Iranian and Russian naval forces conducted joint exercises Thursday in the Gulf of Oman and Indian Ocean, staging what they dubbed "Maritime Security Belt 2026" as President Trump contemplates airstrikes against Iran and American warships tighten their presence across the region.
The drills involved units from the Iranian Navy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Russian Navy special units, employing both air and surface craft. Two days earlier, the IRGC, a designated terrorist organization, temporarily shut down the Strait of Hormuz for live-fire drills involving ship- and shore-launched missiles.
Iran also issued warnings to airline pilots operating in the southern part of the country that rockets would be launched during the exercises. None of this is routine, no matter what Tehran claims.
As reported by Breitbart, the Kremlin insisted the drills were "planned exercises and agreed upon in advance," a familiar line from a government that has perfected the art of pre-scheduling provocations. Video published by the Russian military showed the corvette Stoiky arriving at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, presumably before joining the exercises.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov offered the kind of diplomatic language Moscow deploys when it wants to appear above the fray while actively stoking it:
"We are currently witnessing an unprecedented escalation of tensions in the region, but we still expect that political and diplomatic tools will prevail."
He followed that with a call for "restraint and prudence" directed at "our Iranian friends and all parties in the region." The word "friends" is doing considerable work in that sentence. Russia is not a neutral observer counseling calm. It is a participant sailing warships into contested waters alongside a regime that just closed one of the world's most critical shipping lanes to practice firing missiles.
Iranian Navy commander Rear Adm. Shahram Irani dispensed with any pretense of the exercises being defensive or routine. He complained publicly about "threats, noise, propaganda, and the presence of extra-regional fleets in West Asia," then escalated:
"If the extra-regional fleet feels it has come with power, it should know that the Iranian people will confront them with greater power. The faith of the people and missiles are the Islamic Republic of Iran's deterrent weapons against the enemy."
Iranian state media described the drills as "routine" and said they included "the liberation of a hijacked ship," aerial reconnaissance, surface operations, and "the capture of simulated pirates." The gap between "routine anti-piracy exercise" and "we will confront you with missiles and faith" tells you everything about where Tehran's head is.
Iranian spokesman Capt. Hassan Maqsoudlou confirmed that participating units included "special operations units" from both the Iranian Navy and IRGC naval forces, and spoke of strengthening relations between the two countries' navies. China was reportedly supposed to participate, but little information was made publicly available about the presence of any Chinese ships. Whether Beijing quietly pulled back or simply kept its involvement out of the press is an open question worth watching.
The joint drills unfold against a backdrop of significant American force projection. The USS Abraham Lincoln and its battle group are currently within striking distance of Iran. The USS Gerald R. Ford, America's largest and most advanced warship, is headed for the Strait of Gibraltar and could be in position as soon as this weekend. Some 50 additional American combat aircraft have been moved into position this week.
If those figures hold, Iran could be facing one of the largest U.S. aerial deployments since the Cold War.
That is the context in which Tehran chose to close the Strait of Hormuz for missile drills and then stage joint exercises with Russia. These are not the moves of a regime confident in its diplomatic position. They are the moves of a government that sees the board clearly and is scrambling to project strength it may not possess.
There is a pattern with regimes under pressure. They hold military parades. They fire rockets into open water. They invite a fellow pariah state to sail alongside them for the cameras. The spectacle is the point, because the spectacle is all they have.
Russia gets to remind Washington that it has relationships in the region. Iran gets to claim it isn't isolated. Both governments get footage for state television. But none of it changes the correlation of forces. Two carrier strike groups, dozens of advanced combat aircraft, and the full logistical weight of the American military do not become less formidable because a Russian corvette docked at Bandar Abbas.
Tehran's strategy appears to be deterrence through rhetoric and symbolism: missiles and faith, as Rear Adm. Irani put it. That formulation tells you what's missing from the list. Modern air defense systems. A navy capable of contesting blue water. Allies are willing to fight rather than issue press releases about restraint.
Russia will call for calm. Iran will fire rockets at imaginary pirates. And American carrier groups will continue closing the distance. The Gulf of Oman is getting crowded, and only one side chose to be there from a position of strength.
Rep. Lou Correa (D-CA) went on CNN International Thursday and said the quiet part out loud: Democrats have almost no cards to play in the DHS shutdown standoff, and the White House knows it.
Appearing on "The Brief," Correa laid out a remarkably candid assessment of his party's negotiating position. The $170 billion Congress gave DHS through the reconciliation bill last year means ICE and CBP can keep operating regardless of the partial shutdown. The agency Democrats want to constrain is already funded to do exactly what it's doing.
Correa's solution? Hold firm anyway.
The California Democrat's appearance was a masterclass in self-defeating political messaging, Breitbart noted. In the span of a few minutes, he managed to acknowledge that the administration holds the leverage, that the shutdown is "very small," and that the funding Democrats themselves voted on gives the White House the resources to continue enforcement operations without interruption.
Then he argued Democrats should dig in harder.
"Big, beautiful bill, $170 billion, they can continue moving forward on this very small shutdown and continue to do what they're doing. They have the cards. We have very few cards, and that's why we have to hold firm on this one."
Read that again. The reason to hold firm is precisely that they have no leverage. This is not a negotiating strategy. It's a coping mechanism dressed up as resolve.
Correa framed the Democratic position as a simple request for "guardrails" on immigration enforcement. He attributed the effort to "Hakeem," a reference to House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who he said was asking that ICE obtain warrants, respect churches, and protect citizens' rights during operations.
On the surface, these sound reasonable. Nobody objects to constitutional protections. But the framing does a lot of heavy lifting. What Correa and his colleagues are actually demanding is a set of procedural restrictions designed to slow enforcement to a crawl. Requiring warrants for every immigration arrest, carving out broad sanctuary zones around churches, and layering new bureaucratic requirements onto agents already doing their jobs. These aren't guardrails. They're speed bumps engineered to make enforcement impractical.
The tell is in the rhetoric surrounding the request. Correa didn't just ask for procedural reforms. He accused ICE of going "after anybody that gets in their way, including Americans" and described Homeland Security as having become "a police force" rather than a national security agency. He referenced individuals in his district who he said were "beaten, arrested, jailed by ICE," though he offered no names, no case numbers, and no documentation.
Correa referenced two individuals, "Mother Good" and a nurse he called "Pretti," as having been killed. He provided no details about when, where, how, or by whom. He didn't connect these deaths to any specific enforcement action. He simply dropped the names and moved on to broader accusations that the administration would "kill more individuals" if left unchecked.
This is a serious pattern in the immigration debate. Elected officials make grave accusations on camera, offer no specifics, and trust that the emotional weight of the claim will do the work that evidence should. If ICE agents are genuinely brutalizing citizens in Correa's district, that demands specifics: names, dates, incident reports, lawsuits. Not vague gestures on an international news broadcast.
The contrast with the administration's actual stated goal is striking. Correa himself acknowledged that President Trump "promised to deport the most serious of criminals." That's the mandate. That's what the $170 billion is funding. If Democrats believe enforcement is exceeding that mandate, the answer is oversight with evidence, not a shutdown standoff they've already admitted they can't win.
What Correa's interview actually revealed isn't a path forward for Democrats. It's the depth of their strategic bind. They voted for the funding. The enforcement apparatus is operational. The shutdown affects a narrow slice of DHS operations, and the public isn't clamoring for ICE to stop arresting illegal immigrants.
So Democrats are left arguing that:
This isn't a policy disagreement. It's a party watching its own prior decisions play out and objecting to the results.
The White House has little reason to make concessions. Correa said it himself: they have the cards. ICE is funded. CBP is funded. The "very small shutdown" is a nuisance, not a crisis, and every day it continues, Democrats are the ones who have to explain why they're holding out for restrictions on an agency that most voters want to see doing its job.
Correa's honesty, however unintentional, did his party no favors. When your own members go on international television and explain that you have no leverage, the other side tends to believe them.
Democrats wanted a fight over immigration enforcement. They got one. They just forgot to check whether they had any ammunition first.
Brazilian prosecutors have archived their investigation into former President Jair Bolsonaro over allegations of "genocide" during the COVID-19 pandemic, concluding that the case rested on nothing more than political grievance dressed up as a criminal complaint.
The office of the federal public prosecutor announced Thursday that the investigation, rooted in accusations that Bolsonaro's pandemic response amounted to genocide, lacked any factual basis worth pursuing. Federal Prosecutor Luciana Furtado de Moraes had requested the archive in late January, and her reasoning was blunt.
"From the analysis of the records, this ministerial body finds that there is no reason to initiate criminal prosecution due to the facts, given that the information presented is nonspecific and generic, lacking minimum documentary evidence to corroborate the complex and comprehensive allegations."
That is prosecutorial language for: there was nothing there. The complaint that launched the investigation amounted to "personal reports, subjective evaluations, political perceptions" without "individualized facts, minimum elements of materiality or concrete evidence," according to Furtado de Moraes's request.
The left wanted to criminalize a policy disagreement. Prosecutors, to their credit, declined.
According to Breitbart, the genocide accusation traces back to October 2021, when Brazilian leftist lawmakers reportedly prepared a motion to charge Bolsonaro with the crime. Their leaked complaint made the case in terms that were sweeping and conveniently unfalsifiable:
"The decision not to acquire vaccines between the months of July 2020 and at least January 2021, which lacked any technical or scientific basis, and flew in the face of recommendations from international health authorities, ended up claiming the lives of thousands of Brazilians who would undoubtedly have made use of such vaccines."
Set aside the rhetorical certainty of "undoubtedly." The complaint targeted a period when vaccines were barely available anywhere on earth, and when the primary vaccine products accessible to Brazil were Chinese-made offerings that even a top Chinese public health official admitted "don't have very high protection rates." Bolsonaro was initially skeptical of those products, then later thanked the Chinese government for providing them.
So the genocide charge boiled down to this: Bolsonaro did not move fast enough to purchase vaccines that their own manufacturers conceded were mediocre, during a window when global supply was constrained for every nation. That is not genocide. That is a policy dispute, and an increasingly common one that played out in capitals worldwide.
Bolsonaro's broader pandemic stance was well known. He:
Reasonable people can debate those positions. Charging a head of state with genocide for them is not reasonable. It is the weaponization of criminal law against political opponents, and prosecutors finally said so plainly.
The genocide investigation's collapse would be cause for straightforward vindication in any normal legal environment. Brazil is not normal. Bolsonaro remains buried under a cascade of legal actions that, taken together, paint a picture of a judicial system operating with a political mandate.
Consider the inventory. The Supreme Federal Tribunal convicted Bolsonaro on charges related to an alleged coup attempt, linking him to a riot in Brasilia on January 8, 2023. Bolsonaro was in the United States at the time. The court sentenced him to 27 years in prison, claimed he had planned to poison current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and banned him from running for public office until 2060. He will be 105 years old.
Shortly after that conviction, another Brazilian court found him guilty of "recreational racism" over a joke made to a Black supporter who himself stated he did not find the joke offensive. The fine: $188,750.
Then, in September, STF Justice Flávio Dino opened yet another investigation into Bolsonaro related to the pandemic, alleging potential charges of irregular use of public funds, spreading an epidemic, and "crimes against humanity." This is a separate action from the genocide case that was just shelved.
According to a CNN Brasil report, the charges archived Thursday extended well beyond genocide, encompassing allegations of "involvement with militias, drug trafficking, corruption, poisoning of authorities, political persecution, and attacks on the democratic order." It reads less like a criminal investigation and more like a keyword search for every possible accusation that could be leveled against a political figure.
What emerges from the full picture is a judicial apparatus that functions as an extension of political opposition. Bolsonaro lost the 2022 presidential election to Lula, a socialist who was himself a convicted felon before judicial intervention cleared his path to run. Since then, the legal system has pursued Bolsonaro with a breadth and intensity that makes selective prosecution look restrained by comparison.
The genocide case was the most nakedly political of the bunch, which is why its collapse matters. Prosecutors looked at the file and found nothing but rhetoric. Not thin evidence. Not a close call. Nothing. Generic accusations and subjective evaluations.
Yet for years, the charge served its purpose. "Genocide" is not a word deployed for legal precision. It is deployed for political destruction. It circulated in international media. It shaped perceptions of Bolsonaro as something beyond a conservative leader with heterodox pandemic views. It made him, in the framing of his opponents, a mass killer.
Now prosecutors have confirmed what was evident from the start: the accusation was built on air.
The shelving of the genocide case does not free Bolsonaro from legal jeopardy. He is still serving a 27-year sentence. He is still banned from office for decades. Justice Dino's pandemic investigation remains open. The machinery continues.
But the genocide charge was the crown jewel of the left's narrative, the single most dramatic accusation leveled against a leader whose real offense was governing as a conservative in a country whose institutions prefer otherwise. Its quiet burial in a prosecutor's filing cabinet that tells you everything about the strength of the case his opponents built.
They called it genocide. Prosecutors called it nothing.
New York City's new mayor just took office, facing a multibillion-dollar deficit, and decided the problem was too many cops. Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who succeeded the indicted Eric Adams, canceled thousands of planned NYPD hires and proposed roughly $22 million in cuts to the department's budget as part of a sprawling $127 billion spending plan unveiled Tuesday.
Under Adams' hiring roadmap, the NYPD was set to add 300 officers in July 2026, scale up to 2,500 by July 2027, and eventually bring on 5,000 additional officers annually by July 2028. That trajectory would have put approximately 40,000 officers on New York's streets. Mamdani's plan caps the force near its current level of around 35,000.
All of it is gone with a stroke of a pen. The mayor canceled all orders Adams issued after his September 2024 indictment, and the NYPD expansion was among the casualties.
According to Breitbart, Mamdani framed the budget as a moment of reckoning, telling reporters his administration "inherited a historic budget gap." He tried to preempt the obvious criticism that this is just another round of New York City fiscal theater:
"I know that for those who have watched budget after budget, it is tempting to assume that we are engaging in the same dance as our predecessors. Let me assure you, nothing about this is typical. That's why our solutions won't be either."
He's right that it isn't typical. Most predecessors didn't respond to a crime-weary city by gutting police hiring while simultaneously shopping for tax increases.
Mamdani laid out two paths for closing the deficit. The first, and his preferred route, involves raising taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and profitable corporations. That requires Albany's blessing, meaning Governor Kathy Hochul would have to sign off. Hochul, a moderate Democrat seeking re-election, has been steadfastly opposed to any kind of tax hikes. That alliance seems unlikely despite the two reportedly finding common ground on expanding child care.
The second path is the quiet threat. Mamdani warned that without state-level tax authority, the city would be forced to raise property taxes and raid its reserves:
"And if we do not go down the first path, the city will be forced down a second, more harmful path. Faced with no other choice, the city would have to exercise the only revenue lever fully within our own control. We would have to raise property taxes."
Translation: give me the power to tax the rich, or I'll tax homeowners instead. It's a hostage negotiation dressed up as fiscal responsibility.
What Mamdani is proposing isn't a budget. It's a prioritization exercise, and the priorities tell you everything. The city has a spending problem large enough to require the word "multibillion" in front of "deficit," and the first place the new mayor looks for savings is law enforcement. Not the bloated bureaucracy. Not the programs that have turned city government into a jobs program for activists and consultants. The cops.
This is the democratic socialist governing philosophy in practice. The theory holds that policing is overinvested and social services are underinvested. The result, everywhere it's been tried, is the same: neighborhoods that needed more officers get fewer, and the people who bear the cost are the ones least able to leave.
New York City residents who lived through the crime surges of recent years watched Adams promise a return to public safety through manpower. Whatever else Adams got wrong, and the indictment suggests he got plenty wrong, the instinct to put more officers on the street reflected what voters actually wanted. Mamdani scrapped that commitment within weeks of taking office.
The revenue side of this proposal deserves its own scrutiny. Mamdani presented his preferred path as "the most sustainable and the fairest," calling for an end to what he described as "the drain on our city" by taxing the wealthy and corporations.
New York already competes with states like Florida and Texas that charge no state income tax at all. Every year, high earners and the businesses that employ thousands of New Yorkers weigh whether the city is worth the cost. Mamdani's answer to the question "why are people leaving?" is apparently "let's give them another reason."
And if Hochul refuses to play along, property taxes go up. That doesn't hit hedge fund managers. It hits the retired couple in Queens who bought their house in 1987. It hits the small landlord whose margins are already razor-thin. Mamdani frames this as the unfortunate backup plan, but the structure of his proposal ensures that someone pays more no matter which path Albany chooses.
Cut policing. Raise taxes. Frame it as justice. This is not a New York innovation. It's the same formula that hollowed out city after city over the past decade. The rhetoric always sounds compassionate. The results never are.
Mamdani told reporters the city "can and will overcome" its budget crisis. Maybe so. But five thousand officers who were supposed to be walking beats, answering calls, and keeping subway platforms safe won't be there to help. New Yorkers will overcome their budget crisis the way they overcome everything else: on their own, with fewer police between them and whatever comes next.
Federal prosecutors investigating the alleged weaponization of intelligence against President Donald Trump have sent a formal request to the U.S. Senate for evidence tied to former CIA Director John Brennan. The request, described as secret and rare, seeks documents, transcripts, and testimony related to Brennan's statements about efforts to link Trump's 2016 campaign to Russian collusion.
The written request was sent last Friday by the team of U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones, who operates out of Miami and was assigned by Attorney General Pam Bondi to review evidence for possible crimes and conspiracy. Overtures between his team and the Senate began over the last month, and negotiations are now underway for the transfer of evidence, including a possible visit by prosecutors to Washington.
Meanwhile, a federal grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, has already begun collecting evidence.
Just the News reports that the core of the case against Brennan centers on what he told Congress versus what the record actually shows. In 2017, Brennan testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the now-discredited Steele Dossier played no role in the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election. His words were unequivocal:
"[The dossier] was not used in any way as far as the judgments in the ICA were concerned."
He also told senators that top CIA officials were "very concerned about polluting the ICA with this material." The picture he painted was clear: the CIA resisted the dossier, and the dossier stayed out of the assessment.
That picture has since collapsed under the weight of declassified documents.
A declassified House Intelligence Committee report found the opposite of what Brennan claimed:
"[C]ontradicting public claims by the DCIA that the dossier 'was not in any way' incorporated into the ICA, the dossier was referenced in the ICA main body text, and further detailed in a two-page CIA annex."
That same report revealed that two senior CIA officers, one from Russia operations and the other from Russia analysis, argued directly with Brennan that the dossier should be excluded because it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards. Brennan overruled them. When one officer raised concerns, Brennan reportedly responded: "Yes, but doesn't it ring true?"
Analytical soundness, apparently, was optional if the narrative fit.
The story of how the Steele Dossier ended up inside a presidential intelligence assessment is a case study in institutional corruption dressed up as an interagency process.
In December 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe pushed to include the dossier, compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who had been hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS, in turn, was being paid by Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias. The dossier was, from its inception, a political product. It was later used by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants against a Trump campaign official.
Comey testified before the Senate in June 2017 about his role in getting the material included:
"I insisted that we bring it to the party, and I was agnostic as to whether it was footnoted in the document itself, put as an annex. I have some recollection of talking to John Brennan maybe at some point saying: I don't really care, but I think it is relevant and so ought to be part of the consideration."
Brennan's own written position, as cited in a CIA review memo, stated that he believed "the information warrants inclusion in the report." This directly contradicts his testimony that the CIA opposed its inclusion.
On December 29, 2016, the CIA's own Deputy Director for Analysis emailed Brennan warning that including the dossier in any form risked "the credibility of the entire paper." Brennan proceeded anyway.
The result: the dossier was referenced as the fourth supporting bullet for the ICA's judgment that Putin "aspired" to help Trump win. A CIA review later concluded that this placement:
"[I]mplicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment."
That same review found Brennan "showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness." In plain English: he wanted a story, not the truth.
Adding another layer of institutional failure, the Senate Intelligence Committee itself issued reports in 2020 that appeared to provide cover for Brennan's claims. The committee's April 2020 report stated it "found that the information provided by Christopher Steele to the FBI was not used in the body of the ICA or to support any of its analytic judgments." Its August 2020 fifth volume echoed that the "dossier material was not used in the ICA and did not contribute to its findings."
These findings have since been contradicted by declassified documents showing the dossier was, in fact, referenced in the ICA's main body text and detailed in a two-page annex. A host of top Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats, attempted to point to the 2020 Senate report to push back against evidence declassified by DNI Tulsi Gabbard.
The committee's own records are now the subject of the prosecution's request. That irony needs no commentary.
The scope of this investigation extends well beyond a single instance of alleged false testimony. FBI Director Kash Patel drafted a memo last year recommending that the full chain of actions against Trump and his allies, stretching from the Crossfire Hurricane probe through Special Counsel Jack Smith's now-dismissed indictments, be viewed as "an ongoing criminal conspiracy to deprive American citizens of their civil rights." That legal framework would allow prosecutors to charge crimes outside the standard five-year statute of limitations as overt acts of a continuing conspiracy.
This matters because Brennan's last known testimony contacts with the Senate occurred on June 23, 2017, and May 16, 2018, both well outside a standalone five-year window. His May 2023 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee falls within range, but the conspiracy framework opens a much broader field.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said last October that Brennan made "numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact," contradicted by the record established by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the CIA itself. The committee formally referred Brennan for prosecution last year.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe followed with his own criminal referral to the FBI after conducting a "lessons-learned" review of the ICA. DNI Gabbard sent declassified evidence to the Justice Department in July, describing the matter as a "treasonous conspiracy" involving top intelligence officials during the Obama administration who allegedly politicized intelligence related to Russia and the 2016 election.
For years, the phrase "walls closing in" was a punchline, the breathless prediction of cable news anchors who were certain that Trump, not the people who surveilled his campaign, would face legal consequences. The irony is that the phrase may finally apply to the right target.
Brennan, now a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, did not respond to a request for comment sent through his lawyer. His post-government career as a cable news commentator has been spent reinforcing the very narrative his own agency's analysts warned him was analytically unsound.
The declassified House report put the matter bluntly:
"[B]y devoting nearly two pages of ICA text to summarizing the dossier in a high-profile assessment intended for the President and President-elect, the ICA misrepresented both the significance and credibility of the dossier reports."
An intelligence assessment written at the direction of a sitting president, based partly on opposition research funded by the opposing candidate's campaign, was used to justify surveillance of American citizens and to cast a cloud over an incoming administration. The people who built that cloud are now the ones under investigation.
The grand jury in Fort Pierce is collecting evidence. The Senate is negotiating the transfer of documents spanning nearly a decade. And John Brennan, the man who told Congress the dossier wasn't part of the assessment while his own written communications show he pushed to put it there, sits in silence.
The record speaks loudly enough.
The U.S. trade deficit shrank by nearly half between March and December, falling from $136.0 billion to $70.3 billion, according to Commerce Department data released Thursday. That is a $65.7 billion improvement in nine months.
The numbers tell a straightforward story. President Trump announced sweeping tariffs on Liberation Day in March. The deficit peaked that same month as importers rushed to bring in goods ahead of the new rates. Then it fell, steadily and significantly, as the tariffs took hold and redirected trade flows.
The goods deficit alone dropped 39 percent, from $162.1 billion in March to $99.3 billion in December. The combined deficit actually hit its lowest point in October, at $58.5 billion, before ticking up slightly in December.
The most consequential figure in the data may be the China-specific deficit, according to Breitbart. It fell from $295.5 billion in 2024 to $202.1 billion in 2025, the smallest in more than two decades.
That matters because reducing dependence on Chinese imports has been the strategic centerpiece, not just the economic centerpiece, of the tariff agenda. For years, the bipartisan consensus held that engagement with Beijing would liberalize its economy and level the playing field. It didn't. What it did was hollow out American manufacturing, transfer critical supply chains overseas, and hand Beijing the leverage it wielded without hesitation.
A $93 billion reduction in the China deficit in a single year is not a rounding error. It reflects actual changes in where American businesses source goods and how trade flows respond when the rules change.
Critics will inevitably point to the March peak as evidence that the tariffs themselves caused the spike. They are half right, and it proves the opposite of what they think.
The March surge was driven by what economists call "front-loading," importers racing to get goods into the country before tariff rates went into effect. That behavior inflated the March number artificially. It also means the true baseline was already lower than $136 billion. Which makes the subsequent decline even more significant when measured against normal trade volumes.
The December figure of $70.3 billion was slightly above the October low, a gap attributed to volatile gold flows and a surge in computer accessory imports tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure investment. Strip out those temporary factors and the underlying trajectory points in one direction: down.
Trade deficits are not inherently catastrophic, and not every conservative agrees on what they signify. But persistent, structural deficits of the kind the United States has run for decades represent something specific: American consumption subsidizing foreign production. When the gap narrows because imports fall and domestic sourcing rises, that is economic activity being relocated back inside U.S. borders.
The Washington establishment spent years insisting this kind of reshoring was impossible without triggering economic collapse. The data released Thursday suggests otherwise. Nine months of sustained improvement is not a blip. It is a trend.
The policy class that told Americans free trade with China would lift all boats, that tariffs were economic suicide, that manufacturing jobs were gone forever, now has to contend with numbers that contradict every one of those assumptions. They will find ways to explain the data away. They always do.
The question now is whether these numbers hold as the tariff regime matures and trading partners adjust. Supply chains do not reorganize overnight, and some of the shift in import patterns may reflect rerouting through third countries rather than genuine reshoring. That is a challenge for enforcement, not an argument against the policy.
What the data establishes is a proof of concept. Tariffs, applied with strategic intent and sustained political will, can move the needle on trade imbalances that Washington accepted as permanent for a generation. The March-to-December trajectory does not prove the job is finished. It proves the job is possible.
For two decades, the China deficit climbed while politicians from both parties promised to do something about it. One administration actually did.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on April 1 in Trump v. Barbara, the case challenging President Donald Trump's executive order that denies birthright citizenship to certain children born on U.S. soil. It is the first time the high court has agreed to directly confront the scope of the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause in the modern immigration context.
The executive order, signed on January 20, 2025, applies to children born after February 19, 2025, whose parents are either illegally present in the United States or here on temporary visas. The question before the justices is deceptively simple: what does "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" actually mean?
For decades, the political establishment treated birthright citizenship as settled law, a constitutional given that no serious person would question. That consensus is now before the nine justices, and the legal arguments supporting the challenge are far more grounded in history than critics would like to admit.
According to Just the News, the entire case turns on five words in the 14th Amendment: "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." The amendment was ratified to provide citizenship to formerly enslaved African Americans. Its application to the children of foreign nationals, including those here illegally, rests not on the amendment's text or its framers' intent, but on subsequent judicial interpretation.
Second Circuit Judge Steven Menashi has noted that the clause refers to being born under the protection of, and owing allegiance to, a sovereign. That framing matters enormously. If jurisdiction requires allegiance, the automatic extension of citizenship to children of illegal immigrants is not a constitutional command. It is a policy choice dressed up as one.
Ilan Wurman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, argued that English common law, on which America's founding documents were modeled, tied citizenship to a reciprocal relationship between sovereign and subject. Permission to be present was linked to protection, and protection was linked to jurisdiction. As Wurman put it:
"Permission was relevant to protection and protection, as it turns out, was relevant to jurisdiction."
That framework draws a clear line between those lawfully admitted to the country and those who entered or remained in violation of its laws. Wurman also noted the historical understanding of how sovereignty operated on families:
"The sovereign operated on children through the parents, which, of course, makes sense because parents have a natural authority over their children."
If the parents have no lawful permission to be here, the logic follows that their children are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States in the constitutional sense the 14th Amendment contemplated.
Yale law professor Keith Whittington offered a nuanced point that undercuts the left's position even on its own terms. He traced the concept of sovereign jurisdiction back to English legal tradition, where a king's decision not to remove a foreign national still placed that person under the crown's governing authority. Whittington explained:
"If the king chooses to tolerate your presence in the country and does not take active steps to remove you, then the assumption is you are under the full governing authority of the king and should be treated accordingly."
At first glance, this might seem to support birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants. If you're here, you're under jurisdiction. But Whittington connected this directly to the Trump administration's enforcement posture, which targets the "worst of the worst" among those here illegally. The implication is significant: a government actively working to deport someone has not chosen to tolerate their presence. The reciprocal relationship that historically undergirded jurisdiction simply does not exist.
Whittington elaborated on what tolerance actually means in practice:
"If you're not being actively removed from the country, then you are expected to play by the rules of the local jurisdiction and the government will continue to place demands on you and also expect that you will abide by local laws until the moment comes when we choose to actually take action and deport you."
This is not an argument for blanket birthright citizenship. It is an argument that jurisdiction is contingent, not automatic. And in an era of active enforcement, the category of people whose presence the government has chosen to tolerate is narrower than the open-borders crowd would prefer.
Both Wurman and Whittington agreed that the justices should not read the 14th Amendment as automatically extending citizenship to every child born on American soil to foreign parents. But they also pointed to a glaring institutional failure: Congress has never bothered to clarify the amendment's definitional ambiguities.
Whittington suggested that if Congress genuinely cared about phenomena like birth tourism, it had the authority to act:
"If Congress really cared about this, they can take steps to try to minimize how often it happens, but that's the extent of their authority to be able to do something about it."
He also acknowledged that any legislation would likely contain its own loopholes, much like the amendment itself. This is an honest concession, but it doesn't excuse decades of legislative inaction. Congress has been content to let courts do its work, and courts have been content to let a post-hoc interpretation stand in for original meaning. The result is a citizenship framework built on assumptions rather than text.
The broader significance of Trump v. Barbara extends well past constitutional interpretation. Birthright citizenship as currently practiced creates a set of incentives that no rational immigration system would design on purpose:
Every other developed nation has moved away from unrestricted birthright citizenship or never adopted it in the first place. The United States clings to it not because of constitutional necessity, but because of political convenience. Democrats benefit from the demographic math. Republicans have lacked the institutional will to challenge it. Until now.
Much of the legal and media establishment will frame this case as radical, an assault on constitutional norms by an overreaching executive. That framing requires you to accept that a 19th-century amendment designed to secure the citizenship of freed slaves was always intended to grant automatic citizenship to the children of people who broke the law to be here. It requires you to believe the framers of the 14th Amendment imagined a world in which illegal entry would generate irrevocable legal rights for the next generation.
The scholars preparing the ground for this argument are not fringe voices. They are a federal appellate judge and professors at Yale and the University of Minnesota. Their reading of the text and its historical antecedents is serious, sourced, and difficult to dismiss on the merits.
The Supreme Court now has the opportunity to do what Congress wouldn't and what lower courts have avoided: read the 14th Amendment as it was written, not as decades of political convenience have wished it to read. April 1 is not just a date on the docket. It is the first honest examination of a question the country has been told, for far too long, was not allowed to be asked.
Rep. Ilhan Omar told a town hall audience on Wednesday that Democrats aren't just talking about abolishing ICE anymore. They're having active conversations about dismantling the entire Department of Homeland Security.
The Minnesota Democrat framed the shift as a natural evolution, suggesting that what once seemed radical has become mainstream within her party. In her own words:
"What I will say is that there is an easier conversation happening today than six, seven years ago when I got to Congress, about what we need to do with ICE, which is to abolish it."
She didn't stop there. Omar went further, describing broader ambitions that extend well beyond a single agency:
"There is a lot of conversation about what the dismantlement of the Department of Homeland Security should look like."
Not whether it should be dismantled. What the dismantlement should "look like." The premise is already settled in her circles. They've moved past the debate and into the logistics.
Remember when "Abolish ICE" was supposed to be a fringe position? When respectable Democrats assured moderate voters that nobody serious was actually proposing the elimination of federal law enforcement agencies? As Breitbart reported, Omar just confirmed what conservatives have warned about for years: the Overton window on the left didn't just shift. It shattered.
ICE has existed since 2003. The Department of Homeland Security was created in the wake of the worst terrorist attack in American history. These aren't bureaucratic relics from a forgotten era. They are the institutional architecture of national security in the post-9/11 world. And a sitting member of Congress is casually describing their demolition as though she's planning a kitchen renovation.
The honesty is almost refreshing. For years, Democrats played a double game: campaign on compassion, govern with ambiguity, and let activists do the dirty work of pushing actual policy positions. Omar skipped the choreography. She said the quiet part out loud, and she said it to applause.
Omar's comments land in a broader context that makes them harder to dismiss as mere rhetoric. Her home state has become ground zero for Democratic resistance to federal immigration enforcement. Governor Tim Walz, who lost the 2024 presidential election alongside his running mate, has positioned himself as a leader of that resistance.
Walz threatened last month to activate the Minnesota National Guard against federal law enforcement. He's also urged Americans across the country to join the fight. At one point, the governor issued this appeal:
"To Americans who are watching this, if you're in Portland or you're in L.A., or you're in Chicago, or you're wherever, they're coming next."
He called on people to "stand with us against this."
Against what, exactly? Against federal officers enforcing federal law? Against the agencies charged with border security and immigration enforcement? The language of resistance presupposes tyranny. But what Walz is describing isn't tyranny. It's the basic function of a sovereign nation to enforce its own borders.
Here's what makes the Omar-Walz position so revealing. Democrats spent the better part of four years insisting that "no one is above the law." They impeached a president twice on that principle. They prosecuted his allies. They lectured the country about norms, institutions, and the rule of law.
Now, a Democratic congresswoman openly discusses dismantling the federal department responsible for homeland security, and a Democratic governor threatens to deploy state military assets against federal agents. The principle of institutional respect apparently has an expiration date, and it expires the moment institutions start enforcing laws that progressives find inconvenient.
This isn't a policy disagreement. It's a philosophical one. Omar and her allies don't believe the United States has the right to enforce its immigration laws. Not selectively, not compassionately, not at all. The call to abolish ICE was never about reforming a single agency. It was about removing the capacity for enforcement itself. Dismantling DHS is simply the logical next step.
The American electorate weighed in on this question decisively in 2024. They chose President Trump and Vice President JD Vance over the alternative. The mandate was not subtle. Voters wanted the border secured, laws enforced, and sovereignty treated as something more than a talking point.
Omar's town hall remarks are a gift to anyone who wondered whether Democrats learned anything from that loss. They didn't. The party's progressive wing isn't recalibrating. It's accelerating. While voters demanded enforcement, Omar and her colleagues are blueprinting abolition.
That gap between what the electorate demanded and what the progressive left is planning tells you everything about where the Democratic Party is headed. They aren't interested in winning the argument. They're interested in eliminating the agencies that make the argument enforceable.
At least now they're saying so plainly.
The U.S. Air Force is repainting Air Force One and the rest of the executive airlift fleet in a bold red, white, and dark blue color scheme, replacing the light blue and white design that has adorned presidential aircraft for more than six decades. The first C-32 has already been painted and is expected to be delivered to the Air Force in the next few months.
An Air Force spokesperson confirmed the scope of the project:
"The Air Force is implementing a new paint scheme requirement (red, white and dark blue) for VC-25B as well as the additional executive airlift fleet, which will include the new 747-8i and four C-32 aircraft."
The C-32s will be painted during regularly scheduled maintenance, meaning the overhaul rolls into existing upkeep cycles rather than requiring standalone operations. The VC-25B, the Defense Department's designation for its next-generation Boeing 747 airliners, will carry the new colors as well.
This is a story about persistence. During his first term, President Trump unveiled a model airplane bearing his preferred color scheme for Air Force One: the deep red, white, and blue of the American flag, Breitbart reported. It was a deliberate departure from the Kennedy-era aesthetic, which dates back to the early 1960s.
Then Joe Biden canceled the redesign for the VC-25Bs, according to CBS News. No fanfare. No public explanation of why a sitting president felt compelled to undo a predecessor's cosmetic preference for the presidential fleet. Just a quiet reversal, the kind of reflexive undoing that defined much of the Biden era's approach to anything bearing Trump's fingerprints.
Now it's back. Last summer, Trump put it plainly:
"We're painting it red, white and blue like the American flag, which is incredible."
And so it is happening.
Critics will call this vanity. They always do when a president puts his stamp on something visible. But the Kennedy-era livery wasn't sacred scripture. It was a design choice made by one administration and inherited, without serious reconsideration, by every administration since. Six decades is a long time to coast on inertia and call it tradition.
Something is fitting about a paint scheme modeled on the American flag flying on the aircraft that represents American power abroad. The light blue design carried its own elegance. But the argument that presidential aircraft should look like the flag of the country they represent is not exactly radical.
The fact that Biden felt the need to cancel a paint job tells you more about the previous administration's priorities than it does about this one's. There was no policy consequence to the Kennedy-era scheme. No strategic downside. The cancellation was purely symbolic, an act of erasure for its own sake. That the current administration simply reinstated its vision and moved forward speaks to a different operating philosophy: do the thing you said you'd do.
The scope extends beyond Air Force One itself. The full executive airlift fleet is getting the treatment, including:
L3 Harris's facility in Greenville, Texas, is involved in upgrading the Air Force Two planes, though the precise relationship between the upgrades and the repainting effort remains unclear from available information. What is clear is that the first repainted C-32 is already done and headed for delivery.
The original design will always carry historical weight. The image of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy descending the stairs of Air Force One at Houston International Airport on November 21, 1963, the day before Dallas, is seared into the American memory. That pale blue fuselage is part of the visual vocabulary of a generation's grief.
But honoring history doesn't require freezing it in place. Every era marks its moment. The Kennedy design reflected midcentury restraint and sophistication. A red, white, and blue scheme reflects something more direct: the flag, unadorned. Both are legitimate aesthetic choices. Only one has been treated as untouchable.
After sixty years, the executive fleet finally looks like the country it serves.
Amber Glenn, the Team USA figure skater who made more headlines for her politics than her performances, finished 13th in the women's singles short program at the Milan Cortina Olympics on Tuesday after omitting a required triple loop from her routine.
The mistake earned her a zero in the technical skill category for the element and cost her seven technical points, according to Sports Illustrated. Her final score: 67.39. She struggled to hold back tears on the ice before embracing her coach.
Glenn had been seen as a favorite to medal in women's singles. That prospect now looks grim.
As Breitbart reported, the collapse is striking, given where Glenn stood just days ago. Last Sunday, she won gold in an earlier event at the Games. After that victory, she posted a TikTok celebrating the moment with a message aimed squarely at her critics.
"They hate to see two woke b*tches winning."
By Tuesday, the story had changed. Glenn landed her triple axel but skipped the required triple loop entirely, a decision that gutted her score and left her buried in the standings. Sports Illustrated laid out the math plainly:
"With a score of 67.39 in the short program, Glenn finished in 13th place in Tuesday's competition. Her mistake cost her seven technical points from her score. It'll be extremely difficult for her to medal on Thursday following the free skate."
Thursday's free skate is still ahead, but climbing from 13th into medal contention would require a historic performance and a wave of collapses above her. The math doesn't lie, even when the narrative does.
Glenn, who has identified as bisexual and pansexual, spent the weeks leading up to the Olympics injecting politics into what should have been a straightforward athletic story. She made public comments claiming the LGBTQ+ community in the U.S. was enduring a "hard time" under the current administration.
"It's been a hard time for the community overall and this administration. It isn't the first time that we've had to come together as a community and try and fight for our human rights. And now, especially, it's not just affecting the queer community, but many other communities."
The backlash was swift. Glenn eventually suspended her social media accounts, citing the "hate" she said she was facing. When the criticism didn't subside, she leaned further in, posting a follow-up defending the label she'd given herself:
"If 'Woke' means people who use their platforms to advocate for marginalized communities in the country that they are actively representing…… Then yeah sure?"
There's a pattern here that extends well beyond figure skating. An athlete representing the United States on the world stage decides the platform is best used not to compete but to litigate domestic cultural grievances. The crowd is supposed to cheer. The media is supposed to amplify. And when ordinary Americans push back, the athlete plays victim.
The uncomfortable truth Glenn's 13th-place finish illustrates is one the sports world keeps learning and refusing to absorb: the arena doesn't care about your TikTok.
You can call yourself a "woke bitch" and collect applause from the corners of the internet that reward that sort of thing. You can position yourself as a voice for the marginalized while competing on a global stage most people will never touch. You can frame every critic as a bigot and every setback as persecution.
But the ice is merciless. It doesn't grade on ideology. It doesn't award points for courage in posting. When you skip a required element, you get a zero. The scoreboard is indifferent to your pronouncements about human rights.
None of this is to say Glenn doesn't have the right to her opinions. She does. But the choice to make yourself a political symbol carries a cost. Every camera that followed her to Milan was tracking two stories at once: the skater and the activist. When you invite that scrutiny, a 13th-place finish doesn't land as a quiet disappointment. It lands as a verdict.
Glenn still has the free skate on Thursday, and stranger things have happened in figure skating. But the deficit is enormous, and the field above her isn't likely to cooperate.
The broader lesson is one conservative sports fans have been articulating for years. Americans don't tune into the Olympics to hear lectures about domestic politics from athletes draped in the flag. They tune in to watch excellence. They want to see someone who trained for a decade land the jump, not someone who trained for a decade and spent the last month picking fights on social media.
Glenn chose to be a symbol. On Tuesday, the scoreboard chose what she was a symbol of.