New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a secret trip to Washington on Thursday, slipping into the White House for a closed-door meeting with President Trump that his own office never announced.
City Hall made no mention of the visit ahead of time. It wasn't on his public schedule. The meeting only became public after reporters caught wind of it.
What Mamdani brought with him tells you everything you need to know about how the Democratic socialist is approaching the most powerful Republican in the world: flattery, props, and a massive ask.
Mamdani posted on X after the meeting, calling it "productive" and saying he looked forward to "building more housing in New York City."
The New York Post reported that attached to the post was a photo of Trump at the Resolute Desk holding up what the source material describes as a "fake front page" with the headline "TRUMP TO CITY: LET'S BUILD" and text reading "Trump delivers 12,000+ homes. Most since 1973."
The image was seemingly heavily edited. Next to it, Trump held up the infamous October 1975 New York Daily News front page: "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD." The juxtaposition was obvious. Mamdani wanted Trump to see himself as the anti-Ford, the president who saved New York's housing.
Photoshopped newspapers as diplomatic currency. That's where we are.
Mamdani's team told reporters the mayor pitched a road map to adding 12,000 housing units in New York City, anchored by a massive development at Sunnyside Yard in Queens. The project would include 6,000 Mitchell-Lama-style homes. The price tag: a $21 billion federal investment, according to City Hall.
No timeline was released for the project.
Mamdani's press secretary, Joe Calvello, framed the visit as a follow-up to the mayor's first Oval Office meeting, telling reporters:
"The first time the president and the mayor met, the president asked him to come back with some big ideas how we can build things together here in New York City, and that's what he did today."
Calvello said Trump was "enthusiastic" about the plan. The White House didn't comment.
This was Mamdani's second Oval Office sit-down since his election in November. His chief of staff, Elle Bisgaard-Church, described the prior meeting as "productive" as well and said Trump expressed interest in what City Hall calls EULER, an Expedited Land Use Review Procedure.
The standard process, ULURP, can drag out past seven months. EULER is pitched as a 90-day streamlined alternative.
Bisgaard-Church said after the earlier meeting:
"The president felt very interested in a kind of common sense approach to reduce onerous burdens on the housing and development owners, actually."
Cutting red tape for developers sounds reasonable enough. But the messenger matters. Mamdani is a self-described democratic socialist who has long been accused of antisemitism and terrorist sympathies.
He now governs the largest city in America and keeps showing up at the White House with hat in hand, asking for billions in federal money for government-built housing.
Trump acknowledged the relationship during Tuesday night's State of the Union, giving Mamdani what amounted to a backhanded shoutout:
"The new communist mayor of New York City, I think he's a nice guy, actually. I speak to him a lot. Bad policy, but nice guy."
Bad policy, but nice guy. That's a more honest assessment of cross-partisan deal-making than most politicians will ever offer.
The housing pitch wasn't the only item Mamdani carried to Washington. According to Calvello, the mayor also provided Trump with a list of four people detained by federal immigration officials, without providing their identities, and claimed to have convinced Trump to release Columbia University student Elaina Aghayeva, who was detained by ICE agents earlier Thursday.
DHS said Aghayeva was in the US illegally. So in a single meeting, New York's socialist mayor asked the president for $21 billion in federal housing funds and lobbied for the release of illegal immigrants held by federal authorities.
The audacity is almost impressive. Mamdani is treating White House visits like a buffet: housing subsidies on one plate, immigration advocacy on the other, and a photoshopped newspaper as the garnish.
The temptation here is to dismiss this as a sideshow. A socialist mayor flattering a Republican president with a doctored newspaper front page is inherently comedic. But the substance underneath deserves scrutiny.
Trump's own remarks at the State of the Union align with a genuinely populist housing vision. He referenced signing an executive order last month to ban large Wall Street investment firms from buying up single-family homes by the thousands, and he asked Congress to make the ban permanent:
"We want homes for people, not for corporations. Corporations are doing just fine."
That's a message with real traction across party lines. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has proposed a bill that would curb Wall Street's ability to buy housing. When Trump and Warren land on the same side of an issue, the political terrain is shifting underneath everyone's feet.
The question is whether Mamdani is genuinely interested in cutting regulatory barriers to building, or whether the $21 billion ask is the real play: a massive federal subsidy for government-directed housing dressed up in the language of deregulation.
Mitchell-Lama-style housing is government-subsidized, income-restricted development. It is not the free market. Wrapping it in "let's cut red tape" rhetoric doesn't change what's inside the package.
An unnamed source told reporters that Mamdani flying to DC would help "put icing" on Warren's proposed bill. If that's the angle, then the mayor isn't just pitching a housing project. He's trying to position himself as a bridge between progressive housing policy and a Republican White House, using personal rapport as the vehicle.
Mamdani was spotted with his entourage, including top adviser Morris Katz, who has no formal role in City Hall, on a Delta flight to Washington Thursday morning.
The secrecy is revealing. A mayor who believed this meeting would play well with his own base would have announced it. Instead, he hid it until reporters forced confirmation.
That tells you who Mamdani thinks he's accountable to. His progressive coalition in New York would not celebrate their socialist mayor grinning next to Trump in the Oval Office, pitching deregulation and holding up fake newspapers. So he kept it quiet. The flattery was for an audience of one. The secrecy was for everyone else.
This is the reality of governing a city that depends on federal money while holding an ideology that rejects the administration writing the checks. Mamdani needs Trump more than his rhetoric will ever admit. The photoshopped front page was the tell.
Scouting America has agreed to eliminate DEI language, require membership based on biological sex, and waive fees for military families after the Department of War threatened to pull its support entirely.
Fox News reported that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the deal in a video message on Friday, outlining five specific changes the organization must implement.
The message was blunt. Hegseth said the department had been "very seriously considering ending our support of scouting altogether" over what he called the organization's adoption of "radical, woke ideology." That threat worked.
Hegseth laid out the terms. First, Scouting America agreed to comply immediately with Executive Order 14173, which requires reviewing and replacing politicized, divisive, and discriminatory language across the organization, its programs, and all publications. As Hegseth put it: "No more DEI, zero."
Second, a DEI-related merit badge has been discontinued. The specific badge was not named, but its removal signals a clean break from the ideological programming that had crept into scouting curriculum.
Third, and perhaps most consequentially, Scouting America will rewrite its membership policy to reflect biological reality. Hegseth spelled it out:
"That means that the application, any application, will have only two sex designations, male and female, and the application must match the applicant's birth certificate. Scouting will also make clear that biological boys and girls will not be allowed to occupy or share intimate spaces together. Toilets, showers, tents, anywhere like that."
Two sex designations. Birth certificate verification. No coed tents, showers, or bathrooms. These aren't radical demands. They are common sense restored to an institution that abandoned it.
Fourth, Scouting America will waive registration fees for children of active duty, guard, and reserve families. Fifth, the organization will partner with the War Department to introduce a new merit badge focused on military service.
This didn't happen because Scouting America had a sudden change of heart. It happened because the Department of War had something the organization needed and was willing to take it away.
Earlier this month, Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell signaled the review was already underway in a post on X:
"Our review of the DoW's financial assistance and partnership with Scouting America, including its quadrennial National Jamboree celebration, has been rigorous and ongoing."
The National Jamboree alone represents a flagship event for the organization. The broader financial assistance and institutional partnership with the military is significant. When those were on the table, Scouting America moved.
And the clock is still ticking. Hegseth made clear that Friday's announcement was a beginning, not an ending:
"If we're unsatisfied with Scouting America's progress toward and commitment to the agreed-upon reforms, we will find them in violation of the president's executive order and cease our support."
The department will evaluate progress in six months. Hegseth mentioned five changes publicly while indicating there are more. Scouting America is on probation.
For years, the Boy Scouts of America made a series of decisions that alienated its core constituency. The name change to "Scouting America" was the most visible symptom of a deeper institutional shift that prioritized progressive signaling over the organization's founding mission.
Membership based on gender identity rather than biological sex. DEI-infused programming. Language was scrubbed and rewritten to satisfy activist demands rather than serve the families who actually enrolled their kids.
The result was predictable. An organization founded to develop boys into men tried to become something for everyone and ended up meaning less to the people who built it.
Scouting America's official statement Friday leaned into the new arrangement, calling it "a renewed, strengthened partnership with the Department of War" and framing the changes as reinforcing "Scouting's foundational ideas: leadership, character, duty to God, duty to country and service."
That's the right language. Whether it reflects genuine institutional reorientation or merely tactical compliance will become clear over the next six months.
What happened here is a template. An institution drifted left. Its leadership made choices its membership never asked for. And when a government partner with real leverage said "enough," the institution folded in weeks.
This is how cultural recapture works. Not through speeches alone, but through the disciplined application of institutional authority.
The Department of War had the leverage, identified the problem, and used the tools available to force a correction. Executive Order 14173 provided the legal framework. The threat of severed support provided the incentive.
Hegseth closed his message with a note of honesty that captured what millions of Americans have been thinking:
"Ideally, I believe the Boy Scouts should go back to being the Boy Scouts, as originally founded, a group that develops boys into men. Maybe someday."
Maybe someday. But for now, at least, the tents are separated, the DEI badges are gone, and military kids scout for free. That's not everything. It's a start.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem revealed on February 26 that deep state operatives inside her own department secretly installed surveillance software on phones and computers used by top political appointees, including her own devices. Elon Musk's deputies helped her identify the culprits.
Noem told the PBD Podcast that DHS insiders downloaded spyware onto her phone and laptop to monitor her conversations and record meetings. Not outside hackers. Not foreign intelligence. People drawing federal paychecks inside the very building she runs.
"They had done that to several of the politicals, and so we ended up bringing in [outside tech] people … [and we] didn't have those technology experts here in the department looking at all of our laptops and our phones and recognizing that kind of software."
Breitbart reported that the agency's own internal tech apparatus either missed it or wasn't looking. So Noem brought in outside experts, with Musk's team helping trace who planted the software. The implication is stark: the people responsible for securing the department's technology were not the ones who caught the breach.
The surveillance revelation wasn't the only bombshell. Noem described stumbling onto a hidden SCIF, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, on the DHS headquarters campus. A room full of classified files that apparently existed outside the awareness of department leadership.
"I just found the other day a whole room on this campus that was a secret SCIF secure facility that had files nobody knew existed. So we just happened to have an employee walk by a door and wonder what it was. Started asking questions. We went there. There was individuals working there that had secret files that nobody knew about on some of the most controversial topics."
Think about the mechanics of that. An employee happened to walk past a door. Happened to wonder what was behind it. Asked questions. And what they found was a staffed intelligence facility operating inside DHS headquarters without the knowledge of the department's political leadership.
Noem said the files have been turned over to attorneys and that she is working to determine what exactly was being compiled and why it was kept hidden.
Noem also disclosed that she is investigating the movement of scientists between U.S. national laboratories under DHS jurisdiction and the China-based Wuhan lab. She said her department is working to reconstruct the travel records and collaborative work between American researchers and the facility at the center of the COVID-19 origin debate.
"I also have national labs under my jurisdiction, they [have] scientists that participated with that Wuhan lab. [We're studying] how they were traveling back and forth between each other, and working on those experiments."
This is a thread that Congress pulled at for years without ever reaching a definitive conclusion. The difference now is that a cabinet secretary with direct jurisdiction over the labs in question is actively tracing the paper trail.
Whether the scientific establishment likes it or not, the travel patterns between U.S. national labs and Wuhan are going to get scrutinized by people with subpoena-level authority and no institutional loyalty to the researchers involved.
For years, the political establishment treated "deep state" as a conspiracy term, something to be dismissed with an eye roll on cable news panels. Noem, who now sits at the helm of one of the largest federal agencies, offered a blunt assessment of what she's found since taking over.
"I always believed when people talked about the deep state before that it existed: I never would have dreamed that it was as bad as it is."
That's not a pundit speculating. That's the sitting DHS secretary describing what she encountered when she walked through the door.
Noem said the work of rooting out hostile actors inside the federal government extends well beyond her department:
"I'm still every day trying to dig out people who don't love America, not just [those] who work at this department, but also work throughout the federal government."
The pattern emerging across this administration's early months is consistent. Every cabinet secretary and agency head who has taken over a department has described some version of the same phenomenon: entrenched personnel actively working to undermine political leadership, institutional knowledge hoarded and hidden from appointees, and technology infrastructure that serves the bureaucracy's interests rather than the public's.
The real question is accountability. Noem has lawyers reviewing the secret SCIF files. Outside technologists have identified the surveillance software. Scientists' travel records to Wuhan are being reconstructed. These are concrete investigative steps, not rhetoric.
But Washington has a long history of revelations that generate headlines and then quietly dissolve into the bureaucratic fog.
The difference this time may be that the people doing the digging aren't congressional committee staffers issuing sternly worded letters. They are the people who control the building, the budgets, and the badge access.
Someone inside DHS thought it was appropriate to install spyware on the secretary's own devices. Someone staffed a hidden intelligence facility and kept it off the books. Someone facilitated American scientists shuttling between national labs and a Chinese virology institute without adequate oversight.
Those aren't abstractions. Those are personnel decisions made by specific people with specific clearances. And for the first time, the people asking the questions are the ones with the authority to act on the answers.
Marie Hurabiell, a San Francisco nonprofit executive and former Trump appointee, announced this week that she is running for the congressional seat held for nearly four decades by Nancy Pelosi. The move instantly complicates what was already shaping up to be a crowded Democratic contest in one of the bluest districts in America.
The Washington Examiner reported that Hurabiell, who leads the advocacy group ConnectedSF, framed her candidacy around pragmatism rather than ideology. In a post on X dated February 25, she laid out her pitch:
"I didn't plan to run for office this year — but San Francisco doesn't need more ideological extremes. We need results and reform."
"I'm running to bring pragmatic, common-sense Democratic leadership to Washington — focused on safety, innovation, and affordability. I've stood up to failed policies before. I'll do it again."
There's a detail her opponents will make sure voters don't miss: Hurabiell was appointed by President Donald Trump to the Presidio Trust Board of Directors. She was also a former member of the Georgetown University Board of Regents. And until 2022, she was a registered Republican.
Hurabiell switched her party affiliation from Republican to Democrat in 2022. That kind of conversion typically earns you suspicion from both sides, and Hurabiell's case is no exception. She has a paper trail that will thrill conservatives and terrify San Francisco's progressive establishment in equal measure.
Prior posts on X include the blunt declaration that "Trans women are NOT women" and a comparison of critical race theory to tactics "used by Hitler and the KKK." Those comments led to a protest outside the ConnectedSF gala in 2025.
None of this is the profile of someone who drifts quietly into a Democratic primary. Hurabiell is walking into the progressive lion's den with receipts that would get most San Francisco Democrats excommunicated from polite society.
Whether that's courageous or politically suicidal depends on how much the city has actually changed beneath its progressive veneer.
And there are signs it has changed. Through ConnectedSF, Hurabiell has worked on civic engagement and local policy advocacy. The group was an early endorser of San Francisco Democratic mayor Daniel Lurie, who returned the favor and has frequently appeared at Hurabiell's events, including a gala where he was the featured speaker.
That relationship suggests Hurabiell's brand of reform-minded politics has found real purchase among city leaders, even if they'd rather not discuss her old tweets at dinner parties.
Hurabiell faces two significant Democratic challengers who mounted their campaigns this year, and neither will make this easy.
Saikat Chakrabarti, a former tech executive who served as chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, drew more than 700 people to a rally in San Francisco's Mission District when he launched his campaign. He has invested more than $700,000 of his own money into the race.
Chakrabarti is running on the premise that the Democratic establishment is exhausted:
"Democrats are craving a generational change and need a new kind of leader who is not a part of the establishment, because the establishment has failed us."
Then there is state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Harvard-educated attorney who chairs the state Senate Budget Committee. Wiener is known around Sacramento for championing LGBT rights, combating climate change, and pushing for fair housing.
He also made headlines for pushing back on Trump's recommendation to send National Guard troops to San Francisco.
So the field offers voters a clear menu:
Only in San Francisco would all three of these people be competing in the same primary.
The real story here isn't whether Hurabiell wins. It's what her candidacy says about the state of progressive politics in its own heartland. Pelosi's departure leaves a seat shaped by nearly four decades of Democratic power and national influence. The scramble to fill it is exposing fault lines the party would rather keep hidden.
Chakrabarti thinks the establishment has failed. Wiener is the establishment. And Hurabiell is betting that enough San Francisco Democrats are tired of both factions to rally behind someone who called out failed policies when it was unpopular to do so, even if she did it from the other side of the aisle.
Hurabiell has lost two bids for a seat on the City College of San Francisco board of trustees, so the electoral track record isn't exactly encouraging. But this is a different race in a different moment.
San Francisco spent years watching its streets deteriorate, its schools falter, and its businesses flee while its leaders competed to see who could be the most progressive. Voters elected Lurie on a reform platform. The appetite for something different is real.
Whether that appetite extends to a woman who was posting conservative critiques of gender ideology and critical race theory just a few years ago is the open question. Hurabiell is gambling that results matter more than orthodoxy. In most of America, that's not a gamble at all. In San Francisco, it's a high-wire act without a net.
The primary will tell us exactly how far the city's political correctness has traveled.
President Trump reportedly dressed down FBI Director Kash Patel behind closed doors after a video surfaced of Patel chugging a beer and pounding a table inside the U.S. men's hockey team's locker room following their gold medal victory at the Winter Olympics in Milan.
The Daily Mail reported that Trump told Patel he was unhappy with the locker-room celebration and raised concerns about Patel's use of a government aircraft for the trip to Italy, which could cost taxpayers up to $75,000, according to NBC News.
The president, who does not drink alcohol, took issue with both the optics of the celebration and the travel arrangements, per a person familiar with the matter.
The FBI declined to comment on whether Trump expressed frustration with Patel.
Team USA won its first Olympic men's hockey gold since 1980. That's a legitimate historic moment. Patel was filmed enthusiastically drinking from a beer and shouting inside the locker room with the newly crowned champions. ProPublica first posted the video, which circulated widely.
Patel defended himself on X:
"For the very concerned media - yes, I love America and was extremely humbled when my friends, the newly minted Gold Medal winners on Team USA, invited me into the locker room to celebrate this historic moment with the boys- Greatest country on earth and greatest sport on earth."
The FBI maintained the trip was official in nature, stating simply that "it is not a personal trip." Patel said he met with Italian law enforcement officials and U.S. agencies involved in security during the visit.
Earlier, he had posted pictures from inside the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena during Sunday's final.
There's nothing wrong with celebrating American greatness. There's nothing wrong with an FBI director being proud of Team USA. But government aircraft cost money, and the director of the FBI is not a sports ambassador. Trump understood that distinction immediately.
This is the kind of thing that hands your opponents ammunition for free. And sure enough, Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wasted no time asking the Justice Department's inspector general to "investigate Director Patel's misuse or mismanagement of government resources."
Predictable as sunrise. But predictable doesn't mean unearned when you give them the material.
The $75,000 price tag for a government jet to watch hockey and pound beers in a locker room writes the attack ad itself. It doesn't matter that Patel also conducted official meetings. The video is what people saw. And in politics, what people see is what exists.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson pivoted to the administration's record rather than relitigating the locker room footage. She pointed to the results:
"Crime rates are dropping across the board. This is a direct result of the President's law and order agenda which is being successfully implemented by his law and order team, including FBI Director Kash Patel."
Jackson added that "the President has full confidence in his Administration." That's the standard vote-of-confidence language, and notably, it came after the reported rebuke, not instead of it.
Trump corrected the problem privately and kept the public messaging unified. That's how leadership works: address the issue internally, present a united front externally.
Lost in the beer-chugging discourse is what the FBI was actually doing this week. The bureau fired at least 10 employees connected to the 2022 search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, according to three people familiar with the matter.
That search uncovered classified documents and led to one of two federal criminal cases against Trump, both of which were ultimately dismissed.
This is the real story. Patel has been systematically cleaning house at an agency that spent years weaponizing against the man who appointed him.
He disclosed that his own cellphone "toll" records were obtained during those investigations. The man running the FBI knows firsthand what it looks like when the bureau targets people for political reasons.
Also, while Patel was in Italy, an armed man entered the security perimeter of Trump's Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago. Trump was not present at the time. The incident underscores the constant threat environment in which the administration operates and the seriousness of the security apparatus Patel oversees.
Democrats want this to be a scandal. It isn't. It's a moment of poor judgment that the president caught and corrected. The left would love nothing more than to turn a locker room beer into Patel's undoing, because what Patel is actually doing at the FBI terrifies them.
Every agent fired for the Mar-a-Lago raid, every institutional reform, every step toward accountability for the bureau's years of political overreach represents the thing they fear most: consequences.
Durbin's call for an inspector general investigation is theatrical. The same Democrats who shrugged at the FBI being used as a political weapon against a sitting president now want an audit because the FBI director celebrated a hockey game too enthusiastically. The selective outrage isn't even clever anymore.
Patel should take note. Keep the patriotism, lose the government jet to sporting events. The mission is too important and the enemies too eager for the FBI director to hand them distractions on a silver platter.
There's a bureau to rebuild. That job doesn't happen in a locker room.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Friday that 30 more people have been indicted for their alleged roles in an anti-ICE protest at a Minnesota church, bringing the total number of defendants to 39.
News Nation Now reported that twenty-five of the newly indicted individuals had already been arrested, with more arrests expected before the day was out.
The sweep dramatically expands a case that first drew national attention when former CNN anchor Don Lemon was named as one of nine people initially charged.
Now, with 30 additional names on the indictment, the Justice Department is making clear that the original arrests were an opening salvo, not a final word.
All 39 defendants face the same pair of federal charges: conspiracy against the right of religious worship and violating a law that forbids obstructing access to houses of worship.
Read that again. The protesters who claimed to be standing up for the vulnerable are being prosecuted for targeting a church. For interfering with the right of Americans to worship freely.
There is a deep irony here that the left will never acknowledge. The same political movement that wraps itself in the language of rights and tolerance descended on a house of worship to obstruct a lawful federal operation.
They didn't picket a government building. They didn't march on a courthouse. They chose a church. And the charges reflect exactly what that choice was: an assault on religious liberty.
Bondi did not mince words in a social media post announcing the indictments:
"YOU CANNOT ATTACK A HOUSE OF WORSHIP. If you do so, you cannot hide from us — we will find you, arrest you, and prosecute you."
She followed that with a pointed declaration about the Justice Department's priorities:
"This Department of Justice STANDS for Christians and all Americans of faith."
FBI Director Kash Patel echoed the attorney general's resolve in his own statement:
"Let it be known: This FBI will never tolerate anyone who targets, intimidates, or attacks Americans peacefully exercising their right to worship freely. Thank you @AGPamBondi and @TheJusticeDept for your relentless pursuit of this case."
The tone from both officials is unmistakable. This is a DOJ that views obstruction of worship as a serious federal crime, not a misdemeanor footnote to be plea-bargained into community service.
When the original charges dropped, and Don Lemon's name surfaced, the predictable machinery of progressive sympathy kicked into gear.
Protesters were cast as brave dissidents. The church was reframed as a staging ground for ICE operations, as though that justified mobbing it. The actual congregants, the people who use the building to pray, were erased from the narrative entirely.
This is a pattern. The left champions "sanctuary" when it means shielding illegal immigrants from federal law. But the actual sanctuary of a house of worship? That gets trampled the moment it becomes politically inconvenient. The word only matters when it serves their purposes.
Consider what the charges tell us about what happened at that church:
This was not a candlelight vigil. This was not a peaceful assembly. It was a coordinated effort to prevent Americans from accessing their own church.
The expansion from nine to 39 defendants signals that investigators took their time building this case.
They identified participants methodically, secured evidence, and brought charges in waves. That's how serious federal prosecutions work. Bondi's note that more arrests were expected later Friday suggests the net may not be fully drawn yet.
For those who participated in the Minnesota church protest and assumed the original nine indictments were the end of it, Friday delivered a different message.
The DOJ kept working. The FBI kept identifying faces. And 30 more people woke up to the reality that obstructing a house of worship carries federal consequences.
The celebrity defendant in this case may be Don Lemon, but the story is bigger than one disgraced cable news anchor looking for a second act. It's about whether a movement that claims moral authority can bulldoze the religious liberty of ordinary Americans and walk away clean.
Thirty-nine indictments say it cannot.
The White House delivered a new Homeland Security funding proposal to congressional Democrats late Thursday, marking the latest attempt to end a partial DHS shutdown that has now dragged into its third week.
A White House official called it a "serious counteroffer" and placed the burden squarely on the other side of the aisle.
Politico reported that spokespeople for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a joint statement saying they had "received the White House's counteroffer and are reviewing it closely." Schumer, for his part, seemed less than interested in moving toward a deal.
"They're just trying to pass paper back and forth with no real changes."
That's a curious posture for a party that claims to be worried about critical government services going unfunded. The funding lapse began Feb. 14, and no congressional action is expected until the middle of next week at the earliest, with the Senate out of town until Monday and the House not voting until Wednesday.
Washington is on autopilot. And Democrats seem perfectly comfortable leaving it that way.
The White House official framed the stakes bluntly:
"Democrats need to make a move to end the shutdown before more Americans are harmed by a lack of funding for critical services like disaster relief."
President Trump reinforced the urgency during his State of the Union speech, pointing to a recent snowstorm that hammered parts of the Northeast as a concrete reason to restore DHS funding. The partial shutdown touches agencies responsible for everything from immigration enforcement to airport security to cyber infrastructure.
Yet the agencies Democrats claim to be most concerned about, ICE and Border Patrol, have been largely unaffected. Funding put in place last year by the party-line GOP megabill has kept enforcement operations running.
FEMA officials said earlier this month that the main federal disaster fund "has sufficient balances to continue emergency response activities for the foreseeable future," though expected new disbursements could drain it quickly.
So the shutdown's real pressure point isn't enforcement. It's disaster relief. And Democrats are the ones holding it hostage.
Democrats have vowed to block DHS funding until they get changes to Trump's immigration enforcement tactics. Their joint statement made the goal explicit:
"Democrats remain committed to keep fighting for real reforms to rein in ICE and stop the violence."
The "violence" they reference traces to an incident in January when federal agents killed two people in Minneapolis. No further details about the circumstances were provided. But the framing tells you everything about the strategy: treat enforcement actions as inherently violent, demand concessions on that basis, and hold disaster relief funding as leverage until you get them.
This is not a negotiating position. It is a political campaign disguised as one.
The Senate failed Monday to advance legislation that would restore the flow of cash to DHS. Democrats held the line. They would rather let the shutdown grind forward than allow the administration to enforce immigration law without congressional micromanagement.
Consider what Democrats are asking the public to believe simultaneously:
You cannot claim a crisis demands urgent action while also refusing to act unless your unrelated conditions are met. One of those things is a lie. The shutdown is either an emergency or it's a useful pressure tool. Schumer and Jeffries are treating it as both, depending on which microphone they're standing in front of.
The honest answer: not much, at least for several days. Congress is scattered. The Senate won't reconvene until Monday. The House won't vote until Wednesday. The White House has put an offer on the table. Democrats say they're "reviewing" it.
The pattern here is familiar. Democrats slow-walk negotiations, blame the administration for the shutdown they themselves are sustaining, and wait for media coverage to build pressure in their direction. The strategy depends on one assumption: that voters will blame the party in the White House for any disruption, regardless of who is actually blocking the funding bill.
That assumption may have worked in previous eras. It's harder to sustain when the enforcement agencies at the center of the dispute are still operating, and the funding being held up is for disaster relief that Americans across the political spectrum depend on.
The White House made its move. The offer is on the table. The only question now is whether Democrats want to govern or whether they'd rather keep passing paper back and forth while the clock runs.
California Sen. Adam Schiff planted himself squarely in the middle of the Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery merger this week, insisting the multi-billion-dollar deal face intense regulatory review "free from White House political influence."
The statement arrived shortly after Warner Bros. Discovery declared Paramount's amended bid the "superior proposal" over Netflix, which subsequently withdrew from contention.
The Wrap reported that Schiff framed his concern around jobs and free speech, wrapping familiar progressive anxieties in Hollywood-friendly language:
"The merger of two of Hollywood's biggest studios must be subject to the highest levels of scrutiny, free from White House political influence, to determine its impact on American jobs, freedom of speech and the future of one of our nation's greatest exports."
He also called for bringing "moviemaking back to our shores" and investing in the workforce. Noble sentiments from a senator whose party has spent decades championing the regulatory and tax environment that drove production overseas in the first place.
Netflix's exit was notably pragmatic. The streaming giant, already facing an antitrust investigation from the Department of Justice, acknowledged the math no longer worked:
"However, we've always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance's latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid."
That's a clean business decision. But Sen. Elizabeth Warren saw something darker. She openly questioned what changed after Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos met with Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on Thursday.
"Looks like crony capitalism with the President corrupting the merger process in favor of the billionaire Ellison family."
No evidence accompanied the accusation. Just a meeting and a conclusion. Warren's formula is reliable: observe a sequence of events, assume corruption, skip the part where you prove it.
Paramount CEO David Ellison expressed confidence after WBD's board unanimously affirmed the value of the offer. WBD CEO David Zaslav matched that enthusiasm:
"We are excited about the potential of a combined Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery and can't wait to get started working together telling the stories that move the world."
Both executives pointed to shareholder value as the driving rationale. In a media landscape where legacy studios are hemorrhaging subscribers and theatrical revenue remains volatile, consolidation carries an obvious industrial logic. Two weakened players combining assets is not inherently sinister. It is what companies do when the market demands scale.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, however, signaled that the deal still faces significant hurdles at the state level. He called it "not a done deal" and noted that the California Department of Justice has an open investigation with plans for a "vigorous" review.
There is something instructive about Schiff's intervention here. His demand for scrutiny "free from White House political influence" presupposes that such influence is being exerted. The source material offers no evidence of that beyond a meeting between Sarandos and administration officials, which is the kind of meeting that happens in every administration during every major corporate transaction.
Schiff is performing oversight without a predicate. He wants the public to associate the merger with political interference before any interference has been demonstrated. This is a familiar pattern: establish the narrative first, then hunt for the facts to justify it.
His call to "bring moviemaking back to our shores" also deserves scrutiny. Hollywood's exodus to foreign production hubs like Canada, the UK, and Eastern Europe accelerated under incentive structures that California's own leadership failed to compete with.
Studios chase tax credits. They always have. If Schiff wants American production jobs, the answer lies in tax and regulatory policy, not in extracting concessions from a merger he has no authority to block.
The real question isn't whether Adam Schiff approves of this deal. It's whether the combined entity serves consumers and shareholders better than the current fragmented landscape. The antitrust review process exists precisely to answer that question, and it will proceed whether Schiff issues press releases or not.
What voters should notice is the reflex. A major corporate transaction moves forward. Democrats immediately:
Netflix made a business decision. WBD's board voted unanimously. The Ellison-led Paramount team put forward a superior offer. These are the facts. Everything else is positioning.
Schiff wants a stage. Hollywood just handed him one.
Twenty-five Mexican National Guardsmen are dead. So is one prison guard and an innocent woman. Their deaths came not in a single battle but across a wave of coordinated terror that swept through at least 18 states throughout Mexico, all because one cartel kingpin was finally put down.
The Government of Mexico confirmed the toll following the killing of Ruben Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera Cervantes, the leader of the Cartel Jalisco New Generation, or CJNG. El Mencho died Sunday after a high-stakes raid by special forces soldiers from Mexico's Army. Two others, including his son-in-law, also died while being airlifted from the scene.
The cartel's answer was immediate and savage. Shootings, carjackings, blockades, buildings, and convenience stores were set ablaze. Forty cartel gunmen were killed in the violence. Authorities made 70 arrests during the day.
By Monday morning, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced that her forces had cleared all blockades and that life could return to normal.
Consider what "return to normal" means in Mexico. It means a country where a single cartel can paralyze 18 states simultaneously because its boss was killed. It means the death of one man triggers a paramilitary response across a nation of 130 million people. Normal, in this context, is not a reassurance. It is an indictment.
The CJNG did not scramble to organize this response. The infrastructure for nationwide terror was already in place: the vehicles, the weapons, the personnel, the communications networks, the gasoline. All of it is ready to deploy on command. This is not an insurgency that materialized overnight. It is a standing army that the Mexican government has tolerated for years. Breitbart reported.
American policymakers who still treat Mexico as a functional partner in border security should study this weekend carefully. A government that cannot prevent a cartel from waging war across the majority of its own territory is not a government that can be trusted to manage migration flows, interdict fentanyl shipments, or honor bilateral enforcement agreements.
Mexico's Secretary of Defense General Ricardo Trevilla Trejo spoke about the operation in which Mexican soldiers fought El Mencho's forces. He appeared to choke back tears when he talked about the 25 National Guardsmen who died in the attacks.
The emotion would land differently if not for the history. Breitbart Texas has previously reported on a close friendship between Trevilla Trejo and El Mencho, a relationship that dates to Trevilla Trejo's time serving as a regional head of the Mexican Army in Michoacan. The nature and extent of that friendship remain questions that Mexican authorities have never adequately answered.
Meanwhile, Mexico's top security official Omar Garcia Harfuch revealed that the operation against El Mencho was based on intelligence that included tracking down the cartel boss's mistress in an attempt to locate him. That is a detail worth noting: Mexico's most wanted man was found not through the kind of sustained institutional pressure that dismantles organizations, but through a single intelligence thread tied to a personal relationship. It raises an obvious question about why this couldn't have happened years ago.
The left's preferred framing on cartel violence centers on "root causes" and American culpability. We are told the problem is gun trafficking flowing south, or insufficient economic aid, or American drug demand. This framing serves one purpose: to shift accountability away from the Mexican government and onto American taxpayers.
The facts from this weekend tell a different story. The CJNG operates as a parallel state within Mexico. It fields soldiers. It controls territory. It conducts coordinated military operations across 18 states on a few hours' notice. No amount of American foreign aid addresses that. No "root causes" program in Washington fixes a sovereignty crisis in Mexico City.
What does matter is what happens at the border. Every failure of the Mexican state is a force multiplier for illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and cartel operational reach into American communities. The worse things get south of the border, the more critical American enforcement becomes. Not as a complement to Mexican efforts, but as a substitute for them.
Twenty-five guardsmen. One prison guard. One woman who had nothing to do with any of it. These are the numbers that matter most and will be forgotten fastest. They died because a cartel had the capacity and the will to punish an entire country for the loss of a single leader.
Sheinbaum says the blockades are cleared. Life can return to normal. But the 27 families burying their dead this week know what normal costs in Mexico. And so should we.
A 22-year-old medicine technician at a Maryland senior living facility has been charged with first-degree murder after police say he shot and killed 87-year-old Robert Fuller, a millionaire philanthropist and retired lawyer from Maine, inside the man's own apartment on Valentine's Day.
Montgomery County Police announced at a Feb. 25 news conference that officers took Marquise James into custody during a traffic stop the previous day, after he allegedly shot at a Maryland State Trooper. He now sits behind bars without bond.
Fuller was found unresponsive inside his apartment at the facility after emergency services responded around 7:34 a.m. on Feb. 14. Life-saving measures were attempted. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Police noticed Fuller appeared to have head trauma, and homicide detectives alleged he had been shot.
The sequence of events paints a grim picture of what happened inside a facility where elderly residents are supposed to be safe.
Detectives said surveillance video from Feb. 14 showed someone entering the building through an exterior door around 5:05 a.m. Around ten minutes later, the person allegedly exited through the same door and disappeared off-frame while running. Roughly two and a half hours passed before emergency services arrived and found Fuller dead in his apartment.
As reported by The Daily Caller, the police released the surveillance footage on Feb. 20, six days after the killing. Then came another alarming detail: on Feb. 23, a facility employee allegedly discovered James inside the building during an overnight check, after his shift had ended at 11:00 p.m. James fled when confronted over it.
He was in custody within days. But the timeline raises an obvious question: how does someone allegedly commit a murder inside a senior living facility and remain employed there for more than a week afterward?
The details that have emerged since the arrest are striking. Police executed a pair of Baltimore County search warrants and allegedly found numerous wigs, according to Fox News Digital. The surveillance footage from Feb. 14 reportedly showed the suspect entering and exiting in what appeared to be a woman's wig.
Then there is the matter of the door. The exterior door's alarm sensor was allegedly last functional on Jan. 9. Video shows James used the same exterior doorway twice that day, according to WBFF. That means the alarm that was supposed to monitor access to a building full of vulnerable elderly residents had been non-functional for more than five weeks before Fuller was killed.
A broken alarm. A worker who knew the building's layout. An 87-year-old man was shot inside his own apartment before sunrise. The facts speak plainly enough.
Fuller was not just any resident. He was a philanthropist and lawyer from Maine, known for his contributions to Cony High School's Alumni Field complex, the Maine General Medical Center, and Kennebec Valley YMCA, among others. He spent decades building institutions and giving back to his community. He spent his final moments in a facility that was supposed to protect him.
Officials said they do not know why James allegedly killed Fuller, according to Fox News Digital. No motive has been publicly established. The absence of explanation makes the crime feel even more senseless.
James faces a wall of criminal charges. Prosecutors charged him with:
He told detectives he had worked the night before Fuller's death and had provided medicine to both Fuller and his roommate, WBFF reported. The man trusted with dispensing medication to elderly residents is now accused of executing one of them.
This case will inevitably fuel a conversation that too many families have already been forced to have: who, exactly, is watching over our parents and grandparents?
Senior living facilities charge substantial fees and promise safety, supervision, and dignity. Families entrust the most vulnerable people in their lives to these institutions. When a door alarm sits broken for five weeks, when a worker can allegedly re-enter a building after hours without immediate detection, the system has failed at its most basic function.
The criminal justice system will handle Marquise James. But the broader failure here extends beyond one defendant. Robert Fuller survived 87 years, built a legacy of generosity across an entire state, and died in a place that was supposed to keep him safe while someone ran into the dark.