Costco is pulling ready-to-eat meatloaf meals from shelves across 26 states and two territories after an ingredient supplier flagged possible salmonella contamination. The retailer sent a notice to members warning them not to eat the affected product and to return it for a full refund.
The recalled item is Costco's "Meatloaf with Mashed Yukon Potatoes and Glaze," sold between March 2 and March 13, 2026, with sell-by dates ranging from March 5 through March 16. That means some of these meals are still sitting in customers' refrigerators right now.
No illnesses or injuries have been reported at this time.
According to Newsweek, The recall traces back to Griffith Foods Inc., one of Costco's ingredient suppliers for the meatloaf product. Griffith Foods announced a recall of one of the ingredients used in the meatloaf due to the potential presence of Salmonella, which prompted Costco to act.
Costco did not specify how many units were sold during the nearly two-week window, nor did it identify which specific ingredient was the source of concern. What the company did make clear is that customers should stay away from anything covered by the recall.
"Do not consume any product that is part of this recall."
Costco added that customers can return the product to their local store for a full refund.
The affected meals were sold at Costco locations across a wide geographic footprint. The full list of states and territories includes:
That covers a substantial chunk of the country, from the Pacific to the Atlantic and down to the Caribbean.
Salmonella is no minor inconvenience. Symptoms can appear anywhere from several hours to a few days after exposure and can range from gastrointestinal distress to severe illness, particularly in the elderly, young children, and those with compromised immune systems. The potential for fatal infections is what gives recalls like this their urgency.
The fact that no illnesses have been reported is good news. But the sell-by dates on these meals run through today, March 16, which means the window for exposure hasn't closed. Anyone who purchased the product during those two weeks and hasn't eaten it yet should check the packaging carefully.
This recall is a useful illustration of how modern food supply chains work, and where they can break down. Costco didn't produce the contaminated ingredient. Griffith Foods did. But the product carried Costco's name, sat in Costco's deli cases, and went home with Costco's members. The retailer owns the customer relationship, and to its credit, it moved to notify members and offer refunds.
Still, the episode raises a fair question: how much visibility do major retailers actually have into the ingredients that go into their prepared foods? Costco hasn't disclosed which ingredient triggered the concern or when Griffith Foods first identified the problem. The gap between when the meals started selling on March 2 and when customers received the recall notice matters. Every day of delay in a Salmonella situation is a day someone might get sick.
Consumers who bought the meatloaf should not eat it, should not try to cook it to a higher temperature as a workaround, and should return it to Costco or dispose of it. When a company tells you to throw something away and come get your money back, take them up on it.
President Trump declared Saturday that Iran wants to negotiate a ceasefire, but he's not biting. Not yet.
In a nearly 30-minute telephone interview with NBC News, Trump laid out his position plainly: Iran is feeling the pressure, but the deal on the table doesn't meet his standards. He declined to specify what terms he's seeking.
"Iran wants to make a deal, and I don't want to make it because the terms aren't good enough yet."
That single sentence captures the posture of the entire operation. Two weeks into a joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, the administration is negotiating from a position of overwhelming force, and it intends to stay there until the terms reflect it.
The facts on the ground back up the confidence. U.S. Central Command announced Saturday morning that it had conducted precision strikes on 90 military targets while preserving Iran's oil infrastructure. Trump confirmed strikes on Kharg Island, Iran's critical oil export hub, though he noted the deliberate restraint around energy infrastructure, as NBC News reports.
"We totally demolished Kharg Island, but we may hit it a few more times just for fun."
Behind the bravado is a calculated strategy. Trump explained that he spared Iran's energy lines because rebuilding them "would take years." The goal isn't to destroy Iran's economy permanently. It's to destroy Iran's capacity to project military power.
And on that front, the progress is striking. Trump told NBC that U.S. forces have knocked out most of Iran's missiles, most of its drones, and most of its manufacturing capacity for both. He said that within two days, those capabilities would be "totally decimated."
"The only power they have, and it's a power that can be closed off relatively quickly, is the power of dropping a mine or shooting a relatively short-range missile. But when we get finished with the shoreline, they're not going to have that power either."
The message to Tehran could not be clearer: every day you wait, you have less to bargain with.
One of the most significant developments from the interview was Trump's plan to internationalize the security of the Strait of Hormuz. He posted on Truth Social Saturday morning that multiple countries would be sending warships to keep the strait open.
"Many Countries, especially those who are affected by Iran's attempted closure of the Hormuz Strait, will be sending War Ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe."
He specifically called on China, France, Japan, South Korea, and the UK to contribute, and said the U.S. would be "sweeping the strait very strongly." When pressed on which countries had already committed, Trump declined to name them but described their response as "very solid." He said the nations involved "think it's a great idea."
This is exactly the kind of burden-sharing that American foreign policy has needed for decades. The Strait of Hormuz isn't an American waterway. It's a chokepoint for global energy, and the nations that depend on it should bear the cost of keeping it open. Trump is forcing that conversation in real time, under live-fire conditions.
The stakes are not abstract. According to UAE data, 1,475 unmanned aerial vehicles had been fired at the country as of March 10. Iran's campaign of regional intimidation has hit real targets in real countries, and the coalition forming around the Strait reflects the reality that Iran's "thuggery," as Trump called it, affects far more than just the United States.
Perhaps the most revealing exchange in the interview concerned Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran's newly named supreme leader. Khamenei was elevated earlier this week after U.S. and Israeli strikes killed his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But the new leader's first public statement was conspicuously delivered in writing, not on camera.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addressed this on Friday with characteristic directness:
"Iran has plenty of cameras and plenty of voice recorders. Why a written statement? I think you know why. His father: dead; he's scared, he's injured, he's on the run, and he lacks legitimacy."
Hegseth described Mojtaba Khamenei as "wounded and likely disfigured" and called his statement "a weak one." Trump went further, saying he's "hearing he's not alive" but acknowledged it was "a rumor." Then he added a line that doubles as both diplomacy and a threat:
"I'm hearing he's not alive, and if he is, he should do something very smart for his country, and that's surrender."
Trump also mentioned that there are people "living that would be great leaders for the future of the country," but declined to identify them, saying he didn't want to "put them in jeopardy." The implication is unmistakable: the U.S. has a vision for a post-theocratic Iran, and it involves people who already exist inside or near the regime's orbit.
None of this comes without a price. Thirteen active U.S. service personnel have died since the conflict began, including six crew members killed Friday when their military refueling plane crashed in Iraq. Trump said of the troops involved that they "have been terrific" but that "they got shot at unnecessarily."
Iraqi officials reported Saturday that an Iranian strike hit a helipad inside a U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad. The conflict is not one-sided, and the administration isn't pretending otherwise.
There is also the question of gas prices. On March 1, the day after the U.S. and Israel began operations, gas averaged $2.94 a gallon nationally. By Saturday, it had risen to $3.66. Trump, who hammered Biden over gas prices throughout 2024, dismissed concerns.
"I think they'll go lower than they were before, and I had them at record lows."
He pointed to global oil supply as a reason for optimism, saying there's "so much oil, gas" available but that "it's being clogged up a little bit. It'll be unclogged very soon." He also referenced a decision to temporarily lift some sanctions on Russian oil, a move clearly designed to stabilize global markets during the conflict.
In one of the more unexpected turns in the interview, Trump addressed Ukrainian President Zelenskyy's offer to help U.S. forces intercept Iranian drones. Zelenskyy posted on X Friday that Ukraine had already sent expert teams to three countries in the Middle East to share drone interception expertise.
Trump was unimpressed.
"We don't need help. Last person we need help from is Zelenskyy."
He then pivoted to the broader conflict between Russia and Ukraine, saying he was "surprised that Zelenskyy doesn't want to make a deal" and that "Zelenskyy is far more difficult to make a deal with" than Putin. An unnamed Iranian politician called Ukraine a "legitimate and lawful target," a statement that underscores how tangled these overlapping conflicts have become.
Trump acknowledged reports that Russia may be sharing intelligence with Iran but was measured in his response, saying, "Russia is perhaps giving information, perhaps they're not." He noted that the U.S. is "giving a little information to Ukraine" while trying to broker peace between the two nations.
The geopolitical web is thick: the U.S. is striking Iran, coordinating with Israel, easing sanctions on Russia to manage oil prices, and fending off Ukrainian attempts to insert itself into the Middle East theater. It's a lot of spinning plates. But the through line is consistent: Trump is managing each relationship on American terms, not getting pulled into anyone else's preferred framing.
Trump said the conflict is "way ahead of the timetable," faster than the month or longer he had initially suggested it might take. He described Iran's remaining military capability in terms that suggest the campaign's kinetic phase is nearing its conclusion. There is, he said, "practically nothing left to target."
But the military campaign was never the hard part. The hard part is what comes after: the deal, the diplomatic architecture, the question of who governs Iran and under what constraints. Trump made clear Saturday that he's in no rush.
"The only thing I want to do is make sure that Iran can never be the bully of the Middle East again."
That's not a ceasefire condition. That's a strategic objective. And it requires patience, leverage, and a willingness to walk away from a bad deal. Saturday's interview was Trump telling the world he has all three.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has endorsed former U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn in his bid for Maryland's 5th Congressional District, marking the second time she's thrown her weight behind a candidate whose entire political identity rests on a single day five years ago.
Pelosi, who is not seeking re-election, announced the endorsement in a release, according to The Hill.
"On January 6, 2021, Harry Dunn bravely defended our democracy from Donald Trump's violent MAGA mob. Since then, Harry's been called to do everything he can to protect Marylanders and all Americans from extremists like Donald Trump. I'm proud to endorse Harry Dunn for Congress."
Dunn returned the favor, saying Pelosi "stood firm when our democracy was under attack and helped lead the country through one of the most difficult moments in our history."
This is not Pelosi's first time endorsing Dunn. She backed him in 2024 as well. That endorsement didn't carry him very far. Dunn failed to win the Democratic primary that year in Maryland's 3rd Congressional District.
Now he's running in a different district entirely. The 5th is opening up because Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer is not seeking re-election.
Hoyer, for his part, has endorsed his own former campaign manager, Maryland Delegate Adrian Boafo, for the seat. So Dunn isn't just running against the Republican field eventually; he's navigating an intraparty fight where the outgoing incumbent's preferred successor is someone else, as Fox News reports.
Pelosi called Dunn "a true American hero and exactly the right person to represent Maryland in Congress." The question Maryland Democrats will have to answer is whether being present at the Capitol on January 6 constitutes a congressional résumé, or whether voters in the 5th District want something more from their representative.
Dunn's candidacy is a case study in a particular kind of Democratic branding that emerged after 2021: take a figure associated with January 6, elevate them to symbolic status, and convert that symbolism into political office. It worked for some. It hasn't worked for Dunn, at least not yet.
The language of the endorsement tells the story. Pelosi's statement doesn't mention a single policy position. Not healthcare. Not taxes. Not infrastructure. Not education.
Not anything that a voter in Bowie or College Park or Upper Marlboro might actually care about when deciding who represents them in Washington. The entire pitch is January 6, five years later.
There's a shelf life on that argument, and Democrats seem unwilling to test whether it's already expired. Dunn already lost one primary with this exact framing. Switching districts doesn't change the product. It just changes the audience.
Pelosi's endorsement matters less for what it says about Dunn than for what it reveals about the state of the Democratic bench. When a former Speaker of the House, one of the most powerful figures in modern Democratic politics, is spending her remaining political capital on a candidate who already lost a primary, it raises a straightforward question: Who else do they have?
The Democratic Party has spent years investing in narrative over governance. The January 6 committee. The endless hearings. The made-for-television moments. Dunn's candidacy is an extension of that project. It treats political theater as a qualification.
Hoyer's endorsement of Boafo suggests that at least some Maryland Democrats understand the district needs a candidate with actual legislative experience and local roots, not a national symbol parachuting into an open seat. Whether primary voters agree will say something about where the party's base actually is.
Fox News Digital reached out to Dunn's campaign but received no response as of the time of reporting.
Dunn served as a Capitol Police officer. That's an honorable profession. But honorable service in one role does not automatically translate into competence in another, and voters who lived through a primary where this same pitch fell short have every reason to ask what's different this time.
The answer, apparently, is the district. The messenger hasn't changed. The message hasn't changed. Pelosi hasn't changed. Only the zip codes have.
Walter Carter Jr., the president of Ohio State University, resigned Monday after disclosing what the school called an "inappropriate relationship" with "someone seeking public resources." Carter had held the position for barely two years.
The university announced the departure in a statement, though it offered almost nothing in the way of specifics. Neither the identity of the person involved nor the nature of the relationship appeared in the school's announcement. What did appear was a careful selection of language designed to convey seriousness while revealing as little as possible.
Carter, according to the New York Times, acknowledged he had "made a mistake in allowing inappropriate access to Ohio State leadership to support her personal business." That single sentence does more work than the entire university statement. It confirms the relationship involved a woman, that she had a private business interest, and that Carter used his position to open doors for her.
Carter went to work at Ohio State in January 2024 on a contract running through 2028 with a salary of about $1.2 million. He is a former vice admiral and naval flight officer who served as superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, president of the U.S. Naval War College, and president of the University of Nebraska before arriving in Columbus.
That résumé makes the fall steeper. This was not some mid-career administrator with a thin portfolio. Carter carried the weight of military command and institutional leadership at the highest levels. The expectation that accompanies credentials like those is not merely competence but integrity. Ohio State hired a man whose career was built on discipline and accountability. What they got was someone who, by his own admission, compromised university access for someone's private gain.
John W. Zeiger, chairman of the university's board, wrote a letter accepting Carter's resignation. His public statement was measured but unmistakable, Breitbart reported:
"The Board was surprised and disappointed to learn of this matter and takes the situation and its potential impact on the university very seriously."
"Surprised and disappointed" is board-speak, but the phrase "potential impact on the university" signals that the board understands the damage may extend well beyond one man's career. When someone with the keys to a flagship public university grants "inappropriate access" to advance a private business, the questions multiply fast. What resources were offered? What decisions were influenced? Who else knew?
The most striking feature of this episode is the vacuum at its center. The university disclosed almost nothing:
That level of opacity from a public institution spending public money should concern every Ohio taxpayer. Ohio State is not a private company handling a quiet personnel matter. It is one of the largest public universities in the country, and its president was drawing a seven-figure salary from funds that ultimately trace back to the people of Ohio. The public deserves more than a carefully worded press release.
Zeiger closed his letter with a notably diplomatic line:
"We respect your decision and appreciate your cooperation in supporting an orderly leadership transition."
Translation: Carter cooperated, so the board let him walk out the front door. That may be the pragmatic choice for institutional stability, but it leaves the impression that elite leaders at elite institutions still get to manage the terms of their own accountability.
This story fits a pattern that conservatives have watched develop across American higher education for years. University presidencies have become less about academic stewardship and more about institutional empire-building. Salaries climb into the millions. Administrative layers multiply. And the culture at the top starts to resemble corporate boardrooms where conflicts of interest are managed rather than prevented.
Carter's admission that he allowed "inappropriate access" to support a private business is not just a personal failure. It is a window into how university leadership operates when the money is large enough and the oversight is loose enough. Public universities enjoy enormous autonomy. Their boards are often composed of political appointees and donors whose incentive is to protect the brand, not to scrutinize the president's calendar.
The result is a system where a scandal like this surfaces only when the president himself decides to come forward, and even then, the institution releases the minimum information necessary to close the chapter.
Carter resigned. That is a consequence. But resignation without disclosure is damage control, not accountability. If a state legislator had granted government access to a private individual to advance her business interests, the calls for investigation would be immediate. The standard should not be lower because the institution is a university rather than a statehouse.
Ohio State's board now faces a choice. It can treat this as a closed matter, appoint an interim president, and move on. Or it can answer the questions that its own statement deliberately left open. The first option is easier. The second is what a public institution owes the public.
A man who commanded warships and led service academies walked away from a $1.2 million job because he opened the wrong doors for the wrong person. The university that hired him would prefer you not ask which doors or how far they opened.
The Bank of England will replace the historical figures on its banknotes with images of wildlife, trading some of Britain's most celebrated minds for animals after a public consultation found that about 60 percent of respondents "wanted nature to feature" on the next series of currency.
Sir Winston Churchill will be gone from the £5 note. Gone will be Jane Austen from the £10, J.M.W. Turner from the £20, and Alan Turing from the £50. In their place: beavers, birds, or whatever fauna a panel of wildlife experts eventually shortlists.
King Charles III will remain on the front of the notes. The backs, however, belong to the animal kingdom now.
The Bank of England held a public consultation on banknote imagery last year and received some 44,000 responses. Based on those results, the bank announced that nature would replace historical figures as the dominant theme on future notes. Victoria Cleland, the bank's chief cashier, framed the decision in practical terms, Politico reported:
"The key driver for introducing a new banknote series is always to increase counterfeit resilience, but it also provides an opportunity to celebrate different aspects of the U.K."
She added:
"Nature is a great choice from a banknote authentication perspective, and means we can showcase the U.K.'s rich and varied wildlife on the next series of banknotes."
The bank said it will hold a second public consultation in the summer to gather views on the kind of nature people would like to see featured, with a shortlist to be drawn up by the wildlife panel. The new notes won't enter circulation for several years.
There is nothing wrong with loving nature. Britain's countryside is genuinely beautiful. But currency is not a nature documentary. It is one of the few remaining artifacts of shared national identity that every citizen handles, often daily. What a country chooses to print on its money is a statement about what it values most.
For generations, Britain answered that question with its greatest contributions to civilization:
These are not obscure bureaucrats. They are titans. And now they're being swapped out because 60 percent of consultation respondents preferred otters.
Consider what that consultation actually represents. Forty-four thousand people responded. The United Kingdom has a population of 67 million. The decision to erase some of the most consequential figures in Western history from daily public life rests on the preferences of a fraction of a fraction of the country.
This fits a pattern that conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic recognize well. The slow, administrative removal of national heroes from public spaces never arrives as a dramatic confrontation. It comes wrapped in the language of freshness, inclusion, and "celebrating different aspects" of a country. The phrasing is always anodyne. The effect is always the same: the past disappears, and nothing of comparable weight replaces it.
Nobody had to tear down a statue this time. Nobody had to organize a protest. A consultation was held, a bureaucratic process churned, and Winston Churchill got replaced by wildlife. The machinery of cultural forgetting doesn't need a mob. It just needs a committee.
The counterargument writes itself: it's just money, it's just design, the figures aren't being "canceled." But symbols matter. That's precisely why activists spend so much energy fighting over them. A country that can't bring itself to keep its wartime prime minister on a banknote is a country experiencing a quiet crisis of civilizational confidence.
Cleland's justification leaned heavily on counterfeit resilience. Fair enough. Security features on currency evolve, and new note series are periodically necessary. But updating security features has never required abandoning the entire thematic framework of a nation's currency. You can make a more secure banknote without removing Churchill from it. The decision to change the theme was a choice, not a technical requirement, and the bank should own that honestly rather than hiding behind authentication language.
The second consultation this summer will determine which specific animals make the cut. Expect months of earnest debate about red squirrels versus hedgehogs while the deeper question goes unasked: why did Britain decide that its history was no longer worth displaying?
Every nation gets the currency it deserves. A country confident in its past puts its heroes on its money. A country embarrassed by its past puts a beaver there instead and calls it progress.
Churchill once said that a nation that forgets its past has no future. Soon, his face won't even be there to remind them.
A van plowed through a temporary security barricade near the White House early Wednesday morning, and the driver was promptly detained by uniformed officers at the scene. The incident occurred at 6:26 a.m. ET near Madison Place and H Street Northwest, at the northeast corner of Lafayette Park, due north of the executive mansion.
President Trump was at the White House at the time. He was scheduled to travel to Ohio and Kentucky later on Wednesday.
The Secret Service said charges against the driver are pending, but did not provide further details. The driver has not been publicly identified.
The sequence of events moved quickly, according to the New York Post. Washington's Metropolitan Police Department was called to assist the Secret Service roughly ten minutes after the crash, at approximately 6:37 a.m. ET. The department's bomb squad responded and checked the van, ultimately declaring it safe.
Streets approaching the area were blocked off by police and Secret Service vehicles shortly after 8 a.m. By 10 a.m. ET, all road closures had been lifted, according to the Secret Service.
That's a tight operational window: barricade breach to all-clear in under four hours. The rapid response and controlled reopening suggest the security apparatus around the White House performed as designed, even after a perimeter was physically compromised.
This breach did not occur in a vacuum. Security at sensitive sites around the country and at U.S. outposts abroad has reportedly been stepped up amid the ongoing U.S.-Israel war on Iran, which entered its 12th day on Wednesday. A vehicle ramming a barricade near the president's residence, during an active military conflict, immediately raises the stakes of any incident from routine to potentially grave.
We don't yet know the driver's identity or motive. That matters. The difference between a disoriented commuter and a deliberate attack is the difference between a local police blotter item and a national security event. Until authorities release more information, speculation is irresponsible. But vigilance is not.
What we can say is this: temporary barricades are, by definition, temporary. They are not walls. They are not bollards rated for vehicle-borne attacks. The fact that a van was able to crash through one and reach the vicinity of Lafayette Park should prompt serious questions about whether the current perimeter security posture is adequate given the threat environment.
White House security breaches have a long and bipartisan history. Fence jumpers, drones, unauthorized vehicles. Each incident prompts a review, sometimes an upgrade, and then the cycle fades from public attention until the next one. The question is never whether the Secret Service responded well after the breach. They almost always do. The question is whether the breach should have been possible in the first place.
With American forces engaged in a hot conflict overseas and domestic tensions running high, the protective perimeter around the president deserves more than temporary barriers and after-action reports. It deserves the kind of infrastructure that makes a Wednesday morning van attack not just unsuccessful, but physically impossible.
Charges are pending. The driver's identity and motive remain undisclosed. Those details will determine whether this story stays a security incident or becomes something far more consequential.
In the meantime, the van has been towed, the streets have reopened, and Washington is moving on with its day. The system held. But "the system held" is a low bar when the breach happened at the front door of the most important address in the country, during a war, with the president inside.
President Trump told House Republicans in Miami on Monday that passing the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act is the single most important thing the party can do before the fall midterms, and he put Senate Democrats on notice: no SAVE Act, no signatures on anything else.
The bill, which would require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections, cleared the House last month with the support of every Republican and one Democrat. It now heads to the Senate, where it needs 60 votes to pass. Republicans hold 53 seats. The math is obvious. So is the fight.
Trump framed the legislation in the plainest terms possible during his remarks at the House Republican retreat at Trump National Doral Miami:
"This is not complicated: voter identification."
He called it a "common sense measure" and "the easiest thing we have," then pointed to polling he said shows 86% of Democrats support voter ID laws. The holdouts, in his telling, aren't rank-and-file voters. They're the people running the Democratic Party.
"Democrats are at 86%, except for the people that run the Democrat Party, because they want to try and win elections illegally."
He didn't leave room for charitable interpretation.
"It's the only reason you vote against voter ID – because you want to cheat."
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded exactly the way you'd expect from someone whose party has turned election integrity into a culture-war grenade. He labeled the SAVE Act "Jim Crow 2.0" and claimed it would "disenfranchise tens of millions of people," according to the New York Post.
Think about that claim for a moment. Tens of millions of American citizens, according to Schumer, cannot prove they are citizens. The argument collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. You need identification to board a plane, buy a firearm, open a bank account, or pick up a prescription. But requiring it to vote in a federal election is somehow an act of racial oppression.
Schumer then escalated the stakes in response to Trump's vow on Sunday to "not sign other Bills until this is passed."
"If Trump is saying he won't sign any bills until the SAVE Act is passed, then so be it: there will be total gridlock in the Senate."
He followed that with an even starker declaration:
"Senate Democrats will not help pass the SAVE Act under any circumstances."
Under any circumstances. Not "we have concerns about implementation." Not "we'd like to negotiate amendments." Under any circumstances. Schumer isn't opposing a specific provision. He's opposing the concept of verifying that voters in American elections are Americans.
Trump, being Trump, didn't limit himself to policy arguments. He took a shot at Schumer that landed somewhere between insult and observation, calling him "a horrible politician" and adding that Schumer "is now a Palestinian. Officially, he is registered as a Palestinian." The remark was a jab at Schumer's leftward drift on Israel and his willingness to align with the progressive wing of his party on virtually every issue that matters to them.
The quip will generate headlines. The substance underneath it shouldn't get lost. Schumer has positioned himself and every Senate Democrat as a wall against voter ID, a policy supported by overwhelming majorities of the American public, including, by Trump's cited figures, the vast majority of Democratic voters themselves.
That's the contradiction worth watching. Democratic leadership is not representing Democratic voters on this issue. They're representing a strategic interest in keeping the voting process as porous as possible.
Trump's case to House Republicans was straightforward: pass the SAVE Act and make Democrats own their opposition to it heading into November.
"They're doing everything possible because they know if we get this, they probably won't win an election for 50 years."
He paused, then added: "Maybe longer."
Whether or not the bill clears the Senate, the political logic is sound. Voter ID polls at supermajority levels across party lines. Forcing a vote, or forcing Democrats to block one, creates a clean contrast heading into the midterms. Republicans stand for verifying citizenship. Democrats stand against it. That's not a complicated message to communicate to voters.
Trump also acknowledged that Republicans who push election integrity measures "fight like hell," but conceded "boy, do they get killed," a reference to the media and institutional backlash that accompanies any attempt to tighten voting procedures. The acknowledgment matters. It signals to House members that the White House understands the political cost and is willing to absorb it alongside them.
The SAVE Act needs seven Senate Democrats to reach 60 votes. Schumer has promised that zero will defect. That means one of two things happens:
Trump, for his part, dodged questions at a Monday press conference about whether his vow to withhold signatures extends to specific legislation, including funding for the Department of Homeland Security. The ambiguity is itself a pressure tool. Every piece of legislation Senate Democrats want now sits behind a single gate: prove you believe only citizens should vote.
Schumer called it gridlock. Trump might call it leverage. The distinction depends entirely on which side you think is defending something worth defending.
Eighty-six percent of Democrats support voter ID. Their leaders would rather shut down the Senate than let it happen. That gap between the party and its voters isn't a polling anomaly. It's the whole story.
Roberto Detrinidad, a violent sex offender sentenced to life in prison for breaking into a San Francisco woman's apartment and sexually assaulting her while she slept, is scheduled to walk out of San Quentin State Prison in May. He served 11 years.
Eleven years. For a life sentence. For sodomy committed against a sleeping woman in 2013 by an HIV-positive felon who planned the attack.
Two parole commissioners, Michael Ruff and Cristina Guerrero, determined that Detrinidad no longer posed an "unreasonable risk" to public safety. The decision came at a January 6, 2026, parole hearing, where Detrinidad himself described what he did.
"I started a plan that if I could get in there, have my way with her and get away, that was my plan."
That is the man California's parole system has decided is safe to release. A man who, in his own words, hatched a plan to break into a bartender's apartment and rape her while she was unconscious. A man who carried it out. A man who did so while HIV-positive.
Detrinidad's path back to the streets runs through a system of early release programs and "good behavior" credits that have expanded under Gavin Newsom. The same system that, during the pandemic, freed nearly 15,000 inmates early, with about 4,600 of them returning to prison, according to the New York Post.
That recidivism number alone should give any reasonable person pause. Nearly a third of early releases ended up back behind bars. But the machinery keeps running. The credits keep accumulating. And a man who received a life sentence for a premeditated sexual assault walks free after barely a decade.
Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schuber vehemently opposed the decision. Her objection cuts to the core of what makes this case indefensible:
"Why is California releasing violent sex offenders before they've even completed serious treatment for the crimes that put them in prison."
That is not a rhetorical question. Detrinidad reportedly failed to complete sex-offender programming. The state sentenced him to life, offered him treatment as a condition of that sentence, watched him not finish it, and is releasing him anyway.
Commissioner Ruff, in explaining the decision, offered a statement that deserves to be read carefully:
"Our decision in no way excuses his behavior in the life offense where he acknowledges that his actions affected the victim for a significant period of time."
"Affected the victim for a significant period of time." A woman was violated in her own bed, in her own home, by an HIV-positive intruder who planned the attack. The bureaucratic language does more to sanitize the crime than any defense attorney ever could.
This is what happens when a system optimizes for throughput instead of justice. The parole board's job, as California has apparently defined it, is not to ask whether the punishment fits the crime. It is to ask whether a statistical model and a checklist of institutional behavior suggest that the offender can be managed on the outside. The victim, the severity of the crime, and the meaning of "life sentence" become afterthoughts.
None of this exists in isolation. California's political class has spent years constructing an elaborate architecture of leniency:
Each piece, taken alone, gets defended with the same toolkit of progressive criminal justice rhetoric. "Mass incarceration." "Restorative justice." "Second chances." But stack them together, and the picture is unmistakable: the system no longer treats violent crime with the seriousness it demands.
A life sentence used to mean something. It communicated to victims that the state took what happened to them seriously. It communicated to the public that certain acts place you outside the boundaries of civil society permanently. In California, it now communicates that you'll be out in about a decade if you follow the rules of your housing unit.
The progressive theory of criminal justice holds that rehabilitation is always possible, that incarceration is inherently excessive, and that the system's primary obligation runs to the offender, not the victim. This case is the theory made flesh.
Detrinidad planned a rape. He executed it. He did so while carrying HIV. He was caught, tried, and sentenced to life. He did not complete the treatment program designed for sex offenders. And two commissioners decided he was safe to release.
At no point in this sequence does anyone with institutional power appear to have asked the simplest question: What about the woman?
She went to sleep in her own apartment. She woke up to a nightmare that would define the rest of her life. The state told her the man who did it would never walk free. Now, 11 years later, the state has changed its mind.
California's leaders built this system. They expanded it. They staffed the parole boards. They wrote the credit formulas. And in May, Roberto Detrinidad walks out of San Quentin because the system worked exactly as they designed it to.
A 50-year-old Philadelphia man who was ordered deported to Mauritania a quarter century ago has been charged with fraudulent voting after allegedly casting ballots in the last five presidential elections. Mahady Sacko never left the country. Instead, he registered to vote, showed up at the polls cycle after cycle, and falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen every time.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania announced the charges, stating that Sacko "allegedly unlawfully voted in person in the 2024 general election for federal office" and "falsely represented that he was a U.S. citizen to vote and register to vote." If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.
Five years. For two decades of fraudulent voting. That's roughly one year per stolen presidential election.
The criminal complaint lays out a timeline that reads like a catalog of institutional failure. Sacko entered the United States in Miami in March 1998. By June 14, 2000, an Immigration Judge in Philadelphia had ordered him removed. He was present in the courtroom for that decision. He appealed. On November 14, 2002, the Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed his appeal and affirmed the judge's order, as Fox News reports.
And then nothing happened.
According to the complaint, Sacko "did not depart the United States as ordered by the Immigration Judge." The reason? He didn't have a current passport from Mauritania, and ICE could not obtain one for him. So the government placed him on supervision, requiring him to "regularly report to their office as an alien under an order of deportation."
He checked in with ICE more than a dozen times. He was arrested by ICE in Philadelphia in January 2007. And yet he remained. The system knew exactly where he was, knew he had no legal right to be in the country, and let him stay because a foreign government wouldn't issue paperwork.
That is not enforcement. That is a bureaucratic shrug dressed up as a process.
While dutifully checking in with ICE as an illegal immigrant under a removal order, Sacko was simultaneously building a voting record. According to an FBI special agent, Pennsylvania records show Sacko first registered to vote in January 2005, three years after his final deportation appeal was denied.
The agent wrote that Sacko then voted in a string of federal elections:
The FBI agent stated in the complaint that Sacko "voted in person for each of these elections, except for the 2020 primary election, in which he voted by mail. On each occasion, Sacko falsely represented that he was a U.S. citizen."
Every election. Every time. A man the federal government had ordered removed from the country walked into polling places and cast ballots as though he belonged there. Voting records also show Sacko had registered as a Democrat, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
For years, Americans who raised concerns about noncitizen voting were told they were chasing a phantom. Election integrity was unassailable. Voter fraud was so rare as to be functionally nonexistent. Demands for citizenship verification at the polls were branded as voter suppression, thinly veiled racism, or conspiratorial hysteria.
Sacko's case does not prove that millions of illegal immigrants are voting. But it demolishes the comfortable fiction that the system makes such fraud impossible. Here was a man under an active deportation order, reporting regularly to federal immigration authorities, who registered and voted in election after election for nearly twenty years without a single safeguard catching it.
Nobody flagged the registration. Nobody cross-referenced immigration databases with voter rolls. Nobody noticed that a man ICE was supervising as a deportable alien was simultaneously exercising the most fundamental right of citizenship. The question is not whether this happens at scale. The question is how we would even know, given that every mechanism designed to prevent it apparently failed.
It is worth noting where this played out. Philadelphia is not some obscure jurisdiction. It is the largest city in one of the most consequential swing states in the country. It is the city where Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris debated ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Pennsylvania has decided recent presidential races by margins so thin that even a small number of fraudulent votes can carry real weight.
None of this means that Sacko's individual votes swung an election. But the principle matters enormously. Every fraudulent ballot cast by someone with no legal right to vote cancels out the legitimate vote of an American citizen. That is not an abstraction. It is a direct, measurable harm to the democratic process, and the people harmed most are voters in the very communities where fraud occurs.
The left treats election integrity measures as threats to democracy. The Sacko case suggests the real threat is a system so porous that a man living openly under a deportation order can vote for two decades without detection. Requiring proof of citizenship to register is not suppression. It is the bare minimum a serious country would demand.
The maximum sentence Sacko faces is five years. Consider the math. He allegedly voted illegally across seven federal elections spanning nearly two decades, falsely claiming citizenship each time. If convicted and given the maximum, he would serve less than nine months per fraudulent election.
More troubling is what the complaint reveals about the enforcement apparatus. ICE had Sacko under supervision. He reported to their office regularly. He was arrested in 2007. Yet the complaint notes plainly that "ICE/ERO was unable to enforce the decision of the Immigration Judge and remove Sacko from the United States" because Mauritania would not provide travel documents.
A foreign government's refusal to cooperate became the reason an illegal immigrant with a deportation order remained in the country for a quarter century. The system treated that refusal as the final word rather than a problem to be solved. Meanwhile, Sacko registered to vote, cast ballots, and lived as though the immigration judge's order had never been issued.
Sacko's case is a single prosecution, but the failures it exposes are systemic. A voter registration process that accepted a noncitizen's claim of citizenship without verification. An immigration enforcement system that tracked a deportable alien for years without removing him. A gap between federal databases and state voter rolls wide enough to drive two decades of fraud through undetected.
Every official who spent the last several years insisting these systems are airtight owes the public an explanation. Not for this one case, but for the architecture that made it possible.
A man ordered deported in 2000 voted in 2024. The system didn't catch him. The system watched him do it.
Denis Bouchard, a Canadian national living in North Carolina, pleaded guilty to voting illegally in the 2022 and 2024 elections, the U.S. Department of Justice announced. Prosecutors say he has lived in the United States since he was a child but never became a citizen.
WRAL reported that he lied on his voter registration form and said he was a citizen, allowing him to cast ballots. But here's the part that should stop you cold: prosecutors allege Bouchard voted in New Hanover and Pender County elections over the past 20 years.
Two decades. Not a one-time mistake. Not a clerical mix-up. Twenty years of an illegal vote diluting the voice of every lawful citizen in the Wilmington area.
Bouchard faces up to 10 years in federal prison, but only for the 2022 and 2024 elections. The DOJ did not explain why prosecutors charged him only for those two cycles when they believed the illegal voting stretched back two decades. Nor did anyone explain why he was never flagged before.
A spokesperson for U.S. Attorney W. Ellis Boyle pointed to the fact that some federal felonies carry five-year statutes of limitations, then declined to comment further. That's a legal explanation, not a satisfying one. If a man can vote illegally for 20 years before anyone notices, the system that allowed it deserves at least as much scrutiny as the man who exploited it.
Court documents didn't list a lawyer for Bouchard. Efforts to reach him were unsuccessful.
For years, Americans who raised concerns about non-citizens voting were told they were chasing a myth. The standard line from the left was that illegal voting essentially doesn't happen, that the system's safeguards are robust, and that anyone who questioned election integrity was peddling conspiracy theories to justify "voter suppression."
Denis Bouchard voted for 20 years. The safeguards didn't catch him. He caught himself in the sense that a federal investigation had finally landed on his doorstep. The question is how many others haven't been caught.
That's not a conspiracy theory. It's the logical inference from a case where the system failed for two full decades.
Boyle, the U.S. attorney overseeing the case, framed the outcome as a deterrent:
"Every eligible citizen should have confidence that an alien voting illegally will get sniffed and prosecuted."
Confidence is earned, not declared. When it takes 20 years to catch one man in one county, the word "confidence" does a lot of heavy lifting.
The voter registration process asked Bouchard a simple question: are you a citizen? He said yes. That was enough. For two decades, no verification mechanism flagged the discrepancy between his immigration status and his voter file.
State Board of Elections Director Sam Hayes praised the work of the FBI and prosecutors and said the board will continue investigating credible claims of voter fraud. That's the right posture going forward. But praise for catching the problem doesn't answer why the problem existed for so long.
Consider the timeline:
Every one of those bullet points represents a failure. Not a failure of voters, who trusted the process, but a failure of institutions that assured the public no such failure was possible.
One illegal vote in a local election can swing a school board race, a county commission seat, or a bond referendum. Multiply that by 20 years of elections across two counties, and the damage isn't theoretical. Real candidates won or lost by margins that included at least one vote that should never have been counted.
The left's insistence that non-citizen voting is too rare to worry about has always served a convenient purpose: it preempts the very enforcement mechanisms that would reveal the scope of the problem. You can't find what you refuse to look for.
Bouchard's case doesn't prove the system is overrun. But it proves the system is porous. And it proves that the people who told you otherwise were either wrong or uninterested in finding out.
Twenty years. Two counties. One man who simply checked a box and walked right through.