White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt unloaded on CNN Friday, calling a report that President Trump's national security team failed to anticipate Iran's potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz "100% FAKE NEWS."
The rebuke came after CNN reported Thursday that Trump's national security team "failed to fully account for the potential consequences" of U.S. strikes, specifically the possibility that Iran would move to shut down the strait, through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil shipments pass.
Leavitt didn't mince words on X:
"The idea that chairman Cain and Secretary Hegseth weren't prepared for this possibility is PREPOSTEROUS."
She went further, pointing out that neutralizing Iran's ability to threaten the strait was baked into the operation itself:
"The President was fully briefed on it, and a goal of the Operation itself, to annihilate the terrorist Iranian regime's navy, missiles, drone production infrastructure, and other threat capabilities is quite literally intended to deprive them of their ability to close the Strait."
Read that again. The entire point of Operation Epic Fury was to destroy the Iranian regime's capacity to hold global shipping hostage. CNN's thesis is that the administration never considered the very thing the operation was designed to prevent, as Fox News reports.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth blasted the report during remarks at the Pentagon Friday, calling it "more fake news from CNN" and "patently ridiculous."
Hegseth framed the threat in terms that anyone paying attention for the last several decades would recognize:
"For decades, Iran has threatened shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. This is always what they do, hold the strait hostage."
Then the line that landed hardest: "CNN doesn't think we thought of that."
Sen. Tom Cotton, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, added his own assessment on X, and it wasn't subtle:
"As chairman of the Intelligence Committee, let me make clear: whoever leaked this lied."
He followed up with a suggestion CNN might want to consider: "CNN should do some fact-checking."
Here's where it gets interesting. CNN issued a clarification to the story on Friday. The updated version now acknowledges that "top Trump administration officials briefed lawmakers on long-standing military plans to address a major disruption to the Strait, according to one official." That's a significant concession buried inside an update.
But the clarification also tried to thread a needle, noting that "multiple sources familiar with the session said there was no indication there were any near-term solutions." The original report leaned on anonymous sources claiming the administration was blindsided. The updated version concedes there were plans. Those are two very different stories.
When Fox News Digital reached CNN for comment, the network responded: "We stand by our reporting." CNN Chairman and CEO Mark Thompson echoed the sentiment on X: "We stand by our journalism."
Standing by a story you've already materially amended is a choice.
The CNN dustup wasn't an isolated incident. The White House has repeatedly clashed with major news outlets this week over coverage of the Iran conflict. On Thursday, Leavitt called for ABC News to retract a separate story, accusing the network of spreading "false information to intentionally alarm the American people."
According to Leavitt, the ABC report was based on "one email that was sent to local law enforcement in California about a single, unverified tip." ABC News has since updated its story with an editor's note acknowledging that the FBI's alert included the detail that the information was unverified, a fact the original story apparently failed to emphasize.
Two major networks. Two stories require significant corrections or clarifications. One week.
The pattern here isn't complicated. Anonymous sources feed breathless claims to outlets already predisposed to frame military action as reckless. The claims get published. The administration pushes back with named officials making on-the-record denials. The outlets quietly update their stories while insisting nothing was wrong in the first place.
Cotton's point deserves weight. He chairs the Intelligence Committee. He has access to the classified briefings CNN's anonymous sources claim to be describing. And he says whoever leaked to CNN lied. That's not a vague denial from a communications staffer. That's the senator with the most direct oversight authority calling the sourcing fraudulent.
The Strait of Hormuz has been a flashpoint in U.S. strategic planning for decades. Every military planner who has ever war-gamed a conflict with Iran has accounted for it.
The suggestion that an administration actively striking Iranian naval and missile infrastructure somehow forgot about the strait those assets are designed to threaten is not serious analysis. It's narrative construction.
CNN wanted the story to be about incompetence. The story is actually about an operation designed to eliminate the very threat CNN accused the administration of ignoring. The clarification they were forced to publish proves it.
A Minneapolis health clinic led by Rep. Ilhan Omar's older sister collected millions of dollars in public funding during the congresswoman's time in state and federal office, with Omar herself playing a direct role in securing key appropriations for the facility.
People's Center Clinics & Services, which operates in Minneapolis' Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, received $2.2 million through a 2017 Minnesota capital budget that Omar publicly championed.
She later secured an additional $1 million in congressionally directed federal funding for the facility's upgrades. Omar's sister, Sahra Noor, served as CEO of People's Center from July 2014 until April 2018, a tenure that overlapped with Omar's first term in the Minnesota House of Representatives, which began in January 2017.
The connections between Omar's legislative work and her sister's professional role have drawn renewed scrutiny, alongside long-running allegations surrounding Omar's past marriage.
The numbers tell a straightforward story. People's Center has collected approximately $33 million in grants from the Department of Health and Human Services since 2002. Within that stream of federal dollars, Omar's direct contributions stand out:
Omar celebrated the completion of renovations funded by these appropriations at a 2022 event, appearing alongside Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and state Sen. Omar Fateh. Two years later, in April 2024, the People's Center formally acknowledged Omar's role in securing the $1 million in congressionally directed funding, as KTSA reports.
When questions surfaced about the arrangement, Omar offered a single line of defense. In April 2022, she stated:
"Neither I nor my immediate family has any financial interest in this project."
That claim rests on a narrow reading of "financial interest." Noor served as CEO of the organization that directly benefited from her sister's legislative efforts. Whether or not Omar personally profited, the appearance of a sitting legislator steering public money to an entity run by a sibling is exactly the kind of arrangement that corrodes public trust.
Noor's LinkedIn profile lists her as CEO of People's Center from July 2014 through April 2018. During that window, she signed agreements that expanded the clinic's operations, including a 2015 contract pharmacy arrangement under HHS's 340B Drug Pricing Program with Degdeg's Carepoint Pharmacy. That pharmacy reportedly lost its license in 2017.
After stepping down as CEO, Noor relocated to Africa and launched a healthcare consulting firm in Kenya called Grit Partners. Her husband, Mohamed Keynan, followed a similar trajectory.
Keynan previously held several roles in the Minnesota government before returning to Africa, where he served as chief of staff to then-Somali Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khayre and later as a policy adviser to former Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, widely known as Farmaajo.
The pattern is worth noting. A family occupies positions of influence across Minneapolis politics, a federally funded health clinic, and foreign governments. Public dollars flow. Roles shift. People relocate. And the congresswoman insists there is nothing to see.
In most industries, a leader who directed millions in public funds to an organization run by a close family member would face an ethics inquiry at a minimum.
In Congress, members routinely recuse themselves from votes that touch their personal financial interests. Omar did not recuse. She championed the funding publicly and celebrated the results at a ribbon-cutting event surrounded by fellow Democrats.
No one at that 2022 event appears to have asked the obvious question: Should a congresswoman be steering taxpayer money to a clinic her sister ran? Klobuchar stood beside her. Frey stood beside her. Fateh stood beside her. The Democratic ecosystem in Minneapolis treated the arrangement as unremarkable.
That silence is its own kind of answer.
Omar's defense hinges on the word "financial." She and her immediate family may hold no equity stake in People's Center. But the definition of conflict of interest has never been limited to direct profit.
A sibling's career advancement, an organization's growth under family leadership, the political capital gained from delivering millions to a community institution: these are interests. They may not show up on a financial disclosure form. They show up everywhere else.
Washington is full of politicians who technically follow the rules while violating every principle the rules were written to protect. Omar has built a brand on fighting corruption and demanding accountability from powerful institutions. The standard she applies to others now applies to her.
Millions in public money. A sister at the helm. A pharmacy that lost its license. And a congresswoman who says her family had no interest in any of it. The facts are on the table. The question is whether anyone in a position of oversight will bother to read them.
A federal judge ruled Friday that the Trump administration unlawfully refused to request funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, ordering acting director Russ Vought to resume drawing the agency's operating funds from the Federal Reserve.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila, an Obama appointee who serves in San Jose, rejected the administration's legal interpretation that the Fed lacked the earnings to fund the bureau. The ruling forces the CFPB to keep its financial lifeline intact, at least for now, in the latest judicial effort to prevent the administration from dismantling the agency through bureaucratic maneuvering.
The core of the dispute is simple. Under federal law, the Federal Reserve Board must use its "combined earnings" to transfer whatever amount the CFPB director determines is "reasonably necessary" for operations.
Last November, Vought adopted the position that "combined earnings" should be calculated by subtracting the Fed's interest expenses from its revenues. Under that interpretation, the Fed wasn't profitable, which meant there was nothing to transfer.
Judge Davila dismantled the argument in his written ruling:
"Given that the Director has no authority to define or calculate the Federal Reserve's 'combined earnings,' Defendants' entire basis for not requesting funding from the Federal Reserve crumbles."
In other words, the CFPB director doesn't get to redefine how the Fed counts its money. The statute says "combined earnings." It doesn't invite the bureau's director to freelance a new accounting methodology that conveniently zeroes out the balance sheet, as The Hill reports.
The government has said that even under its own definition, the Fed has returned to profitability. Which raises the obvious question: if your own math now works against your position, what exactly are you defending?
Here's where this gets interesting for conservatives, and where the legal strategy collides with the broader policy goal.
The CFPB was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. From the beginning, conservatives have rightly objected to its structure: an agency funded outside the congressional appropriations process, housed at the Fed, insulated from the democratic accountability that's supposed to govern how Washington spends money.
It is, by design, a bureaucratic fortress. Congress doesn't control its budget. The president's leverage over it is limited. It was built to be untouchable, and that's precisely what makes it a problem.
But the fight over the CFPB's existence and the fight over whether the current director can unilaterally redefine how the Fed calculates its earnings are two different fights. Courts were never going to let the executive branch win the second one as a shortcut around the first. The statute is the statute. If it's a bad statute, the remedy is legislative, not an accounting trick that a single federal judge can swat down on a Friday afternoon.
This is the frustration with bureaucratic combat in Washington. The CFPB's design is genuinely problematic. Its funding mechanism was specifically engineered to avoid congressional oversight. Those are serious structural concerns that deserve serious structural solutions.
When the strategy shifts to creative statutory interpretation, it hands judges like Davila easy wins and generates headlines that make the agency look sympathetic.
This ruling doesn't exist in a vacuum. A judge in New York heard near-identical arguments Thursday in a case brought by more than 20 Democratic-led states.
Another judge previously issued a similar ruling that remains in effect, stemming from a lawsuit brought by the National Treasury Employees Union. An appeals court is reviewing that decision after hearing oral arguments late last month.
The lawsuit before Judge Davila was filed by three organizations that rely on CFPB services: Rise Economy, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, and the Woodstock Institute. The legal coalition arrayed against the funding freeze now spans unions, advocacy groups, and a significant bloc of state attorneys general. Every new ruling adds momentum.
Davila also issued a pointed warning about timing, noting that the "end of the second 2026 fiscal quarter rapidly approaches, and they have provided no assurances that they will seek funding from the Federal Reserve again." The judge is watching the calendar, and he's signaling he won't let the delay accomplish what the legal argument couldn't.
The appeals process will ultimately determine whether these rulings hold. But the trajectory is clear: courts are not going to permit the CFPB to be defunded through executive reinterpretation of a funding statute. The legal consensus across multiple jurisdictions is forming fast.
For conservatives who want the CFPB reformed or eliminated, the path runs through Congress. It always has. The agency's independence from appropriations was the original sin of its design, and undoing that sin requires legislation, not litigation gymnastics that lose in court and hand the left a narrative about consumer protection under siege.
The CFPB remains a bureaucracy built to resist accountability. That hasn't changed. But beating it requires fighting on terrain where conservatives can actually win.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has reportedly backed out of a scheduled interview with CBS News, and the reason tells you everything you need to know about how the new Democratic mayor handles scrutiny.
According to Vanity Fair, Mamdani had been in discussions to sit down with Robert Costa on "CBS Sunday Morning." Those discussions collapsed after CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss reacted on social media to pointed remarks from Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist, activist, and new CBS News contributor. Weiss's offense? She posted a fire emoji.
That single emoji, sources told Vanity Fair, was the "nail in the coffin" for the interview.
Fox News reported that on Feb. 28, during CBS News' breaking news coverage of the conflict, Alinejad slammed Mamdani's condemnation of Operation Epic Fury against the Iranian regime. She urged the mayor to shift his "hatred" away from President Donald Trump and toward the people who actually threatened her life. Her remarks were direct and personal:
"Mr. Mamdani, you are more than welcome to come to one of my safe houses."
Then she turned the mayor's own rhetoric against him:
"Where were you when they sent killers here in New York City? You were crying for your aunt because she has stopped using the subway for simply — in an illusionist statement you made saying she didn't feel safe, for wearing a hijab. Really? I stopped using subways because of the would-be assassins being sent to beautiful New York City by the Islamic Republic."
That's not a political pundit manufacturing outrage. That's a woman who lives under the constant threat of assassination by a theocratic regime, responding to a politician who chose to condemn American military action against that same regime. And when Weiss signaled approval of those remarks, Mamdani's team decided the interview was off, as Fox News reports.
Vanity Fair reported that Mamdani had already been "averse" to appearing on the Weiss-run network. The fire emoji simply gave his team the excuse they were looking for.
This is a familiar playbook from a certain strain of progressive politician. They demand media access when the cameras are friendly. They run the moment an interviewer might ask a question that requires more than talking points. Mamdani isn't avoiding CBS because he fears unfair treatment. He's avoiding it because he fears fair treatment.
A former CBS producer offered Vanity Fair this assessment:
"Bari and her people have a clear ax to grind with him."
The same producer then made a broader admission:
"It's not just Zohran. It's really hard now to get people to come on CBS."
Read that again. Since Weiss took over as editor-in-chief and signaled that CBS would pursue something closer to actual journalism, the people who benefited most from the old arrangement don't want to show up anymore. That's not an indictment of CBS. It's an indictment of the politicians who can only function inside a media ecosystem designed to protect them.
The deeper problem isn't a scheduling dispute with a Sunday morning show. It's where Mamdani's sympathies land when American forces are directed at a regime that exports terrorism and assassination plots to American soil.
Alinejad lives in safe houses. She stopped riding the New York City subway not because of generalized urban anxiety, but because the Islamic Republic sent operatives to kill her. When Mamdani condemned Operation Epic Fury, he placed himself opposite a woman whose life is in danger from the very government he chose to defend from American criticism.
That contrast is devastating, which is precisely why Mamdani doesn't want to sit across from anyone at CBS who might draw it out on camera.
There is something deeply unserious about a mayor of the largest city in America pulling out of a major network interview because the network's top editor posted a fire emoji. Not a hit piece. Not an editorial demanding his resignation. A single Unicode character.
If that's the threshold for retreat, New York is in for a very long administration. Governing a city of eight million people requires facing critics who do more than post emojis. It requires answering for your positions when the audience isn't pre-sorted to applaud.
Neither CBS News nor Mamdani's office responded to Fox News Digital's requests for comment. The silence is consistent. When the questions get uncomfortable, the mayor disappears.
The broader subplot here matters. For years, legacy network news operated as a de facto communications arm for progressive politicians.
Interviews were negotiated, questions were softened, and the final product rarely left a Democrat worse off than when they sat down. Bari Weiss's arrival at CBS disrupted that arrangement. Not because she turned CBS into a conservative outlet, but because she introduced the radical concept that journalists might challenge powerful people regardless of party.
The former CBS producer's complaint is revealing. The problem isn't that CBS is unfair. The problem is that CBS is no longer reliably favorable. Politicians who built their media strategies around sympathetic interviewers now face a network where an Iranian dissident can challenge a Democratic mayor on air, and the editor-in-chief won't pretend it didn't happen.
That's not an ax to grind. That's journalism recovering a pulse.
Mamdani can avoid CBS for as long as he wants. But the questions Alinejad raised aren't going away. Where was his outrage when the Islamic Republic targeted a woman on American soil? Why does his compassion extend to a regime that murders dissidents but not to the military operations aimed at stopping it?
He can dodge the interview. He can't dodge the record.
The Department of Justice filed an emergency request with the Supreme Court to lift a lower court order that blocks the Trump administration from terminating Temporary Protected Status for roughly 350,000 Haitian migrants. The move forces a confrontation over one of the most consequential immigration questions of this presidency: whether the executive branch has the power to end a program that has functioned as indefinite amnesty for decades.
The request, reported by Reuters, targets a decision by a Biden-appointed judge who prevented the administration from following through on its announced plans. The DOJ framed the legal challenge in stark terms, accusing the courts of undermining national sovereignty.
"Again attempting to block major executive-branch policy initiatives in ways that inflict specific harms to the national interest and foreign relations."
That language signals an administration unwilling to let a single district judge dictate the boundaries of immigration enforcement for an entire nation.
Temporary Protected Status was designed to be exactly what its name suggests: temporary. Foreign nationals from countries experiencing armed conflict, environmental disaster, or other extraordinary conditions receive a shield from deportation and work authorization. The operative word has always been "temporary."
For Haitian nationals, that temporary status has stretched across several decades, Breitbart noted. The federal government has rewarded Haitians, many of whom illegally entered the United States, with rolling extensions that transformed a short-term humanitarian gesture into a permanent residency program that Congress never voted for and no president before Trump has seriously tried to unwind.
In June 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would end TPS amnesty for thousands of Haitian migrants. The policy was clear. The legal authority was grounded in the plain text of the statute. And within weeks, a federal judge stopped it cold.
The Justice Department's filing goes beyond this single case. It identifies a systemic rot in how immigration litigation now operates. The administration argued that the endless legal churn has made governance nearly impossible.
"Unless the court resolves the merits of these challenges, issues that have now been ventilated in courts nationwide, this unsustainable cycle will repeat again and again, spawning more competing rulings and competing views of what to make of this court's interim order."
That sentence describes a judiciary that has effectively seized control of immigration policy from the political branches. District courts in different circuits issue contradictory rulings. Administrations win in one courtroom and lose in another. Nothing resolves. Nothing ends. The status quo, which always favors those already here, wins by default.
The administration put it plainly: the "stop-and-start litigation over TPS terminations has become endemic."
Endemic is the right word. It describes a disease that never fully leaves a population. TPS litigation has become exactly that for the executive branch: a chronic condition that flares every time a president tries to enforce the law as written.
The surface question is narrow: should a judge's order stand while litigation continues? The real question is whether the President of the United States has the authority to end a discretionary immigration program that the statute plainly allows him to end.
If the answer is no, then TPS has effectively become a constitutional right for anyone who receives it. That was never the intent. It was never the law. But it is the practical reality that years of judicial intervention have created.
Every extension, every blocked termination, every nationwide injunction adds another layer of reliance. Migrants build lives. Advocates argue that deportation would be disruptive. Courts weigh equities that were never supposed to enter the calculation. And the program that was meant to last months endures for generations.
This case is about Haitian TPS holders, but the principle extends far beyond Haiti. The administration's ability to manage any temporary immigration program depends on the word "temporary" meaning something. If federal judges can indefinitely prevent termination of a program explicitly designed to be terminated, then the executive branch has lost a core function.
Back in early February, a Biden-appointed judge blocked the Trump administration from terminating TPS for Haitian migrants. That was the opening move. The DOJ's emergency filing at the Supreme Court is a signal that the administration will not accept district courts as the final word on presidential authority over immigration.
Roughly 350,000 people are covered by this single designation. That is not a small humanitarian gesture. That is a mid-sized American city's worth of foreign nationals whose legal status depends entirely on the willingness of one branch of government to act, and the willingness of another to let it.
The Supreme Court now holds that question. The answer will determine whether "temporary" is a policy term or a punchline.
House Speaker Mike Johnson says the federal government's deportation apparatus is shifting gears. In a recent interview, Johnson acknowledged that immigration enforcement drew some blowback from Hispanic and Latino voters who viewed certain actions as "overzealous," and he framed the coming months as a recalibration, not a retreat.
"We got a little hiccup with some of the Hispanic and Latino voters, for certain, because some of the immigration enforcement was viewed to be overzealous," Johnson said. "But here's the good news, we're in a course correction mode right now."
The shift centers on personnel. Johnson pointed to incoming homeland security chief Markwayne Mullen as a steadying hand, while crediting Tom Homan's decades of experience as a stabilizing force already in motion.
Johnson was explicit about what the next chapter looks like at the Department of Homeland Security. According the Breitbart, he praised Mullen's temperament and predicted a smooth confirmation:
"We're going to have a new secretary on Homeland Security. Markwayne Mullen is going to do a great job in that role. I'm sure that he'll be confirmed by the Senate. He's a thoughtful guy. He'll bring a thoughtful approach. [We] have somebody like Tom Homan who has 40 years of experience [in this] field and was decorated by Democrat presidents for his acumen and expertise. He went into Minneapolis and brought calm to the chaos there. That's what you're going to see."
That last line matters. "Brought calm to the chaos" is the framing Republicans want: competence over controversy, order over spectacle. Mullen, for his part, opposes any form of migration amnesty, though he has been ambivalent on his preferred deportation policy. What he inherits is a department under intense scrutiny from both the left and from conservatives who want enforcement executed with precision.
The course correction was also sketched by James Blair, the White House's deputy chief of staff for legislation and political affairs, signaling this isn't freelancing by Johnson. It's coordinated messaging from the top.
Johnson didn't sugarcoat the political reality. Latino voters swung toward the GOP on a constellation of issues: the open border, the cost of living, and the job market. Keeping them means delivering on all of it, not just the enforcement piece.
"I think that Hispanic and Latino voters who came to us came for a number of reasons. They were very animated about the open border and all the negative secondary effects that came from that, but they also concerned about the cost of living and the lack of jobs and all these other things that everyone's concerned about."
This is the tension Republicans have to manage. The voters who elected them want the border secured and illegal immigrants removed. They also want to feel that enforcement is targeted, proportionate, and doesn't sweep up legal residents or naturalized citizens in the process. Those aren't contradictory demands. They're the demands of a serious electorate that expects competence.
And they're very different from what the left wants, which is to use any enforcement friction as proof that enforcement itself is wrong. That argument collapses on contact with the actual voters Johnson is describing: people who fled dysfunction in their home countries and have zero interest in importing it here.
Behind the political maneuvering sits a real economic story that the legacy press largely ignores. A February 10–18 survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found:
Read those numbers again. The ratio has essentially inverted in twelve months. Employers are finding domestic workers, adjusting compensation, and adapting. The sky has not fallen.
A December 2025 report by The Birmingham Group captured the shift in the construction sector:
"The construction industry is experiencing its most dramatic compensation transformation in decades. The current labor shortage is driving unprecedented wage increases across commercial projects. Construction firms report difficulty filling critical positions, with some markets experiencing job opening-to-candidate ratios exceeding 3:1. This imbalance has created a seller's market for skilled workers, enabling significant salary negotiations and competitive pay packages."
For decades, Americans were told that illegal immigrant labor was essential, that crops would rot and buildings wouldn't rise without a permanent underclass working for wages no citizen would accept. What's actually happening is different. Wages are climbing. Employers are competing for workers. The labor market is doing what labor markets do when the supply of cheap, exploitable labor tightens.
One X user captured the populist frustration that drives this realignment with blunt clarity:
"I want the drywallers who loiter around the gas station at 5 am and clog everything up because the cashier can't understand them gone. I want the farmhand who works for $12/hr and no benefits because the taxpayer shells out for his kids' education, health care, and housing. I want them all gone, violent or not. I want my country back."
That's not policy language. It's the sound of a voter who has watched his community change around him while being told he's not allowed to object. The GOP's job is to translate that energy into enforceable law and economic results, not to dismiss it and not to let it curdle into something unproductive.
Johnson tied enforcement policy directly to the broader economic agenda, projecting that tighter labor markets, tax reform, and deregulation would produce results voters can feel in their wallets.
"We're anticipating extraordinary economic growth going into this year. In the midterm all boats will raise. Salaries and wages will go up. You have bigger tax refunds and bigger paychecks, and the average family $10,000 more money in the pocket because of Republican policies. I think these people will see we did what we said we're going to do."
Trump himself offered a characteristically bold vision for what comes after the labor market tightens. Speaking to Breitbart News, he leaned into automation as the long-term answer:
"We're going to need robots … to make our economy run because we do not have enough people. We have to get efficient … we'll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically — it's going to be robotically … It's going to be big. Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself … we're going to streamline things. We need efficiency."
The logic is straightforward: remove the artificial suppression of wages created by mass illegal immigration, let the market correct itself, and invest in technology to handle the gaps. It's the opposite of the left's preferred model, which is to import an endless stream of cheap labor, subsidize it with taxpayer-funded services, and then call anyone who objects a bigot.
The key distinction in everything Johnson laid out is the difference between adjusting tactics and abandoning the mission. The rule of law still applies. Illegal immigrants who are here unlawfully are still subject to removal. What changes is the tone, the targeting, and the public face of enforcement.
Johnson closed with a line aimed squarely at the voters the GOP is courting:
"We uphold the rule of law, but we do it in a way that honors the dignity of everyone, and they'll understand that our party is with them, cares about them. This is the permanent home where they should be okay."
That's the pitch: a party that enforces the law, grows the economy, and treats legal immigrants as full partners in the American project. Whether the execution matches the rhetoric will determine whether the GOP's gains with Latino voters harden into a durable coalition or evaporate by the midterms.
The Dallas Fed data and rising construction wages suggest the economic argument is already building itself. Now the question is whether Washington can get the politics right without losing its nerve.
President Trump has been asking pointed questions about whether longtime adviser Corey Lewandowski personally profited from a $220 million federal advertising campaign that featured now-ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, according to three people familiar with his conversations.
The president, according to a senior White House official, has raised the subject repeatedly.
"He's mentioned the ads several times."
The questioning comes on the heels of Noem's removal from DHS and her reassignment to a special envoy role within the newly formed "Shield of the Americas." That decision followed a pair of contentious Capitol Hill hearings last week that put the ad campaign, and the contracting apparatus behind it, squarely in the spotlight.
Trump told NBC News he "wasn't thrilled" about Noem's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee and said he "didn't know anything about it." The ads. The contracts. The $220 million price tag.
Lewandowski, who has served as a special government employee at DHS for more than a year and functioned as a de facto chief of staff to Noem, categorically denied receiving any money from DHS contracts, NBC News reported. Asked how much he made, he answered plainly.
"Zero, not one penny."
He told NBC News in a Monday interview that Trump had not raised the ads or contracts with him directly, despite speaking with the president on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the week before Noem was fired. That's three conversations in three days with no mention of a $220 million campaign that the president was simultaneously grilling other aides about.
Lewandowski framed the situation as a matter of personal trust built over more than a decade.
"Since I've known the guy for 11 years, I think it's fair to say if he had a concern about something I was doing, he would raise it."
Maybe. But a second senior White House official offered a blunter read of the situation, telling reporters that "Corey made out on that one."
Two Democratic senators, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Peter Welch of Vermont, have launched an investigation into three businesses that won DHS contracts to produce the ads:
The Strategy Group is run by Ben Yoho, described as the husband of former DHS spokeswoman Tricia McGlaughlin. The senators cited news reports, including a November ProPublica story, detailing ties between the ad contracts and firms connected to Noem's orbit. Their letters asked the businesses to provide documentation of their DHS agreements, which companies they subcontracted, and whether any of them had deals in place with Lewandowski.
No-bid contracts totaling $220 million would raise eyebrows in any administration. In one that has built its mandate on eliminating government waste and draining the bureaucratic swamp, they raise something closer to alarm bells.
Noem's tenure at DHS was dogged by more than just the ad controversy. She had to fend off reports about her acquisition of a luxury jet, tensions with agencies within her own department, and broader contracting problems. During her Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, she told lawmakers that Trump had signed off on the expensive ad campaign. That claim did not help her cause with a president who said he "didn't know anything about it."
Meanwhile, DHS officials and lobbyists have said Lewandowski wielded outsized influence in the awarding of federal contracts at the department, though specifics remain thin. What isn't thin is the trail of dysfunction. In February, Trump switched up the team overseeing DHS's Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis after federal agents shot and killed two American citizens.
The president has consistently praised Noem for helping cut off the southern border with Mexico. But praise for results doesn't grant immunity from accountability for spending. Conservatives who cheered the administration's border enforcement posture have every reason to demand that the money behind it was spent honestly.
Lewandowski, who was the first manager on Trump's original presidential campaign and later had a dust-up with 2024 campaign manager Susie Wiles (now the White House chief of staff), says it is his own decision whether he leaves DHS when Noem departs. He pointed to March 31 as a potential exit date but said he has not made up his mind.
That ambiguity is telling. A man with nothing to hide and no political exposure would have a clear answer. Instead, Lewandowski is hedging on his own future while insisting the president harbors no concerns about his past conduct.
Trump's instinct here is the right one. When $220 million in taxpayer money flows through no-bid contracts to firms connected to political allies, the person at the top should be asking hard questions. The fact that he's asking them about someone in his own orbit, rather than waiting for Democrats to build the narrative, is exactly the kind of accountability that draining the swamp requires.
The answers just need to arrive before March 31.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs killed a bipartisan bill that would have allowed Arizonans to purchase a specialty license plate honoring Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was assassinated on a college campus last year. The bill sailed through the state Senate 16-2 and cleared the House 31-23. Hobbs vetoed it anyway.
In her Friday veto letter, Hobbs acknowledged the obvious while refusing to act on it:
"Charlie Kirk's assassination is tragic and a horrifying act of violence. In America, we resolve our political differences at the ballot box. No matter who it targets, political violence puts us all in harm's way and damages our sacred democratic institutions."
Then came the pivot. Hobbs claimed the bill "falls short" of bringing people together, arguing it would insert "politics into a function of government that should remain nonpartisan."
A memorial license plate. For a man murdered for his beliefs. Too partisan.
The bill's vote totals are worth pausing on. A 16-2 margin in the state Senate is a veto-proof majority. That kind of support means members from both sides of the aisle looked at a proposal to honor a 31-year-old who was publicly assassinated on the campus of Utah Valley University and said yes. The House passed it 31-23. Not razor-thin. Not controversial in any meaningful legislative sense.
The bill would have allocated $17 of the $25 license plate fee to an organization founded in 2012, structured the same way Arizona already handles specialty plates for groups like the Arizona Life Coalition and Alliance Defending Freedom. Those plates were approved with a similar donation framework. No vetoes. No hand-wringing about partisanship.
The mechanism wasn't new. The structure wasn't unusual. The only thing different was the name on the plate.
The governor's stated rationale collapses under the lightest scrutiny. Specialty license plates, by their nature, reflect the voluntary choices of individual drivers. Nobody is forced to buy one. The state isn't endorsing a candidate or a platform. It is allowing citizens to honor someone through a fee that funds a charitable cause. Arizona already does this for organizations with clear ideological identities.
So what changed? Kirk promoted conservative values on college campuses across the country through Turning Point USA. He lived in Arizona. He was Hobbs's own constituent. He was killed in broad daylight. And the governor couldn't bring herself to let people who wanted to remember him put a plate on their car.
The "nonpartisan" framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and it can't hold the weight. If honoring a murdered activist is too political for a license plate, then every specialty plate in the state should be on the chopping block. They won't be, of course. The standard applies selectively, which means it isn't a standard at all.
According to The Hill, State Sen. Jake Hoffman, who sponsored the legislation, did not mince words. He called the veto an act of "grotesque partisanship" and went further in a statement on X:
"Even in the wake of a global civil rights leader — an Arizona resident and her own constituent — being assassinated in broad daylight for his defense of the First Amendment, Hobbs couldn't find the human decency to put her far-Left extremism aside simply to allow those who wish to honor him to do so."
Hoffman added that Hobbs "will forever be known as a stain on the pages of Arizona's story."
Turning Point Chief Operating Officer Tyler Bowyer struck a more forward-looking tone in a Saturday post on X:
"Katie Hobbs wants you to forget about Charlie Kirk. Good reason to show up and vote this year."
Something is clarifying about this moment. Hobbs did not veto a policy initiative. She did not reject a spending bill or block a regulatory change. She vetoed a memorial. For a man she admits was the victim of a horrifying act of political violence. After calling his death tragic in her own veto letter.
That sequence tells you everything. The governor of Arizona can acknowledge that a young conservative was murdered for his beliefs, call it tragic, invoke the sanctity of democratic institutions, and then, in the same document, refuse to let citizens voluntarily honor him through a license plate because it might be too "political."
The contradiction isn't subtle. It is the point. In Hobbs's Arizona, political violence against a conservative earns a paragraph of sympathy and a veto stamp. The words say one thing. The pen says another.
Charlie Kirk was 31 years old. He built an organization from scratch at age 18. He was killed on a college campus. And the governor of his home state won't let the people who loved him buy a license plate.
That tells you who Katie Hobbs is governing for. And who she isn't.
United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz delivered a pointed rebuke to "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker on Sunday after she repeatedly pressed him on whether the United States was "at war" with Iran. Waltz refused to play the semantic game, redirecting the conversation to the decades of American blood spilled by Iranian proxies and the administration's resolve to finally end the threat.
The exchange came days after President Donald Trump announced in a video posted to Truth Social early Feb. 28 that the United States military and Israel Defense Forces had launched strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran's regime. Six American service members were killed on March 1 when an Iranian strike hit a technical operations center in Kuwait.
According to the Daily Caller, Welker opened by framing the question around language, telling Waltz that "words matter" and asking whether the Trump administration described its operations as a war against Iran. Waltz didn't bite.
"Well, I describe it as Iran's been at war with us, as I just said, and thankfully—"
Welker cut in: "So, it's a war? Is it a war?"
Waltz finished the thought with a line that drew the sharpest contrast of the interview:
"President Trump is ending it. Look, I'll leave it to the lawyers and those who deal with Congress in terms of the War Powers Act, which every administration has viewed as unconstitutional. That said, Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio has been there day after day and week after week in the recent months to appropriately brief congressional leaders."
The framing of Welker's question is worth pausing on. The implication was clear: pin the administration down with a single word so it can be weaponized in the next news cycle. If Waltz says "war," Democrats get a talking point about unilateral escalation. If he says it's not a war, the press gets to call the strikes disproportionate to whatever lesser term he uses. It's a familiar trap, and Waltz walked right past it.
Where Waltz landed instead was on the human cost that the Washington press corps has spent decades treating as background noise. He invoked the Marines killed in Beirut in 1983, the hundreds of American troops killed in Iraq by Iranian-supplied improvised explosive devices, and the full constellation of Tehran's proxies: Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and others.
"But I'll tell you, you know, who does believe that they're being attacked? It's the soldiers that have been buried for many, many years as a result of Iranian attacks and their proxy attacks — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and others, in Beirut in 1983 and Iraq through those years — over 600 American soldiers, so, I mean, we have to take a step back, Kristen, and look at how many billions, how much time, how much treasure that administration after administration has spent dealing with this."
Over 600 American soldiers. That number rarely surfaces in mainstream coverage of Iran policy. It should be the starting point of every conversation about whether the United States is justified in striking the regime. Instead, the press prefers procedural questions about the War Powers Act and congressional notifications, as though the real scandal is paperwork rather than dead Americans.
Efforts by Democrats to halt American military operations against the Iranian regime were defeated in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. That fact deserves more attention than it has received.
Consider the sequence: Iran strikes a U.S. facility in Kuwait and kills six American service members. The administration responds with force. And the Democratic caucus moves to shut those operations down. Not to demand a broader strategy. Not to offer an alternative. To stop.
This is the party that spent years insisting America must maintain "credibility" on the world stage. Apparently, that credibility evaporates the moment a Republican president decides to use it.
The first Trump administration killed Qasem Soleimani, a notorious commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and a crucial figure in providing advanced improvised explosive device components used against American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a January 2020 strike. The same hysterics followed then. World War III was supposedly imminent. It wasn't.
What happened instead was a period of relative Iranian restraint, because deterrence works when adversaries believe you'll act. The years that followed that strike, under a different administration, saw deterrence erode, and proxies grow bolder. Administration after administration spent billions and decades managing the Iran problem rather than confronting it.
Waltz's core point on Sunday was not complicated. Iran has been waging a shadow war against the United States for over forty years. The question was never whether America would fight back. It was when.
Six families in America are grieving service members lost in Kuwait. Over 600 more have grieved for years. The debate in Washington is about terminology.
President Donald Trump signed a proclamation Saturday formally launching the "Americas Counter Cartel Coalition" at a summit of Western Hemisphere leaders in Doral, Florida, vowing to destroy drug cartels with lethal military force and warning that Cuba's communist regime is next on the list.
The "Shield of the Americas" summit at Trump National Doral brought together leaders from over a dozen countries, including Argentinian President Javier Milei, Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz Pereira, Chilean President-elect Jose Antonio Kast, and Honduran President Tito Asfura. The gathering carried unmistakable momentum, arriving on the heels of the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and ongoing U.S. military action in Iran.
Trump did not mince words about what comes next in the Caribbean.
"Cuba's at the end of the line. They're very much at the end of the line. They have no money. They have no oil. They have a bad philosophy. They have a bad regime that's been bad for a long time."
He went further, framing the island's future in stark terms:
"But Cuba's in its last moments of life as it was. It'll have a great new life, but it's in its last moments of life the way it is."
No operational details were offered. None were needed. The message landed on its own.
The Americas Counter Cartel Coalition represents something Washington has struggled to build for decades: a multilateral commitment in the Western Hemisphere anchored not in diplomatic niceties but in the willingness to use hard power against transnational criminal networks. The coalition's stated core is a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy cartels and terrorist networks, as ABC News reports.
Trump put it plainly to the assembled leaders:
"The heart of our agreement is a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks once and for all. We'll get rid of them. We need your help."
The roster of attendees tells its own story. Presidents and prime ministers from Paraguay, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Guyana, Costa Rica, and Trinidad and Tobago all appeared alongside Trump. Even Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who had traded barbs with Trump earlier, was present in spirit if not body. Following the Jan. 3 Venezuela raid, the two appeared to patch up their differences, with Trump inviting Petro to the White House and the two issuing complimentary statements.
That trajectory is worth noting. When American strength is visible, even reluctant partners find reasons to cooperate.
The summit also formalized a significant personnel move. Trump announced he was removing Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from her post and shifting her to a new role as special envoy for "The Shield of the Americas." Noem emailed DHS staff overnight Thursday, stating that her official final day at the department would be March 31.
In her email, Noem framed the transition as a natural extension of the work she had already been doing:
"In my new role, I will be able to build on the new partnerships and national security expertise I forged over my time as Secretary of Homeland Security."
At the summit's working lunch, Noem outlined the mission in direct terms:
"Our objectives are going to be to destroy the cartels, to go after these narcoterrorists that are destroying our people, killing our children and our grandchildren. We're also going to keep our adversaries at bay."
She offered to give attending leaders her personal cell phone number, a gesture that sounds informal but signals something operationally significant: short lines of communication between sovereign leaders and the person Trump trusts to coordinate hemisphere-wide counter-cartel operations.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio introduced Noem to the assembled leaders and made clear she would not be a figurehead. He told the room, "You will see a lot of her," and elaborated:
"She'll be very involved with each of you at a personal level and on a daily and weekly and monthly level to ensure that what we talk about here today and the work we do together continues on, and we can build upon that."
Trump used the summit to connect the dots between the administration's various military engagements, framing them not as scattered interventions but as the natural output of a rebuilt fighting force. He pointed to U.S. military action in Iran and the operation to capture Maduro as proof of concept.
"We're doing something. I built the military and rebuilt it and made it really strong. And my first administration, along with a lot of other things we did, we had a great first term, and now we're using it, unfortunately, we have to, but you're seeing how great it is."
The tone was confident but measured. Trump acknowledged the necessity of force without glorifying it, a distinction that matters when addressing a room full of leaders whose domestic populations are watching closely.
He also singled out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with characteristic directness, telling him, "we want your personality for war" and adding simply, "you're just perfect."
The administration's approach to the hemisphere is now visible in full. It rests on three pillars:
For years, Latin American policy in Washington oscillated between two modes: neglect and lectures. Republican administrations focused elsewhere. Democratic administrations showed up with condescending talking points about "root causes" and development aid that evaporated into the bureaucracies of corrupt governments. Neither approach dislodged the cartels, slowed the flow of fentanyl, or gave regional leaders a reason to align with American interests.
What Saturday's summit offered was something different. Not a promise to study the problem. Not a pledge of foreign aid contingent on progressive benchmarks. A room full of national leaders, a signed proclamation, and a commitment to kill the people poisoning two continents.
Trump's Cuba remarks carried the most forward-looking weight of the day. He tied them explicitly to the Venezuela operation, framing Havana as the next domino:
"As we achieve a historic transformation in Venezuela, we're also looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba."
He offered no timeline and no specifics. But the phrasing, "great change that will soon be coming," was not the language of a man issuing a diplomatic communiqué. It was a warning delivered in front of the hemisphere's most consequential leaders, with the credibility of a recent military operation backing it up.
Cuba's regime has survived on two things for sixty years: Soviet subsidies and then Venezuelan oil. The Soviets are gone. Maduro is gone. Trump's assessment that Cuba has "no money" and "no oil" is not rhetoric. It is an inventory of a regime that has run out of lifelines.
What happens next depends on whether Havana reads the room. Over a dozen hemispheric leaders just sat in a conference room in Florida and agreed that lethal force against the cartels is on the table. The man hosting the summit captured a sitting head of state two months ago. Cuba's leadership can do the math, or they can wait for the math to be done for them.
The Shield of the Americas is not an aspiration. It is a structure, with a signed proclamation, a dedicated envoy, and a coalition of willing partners. For the first time in a generation, the Western Hemisphere has an organizing principle that isn't built on wishful thinking.