivered the verdict:
"Fortunately, his Television Ratings are so low that nobody will learn about his various Fake News statements about me. He is no different than Kimmel, Fallon, or Colbert but, I must admit, slightly more talented!"
For years, Maher cultivated a brand as the liberal who would say what other liberals wouldn't. The one who pushed back on progressive orthodoxy, who called out wokeness, who occasionally gave conservatives a fair hearing. That brand earned him a White House dinner. It earned him a level of respect from people across the political spectrum who were tired of the monoculture of late-night television.
Trump just revoked the distinction. In one sentence, he collapsed the space Maher spent years carving out — reducing him to just another member of the late-night chorus. Kimmel. Fallon. Colbert. Maher. Same product, slightly better packaging.
Whether that's entirely fair is beside the point. What matters is that Maher had an opportunity almost no media figure gets: a private dinner with the president, a genuine human interaction that he publicly acknowledged shattered his expectations. He could have built on that. He could have used it to model something different — a media figure capable of disagreeing with a president without defaulting to the same exhausted contempt.
Instead, he went back to the greenroom and picked up right where he left off.
Trump called the dinner a waste of time. He's probably right — but not for the reason he thinks. The waste isn't that Maher reverted to form. That was predictable. The waste is that Maher proved, on camera, that the media's Trump caricature doesn't survive contact with the actual man — and then decided it didn't matter.
That tells you everything about the incentive structure of modern political entertainment. Honesty about Trump doesn't get clips shared. It doesn't trend. It makes your audience uncomfortable and your bookers nervous. So you tell the truth once, collect your credibility points, and quietly shelve it.
Trump, meanwhile, moves on to the next negotiation, the next policy fight, the next rally. He doesn't need Bill Maher's validation. He said as much:
"I'd much rather spend my time MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN than wasting it on him."
The dinner happened. The truth came out. And then the machine swallowed it whole.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before an audience of European leaders at the Munich Security Conference on Friday and drew a line that no American diplomat has drawn from that stage in decades. In a sprawling, roughly 3,000-word address, Rubio declared that the era of polite transatlantic deference is over — and that the Trump administration has no intention of presiding over a slow-motion surrender of Western strength.
The sentence that landed hardest:
"We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West's managed decline."
That's the red line. Not a threat. Not a withdrawal. A refusal to keep playing a losing game by someone else's rules. Rubio's speech called for tighter borders, revived industry, reasserted national sovereignty, and a European alliance that actually carries its own weight. In a venue that has traditionally served as a showcase for transatlantic unity and multilateral pleasantries, the message was unmistakable: Washington is done subsidizing complacency.
The Munich Security Conference exists in a kind of diplomatic amber. Year after year, U.S. officials have taken the stage to stress multilateral cooperation and institutional continuity — the bureaucratic vocabulary of a foreign policy establishment that treats inertia as stability. Rubio shattered the pattern.
Where previous American diplomats reassured, Rubio diagnosed. According to Fox News, he described the erosion of manufacturing, porous borders, and dependence on global institutions not as isolated policy failures but as symptoms of a deeper Western complacency — a civilization that forgot what made it strong in the first place. Reclaiming supply chain independence, enforcing immigration limits, and rebuilding defense capabilities would be key to reversing course.
This was not a speech designed to make the room comfortable. It was designed to make the room think.
The predictable response from Brussels and its media allies will be to cast this as American isolationism — a retreat from the world stage. Rubio preempted that framing directly:
"We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history."
There's nothing isolationist about telling your allies to get serious. The Trump administration has repeatedly called on European allies to shoulder more of their own defense burden, and Rubio's Munich address embedded that demand inside a larger civilizational argument. The ask isn't just "spend more on tanks." It's "remember what you're defending."
Rubio envisioned an alliance that "boldly races into the future" — not one frozen in the institutional arrangements of 1949, maintained out of habit rather than conviction. The distinction matters. The left hears "change the alliance" and reflexively screams abandonment. What Rubio actually described is a partnership between nations strong enough to stand on their own and choosing to stand together.
Germany — the host nation, the Cold War fault line, the country whose division once symbolized the fracture of a continent — sits at the center of everything Rubio described. Europe's largest economy has spent decades outsourcing its energy security, its defense posture, and increasingly its border enforcement to multilateral frameworks that diffuse responsibility so thoroughly that no one is ever accountable for failure.
Rubio's speech named the consequences of that drift without naming the countries. He didn't have to. Every leader in that room knew exactly which capitals had let their militaries atrophy, which governments had waved through mass migration under humanitarian banners, and which economies had hollowed out their industrial base in pursuit of a borderless global market that enriched elites while gutting working communities.
The speech forced a question that Munich conferences have spent years avoiding: If the West is declining, who chose decline?
Rubio's address was the clearest signal yet that the Trump administration views transatlantic relations not as a legacy arrangement to be maintained but as a living alliance to be rebuilt — on terms that reflect current realities rather than Cold War nostalgia. The administration intends to reverse the policy choices that produced what Rubio framed as Western drift, and it's pressing European allies to do the same.
Europe now faces a straightforward choice. It can treat Rubio's speech as an insult, retreat into institutional defensiveness, and hope the next American administration returns to the old script. Or it can take the dare — invest in its own defense, control its own borders, rebuild its own industrial capacity, and meet the United States as an equal rather than a dependent.
The comfortable middle ground — where Europe lectures Washington about multilateralism while relying on American taxpayers for security — just got a lot smaller.
Rubio didn't go to Munich to break an alliance. He went to tell Europe that an alliance worth having requires partners worth the name.
The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has opened an investigation into Washington state's Puyallup School District after a 16-year-old female wrestler alleged that a trans-identified male opponent sexually assaulted her during a match. The federal probe centers on whether the district violated Title IX by allowing biological males to compete in girls' sports, granting males access to girls' locker rooms, and failing to properly respond to reports of the assault.
The match took place on December 6. The victim, Kallie Keeler, alleges her opponent put his fingers in her vagina during the bout. Video recorded by her mother reportedly shows Keeler visibly distressed. She ended the match by allowing her opponent to pin her.
She didn't even know what had happened to her — or who she'd been matched against — until after the fact.
"Really shocked."
That's how Keeler described learning that the competitor who allegedly violated her was a biological male.
The Department of Education's findings so far suggest this wasn't an isolated failure. According to the National Pulse's reporting of the federal investigation, the problems at Puyallup were neither hidden nor new. The department stated plainly:
"The alleged violations are ongoing and well known to school leaders, with at least a dozen female athletes having complained to administrators about the presence of two males in the girls' locker room."
At least a dozen girls. Two biological males in the girls' locker room. Complaints filed with administrators. And the district's response, by all available evidence, was to do nothing meaningful — until a journalist forced their hand.
Keeler's parents contacted her coaches two days after the match, seeking answers. One of those coaches replied and indicated the matter would be investigated. But the family says they received no further follow-up. The district only acknowledged an investigation after journalist Brandi Kruse obtained video of the match and inquired directly.
That pattern — silence until exposure — tells you everything about the institutional priorities at work here. A dozen complaints from teenage girls didn't move the needle. A reporter's phone call did.
One of the most damning details is that even Keeler's own coaches didn't know who she was being put on the mat against. One coach told the family directly:
"I most certainly would not put Kallie on the mat if I thought she was competing with a male."
This is a coach stating the obvious — that a 16-year-old girl should not be grappling with a biological male in a full-contact sport — and simultaneously revealing that the information was withheld from the very people responsible for her safety. The district created conditions where this could happen, then ensured the adults closest to the athletes couldn't prevent it.
Wrestling is not soccer. It is not a track. It is sustained, close-contact physical combat. The idea that biological sex is irrelevant in this context isn't progressive. It's delusional. And a girl paid the price for that delusion.
The Pierce County Sheriff's Office has reviewed footage of the match and confirmed that its School Resource Officer is following up with Keeler. The investigation remains active.
This matters because it shifts the frame from policy debate to potential criminal conduct. Whatever one's position on transgender participation in sports — and there should only be one serious position — the allegation here is sexual assault of a minor. The policy failure enabled the crime, but the crime stands on its own.
The Office for Civil Rights investigation represents exactly the kind of federal intervention that the current administration has signaled it would pursue. President Trump has issued directives aimed at restricting transgender participation in female sports divisions, and the Department of Justice has challenged state policies that allow biological males to compete in women's categories.
For years, the conservative argument on this issue was dismissed as culture-war noise. Hypothetical, critics said. Fearmongering. The parade of horribles that would never actually materialize.
Kallie Keeler is not hypothetical. A dozen girls filing complaints about males in their locker room is not hypothetical. A coach who would have refused the matchup — had anyone bothered to tell him the truth — is not hypothetical.
Every institution that was supposed to protect these girls prioritized an ideology over their bodies and their dignity. The school district knew. The administrators heard the complaints. They chose to look away, because the alternative — acknowledging biological reality — had become culturally impermissible.
The left's framework on this issue has always rested on a single rhetorical move: make the conversation about the feelings of the trans-identified individual and never about the girls who lose scholarships, privacy, and — in this case — physical safety. The framing only works if you never look at the other side of the scale.
But here's the other side of the scale: a 16-year-old who went to a wrestling match and alleges she was sexually assaulted by someone who should never have been on the mat with her. A mother who recorded her daughter's distress. Parents who asked questions and got silence. A school district that treated a dozen complaints from teenage girls as less important than maintaining a policy no one was brave enough to challenge.
The federal government is now asking the questions that Puyallup refused to ask itself. The sheriff's office is investigating what administrators chose to ignore.
Twelve girls complained. It took the federal government to listen.
Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed a Republican-backed bill that would have required government buildings — including public schools and universities — to segregate restrooms and locker rooms by biological sex. The bill passed with more than two-thirds support in both chambers of the Republican-dominated legislature, and GOP lawmakers are expected to attempt an override.
Kansas has been here before. Last year, the legislature overrode a Kelly veto to pass a ban on puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy for minors. The governor appears determined to keep playing goalie for the gender ideology lobby, even as her own state's elected representatives — by overwhelming margins — keep sending these bills to her desk.
The legislation would have required government buildings, including public schools and universities, to "take every reasonable step" to segregate restrooms and locker rooms by sex. Individuals who repeatedly use facilities not matching their biological sex could face fines or civil suits of $1,000 and criminal charges.
A separate provision would have banned Kansans from changing the gender marker on state-issued driver's licenses and birth certificates — a longstanding goal of Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach. Children up to the age of eight would have been permitted in opposite-sex restrooms when accompanied by a caregiver.
Republican Rep. Bob Lewis, who amended the bill to include the bathroom provisions, framed it plainly to NPR's Kansas City affiliate:
"It just codifies social norms. When people go into bathrooms or locker rooms, there's just an expectation that it'll be single-sex."
That's the core of it. The bill doesn't invent a new norm. It writes down the one that existed without controversy for the entirety of American history until roughly five minutes ago.
Kelly issued a statement positioning herself as the defender of common-sense priorities:
"I believe the Legislature should stay out of the business of telling Kansans how to go to the bathroom and instead stay focused on how to make life more affordable for Kansans."
She also called the legislation "poorly drafted," claiming it left room for unintended consequences beyond bathroom use.
The "stay focused on affordability" dodge is a favorite of Democratic governors who don't want to explain their actual position on a culture-war bill they know is popular. Kelly doesn't argue the bill is wrong on the merits. She argues the legislature should be doing something else. It's a deflection dressed as fiscal responsibility — and it falls apart the moment you remember that legislatures handle multiple bills in a session. Walking and chewing gum is, in fact, the job description.
Twenty states have already passed similar laws restricting bathroom access based on biological sex in certain public spaces. Kansas isn't blazing a radical trail here. Kelly is the one standing against a growing national consensus.
The bill cleared both the state House and Senate with more than two-thirds support — the exact threshold needed to override a gubernatorial veto. Republican House Speaker Dan Hawkins didn't mince words about Kelly's decision:
"Instead of standing with the overwhelming majority of Kansans on this issue, the Governor chose to appease her most radical supporters at the cost of women and girls in our state."
Hawkins has the numbers to back the rhetoric. When a bill passes with veto-proof margins, and the governor vetoes it anyway, the gesture is almost purely symbolic — a signal to progressive donors and activist groups that she tried, even if the override succeeds. It's constituency politics, not governance.
Republican leaders used a procedure known as "gut and go" — cutting the contents of one bill and pasting them into another — to add the bathroom provisions. Critics flagged that this bypassed the opportunity for public comment. Republican state Rep. Susan Humphries, who chairs the committee where the bill was introduced, pushed back:
"School administrators want clarity on how they're supposed to handle these things. And we're going to give them clarity on that."
Humphries noted that lawmakers had a six-hour floor debate before the bill passed. Whatever procedural shortcut was used to get the language into the bill, six hours of floor debate is not a vote taken in the dark.
The pattern in Kansas mirrors what's happening across red and purple states: legislatures pass popular, common-sense protections for women's single-sex spaces, Democratic governors veto them, and then those vetoes get overridden or become campaign liabilities. Kelly's veto of last year's gender-affirming care ban for minors was overridden. A legal challenge to that law is now pending in state court.
Democratic Rep. Abi Boatman, a transgender woman who filled a House vacancy earlier this month, spoke during the January floor debate:
"Am I afforded all of the rights and responsibilities of an elected official, or do I need to just go waste my time at facilities asking where I'm allowed to take a dump?"
Boatman argued the bill targets transgender Kansans' freedoms rather than protecting women. But this frames the debate exactly backward. The question isn't whether transgender individuals have dignity — of course they do. The question is whether biological women and girls have the right to single-sex spaces in government buildings, schools, and locker rooms. The bill answers yes. That shouldn't be controversial. For most Americans, it isn't.
The left's position requires you to believe that acknowledging biological sex in the most intimate public spaces is an act of cruelty — while ignoring that the women and girls who use those spaces have interests worth protecting too. Every time a Democratic governor vetoes one of these bills, they're making that trade explicit. They're choosing gender ideology over the physical privacy of women.
Kelly can veto. The legislature can override. And Kansas voters will remember which side each chose.
Former President Barack Obama took to Instagram on Sunday to clarify remarks from an interview released the day before in which he told liberal media personality Brian Tyler Cohen that aliens "are real" — a two-word answer that, predictably, lit up the internet before anyone bothered to listen to the rest of the sentence.
In the Saturday interview, Cohen lobbed a softball during what Obama described as a "speed round" segment:
"Are aliens real?"
Obama's response:
"They're real, but I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in — what is it —"
Cohen helpfully supplied "Area 51," and Obama ran with it:
"Area 51. There's no underground facility. Unless, there's this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States."
That last line — delivered with the kind of practiced ambiguity Obama has spent two decades perfecting — was enough to send the clip ricocheting across social media with all the nuance of a game of telephone.
By Sunday, Obama apparently realized that a former commander-in-chief casually affirming extraterrestrial life required a footnote. His Instagram clarification tried to thread the needle between cosmic wonder and bureaucratic sobriety:
"I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it's gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there."
Then the pivot:
"But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we've been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!"
Note the exclamation point. When a former president feels the need to punctuate a denial about alien contact with "Really!" — you've entered a strange chapter of American public life.
Obama has flirted with this subject before, according to The Hill. Back in 2021, he appeared on CBS's "The Late Late Show" with James Corden and offered a similar routine — curiosity laced with just enough mystery to keep people talking:
"The truth is that when I came into office, I asked. I was like, 'All right, is there a lab somewhere where we're keeping the alien specimens and spaceship?'"
"And they did a little bit of research, and the answer was no."
Same story, same delivery, same result: breathless headlines, followed by a mundane conclusion. The pattern is worth noticing. Obama has a gift for making the unremarkable sound tantalizing and then retreating to safe ground once the clip goes viral.
What's actually interesting here has nothing to do with extraterrestrial life. It's the machinery around it.
A former president sits down with a friendly interviewer for a rapid-fire segment designed to generate clips, not substance. He delivers an answer — "they're real" — that is technically defensible but functionally misleading in isolation. The clip travels. The clarification follows a day later, extending the news cycle. By the time it's over, Obama has dominated a weekend of coverage without saying anything of consequence.
This is a man who left the White House nearly a decade ago. He holds no office. He commands no policy. Yet he retains an extraordinary ability to absorb media oxygen — and a willing ecosystem of interviewers happy to supply it.
Meanwhile, Cohen's role here is instructive. The interview format — a "speed round" with questions like "Are aliens real?" — isn't journalism. It's content production. It's designed to extract quotable moments from a willing participant in a setting where follow-up questions are structurally impossible. You don't get accountability from a speed round. You get clips.
The cycle is well-worn by now:
It's not a conspiracy. It doesn't need to be. It's just how the incentive structure works when a figure with Obama's cultural footprint has access to platforms that reward ambiguity over precision.
The aliens aren't here. The spin cycle never left.
Carrie Prejean Boller, the former Miss California who once became a conservative cause célèbre for opposing gay marriage, has been removed from the White House Religious Liberty Commission after she showed up to a hearing on antisemitism wearing a Palestinian flag pin and used the platform to push her own agenda.
The hearing took place Monday, February 9, at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. It was supposed to focus on combating antisemitism and upholding religious freedom. Instead, Prejean Boller turned it into a spectacle — rejecting Zionism, invoking her Catholic faith as justification, and getting into heated exchanges with other participants.
Dan Patrick, the Texas lieutenant governor who chairs the commission, said she worked to "hijack a hearing" and promote her "own personal and political agenda." Her removal drew applause from Catholic leaders, conservative commentators, and Trump allies alike.
The confrontations were not subtle. According to the New York Post, Prejean Boller squared off with Shabbos Kestenbaum, a former Harvard student who sued the university over its response to antisemitism — exactly the kind of person you'd expect at a hearing on that subject. She demanded he condemn Israel on the record:
"Are you willing to condemn what Israel has done in Gaza? You won't condemn that? Just on the record."
When Babylon Bee founder and CEO Seth Dillon pressed her on whether Candace Owens had made antisemitic remarks, Prejean Boller didn't flinch:
"No, I don't."
And then the line that crystallized the problem. Prejean Boller declared to the room:
"I am a Catholic, and Catholics don't embrace Zionism."
She didn't speak for herself. She spoke for an entire faith — one she converted to just last April.
The response from actual Catholic leaders was swift and unsparing. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, published an opinion piece calling for her ouster on Wednesday. He did not mince words:
"Prejean Boller is a former Miss California and a convert to Catholicism. She does not run a Catholic organization, has no Catholic credentials as an author or instructor, and indeed represents no one but herself. For her to say, without qualification, that 'Catholics do not embrace Zionism,' is presumptuous and arrogant."
Donohue went further, dismantling the premise entirely:
"Zionism is a movement that promotes Jewish self-determination in a homeland. There are millions of Catholics like myself who, even if they do not identify themselves as Zionists, recognize the Jewish state of Israel. Prejean Boller apparently does not — she is more comfortable showing up at the Religious Liberty Commission wearing a Palestinian flag pin. So telling."
Shawn Carney, president and CEO of 40 Days for Life, delivered the theological rebuttal. His point was simple: the idea that Catholicism is inherently anti-Jewish isn't just wrong — it's a recent fabrication with no roots in Church history:
"This division is a recent fad and an online invention. For centuries, Catholics have understood that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the Davidic kingdom and that our faith comes from the Jews. Catholic teaching holds that the Church is the fulfillment of the promises of the Old Covenant. To suddenly claim that Catholics are against Jews is absurd — it is a modern, internet-based error."
Carney also noted that no president in modern history has done more to protect religious liberty for both Catholics and Jews than Trump. The commission exists because of that commitment. Prejean Boller treated it like an open mic night.
There's a playbook here, and conservative commentators recognized it immediately. Social media account Bonchie laid it out plainly:
"The only one who brought up Zionism at the event was… Carrie Prejean Boller. Classic grifter play happening here. Cause a scene of her own making, claim to be the victim, profit. A story as old as time."
Jim Hanson, president of WorldStrat and chief editor of the Middle East Forum, zeroed in on the symbolism:
"Whatever you think of the rest of Carrie Prejean Boller's views, wearing a Palestinian flag to a hearing on religious liberty is disgraceful."
And that's the thing. This wasn't a policy disagreement. It wasn't a good-faith debate about the complexities of Middle Eastern geopolitics. She wore a Palestinian flag pin to a hearing specifically convened to address antisemitism. The provocation was the point.
Patrick said he personally decided to remove her. Prejean Boller disputed that on X, claiming he lacked the authority:
"You did not appoint me to the Commission, and you lack authority to remove me from it. This is a gross overstepping of your role and leads me to believe you are acting in alignment with a Zionist political framework that hijacked the hearing, rather than in defense of religious liberty."
Senator Ted Cruz settled the question with one sentence on X:
"Let's be clear: it was President Trump who fired her."
Cruz didn't stop there. His full comments revealed a mix of exasperation and something close to pity:
"There are 57 Muslim countries on Earth; this poor thing has been deluded into thinking that the fact that Israel exists — in the promised land given to the Jewish people thousands of years ago by Jehovah — is somehow the source of all her troubles. And no, Catholics don't hate Israel. As Charlie Kirk said repeatedly, antisemitism is a brain rot, and someone has been pouring this poison into her head."
A former Trump White House official was less charitable:
"Carrie Prejean was thrown off the Religious Liberty Commission, and thank God. These commissions exist to advance the President's agenda, not to serve as a personal Jew-hating platform."
Prejean Boller's post-removal statements only confirmed the wisdom of the decision. Rather than recalibrate, she escalated:
"Christians have been manipulated into believing that God blesses bombing, starvation, and mass killing. That is the opposite of Christ, who came to stand with the suffering and confront power. I reject that lie completely. I am not owned by money, donors, or access. I belong to Christ alone who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. I would rather die than bend the knee to Israel."
There's a strain of thinking that has infected certain corners of the online right — a conspiratorial posture dressed in theological language, where support for the Jewish state becomes evidence of corruption, and every institution that disagrees with you has been "hijacked." Prejean Boller's rhetoric fits that mold perfectly. She framed her removal not as a consequence of her own conduct but as proof that shadowy forces control the commission. The hearing was "hijacked" — not by her, of course, but by the "Zionist political framework."
This is what makes it different from a simple policy disagreement. Reasonable people can debate the scope and conduct of military operations. But Prejean Boller wasn't offering policy analysis. She was deploying the language of martyrdom to shield herself from accountability, while claiming to speak for a faith she joined less than a year ago.
Trump established the Religious Liberty Commission by executive order in May, directing the Department of Justice to support a body focused on upholding federal laws that protect citizens' participation in a pluralistic democracy and the free exercise of religion. The former Trump White House official outlined the record that undergirds it:
"President Trump delivered historic victories for the Jewish people. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moved the US Embassy there. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He brokered the Abraham Accords and reshaped the Middle East. He kept his promise to bring every last hostage home and made clear that antisemitism at home will be confronted head on, including holding universities accountable when Jewish students are targeted."
That's the agenda the commission exists to advance. Prejean Boller walked into the Museum of the Bible, pinned a Palestinian flag to her lapel, and tried to turn a hearing on antisemitism into a referendum on Israel's right to exist.
The commission did what commissions rarely do. It enforced its own standards.
An Obama-appointed federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to pay for airfare and provide travel documents to bring back hundreds of Venezuelan migrants—suspected members of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang—who were deported to El Salvador. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Chief Judge James Boasberg issued the order Thursday, declaring the administration must "remedy the wrong that it perpetrated" by removing them from the country.
The migrants would be taken into custody upon arrival. But the core demand is extraordinary: a single district court judge compelling the executive branch to reverse a completed deportation, fund the return trip, and hand suspected gang members the paperwork to board flights back to American soil.
In March 2025, President Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to allow expedited removal of Venezuelan migrants suspected of belonging to TdA. This transnational criminal organization has embedded itself in American cities. Boasberg responded almost immediately with an order blocking those deportations.
The Supreme Court weighed in weeks later. In a 5-4 decision in April 2025, the justices lifted Boasberg's block, finding that the migrants had improperly challenged their deportations in Washington, D.C., when they should have done so in Texas. The highest court in the land said Boasberg's court wasn't even the right venue.
And yet according to Breitbart, here he is again—issuing orders from that same court, now demanding something far more dramatic than blocking a deportation. He wants one undone.
Boasberg framed his order as a matter of constitutional process. In his telling, the administration removed the migrants without affording them adequate opportunity to challenge their deportations:
"Were it otherwise, the Government could simply remove people from the United States without providing any process and then, once they were in a foreign country, deny them any right to return for a hearing or opportunity to present their case from abroad."
He further stated that the situation would never have arisen had the government afforded the plaintiffs their constitutional rights before initially deporting them.
Set aside the legal theory for a moment and consider the practical reality. These are suspected members of a violent Venezuelan gang. They were in the United States illegally. The president invoked a law that has been on the books since the John Adams administration to remove them. The Supreme Court sided with the administration on the jurisdictional question. And a district judge is now ordering the government to buy plane tickets to bring them back.
The Trump administration has agreed to return the men to immigration custody if they arrive at a U.S. airport or border station on their own. But Department of Justice attorneys are pushing back against providing the men with letters that would help them board flights to the United States—a critical distinction.
There is a canyon between "we won't block your return" and "we will actively facilitate it." Boasberg's order bridges that canyon by force, demanding the administration not merely permit reentry but engineer it—airfare, documents, the works.
This is where judicial overreach stops being an abstraction and becomes an operational mandate. A judge is ordering the executive branch to spend taxpayer money transporting suspected gang members back into the country, the executive branch just removed them from.
The sequence is now familiar. The administration enforces immigration law. A district court judge—often in D.C., often appointed by a Democratic president—intervenes. The case climbs toward the Supreme Court. The administration wins on the merits or on jurisdiction. And the same judge finds a new angle to reassert control.
Boasberg was already overruled once on this very matter. The Supreme Court told him the case didn't belong in his courtroom. His response was not deference but escalation—an order more sweeping than the one the Court struck down.
The left has spent years insisting that "no one is above the law." Apparently, that principle has a carve-out for federal judges who keep issuing orders after the Supreme Court pulls the rug out from under them.
Hundreds of illegal immigrants suspected of gang ties were removed from the United States under a lawful act of Congress signed in 1798. The Supreme Court cleared the way for those removals. No,w a lower court judge wants to put them on planes headed back.
If this order stands, the precedent it sets dwarfs this single case. Any future deportation could be reversed by a sympathetic judge claiming insufficient process—after the fact, from a courtroom the Supreme Court already said lacked jurisdiction. Enforcement becomes provisional. Removal becomes temporary. And the executive branch's core immigration authority exists only at the pleasure of whichever district judge gets the filing first.
The administration removed suspected gang members from American communities. A judge wants them returned. Somewhere in that gap lives the question of who actually governs immigration policy in the United States—and right now, one man in a black robe is making a compelling case that it's him.
Hillary Clinton stood before a room of U.S. and European politicians and security officials in Munich and said what Democratic leaders spent four years refusing to admit: the Biden-era migration wave went too far.
"We need to call it for what it is, a legitimate reason to have a debate about things like migration. It went too far. It's been disruptive and destabilizing, and it needs to be fixed in a humane way with secure borders."
That's Clinton — not some MAGA firebrand, not a conservative talk show host — acknowledging that the open-border experiment Americans lived through was exactly as destructive as conservatives warned it would be. The word "destabilizing" is doing heavy lifting there, and she knows it.
The admission landed at a European meeting of national security officials and influencers, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio had spoken before Clinton's event, laying out the Trump administration's low-migration, high-tech alternative to Europe's strategy of growing economies through mass, low-skilled migration.
According to Breitbart, Clinton framed migration as a "huge flash point," which is a remarkably sterile way to describe what Biden's border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, oversaw. Under his tenure, at least 10 million illegal migrants entered the country, alongside millions of legal migrants and visa workers. That isn't a "flash point." It's a policy choice that reshaped American communities without their consent.
But Clinton's concession came wrapped in the kind of moral packaging that Democrats specialize in. She wants secure borders, she says — but the response must not "torture and kill people." The framing is instructive. Enforcing immigration law becomes cruel. Failing to enforce it becomes compassion. The only acceptable position is the one where Democrats retain moral authority regardless of outcomes.
She also couldn't resist folding her migration remarks into a broader progressive sermon:
"It is for me, a blessing that freedom was expanded to include — in the United States, for example — the right of black people to be treated at least better than they had been for 400 or so years. It was a culmination of freedom for women to be given their rights much more fully than they had been. It was, I think, a dramatic recognition of dignity for gay people to be able to be treated without fear and even marry, which, to me, is creating a family."
Notice the move. Civil rights, women's suffrage, and marriage equality get stacked together, and mass illegal immigration gets quietly filed under the same umbrella of expanding freedom. It's a rhetorical sleight of hand that conflates the constitutional rights of American citizens with the question of whether a nation enforces its borders. Those are not the same conversation, and treating them as one is how the Democratic Party lost the argument in the first place.
Clinton offered what she clearly believed was an olive branch:
"I understand conservative impulses. I understand we are fighting an ideological battle that is as old as time. There are those of us who are more comfortable in a more open, tolerant world, and there are those who have their concerns about it because they worry about the impact on existing institutions like the family, community and others."
This is the tell. In Clinton's framework, progressives are "comfortable" in an "open, tolerant world," while conservatives merely "have their concerns" — as though protecting the institutions of family and community is a nervous tic rather than a coherent worldview backed by millennia of human experience.
She "understands" conservative impulses the way an anthropologist understands a tribe she's studying. The empathy is clinical. The hierarchy is clear. Her side represents progress. The other side represents anxiety about progress. That framing hasn't changed since 2016 — it's just gotten a softer delivery.
And that's the core problem with Clinton's Munich performance. She admitted the policy failed. She refused to admit the worldview behind it was wrong.
Clinton wasn't the only one attempting revisionist history at the gathering. Polish Foreign Affairs Minister Radosław Sikorski offered his own take on mass migration's origins:
"It was for decades, supported by Republican businessmen who wanted cheap labor from Latin America."
Sikorski added that mass migration "is not inherently a left-wing or right-wing idea." He's partially right — the bipartisan cheap-labor consensus that fueled decades of lax enforcement is one of the reasons Donald Trump won the presidency in the first place, and won it again in November 2024. Republican voters punished their own party's establishment on this issue long before Democrats felt the consequences.
But Sikorski's framing conveniently ignores which party made open borders an ideological commitment rather than a business convenience. Republican businessmen may have wanted cheap labor. Democrats built an entire moral infrastructure around the idea that enforcement itself was bigotry.
Clinton lost the 2016 election. Trump won reelection in November 2024. Between those two data points lies a simple truth that Clinton's Munich remarks dance around but never fully confront: voters rejected the migration consensus — twice.
Saying "it went too far" in a conference room in Germany is not the same as reckoning with the policy. It's reputation management. Clinton wants to preserve the progressive project by conceding its most politically toxic element — without surrendering any of the underlying assumptions that produced it.
She wants secure borders, but only "humane" ones — with Democrats defining what humane means. She wants to acknowledge conservative concerns, but only as something to be "understood," not adopted. She wants credit for honesty while offering the minimum viable admission.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is doing what Clinton says needs to be done — securing the border and enforcing the law — and Democrats are calling it extreme. The same party whose most prominent figure just admitted the old policy was "destabilizing" treats the correction as a crisis.
Clinton told the room in Munich what everyone already knew. The question was never whether Biden's migration policy failed. The question is whether Democrats will let anyone fix it.
The Virginia Supreme Court ruled Friday that a Democrat-backed redistricting plan can go before voters in an April 21 special election, overturning a lower court's decision that had blocked the measure. The ruling keeps alive a power play by Virginia's Democrat-controlled legislature that could reshape the state's congressional map — and potentially flip four seats in Democrats' favor heading into the fall midterms.
Virginia Democrats already hold six of the state's eleven congressional seats. If the new maps survive legal challenges and pass the referendum, that advantage could swell to ten out of eleven. In a cycle where Republicans are defending a narrow House majority, the stakes could hardly be higher.
Last October, the Democrat-controlled Virginia Legislature passed new district maps in what Republicans have called an illegally rushed maneuver. Senate Minority Leader Ryan McDougle framed it in blunt terms:
"Last October, Democrats took an unprecedented step to illegally pass a constitutional amendment at the 11th hour. The judiciary agreed and the Supreme Court has taken up and fast tracked the case. Make no mistake, the rule of law will prevail."
A state court agreed — at least partially — and blocked the redistricting effort last month. That should have been a stop sign. Instead, the Virginia Supreme Court stepped in, overturned the lower court, and let the referendum proceed.
Here's the critical detail: the Supreme Court is still considering the legality of the new maps. A final ruling won't come until after the April 21 special election. Virginia voters may cast ballots on a redistricting plan that could ultimately be struck down as unconstitutional. Democrats are betting the political momentum of a public vote will be harder to unwind than a quiet legislative maneuver, as New York Post reports.
Virginia House Speaker Don Scott, one of the architects of the redistricting push, wasted no time declaring victory:
"Today the Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed what we already know, Virginians will have the final say."
That line sounds democratic in the small-d sense — until you examine the process that got the question onto the ballot. Passing new maps at the eleventh hour, having them blocked by a court, and then getting a higher court to override the block so voters can weigh in before the legality question is even settled — that's not "letting the people decide." That's engineering an outcome and wrapping it in populist language.
If Democrats were confident in the legality of their maps, they wouldn't need the political insurance of a referendum vote before the courts finish their work. The sequencing tells you everything.
Virginia isn't operating in a vacuum. Redistricting fights are erupting across the country as both parties position for the midterms.
Both parties gerrymander when they can. That's the uncomfortable reality. But Virginia's gambit stands out for its procedural aggression. Passing maps that may violate the state constitution, losing in court, and then racing to get a public vote locked in before the legal question is resolved isn't standard-issue redistricting hardball. It's an attempt to create facts on the ground that make judicial intervention politically radioactive.
Four seats are not a rounding error. In a House where control has hinged on margins of five or fewer seats in recent cycles, Virginia alone could determine which party holds the gavel. Republicans defending their majority now face the prospect of a map drawn explicitly to erase them — in a state where Democrats already hold the advantage.
The fall midterms will be fought district by district. But some of those districts may be drawn by the very people trying to win them. McDougle's insistence that "the rule of law will prevail" isn't just rhetoric — it's the only firewall Republicans have left in Virginia. If the courts ultimately uphold the maps, the damage will be structural and lasting.
Watch the language Democrats use in the coming weeks. Every objection to the maps will be recast as an attack on voters' rights to decide. Every legal challenge will be framed as elitist overreach. The referendum itself becomes the argument — not the substance of the maps, not the process that produced them, not the constitutional questions still unresolved.
It's a familiar playbook. Engineer the outcome, then dare anyone to overturn it. Call the engineered result "the will of the people." Accuse anyone who objects of being anti-democratic.
April 21 is less than a referendum on maps. It's a test of whether process still matters — or whether speed and political will are enough to redraw the rules of the game while the referees are still deliberating.
A federal grand jury has charged 11 individuals in a marriage fraud conspiracy run by a Chinese transnational criminal organization that recruited U.S. Navy service members to enter sham marriages with Chinese nationals — granting them not just immigration benefits but physical access to American military installations.
The three-count indictment, unsealed in Jacksonville, Florida, lays out a scheme spanning from March 2024 to February 2025. Five suspects were arrested on Feb. 3 by Homeland Security Investigations and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Two more are scheduled to self-surrender. Six remain at large.
Four former Navy service members have already pleaded guilty in related cases. Their sentencing hearings are pending.
The operation worked like a pipeline. The criminal organization recruited U.S. citizens — preferably members of the armed forces, according to the indictment — to marry Chinese nationals in exchange for structured cash payments. The first installment came up front. A second followed when the foreign spouse obtained legal immigration status. A final payment arrived after the divorce. The marriages were transactional, start to finish.
But immigration fraud was only half the equation. Because military spouses receive identification cards granting access to U.S. installations, the scheme doubled as a backdoor onto American bases. That elevates this from garden-variety fraud to a direct national security threat, as Just The News reports.
The sham marriages took place across multiple states — New York, Connecticut, Nevada, and Florida — suggesting the network's reach extended well beyond a single jurisdiction.
The most detailed episode in the indictment reads like a federal case study in how brazen the operation had become.
In January 2025, a confidential source reported to law enforcement that Navy reservist Raymond Zumba had offered to bribe the source and the source's spouse — who worked in the personnel office issuing identification cards at Naval Air Station Jacksonville — in exchange for unauthorized Department of War ID cards.
Federal agents directed the source to continue communications with Zumba. On Feb. 13, 2025, Zumba drove from New York to Jacksonville with three co-defendants: Anny Chen, 54, of New York; Hailing Feng, 27, of New York; and Kin Man Cheok, 32, of China. After business hours, Zumba brought Chen and Cheok onto Naval Air Station Jacksonville and initiated the process for them to receive ID cards.
The next day — Valentine's Day — Zumba met with the confidential source and handed over $3,500 in exchange for two cards.
He was arrested on the spot. Both cards were recovered.
The indictment names five defendants:
Four former Navy members — Raymond Zumba, Brinio Urena, Morgan Chambers, and Jacinth Bailey — have pleaded guilty in related cases. The identities of the remaining defendants have not been publicly disclosed.
Each count of marriage fraud conspiracy and bribery conspiracy carries a maximum federal prison sentence of five years.
Marriage fraud schemes are not new. What distinguishes this case is the deliberate targeting of military personnel — not as incidental marks, but as the preferred vehicle for the operation. The indictment's language is telling: the organization sought U.S. citizens, "preferably members of the armed forces." That preference wasn't about romance. It was about what a military spouse ID card unlocks.
HSI Tampa acting Special Agent in Charge Michael Cochran framed the stakes clearly:
"This investigation underscores the critical role that HSI plays in protecting our nation from transnational criminal organizations that seek to exploit our customs and immigration laws and threaten our national security. Through the dedication and expertise of our agents and partners, we have successfully investigated, disrupted and dismantled a sophisticated criminal network operating across borders."
"Dismantled" may be the operative word — but six targets remain unaccounted for, and the network's full scope across four states suggests this indictment captures a slice of the operation, not necessarily its totality.
Every immigration enforcement story invites the same tired deflection: that these are victimless bureaucratic violations, paperwork crimes dressed up as threats. This case demolishes that narrative. Chinese nationals obtained physical access to a U.S. naval air station through fraudulent marriages brokered by a transnational criminal organization. Active-duty and reserve service members sold their status — and their country's security — for cash.
The men and women who serve honorably on bases like NAS Jacksonville deserve to know that the people walking through the gate beside them actually belong there. Four of their own peers betrayed that trust. The organization that recruited them exploited every seam in the system — immigration law, military spousal benefits, base access protocols — simultaneously.
This is what immigration enforcement actually looks like when agencies are empowered to do their jobs: a multijurisdictional takedown spanning HSI offices in Jacksonville, New York, Baltimore, and Los Angeles, coordinated with NCIS, culminating in arrests, guilty pleas, and an indictment that names the network for what it is.
Six suspects are still out there. The work isn't finished.