Hillary Clinton abruptly ended a press exchange Thursday after a reporter asked her a simple question: Why was Ghislaine Maxwell invited to Chelsea Clinton's wedding?
Clinton had just finished a closed-door House deposition related to Jeffrey Epstein. She was speaking to reporters when the question landed.
"Can I ask, why was Ghislaine Maxwell invited to your daughter Chelsea Clinton's wedding?"
Clinton's answer was brief and careful. She said Maxwell "came as the plus one, the guest of someone who was invited." Then she offered a quick "Thank you all" and stopped taking questions.
The reporter didn't let the moment pass without context, noting that Maxwell had already been named in a civil lawsuit by Virginia Giuffre before the wedding and that Jeffrey Epstein had already been convicted.
Clinton didn't respond to that. She was already walking away.
Chelsea Clinton married on July 31, 2010, in Rhinebeck, New York. Multiple outlets reported that Maxwell attended. Photos from the event show her among the guests. Maxwell herself said she attended with her then-boyfriend, tech billionaire Ted Waitt.
By that date, the public record on Epstein was not exactly thin. In 2009, Giuffre filed a lawsuit against Epstein under the pseudonym "Jane Doe 102," alleging she had been trafficked as a minor. In that lawsuit, Giuffre alleged Maxwell recruited and groomed her for Epstein. The Daily Caller reported.
So when the Clintons welcomed Maxwell to one of the most high-profile social events of the decade, these allegations were already part of the legal landscape. Not a rumor. Not gossip. Court filings.
Giuffre later sued Maxwell directly for defamation in 2015. That case was settled in Maxwell's favor in 2017.
Clinton's appearance on Thursday was not voluntary in spirit, even if it was technically consensual. The Clintons consented to appear on Feb. 2 to answer questions about their connections to Epstein.
The timing mattered. Just one day earlier, the Department of Justice made public a new batch of records that mentioned former President Bill Clinton. Those records included an image depicting him in a hot tub with Epstein. Federal officials distributed the materials in batches under requirements set by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which President Donald Trump enacted in November.
That sequence tells its own story. The documents drop. The next day, the Clintons sit for a deposition. And when a reporter connects the obvious dots, Hillary Clinton offers one sentence and leaves.
There's a pattern with the Clintons and the Epstein question that has persisted for years. Every answer is technical. Every response is minimal. Every exit is swift.
Maxwell was a "plus one." That's the explanation. Not an expression of regret. Not a concession that maybe the guest list should have been vetted more carefully, given that Epstein had already been convicted and Giuffre's allegations against Maxwell were already in the courts. Just a procedural deflection: she came with someone else.
The reporter's follow-up framed the issue precisely. Giuffre's lawsuit was filed in 2009. Epstein's conviction preceded the wedding. The information was available. The Clintons are not people who lack access to information, staff, or legal counsel. They are arguably the most connected political family in modern American history. The idea that Maxwell simply slipped through as an anonymous plus-one strains belief past its breaking point.
And yet the question remains one that apparently cannot be answered for more than eight words.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act exists because the American public grew tired of watching powerful institutions treat the Epstein case like something to be managed rather than resolved. The steady release of documents has kept the story alive in a way that quiet settlements and sealed records were designed to prevent.
Every new batch of records puts names back in the spotlight. Every deposition forces someone to sit in a chair and answer questions. That is what accountability looks like when it finally arrives, however late.
The Clintons consented to appear. They answered questions behind closed doors. But when the doors opened, and a reporter asked the most obvious question in the world, Hillary Clinton gave seven words and walked away.
The documents will keep coming. The questions won't stop. And "she was a plus one" is not an answer that ages well.
CBS Evening News host Tony Dokoupil praised President Trump's record-breaking State of the Union address as "extraordinary" and "historic" Tuesday night, while over on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow offered a starkly different verdict: the speech was "wound-up and weird" and amounted to "violence porn."
The split-screen reactions, delivered within minutes of Trump concluding the longest State of the Union in American history, offered a near-perfect snapshot of where the media stands heading into the midterms. One network's anchor engaged with the substance. The other couldn't get past her own revulsion long enough to try.
Trump spoke for a record-breaking 1 hour and 47 minutes, covering the economy, immigration, gender ideology, and voter identification. Dokoupil, 45, who was elevated to the CBS Evening News anchor desk in January 2026, described what he watched this way:
"It was an extraordinary speech - the longest to a joint session in history, the longest State of the Union in history... The first part of the speech, all about the economy, an issue we know a lot of Americans want to hear about."
As reported by the Daily Mail, he characterized the performance as "vintage Trump: combative, populist. Historic for other reasons, as well." Dokoupil also identified what he called "the heart of the speech," pointing to the president's remarks on immigration, gender, and voter identification as the substance that mattered most.
Dokoupil noted that Trump ad-libbed one of the night's sharpest lines, one that wasn't in the prepared script: "The first duty of elected officials is to protect Americans, not illegal aliens." He also observed that Trump "seemed at times to be goading Democrats into reacting, and at times they took that bait."
That's a straightforward observation. It's also the kind of analysis that would have been unremarkable at CBS five years ago. Today it qualifies as countercultural.
Rachel Maddow, 52, took a different approach. She skipped past the economic portion of the address almost entirely, dismissing it in a single breath:
"The president didn't seem very invested in the lies that he was telling about the economy, but he did list a whole bunch of them right off the bat."
No rebuttal. No specifics. Just "lies" as a category and a wave of the hand. The real offense, in Maddow's telling, was that Trump devoted large portions of the speech to anecdotes about Americans killed by illegal immigrants. She described it as gratuitous:
"He talked about people being covered in blood, gushing blood, blood pouring out of things… people being on the edge of death."
She went further, accusing Trump of going into "graphic detail on several different people's injuries" and offering "as much sort of gory detail as he could, talking about very bloody scenes." Her final characterization: the president engaged in "sort of violently pornographic riffing."
Think about what that framing actually does. A president stands before Congress and tells the stories of Americans whose lives were destroyed by people who should never have been in the country. He names the cost of policy failure in human terms. And the progressive response is to complain that it was too vivid.
The families of those victims might use a different word than "pornographic." They might call it recognition.
Maddow predicted the main takeaway from the speech would be "his pace and his freneticism." That tells you everything about how she processed the evening. Not the policy. Not the arguments. The tempo.
CBS Chief Washington Analyst Robert Costa offered a more grounded assessment, calling the speech "entirely who President Trump is":
"Totally defiant, blunt force politically on all of these issues, not so much making a speech but a presentation, and a recharacterization of the political reality. Trying to put it in his fingerprints ahead of the midterms."
Costa may not have been cheerleading, but he was doing his job: explaining what the speech accomplished politically. That's a low bar, and yet it towers above dismissing the whole thing as a blood-soaked fever dream.
The divide here isn't really between CBS and MSNBC. It's between a media willing to grapple with what a president actually said and a media that pre-decided its reaction before Trump reached the podium. Maddow didn't engage with the immigration argument. She didn't contest the specific cases Trump raised. She objected to the fact that he raised them at all.
Dokoupil's willingness to call the speech "extraordinary" without immediately qualifying it into meaninglessness is worth noting in context. He was promoted from CBS Mornings earlier this year by new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, 41, the founder of the right-leaning Free Press, who was appointed by Paramount CEO David Ellison under the pretense of being a disruptor after the company's merger with Skydance.
Weiss has had a turbulent tenure since taking over in October. She held a highly publicized town hall with Erika Kirk in December. She hired Matt Gutman, a longtime former ABC journalist who previously worked at the Jerusalem Post, as the network's chief reporter. She also pulled a 60 Minutes segment that was set to examine conditions at CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, where the Trump administration has been sending illegal immigrants.
The CECOT decision drew predictable outrage from the usual corners, but it signaled something important: editorial choices at CBS are no longer running on autopilot. Whether Weiss can sustain that shift through a full midterm cycle is an open question, but Dokoupil's Tuesday night performance suggests she's at least putting anchors in front of the camera who are willing to describe reality without flinching.
There's a pattern worth naming. Every time a conservative leader forces the public to confront the human consequences of illegal immigration, the progressive media apparatus reaches for the same move: don't argue the facts, argue the tone. Call it fearmongering. Call it exploitation. Call it pornographic. Anything to avoid the underlying question: were these people killed, and could their deaths have been prevented by enforcing the law?
Maddow never answered that. She never had to, because her audience doesn't require it. They tuned in to be told the speech was bad, and she delivered.
Dokoupil's audience got something different. They got an anchor who acknowledged the speech was long, noted its political strategy, identified its emotional core, and let viewers decide for themselves. That used to be called journalism.
The longest State of the Union in history, and the most revealing reaction wasn't anything Trump said. It was what his critics refused to hear.
Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar (MN) and Rashida Tlaib (MI) began screaming during President Trump's State of the Union address on Tuesday, only to have their outbursts swallowed whole by Republican lawmakers chanting "U-S-A, U-S-A" across the House Chamber. Texas Democrat Al Green was ejected after brandishing a placard reading "Black people aren't apes." The joint session of Congress, meant to showcase a president's agenda, instead became the latest stage for Democratic theatrics.
The disruptions started early and escalated fast. As Trump spoke about domestic accomplishments from his first year in office, cameras caught Omar appearing distraught, almost overcome with emotion, before she and Tlaib began yelling. The pair shouted "You have killed Americans" and called the president a liar, their voices competing with, and ultimately losing to, the rolling "U-S-A" chants from the Republican side of the chamber.
Trump did not flinch. He branded the two members of Congress a "disgrace" and told them plainly from the podium:
"You should be ashamed."
The moment that appeared to trigger the outburst was Trump's direct remarks about fraud in Minnesota, the state Omar represents, according to the Daily Mail. The president did not mince words:
"When it comes to the corruption that is plundering America, there has been no more stunning example than Minnesota, where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer."
He went further, arguing that the pattern of corruption in Minnesota illustrates a broader problem with immigration policy:
"Importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings those problems right here to the USA."
Omar, who represents Minneapolis and is herself Somali, took the remarks personally. That much was obvious from the cameras. But taking remarks personally and refuting them are two different things. The $19 billion figure Trump cited has been a subject of ongoing scrutiny in Minnesota, and screaming from the House floor is not the rebuttal that a serious legislator would offer if the numbers were wrong.
If Omar had data showing the president was mistaken, a press conference would have been the appropriate venue. A written rebuttal. A hearing request. Instead, she chose a primal scream on national television, which tells you everything about whether the goal was to inform or to perform.
Before the address even got underway, the evening had already been beset by protests. Al Green brought a sign into the chamber reading "Black people aren't apes," a reference to a recent Trump social media post featuring an AI video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as primates.
GOP Senators Markwayne Mullin and Roger Marshall moved swiftly to stand in front of Green, blocking his sign from view. Trump kept walking. Green was subsequently ejected from the chamber.
Whatever one thinks of the social media post in question, the State of the Union is not a protest rally. There are rules governing decorum in the House Chamber, and Green knew them. The placard was designed for a camera, not for a conversation. He got his clip. He also got escorted out.
There was a time when the so-called Squad commanded enormous media attention simply by existing. Omar, Tlaib, and their allies were treated as the ideological vanguard of the Democratic Party, their every tweet amplified, their every accusation treated as moral authority. That era is visibly ending.
What played out on Tuesday was not powerful dissent. It was impotence dressed up as courage. The heckling accomplished nothing legislatively. It changed no votes. It persuaded no one who wasn't already persuaded. And it was physically overwhelmed by the opposing chant, a metaphor so on-the-nose it barely needs articulation.
Consider what voters actually saw:
The optics were brutal for Democrats. Not because conservative media will frame them that way, but because the footage speaks for itself. One side looked like it was governing. The other looked like it was melting down.
What's notable is not just what Omar and Tlaib said, but what the broader Democratic caucus did not say. No Democratic leader appears to have condemned the disruptions or called for decorum. No one from the party stepped to a microphone to distance themselves from the spectacle.
This is the trap that progressive theatrics set for the larger party. When your most vocal members turn a joint session of Congress into a shouting match, and your leadership says nothing, voters draw a reasonable conclusion: this is who you all are.
Trump told them they should be ashamed. The chants drowned out the screaming. And somewhere in that chamber, the Democratic Party's moderates, if any remain, watched their brand shrink a little further.
Peter Mandelson, the former U.K. ambassador to the United States, has been released on bail after his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The Metropolitan Police confirmed the news in a statement issued just after 2 a.m. Tuesday.
Mandelson, 72, was filmed being led from his London home to a car by plainclothes officers on Monday afternoon. Police searched two of his properties in London and western England as part of a criminal probe launched earlier this month into his ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein.
The Metropolitan Police spokesperson kept it clinical:
"A 72-year-old man arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office has been released on bail pending further investigation."
The police did not name the suspect. Mandelson had previously been identified as the former diplomat under investigation.
At the center of the investigation are claims that Mandelson passed sensitive government information to Epstein, the disgraced U.S. financier convicted of sex offenses involving a minor in 2008. Messages suggest the information exchange occurred in 2009, when Mandelson was a senior minister in the British government, the AP reported. The information was potentially market-moving.
Mandelson also appears to have told Epstein he would lobby other members of the government to reduce a tax on bankers' bonuses. This was after Epstein's conviction. Not before. After.
And Mandelson once called Epstein "my best pal."
More than 3 million pages of Epstein-related documents were released last month by the U.S. Justice Department. Those files helped trigger the criminal probe now engulfing two of Britain's most prominent public figures.
Mandelson's arrest was not an isolated event. Four days later, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew, landed in police custody on suspicion of a similar offense related to his friendship with Epstein. Both men are suspected of improperly passing U.K. government information to the financier.
Mountbatten-Windsor was released after 11 hours in custody while the police investigation continues.
Two members of the British establishment, each with deep ties to Epstein, each arrested within days of each other, each on suspicion of betraying their government's trust to a convicted sex offender. The pattern speaks for itself.
The political fallout lands squarely on Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who made the baffling decision to name Mandelson as ambassador to Washington at the start of President Donald Trump's second term. This was a man with known, deep, and publicly acknowledged connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer chose him anyway.
The decision nearly cost Starmer his job earlier this month. He has since acknowledged he made a mistake and apologized to the victims of Epstein. He fired Mandelson in September.
Consider the sequence: Starmer appointed a man who called a convicted sex offender his "best pal" to represent Britain in Washington, then fired him when the obvious became undeniable, then watched him get arrested on suspicion of passing government secrets to that same sex offender. This is not a case of hindsight being 20/20. The warning signs were visible from orbit.
The British government has pledged to begin releasing documents connected to the appointment in early March. Whatever those documents reveal, the judgment failure has already been exposed.
Mandelson was no backbencher. He was an architect of New Labour, the political movement that brought the party back to power in 1997. He served in senior government roles under Prime Minister Tony Blair between 1997 and 2001, then returned under Prime Minister Gordon Brown from 2008 to 2010. He was the European Union's trade commissioner between those stints. He was appointed to the House of Lords for life in 2008. His grandfather, Herbert Morrison, was a former Labour Cabinet minister.
He twice had to resign from government posts. Earlier this month, he resigned from the House of Lords entirely.
The man was Labour royalty. Now he is out on bail.
Gordon Brown, for his part, has been particularly angered by the revelations and has been helping police with their inquiries. When a former prime minister cooperates with investigators probing his own former cabinet minister, the institutional rupture runs deep.
Mandelson remains on bail pending further investigation. The government's promised document release in early March could deepen the political crisis or clarify the scope of Starmer's knowledge before the appointment. Meanwhile, the Mountbatten-Windsor investigation proceeds on a parallel track.
The Epstein saga has already consumed reputations on both sides of the Atlantic. The release of 3 million pages of documents by the U.S. Justice Department made sure of that. But what's unfolding in Britain is something distinct: not just social embarrassment or tabloid scandal, but criminal investigations into whether powerful men traded their country's secrets to a man everyone already knew was a predator.
Mandelson helped secure a trade deal in May. He moved in the highest circles of British and international politics for three decades. None of it insulated him from a pair of plainclothes officers and a Monday afternoon car ride.
President Donald Trump declared Friday that voter ID requirements will be in place for this year's midterm elections, with or without congressional approval. The announcement, posted on Truth Social, left no room for ambiguity about his intentions.
"There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!"
In a separate, lengthier post, Trump said he had "searched the depths" of legal arguments and would be "presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future," delivered in the form of an executive order. He did not specify what legal rationale he would rely on, but the message was clear: the executive branch is not waiting on a Senate that may not deliver.
Trump's declaration comes days after the House passed the SAVE America Act on Wednesday by a vote of 218-213. The bill would overhaul federal voting rules in ways that most Americans, when polled honestly, already support. Its key provisions:
The bill drew support from prominent figures, including tech mogul Elon Musk, while MAGA-aligned rapper Nicki Minaj rallied fans to pressure their senators to pass it. That coalition alone tells you something about how broad the appetite for election integrity actually is when you strip away the Beltway spin.
The problem is the Senate, Politico noted. Republicans have privately acknowledged the bill faces uncertain prospects in the upper chamber, which is why Trump's executive order threat carries real strategic weight. It forces the issue. Senators who might have quietly let the SAVE America Act die in committee now face a binary choice: pass the legislation yourselves, or watch the president do it without you.
You need a photo ID to board a plane, buy a beer, pick up a prescription, or open a bank account. The notion that requiring one to vote in a federal election constitutes some kind of radical overreach is a position that exists almost exclusively among political operatives who benefit from the status quo.
Trump has been personally involved in efforts to tighten voter registration standards nationwide, and the SAVE America Act represents the legislative culmination of that push. Requiring proof of citizenship to register is not voter suppression. It is the bare minimum any functioning democracy should expect. Directing states to remove noncitizens from voter rolls is not xenophobia. It is bookkeeping.
The left's opposition to these measures has always rested on a curious foundation: the simultaneous insistence that noncitizen voting never happens and that any effort to prevent it is an existential threat to democracy. If it never happens, the safeguards cost nothing. If it does happen, the safeguards are essential. Either way, the objection collapses under its own weight.
Trump wrote that "if we can't get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted," signaling that his legal team is building a case rooted in existing federal authority rather than new legislative power. The specifics remain to be seen, but the posture matters. This is a president who has learned from his first term that waiting on Congress is often waiting on nothing.
Critics will inevitably frame this as executive overreach. They will discover their concern for constitutional restraint at the precise moment a Republican president acts on an issue that polls well with the American public. The same voices that cheered expansive executive action on climate regulation, student loan transfers, and immigration enforcement pauses will suddenly rediscover the beauty of the legislative process. Set your watch by it.
The deeper question is whether the Senate will make the executive order unnecessary. The SAVE America Act passed the House by the slimmest of margins. Every Republican voted for it. Every Democrat voted against it. That unanimity on the left is worth noting. Not a single Democrat could bring themselves to support the idea that Americans should prove they are, in fact, Americans before casting a ballot.
The legislative path through the Senate remains narrow. The executive order path remains legally untested. But the political ground has shifted. Voter ID is no longer a wish-list item or a campaign applause line. It is an active confrontation between a president willing to act and a political class that has spent years explaining why the simplest election safeguard in the democratic world is somehow impossible here.
Trump is forcing the question. Congress can answer it, or he will.
A Spanish teacher at a public high school in upstate New York was placed on paid administrative leave after she agreed to advise a student-led chapter of Turning Point USA on campus. Jennifer Fasulo, who teaches at Charles W. Baker High School in Baldwinsville, a Syracuse suburb, has been out of the classroom since Jan. 30.
The students asked for the club. The teacher said yes. The district pulled her from her job.
The Baldwinsville Central School District informed parents in a Feb. 10 letter that offered almost nothing in the way of explanation:
"The district can confirm that a staff member has been placed on paid administrative leave while a matter is under review. We are following established administrative and legal procedures, and we are unable to comment further or share additional details at this time."
That's the entire statement. No specifics. No allegations of misconduct. No timeline for resolution. Just bureaucratic boilerplate designed to say something without saying anything at all.
According to her supporters, Fasulo offered to help students establish a Club America chapter on campus, affiliated with Turning Point USA. The request came from the students themselves, not from parents, not from outside political organizers, and not from Fasulo, as New York Post reports.
Former Republican state Senate candidate Caleb Slater, who met Fasulo through church and other Christian circles and has taken up her cause, made this point directly:
"These are students who asked for this organization to be founded, not parents or teachers."
That distinction matters. Public schools routinely host student clubs across every conceivable interest and ideology. Environmental clubs, social justice clubs, LGBTQ alliance groups: these all operate with faculty advisers, and nobody gets suspended for volunteering. But when the club leans conservative, suddenly a "matter is under review."
Club America President Jerry Dygert addressed the Baldwinsville school board directly at its Feb. 9 meeting:
"This teacher is being targeted not because of her performance, but for her political beliefs."
Students have rallied behind Fasulo. A petition demanding her return has collected more than 2,100 signatures as of Thursday. Parents have taken to Facebook to voice support. The community response has been loud and overwhelmingly on the teacher's side.
Slater has gone further, saying Fasulo is being used as a sacrificial lamb to discourage any conservative organizations or opinions at the school. That's a serious charge. It's also one of the district has done nothing to refute,e beyond hiding behind "established administrative and legal procedures."
Others have claimed the school's actions had nothing to do with Turning Point USA and were instead sparked by an interaction Fasulo had with a student about sexual orientation. An unnamed parent alleged that Fasulo questioned her daughter about her sexual orientation while advising an after-school Christian youth group called Youth Alive.
These claims are unsubstantiated.
That's worth pausing on. The district has provided no official reason for the leave. The only competing explanation comes from an anonymous allegation with no corroboration. And yet, the teacher is the one sitting at home while the district "reviews" the matter weeks later with no end in sight.
If the district had a legitimate, non-political reason to place Fasulo on leave, nothing stopped them from saying so. Their silence speaks volumes. When a school district refuses to explain why it removed a teacher, but the only publicly visible trigger is her agreement to sponsor a conservative student club, reasonable people will draw reasonable conclusions.
This is how ideological conformity gets enforced in public education. Not through written policies banning conservative clubs. Those would be struck down immediately. Instead, through soft power: the raised eyebrow in the faculty lounge, the administrative "review" that never quite concludes, the chilling effect on every other teacher who might consider sponsoring something outside the approved ideological menu.
Every teacher in the Baldwinsville Central School District is watching what happens to Jennifer Fasulo. If she's reinstated quietly with no consequences for those who removed her, the message is still clear: helping conservative students will cost you weeks of your professional life and a cloud of suspicion. If she isn't reinstated, the message is worse.
The students at Baker High School did exactly what every civics teacher in America tells students to do. They organized. They found a faculty adviser. They followed the process. And the adults in charge responded by removing the only teacher willing to help them.
More than 2,100 people have signed a petition saying that's wrong. The district hasn't even bothered to explain why it thinks otherwise.
Robert De Niro wants you to know that Donald Trump will never leave the White House. He has wanted you to know this since at least May of 2024. He wanted you to know it again in October of 2025. And now, in a forthcoming podcast appearance with Nicolle Wallace, he wants you to know it one more time.
Breitbart reported that the actor is set to appear on a podcast sponsored by MS NOW, the far-left news network, where he delivers a familiar refrain. According to a preview reported by The Wrap, De Niro once again insists that Trump will refuse to vacate the presidency when his second term ends in 2028.
"Let's not kid ourselves. He will not leave. It's up to us to get rid of him."
Wallace, for her part, tried to emphasize that such a movement should be "peaceful." A reassuring qualifier, given the temperature of the rhetoric preceding it.
This is not new material. De Niro has been delivering this warning on a loop since the 2024 election, and the quotes are almost interchangeable at this point. In May of 2024, the actor offered this:
"Elections? Forget about it. That's over. That's done. If he gets in, I can tell you right now. He will never leave. He will never leave. You know that. He will never leave."
Then, in October of 2025, he kept the streak alive:
"We can't let up. Cannot let up on him because he is not going to leave the White House. He does not want to leave the White House. He will not leave the White House. Anybody thinks he, oh, he'll do this, he'll do that, it's just deluding themselves."
And now, from the podcast preview:
"He will never leave. We have to make him leave. He jokes now about nationalizing the elections. He's not joking. We've seen enough already."
Four statements across two years, all saying the same thing, with the same evidence behind them. Which is to say: none.
There is a rather large problem with the theory that Trump will barricade himself in the Oval Office and refuse to yield power. He already lost an election and left.
Trump lost his first re-election bid to Joe Biden in 2020. He left the White House without hesitation when he lost. There is no indication that he won't do so again in 2028. The Twenty-Second Amendment exists. The transfer of power has a date on the calendar. None of this requires Robert De Niro to organize a citizen resistance movement from a podcast studio.
But facts have never been the point of this exercise. The point is the performance.
De Niro also went on to claim that Trump is somehow threatening polling places, suggesting citizens may need to physically show up on "the other side" to ensure people can vote safely. His exact words:
"We have to make sure that like what he's trying now, that all the polling places have people that can come there safely. That might mean citizens on the other side."
What Trump is "trying now" at polling places is never specified. No incident is cited. No evidence is offered. It is the kind of claim that sounds urgent precisely because it is vague, a shadow on the wall that the audience is invited to fill in with their own anxieties.
This is the engine of modern progressive fearmongering. You don't need proof. You need tone. You need a famous face saying "you know that" with enough gravity that the listener nods along without asking what, exactly, they know.
The broader pattern here is worth noting, not because De Niro is uniquely influential, but because he represents a type. The celebrity who mistakes volume for moral authority.
The cultural figure who, having spent decades in rooms where everyone agrees with him, genuinely cannot fathom that the democratic process might produce outcomes he dislikes and then self-correct on schedule.
Some even made the same "he'll never leave" claim in 2020. Trump left. The prediction failed. Nobody recalibrated. They simply moved the goalpost to 2028 and kept going.
This is not political commentary. It is a ritual. The conspiracy refreshes itself every cycle, immune to the fact that its core prediction has already been disproven by observable reality. The left spent years warning that democracy was about to end, watched it continue functioning, and concluded that they simply hadn't warned hard enough.
De Niro telling Nicolle Wallace that Trump "will never leave" is not brave. It is not insightful. It is a man reciting the same line to the same audience and receiving the same applause. The podcast drops Monday. The next one will sound identical.
New York City's new mayor just took office, facing a multibillion-dollar deficit, and decided the problem was too many cops. Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who succeeded the indicted Eric Adams, canceled thousands of planned NYPD hires and proposed roughly $22 million in cuts to the department's budget as part of a sprawling $127 billion spending plan unveiled Tuesday.
Under Adams' hiring roadmap, the NYPD was set to add 300 officers in July 2026, scale up to 2,500 by July 2027, and eventually bring on 5,000 additional officers annually by July 2028. That trajectory would have put approximately 40,000 officers on New York's streets. Mamdani's plan caps the force near its current level of around 35,000.
All of it is gone with a stroke of a pen. The mayor canceled all orders Adams issued after his September 2024 indictment, and the NYPD expansion was among the casualties.
According to Breitbart, Mamdani framed the budget as a moment of reckoning, telling reporters his administration "inherited a historic budget gap." He tried to preempt the obvious criticism that this is just another round of New York City fiscal theater:
"I know that for those who have watched budget after budget, it is tempting to assume that we are engaging in the same dance as our predecessors. Let me assure you, nothing about this is typical. That's why our solutions won't be either."
He's right that it isn't typical. Most predecessors didn't respond to a crime-weary city by gutting police hiring while simultaneously shopping for tax increases.
Mamdani laid out two paths for closing the deficit. The first, and his preferred route, involves raising taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and profitable corporations. That requires Albany's blessing, meaning Governor Kathy Hochul would have to sign off. Hochul, a moderate Democrat seeking re-election, has been steadfastly opposed to any kind of tax hikes. That alliance seems unlikely despite the two reportedly finding common ground on expanding child care.
The second path is the quiet threat. Mamdani warned that without state-level tax authority, the city would be forced to raise property taxes and raid its reserves:
"And if we do not go down the first path, the city will be forced down a second, more harmful path. Faced with no other choice, the city would have to exercise the only revenue lever fully within our own control. We would have to raise property taxes."
Translation: give me the power to tax the rich, or I'll tax homeowners instead. It's a hostage negotiation dressed up as fiscal responsibility.
What Mamdani is proposing isn't a budget. It's a prioritization exercise, and the priorities tell you everything. The city has a spending problem large enough to require the word "multibillion" in front of "deficit," and the first place the new mayor looks for savings is law enforcement. Not the bloated bureaucracy. Not the programs that have turned city government into a jobs program for activists and consultants. The cops.
This is the democratic socialist governing philosophy in practice. The theory holds that policing is overinvested and social services are underinvested. The result, everywhere it's been tried, is the same: neighborhoods that needed more officers get fewer, and the people who bear the cost are the ones least able to leave.
New York City residents who lived through the crime surges of recent years watched Adams promise a return to public safety through manpower. Whatever else Adams got wrong, and the indictment suggests he got plenty wrong, the instinct to put more officers on the street reflected what voters actually wanted. Mamdani scrapped that commitment within weeks of taking office.
The revenue side of this proposal deserves its own scrutiny. Mamdani presented his preferred path as "the most sustainable and the fairest," calling for an end to what he described as "the drain on our city" by taxing the wealthy and corporations.
New York already competes with states like Florida and Texas that charge no state income tax at all. Every year, high earners and the businesses that employ thousands of New Yorkers weigh whether the city is worth the cost. Mamdani's answer to the question "why are people leaving?" is apparently "let's give them another reason."
And if Hochul refuses to play along, property taxes go up. That doesn't hit hedge fund managers. It hits the retired couple in Queens who bought their house in 1987. It hits the small landlord whose margins are already razor-thin. Mamdani frames this as the unfortunate backup plan, but the structure of his proposal ensures that someone pays more no matter which path Albany chooses.
Cut policing. Raise taxes. Frame it as justice. This is not a New York innovation. It's the same formula that hollowed out city after city over the past decade. The rhetoric always sounds compassionate. The results never are.
Mamdani told reporters the city "can and will overcome" its budget crisis. Maybe so. But five thousand officers who were supposed to be walking beats, answering calls, and keeping subway platforms safe won't be there to help. New Yorkers will overcome their budget crisis the way they overcome everything else: on their own, with fewer police between them and whatever comes next.
Three weeks after 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie vanished from her Tucson home, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told BBC News on Tuesday that investigators have not ruled out the possibility that an accomplice aided the suspected kidnapper captured on doorbell camera video.
Guthrie was last seen the night of January 31, when her son-in-law, Tommaso Cioni, dropped her off at her house after she spent the evening with him and her daughter, Annie Guthrie. She was reported missing the following day. Her heart pacemaker showed a disconnect from her phone in the early morning hours that night.
The FBI shared doorbell camera footage last week showing what it described as an armed individual who appeared to have tampered with the camera at Guthrie's front door on the morning of February 1. The bureau describes the suspect as male, between approximately 5 feet 9 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall, with an average build. No suspect has been named.
According to CBS News, on Monday, the Pima County Sheriff's Department announced that Savannah Guthrie, the "Today" show co-host and Nancy's daughter, along with her two siblings and their spouses, had all been cleared as suspects. Nanos did not mince words about how thoroughly investigators examined the family before reaching that conclusion:
"We really put them through the wringer. We not just interview them, we take their cars, we take their houses, we take their phones, all this stuff — and we're not taking it. They're giving it to us voluntarily. They have been 100% cooperative with us through everything we've asked. They are victims. They are not suspects."
All three of Nancy Guthrie's children have appeared in videos pleading for their mother's return since the disappearance.
Nanos told BBC News he believes Guthrie was targeted in the apparent abduction. That word, "targeted," carries weight. It suggests that investigators believe this was not random, that someone selected an 84-year-old woman living alone and executed a plan to take her. Whether that plan involved one person or more remains an open question.
The forensic picture is developing but has yet to produce a breakthrough. Investigators recovered a set of gloves approximately two miles from Guthrie's home. On Tuesday, the sheriff's department disclosed that a DNA profile from those gloves did not produce a match in the national database maintained by the FBI, nor did it match different DNA evidence collected at the home itself.
Investigators are now looking into genetic genealogy options to check for matches, a technique that gained national attention in the Golden State Killer case and has since become a critical tool for law enforcement working without a hit in traditional databases.
On Thursday, the sheriff's office said "biological evidence" found at Nancy Guthrie's home was being analyzed and that DNA profiles were "under lab analysis." The office did not specify the type of biological evidence recovered.
Meanwhile, the FBI has been probing gun purchases in the Tucson area. The owner of a local gun store told CBS News that an FBI agent visited approximately a week ago, showed him several images with faces and names, and inquired about purchases made in the last year. That suggests the bureau is working from a set of possible leads, even if none have materialized publicly.
Law enforcement sources also told CBS News that investigators have been using a "signal sniffer" tracking device to detect possible signals from Guthrie's heart pacemaker. Engineers are still working through additional cameras from the property as well.
The reward for information has climbed sharply. On Thursday, the 88-CRIME tipline reward increased to $102,500, buoyed by a $100,000 anonymous donation. The FBI is separately offering $100,000 for information leading to a resolution. That is a combined incentive of $200,000 for anyone who knows something.
The size of that reward reflects both the severity of the case and the frustration of a community watching an elderly woman's disappearance stretch into its third week without an arrest. Anonymous six-figure donations don't materialize for ordinary cases. Someone with resources wants answers badly enough to pay for them.
The most unsettling detail in this investigation may be what is absent. No ransom demand has surfaced publicly. No suspect has been identified by name. No person of interest has been announced. The doorbell footage shows a figure, not a face. The DNA tells investigators who the suspect isn't, not who he is.
Nanos's refusal to rule out an accomplice adds another layer. A solo kidnapping of an elderly woman from her home is alarming enough. The possibility that this was coordinated, that more than one person planned and executed the abduction of an 84-year-old grandmother, transforms the case into something darker.
For now, the investigation grinds forward on forensics, genetic genealogy, gun purchase records, and whatever those additional property cameras might yield. The FBI and the Pima County Sheriff's Department are working the case aggressively. The question is whether the evidence will catch up to whoever disappeared into the Arizona night with Nancy Guthrie.
An entire family waits. So does a $200,000 reward. Someone knows something.
A Texas jury handed Asher Vann a $3.2 million verdict after finding that false accusations of racially motivated bullying destroyed his adolescence, invaded his privacy, and inflicted severe emotional distress. Vann, now a college freshman, was never charged with a crime. Police investigations at the time produced no arrests. But the damage was already done.
The case traces back to a 2021 sleepover in which a classmate, 13-year-old SeMarion Humphrey, accused Vann and several other boys of shooting him with a BB gun and forcing him to drink urine. The accusations spread across social media like accelerant on dry wood, quickly framed as race-based bullying. National media picked it up. Protesters showed up in the Vann family's neighborhood. Activists demanded that the school expel him.
Five years later, a jury saw through it.
Asher Vann appeared on Fox News's "The Will Cain Show" on Tuesday alongside his father, Aaron Vann, to discuss the verdict and the years of fallout that preceded it. His description of what actually happened at the sleepover bears almost no resemblance to the story that consumed social media and cable news in 2021.
"We went hunting for frogs. We had big jackets on, so dumb kids, we each took shots at each other like a Nerf war, except with airsoft guns. Then after, he fell asleep, and way before that, we all agreed, whoever falls asleep first gets pranked, and he got pranked, and it was nasty, but it was not like this big racial torture that it was played out to be."
Stupid? Sure. Gross? Absolutely. A racially motivated hate crime committed by teenagers? The police didn't think so. The district attorney didn't think so. And now twelve jurors don't think so either.
But that distinction never mattered to the mob. The narrative was too useful. A story about dumb kids being dumb kids at a sleepover doesn't generate clicks, protests, or national outrage. A story about racial torture does. So that's the story that got told.
Aaron Vann described the experience of watching his family become a national target overnight. Demonstrations materialized in their neighborhood. Calls flooded the school demanding his son's expulsion. The family was on the defensive before they even understood what was happening.
"Everything's happening all at once. You don't know what to do. You go into immediate protection mode and protecting your family."
The elder Vann said he wanted to tell their side of the story but understood the danger of fighting a viral narrative on its own turf.
"I wanted to get our story up, but I knew that there was a way to do that in an appropriate manner that wasn't trial by social media."
That restraint cost the family five years. Five years of living under the weight of accusations that law enforcement had already declined to pursue. Five years of being publicly branded as something they were not. But the Vanns chose the courtroom over the comment section, and the courtroom delivered.
Attorney Justin Nichols, who appeared on-air to discuss the case, noted the composition of the jury: five African American members, three Asian members, two Latino members, and the remaining jurors were Caucasian. The diversity of that panel matters because it preemptively dismantles the inevitable counternarrative. This wasn't a story of racial solidarity overriding the facts. It was a multiracial jury unanimously recognizing that a false accusation had been weaponized.
Nichols didn't mince words about the defendant's conduct throughout the proceedings:
"This is emblematic of somebody who continues to refuse to accept responsibility throughout the case, throughout their depositions and even on the stand. They continued to push this false narrative of racism that they know did not exist, that was untrue, and they continue to double down instead of finally taking some responsibility for hurting so many lives."
Summer Smith, Humphrey's mother, issued a statement to Fox News emphasizing that the legal claims involved intentional infliction of emotional distress and invasion of privacy, not defamation or slander. She stated the decision will be appealed and said she remains "steadfast" in seeking justice for her son.
The distinction she draws is technically correct and entirely beside the point. A jury found that what she did caused severe emotional distress and invaded Asher Vann's privacy. Whether the legal label reads "defamation" or "intentional infliction of emotional distress," the underlying finding is the same: the story she pushed was false, and it ruined a kid's life.
This case fits a pattern that Americans have watched repeat itself for years. An accusation surfaces. It carries a racial charge. Social media amplifies it before anyone verifies it. National media treats the amplification as confirmation. Activists arrive. Institutions buckle. And by the time the facts emerge, the accused has already been convicted in every forum that matters except the one with rules of evidence.
The playbook works because it exploits a genuine moral impulse. Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of a racial injustice story. So institutions, media outlets, and public figures rush to condemn first and investigate later, because the cost of being seen as insufficiently outraged feels higher than the cost of being wrong. The people who pay the price for that calculus are the ones who get falsely accused.
Asher Vann was a teenager when this happened to him. He spent five years carrying the public weight of an accusation that police declined to prosecute, and a jury has now financially punished him. He told Will Cain what the verdict means to him:
"I don't feel so scared and so little as I did back then. I feel like I'm getting heard."
He shouldn't have had to wait five years to feel heard. But a jury of twelve Americans, from every background, finally listened.
Smith says she will appeal. That is her right. But the facts on the ground are stubborn things. No criminal charges were ever filed. No arrests were ever made. And a jury that reflected the full diversity of the community heard the evidence and awarded $3.2 million to the boy whose life was upended by a story that wasn't true.
The media outlets that ran with the original narrative in 2021 will likely not cover the verdict with the same enthusiasm. They never do. The accusation gets the front page. The vindication gets a paragraph on page twelve. That asymmetry is its own kind of injustice, and it's one that no jury can fix.
Asher Vann is a college freshman now. He lost his teenage years to a lie. The $3.2 million won't give those back. But at least, after five years, the record is straight.