The most decorated woman in bobsled history walked into the White House on Thursday and did something no Olympic athlete has ever done for a sitting president. Kaillie Humphries, fresh off a bronze medal at the 2026 Winter Games in Italy, presented President Donald Trump with her Order of Ikkos medal during a Women's History Month event hosted by the president and first lady Melania Trump.
Trump, according to Humphries, is the first president in history to receive one.
The Order of Ikkos isn't a trinket. Every U.S. Olympic medalist receives one to award to someone who made a meaningful contribution to their journey to the podium. Humphries chose the President of the United States.
Humphries didn't mince words about her reasons, according to the Washington Examiner. She cited Trump's "support and the impact" he has had on women's sports, specifically "standing up to keep biological women in women's sports, to keep the field of play safe and allow for fair competition."
She also pointed to his administration's work on IVF access. As Humphries put it:
"Furthermore, because your policies are creating greater access to IVF, so families like mine can continue to grow."
Then she turned to the crowd and asked, "Isn't he just the best?"
Trump's response was characteristically succinct: "Wow." Followed by, "I knew I liked her."
Humphries isn't a newcomer leveraging a political moment. She's an athlete whose resume commands respect in any room. She won gold at the 2010 and 2014 Winter Games as a member of the Canadian bobsled team before eventually competing for the United States. She took monobob bronze at the 2018 Games, then gold in the same event at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing. Last month, she added another bronze in monobob at the 2026 Games in Italy.
That's a career spanning nearly two decades at the highest level of one of the most physically demanding sports on earth. When someone with that pedigree hands you a medal and explains why, it carries weight.
What makes this moment resonate beyond the ceremony itself is what it represents. For years, female athletes who objected to biological males competing in women's sports were told to sit down. They were called bigots. They were warned that speaking up would cost them sponsorships, teammates, and careers. Many stayed quiet. Some didn't, and paid the price.
Humphries chose a different path. She stood in the White House, on a platform built by a lifetime of elite competition, and publicly thanked the president for defending the category that made her career possible. She framed fair competition not as a culture war talking point but as the foundation of women's athletic achievement.
That framing matters. The left has spent years insisting that protecting women's sports is somehow an attack on progress. Humphries, a woman who has competed at the highest level across four separate Olympic Games, just called it what it is: keeping the field of play safe and fair.
It's harder to dismiss that message when it comes from someone who has actually stood on the podium.
There's a pattern developing that the legacy sports media would rather not cover. Elite female athletes, the ones with the medals and the miles and the scars to prove it, are increasingly willing to say publicly what they've long said privately. They want to compete against other biological women. They want rules that reflect basic physiological reality. And they're willing to thank the people in power who agree.
Humphries explained the significance of the Order of Ikkos before she handed it over:
"Every Olympic medalist in the United States gets an Order of Ikkos that they get to hand to somebody in honor and recognition of somebody who's made a meaningful contribution to their journey to the podium, because Olympic medals are never achieved alone."
She could have given that medal to a coach, a trainer, a family member. She gave it to the president. Not as a political stunt, but as recognition of something concrete: policies that protect the competitive environment she has dedicated her life to.
The ceremony was brief. The message was not. A world-class athlete looked at the landscape of women's sports, assessed who was actually fighting to preserve it, and made her choice in front of the entire country.
No hedging. No apology. No anonymous quotes to a friendly reporter afterward, walking it back.
Just an Olympic champion, a medal, and a "thank you" that landed exactly where she intended it.
Dr. Mehmet Oz fired back at New York Attorney General Letitia James in a March 10 letter, defending NYU Langone Medical Center's decision to permanently shut down its transgender youth health program and dismantling James's threat to force the hospital to restart it.
The letter landed one day before a deadline James herself had imposed. Her office gave NYU Langone until Wednesday, March 11, to resume the procedures or face legal action. Oz made clear that wouldn't be happening without a fight.
"Our children are not guinea pigs."
That was the centerpiece of Oz's message, and it framed everything that followed: a methodical, medically grounded rejection of the attorney general's claim that canceling these interventions amounts to unlawful discrimination.
According to the New York Post, NYU Langone permanently axed its transgender youth health program in February, after the Trump administration threatened to pull federal funding from the hospital if it continued providing gender-affirming care for minors. James responded on February 25 with a letter accusing the hospital of abandoning patients.
"NYU Langone appears to be suddenly and indefinitely cancelling transgender children's future appointments thereby jeopardizing access to medically necessary healthcare for some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers."
That phrase, "medically necessary," is doing an enormous amount of work in James's argument. It presumes settled science where none exists. It treats an active, international medical debate as though one side has already won. And it forms the entire legal basis for the attorney general of New York to threaten a major medical institution into performing procedures on children.
Neither the AG's office nor NYU Langone officials returned requests for comment.
Oz didn't just disagree. He went after the foundation of James's position, calling it both scientifically irresponsible and ethically indefensible. His letter cited a report ordered by the Trump administration and pointed to the growing body of evidence from European health authorities that have pulled back from the same interventions James wants to compel.
"Given that emerging medical evidence continues to demonstrate the harm these procedures inflict on children, it is both irresponsible and false to declare the other side of this ongoing scientific debate definitively 'medically necessary.'"
He went further, addressing the coercion directly:
"It is worse still to compel doctors to perform procedures that remain the subject of substantial dispute. It is also unethical. Your claim that discontinuing these interventions constitutes unlawful discrimination is irresponsible."
Oz described the procedures in question as "surgical and chemical interventions on vulnerable children with potentially irreversible consequences." He called NYU Langone's decision "a serious and necessary course correction." And he made his position unambiguous: "My office stands behind NYU's decision."
One of the most devastating elements of Oz's letter is the international comparison. Several European health authorities acknowledged years ago what American progressives still refuse to concede. The UK, for example, imposed restrictions on prescribing puberty blockers. Other European governments followed suit.
Oz noted that those decisions weren't driven by politics:
"Those governments framed their decisions as grounded in formal evidence reviews and evolving assessments of the clinical data — not politics and baseless pressure campaigns."
The irony is sharp. The American left routinely invokes European models when it suits them: healthcare systems, climate policy, labor protections. But when Sweden, Finland, and the UK conduct rigorous evidence reviews and conclude that these interventions on minors lack sufficient scientific support, suddenly, Europe has nothing to teach us.
That selective deafness tells you everything about what's actually driving this debate.
Strip away the legal language, and what you have is a state attorney general attempting to override medical judgment at a private hospital. James isn't arguing that NYU Langone committed malpractice. She isn't alleging fraud. She's arguing that a hospital choosing not to perform contested procedures on children is, in itself, discrimination.
Think about what that standard would mean if applied broadly. Any hospital that declines a disputed treatment based on evolving evidence could face legal action from a state AG with a political agenda. Medical institutions would not be free to follow the science. They would be compelled to follow politics.
Oz put it plainly:
"As a doctor, I am appalled that your office would attempt to force a hospital to perform potentially life-altering medical procedures on children that are not solidly grounded in science to make a political point."
James's self-imposed deadline has arrived. Whether her office follows through with legal action remains to be seen. But the dynamics have shifted. NYU Langone now has explicit federal backing. The Trump administration has made its position clear through both funding threats and the report Oz cited. And the medical evidence continues to accumulate on the side of caution.
James is welcome to take this to court. She should be prepared to explain to a judge why the attorney general of New York knows better than NYU Langone's medical staff, better than European health authorities, and better than the growing chorus of clinicians who are raising alarms about irreversible procedures performed on children who cannot fully consent to them.
The Empire State's chief lawyer set a deadline. The answer came back a day early, and it wasn't the one she wanted.
Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran's newly appointed supreme leader, failed to appear at his own succession rally in Tehran on Monday. Thousands gathered at Enghelab Square to celebrate his appointment, and the man they came to honor was represented by a portrait. Just a portrait. One that was half the size of the one displayed for his late father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
State media footage of the event confirmed the absence. No explanation was offered. The new supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has yet to be spotted in public since the war with the US and Israel began.
According to the New York Post, the portrait of the dead leader took up the center of the stage while his son's smaller image hung nearby, a visual hierarchy that told the story better than any analyst could. The regime staged the rally. The crowds showed up. The supreme leader did not.
Khosro Isfahani, the research director for the National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI), offered a blunt assessment of what's going on:
"It's either he's out cold in a hospital, or he's scared and hiding in the deepest bunker they have after seeing his dad be turned into red mist."
Isfahani told The Post that Khamenei lacks public support and was only appointed to the position because of pressure from the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC needed a figurehead. They got one who won't leave his bunker.
Isfahani's most memorable line deserves its full airing:
"He has the charisma of a boiled potato."
Observers speculate that Mojtaba is either wounded or hiding out in fear. Neither option inspires confidence in a regime that styles itself as a divinely ordained revolutionary state. Supreme leaders are supposed to project strength. This one projects absence.
The more interesting story may not be who's missing, but who's watching. Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, is widely viewed as the most powerful man in Iran following the ayatollah's death at the start of the war. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf leads the other major faction. Together, they represent the two poles of Iranian power politics.
Neither seems particularly bothered by Mojtaba's installation. According to Isfahani, they see it as a strategic gift:
"Those two want to sit this out and are happy to see Mojtaba be the one to beat his chest and take the reins."
In other words, Larijani and Ghalibaf are content to let Khamenei's son absorb the incoming fire while they position themselves for whatever comes next. Isfahani put it plainly:
"Mojtaba is irrelevant, and they see it as a short-term appointment because it's not going to last very long."
That framing matters. When the people closest to power inside a regime view the new supreme leader as a temporary placeholder, the regime is not projecting strength. It is managing decline.
President Trump has repeatedly warned Tehran not to pick a leader without seeking his approval first, specifically naming Khamenei an "unacceptable" candidate. The regime installed him anyway, and Trump responded with characteristic directness.
"They are wasting their time. Khamenei's son is a lightweight."
He added that the new leader was "not going to last long."
That assessment lines up almost perfectly with what Isfahani and other analysts are saying from the opposition side. When the American president and Iranian opposition researchers reach the same conclusion independently, it's not spin. It's pattern recognition.
Larijani has reportedly been recently threatening President Trump, though no details of those threats have been made public. Whatever leverage Iran's security council believes it holds, the spectacle in Enghelab Square didn't strengthen its hand.
There's a particular kind of weakness that authoritarian regimes cannot survive: the kind everyone can see. Democracies absorb embarrassment. Strongman states cannot. When the supreme leader of Iran skips his own rally, every faction inside the country recalculates. Every ally reconsiders. Every enemy takes note.
The IRGC pushed Mojtaba Khamenei into the role because they needed continuity. They needed the Khamenei name on the door. What they got instead is a leader who:
The regime held a coronation. The king didn't show. The portrait was smaller than his father's. The factions that actually run the country are already looking past him.
Tehran filled a square. It couldn't fill a throne.
An inmate at Pima County Jail has filed a lawsuit against Sheriff Chris Nanos and his department, claiming deputies endangered his life by ignoring COVID-19 quarantine protocols. Christopher Michael Marx filed the suit in the US District Court for the District of Arizona on March 5, seeking $1,350,000 and a formal apology.
Marx alleges a sheriff's deputy moved freely between jail units, including one housing an inmate quarantined with COVID-19, without taking basic sanitation precautions. According to the lawsuit, the deputy "did not wipe down his body" while rotating between the units, exposing other inmates to the virus.
"This deputy was going back and forth working both units … our unit was on lockdown because this deputy was working both units."
Marx claims this conduct violated Article Two of the Arizona State Constitution, the Declaration of Rights, and amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Beyond the seven-figure payout, he wants Nanos and the department to guarantee that deputies "properly disinfect their bodies while working between quarantined units."
The lawsuit lands on Nanos at a particularly inconvenient moment. The sheriff is already facing pointed criticism over his department's handling of the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie. Nancy Guthrie was reported missing on Feb. 1, and a months-long investigation has produced, according to critics, no real leads.
Sgt. Aaron Cross, president of the Pima County Deputies Organization, offered a blunt assessment of the situation to the New York Post:
"It is a common belief in this agency that this case has become an ego case for Sheriff Nanos."
When the people inside your own agency are saying that publicly, the problem isn't external perception. It's internal confidence. Cross's statement suggests a department where rank-and-file deputies have lost faith in the leadership directing their work.
Marx is not a sympathetic plaintiff by any stretch. He was found guilty of shoplifting in late 2024, according to Newsweek. He's an inmate suing the county for over a million dollars because a deputy allegedly walked between two units without sanitizing. The claim itself reads like the kind of jailhouse litigation that floods federal courts every year.
But that's precisely what makes the broader picture worth watching. When a sheriff's department can't keep a routine COVID protocol complaint from escalating to federal court, and simultaneously can't produce results in a high-profile missing persons case involving a nationally known family, the question stops being about any single incident. It becomes a question about competence.
The Pima County Sheriff's Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. That silence is becoming a pattern.
The demands in the suit are worth listing plainly:
The money is one thing. The apology demand tells you something about the nature of the complaint. Marx isn't just alleging negligence. He's alleging indifference.
"This put my life in jeopardy with their action, constantly."
Pima County sits in southern Arizona, a region that has dealt with enormous strain on law enforcement resources in recent years. Sheriffs in border-adjacent counties are expected to manage routine jail operations, complex investigations, and the downstream consequences of border policy failures, all at once. That's a real challenge, and it deserves honest acknowledgment.
But resource strain doesn't excuse basic institutional dysfunction. If deputies are rotating between quarantined and non-quarantined units without following sanitation protocols, that's a supervision failure. If a months-long missing persons investigation has stalled to the point where your own sergeants are calling it an "ego case" in the press, that's a leadership failure.
Marx may or may not have a meritorious legal claim. Federal courts will sort that out. What can't be sorted out in a courtroom is the growing chorus of voices, from inmates to deputies to the families of missing persons, all pointing at the same office and asking the same question.
Who's running this department?
United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz delivered a pointed rebuke to "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker on Sunday after she repeatedly pressed him on whether the United States was "at war" with Iran. Waltz refused to play the semantic game, redirecting the conversation to the decades of American blood spilled by Iranian proxies and the administration's resolve to finally end the threat.
The exchange came days after President Donald Trump announced in a video posted to Truth Social early Feb. 28 that the United States military and Israel Defense Forces had launched strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran's regime. Six American service members were killed on March 1 when an Iranian strike hit a technical operations center in Kuwait.
According to the Daily Caller, Welker opened by framing the question around language, telling Waltz that "words matter" and asking whether the Trump administration described its operations as a war against Iran. Waltz didn't bite.
"Well, I describe it as Iran's been at war with us, as I just said, and thankfully—"
Welker cut in: "So, it's a war? Is it a war?"
Waltz finished the thought with a line that drew the sharpest contrast of the interview:
"President Trump is ending it. Look, I'll leave it to the lawyers and those who deal with Congress in terms of the War Powers Act, which every administration has viewed as unconstitutional. That said, Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio has been there day after day and week after week in the recent months to appropriately brief congressional leaders."
The framing of Welker's question is worth pausing on. The implication was clear: pin the administration down with a single word so it can be weaponized in the next news cycle. If Waltz says "war," Democrats get a talking point about unilateral escalation. If he says it's not a war, the press gets to call the strikes disproportionate to whatever lesser term he uses. It's a familiar trap, and Waltz walked right past it.
Where Waltz landed instead was on the human cost that the Washington press corps has spent decades treating as background noise. He invoked the Marines killed in Beirut in 1983, the hundreds of American troops killed in Iraq by Iranian-supplied improvised explosive devices, and the full constellation of Tehran's proxies: Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and others.
"But I'll tell you, you know, who does believe that they're being attacked? It's the soldiers that have been buried for many, many years as a result of Iranian attacks and their proxy attacks — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and others, in Beirut in 1983 and Iraq through those years — over 600 American soldiers, so, I mean, we have to take a step back, Kristen, and look at how many billions, how much time, how much treasure that administration after administration has spent dealing with this."
Over 600 American soldiers. That number rarely surfaces in mainstream coverage of Iran policy. It should be the starting point of every conversation about whether the United States is justified in striking the regime. Instead, the press prefers procedural questions about the War Powers Act and congressional notifications, as though the real scandal is paperwork rather than dead Americans.
Efforts by Democrats to halt American military operations against the Iranian regime were defeated in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. That fact deserves more attention than it has received.
Consider the sequence: Iran strikes a U.S. facility in Kuwait and kills six American service members. The administration responds with force. And the Democratic caucus moves to shut those operations down. Not to demand a broader strategy. Not to offer an alternative. To stop.
This is the party that spent years insisting America must maintain "credibility" on the world stage. Apparently, that credibility evaporates the moment a Republican president decides to use it.
The first Trump administration killed Qasem Soleimani, a notorious commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and a crucial figure in providing advanced improvised explosive device components used against American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a January 2020 strike. The same hysterics followed then. World War III was supposedly imminent. It wasn't.
What happened instead was a period of relative Iranian restraint, because deterrence works when adversaries believe you'll act. The years that followed that strike, under a different administration, saw deterrence erode, and proxies grow bolder. Administration after administration spent billions and decades managing the Iran problem rather than confronting it.
Waltz's core point on Sunday was not complicated. Iran has been waging a shadow war against the United States for over forty years. The question was never whether America would fight back. It was when.
Six families in America are grieving service members lost in Kuwait. Over 600 more have grieved for years. The debate in Washington is about terminology.
Jeremy Boreing, the co-founder of the Daily Wire, is breaking his silence on Candace Owens, and the portrait he paints is not flattering. In a recent interview, Boreing told the Daily Mail that he bears some responsibility for elevating the media personality and wishes he had exercised better judgment along the way.
"I'm not the cause of Candace's talent or fame, but I did play a role," Boreing said. "I should have been more discerning."
Boreing, who co-founded the conservative media brand alongside Ben Shapiro and helped build the startup into a billion-dollar enterprise, stepped away from his role at the Daily Wire in March. He has since focused on creative projects like producing "The Pendragon Cycle: Rise Of The Merlin," but his comments about Owens mark a rare and pointed return to the public conversation about the direction of the right.
Boreing's central claim is simple: Candace Owens is not driven by ideology. She is driven by celebrity. And he says the evidence was there all along, if you knew where to look.
"Fame is the driving, fundamental priority in her life. Once you see it, you can't unsee it."
According to Boreing, Owens used to tell PragerU CEO Marissa Strite that her goal was to be "the most famous woman in the world." The version she shared with Boreing was slightly different in phrasing but identical in ambition: she wanted to be Oprah.
That kind of ambition is not, by itself, disqualifying. Plenty of effective conservatives have large personalities and sharp elbows. The question is whether the ambition serves a set of convictions, or whether the convictions are just fuel for the ambition. Boreing is firmly in the second camp, as Yahoo Entertainment reports.
"Candace uses ideology in the same way that she uses conspiracy, or in the same way that she uses slander, and that's for clicks."
He described Owens as someone with an almost preternatural ability to sense where the energy is flowing online and to position herself at the center of it. "She has the highest quantity of 'it' of any person that I've ever encountered," Boreing said, adding that in any interaction, "she's the star of the room. She's the center of gravity."
That is a remarkable concession. Boreing is not dismissing Owens as talentless. He is arguing something more uncomfortable: that extraordinary talent, unmoored from principle, becomes a liability to the movement that hosts it.
One of the more revealing anecdotes Boreing shared concerns a private conversation about Nick Fuentes and the Groypers, the online movement that has drawn sharp criticism from mainstream conservatives for its open flirtation with antisemitism and white identity politics.
Boreing recalled pressing Owens on her unwillingness to challenge what he called "very obviously bad actors starting to emerge in the movement." Her response, as he tells it, was blunt:
"I'll never go against the YouTube boys, are you crazy? I don't go against the YouTube boys."
Boreing called this "one of the most honest things that I think Candace has ever said." Not because the position was defensible, but because it revealed the operating logic. She wasn't making a principled case for engagement or free speech. She was making a market calculation. The Groypers had an audience. She was not going to alienate it.
This is the pattern that should concern anyone invested in the future of conservative media. When audience metrics replace editorial judgment, the boundary between populism and pandering disappears entirely.
Owens joined the Daily Wire on March 19, 2021, after gaining recognition at PragerU and Turning Point USA. She left in March 2024. Boreing addressed her departure in a leaked staff speech, claiming she had violated contractual obligations.
But the real rupture, Boreing says, was not contractual. It was moral. He pointed to Owens' engagement with users, accusing a rabbi of "drinking the blood of Christians," a reference to blood libel, the centuries-old antisemitic trope that has been used to justify persecution of Jews for generations.
"I'd been uncomfortable with a lot of what she had said in the months leading up to that, but really, if there was a straw, it was the blood libel."
"A centuries-old trope used by anti-Semites to defame the Jews, from my point of view, that was the point of no return," Boreing added.
There is a meaningful distinction between criticizing specific policies of the Israeli government and trafficking in medieval conspiracy theories about Jewish people. Conservatives can and do disagree on foreign policy. What they should not do is provide cover for rhetoric that has been the prelude to pogroms.
Boreing's most interesting observation may be his characterization of where Owens has landed since leaving the Daily Wire. He describes her as "post-political," noting that she is "openly telling people not to vote" and presenting herself as no longer constrained by the right-wing framework that made her famous.
"She's really actually just sort of detransitioning. She's returning to her first identity."
When asked what Owens actually believes, Boreing recounted that she once answered the question herself: "I believe what the people believe, I'm the voice of the people." It is a statement that sounds populist until you realize it means nothing at all. It is a mirror held up to whatever audience is standing in front of it.
"She views herself as primarily a famous person. She is going to give the people what they want. And she has an unbelievable instinct, as many incredibly talented people do, to [determine] which way the river is flowing at any given time. She knows where the clicks are."
This is worth taking seriously, not because Boreing is a disinterested observer (he plainly is not), but because the pattern he describes is recognizable. The conservative movement has a recurring vulnerability to personalities who adopt its language, build a following on its platforms, and then drift toward whatever content maximizes engagement, regardless of whether it serves the movement's actual goals.
Perhaps the most strategically important thing Boreing said was this:
"I think that Candace can be opposed. I think that she must be opposed, [but] I don't think that she can be defeated."
He explained the asymmetry plainly:
"Everyone who stands up to her is engaged in an action that's fundamentally about worldview, ideology, morality and truth. And that's not even the game Candace is playing."
This is the core problem with influence merchants who operate outside ideological frameworks. You cannot win a principled argument against someone who is not having one. Every rebuttal becomes content for them. Every confrontation becomes a storyline. The attention economy rewards the person who treats everything as performance, and punishes the person who treats anything as serious.
Conservatives have faced this before. The right has always had to police its own boundaries more carefully than the left, because the media establishment is eager to amplify the worst voices on the right and ignore the worst on the left. That reality makes discernment not optional, but essential.
Boreing says he learned that lesson too late. The question is whether the broader movement learns it at all.
President Trump wants the SAVE America Act on his desk before he picks a side in the Texas Senate runoff, and he's making sure Senate leadership heard him clearly.
Breitbart reported that Trump delivered that message directly to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Sen. John Cornyn on Friday during an interview with CNN's Dana Bash, laying down a legislative marker that transforms a state-level primary into a national fight over election integrity.
The bill would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Trump made clear he wants the full package, not a watered-down version.
"We have to have voter ID. We have to have proof of citizenship. We have to have no mail in ballots except the military, illness, disability and travel. We have to have no men in women's sports. I added two things, and we have to have no transgender operations for youth."
That's not a wish list. That's a condition.
Tuesday's primary produced a dead heat that sent shockwaves through Texas Republican politics. Cornyn pulled 42 percent of the vote. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton grabbed 41 percent. Rep. Wesley Hunt earned 14 percent. Neither Cornyn nor Paxton eclipsed the 50 percent threshold, forcing a runoff.
On Wednesday, Trump announced he would soon make an endorsement in the runoff and called for whoever does not get his nod to drop out immediately. The signal was unmistakable: fall in line or face a fight.
Paxton responded by saying he would not drop out even if Cornyn gets the president's endorsement. In a Thursday interview with Politico, Trump's reaction was blunt: "Well, that's bad for him to say."
Paxton then took to X with a counteroffer. Rather than simply defying the president, he tried to reframe the standoff around the very legislation Trump is demanding.
"I would consider dropping out of this race if Senate Leadership agrees to lift the filibuster and passes the SAVE America Act."
It's a savvy move on paper. Paxton aligned himself with Trump's top legislative priority while putting the pressure back on Thune and Cornyn to deliver. He didn't just ask for a vote. He asked for the filibuster to be lifted to get it done.
He also went after Cornyn directly, calling him "a coward who has refused to support abolishing the filibuster to pass this bill." He accused the media and "the establishment" of trying to destroy him with misinformation.
Paxton then laid out his loyalty credentials in unmistakable terms:
"The truth is clear: No one has been more loyal to Donald Trump than me — fighting the stolen 2020 election, being in Mar-a-Lago when he announced his 2024 campaign, and standing with him in NY in the face of lawfare."
He concluded by pledging to help the president get the SAVE America Act across the finish line "for the good of our country and for the good of passing President Trump's agenda."
While Trump wouldn't commit publicly, NBC News' Garrett Haake reported on X that the president may have revealed his leanings during a Thursday night conversation. When Haake noted that Cornyn had outperformed polls on Tuesday, Trump responded warmly.
"Cornyn is a very underrated person. He was supposed to lose by ten points and he won. He's a good man."
That's not an endorsement. But it's nothing, either. Trump said he would make a "decision fairly shortly."
What makes this moment interesting isn't just the Texas race. It's the leverage architecture Trump is building. By conditioning a high-profile endorsement on legislative action, he's converting political capital in one arena into results in another.
The SAVE America Act isn't stuck because it lacks popular support. Proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration are common sense to most Americans. The bill is stuck because Senate procedure protects inaction.
Trump is telling Thune and Cornyn, in plain language, that there's a price for his involvement. Pass the bill. Get it to my desk. Then we'll talk about Texas.
Paxton, for his part, is trying to make the same argument from the other direction: that the bill matters more than any single Senate seat. Whether that's principled conviction or campaign survival instinct dressed in legislative clothing, only Paxton knows.
But the effect is the same. Both lanes of the Texas runoff now run through the SAVE America Act. Both candidates need to show they can deliver what Trump actually wants. And what Trump wants is simple:
Prove you're a citizen before you vote. No exceptions. No excuses.
The Texas Senate seat is the carrot. The SAVE America Act is the point.
Lou Holtz, the legendary college football coach who led Notre Dame to the 1988 national championship and later became one of the most prominent conservative voices in American sports, died Wednesday in Orlando, Florida. He was 89 years old.
His family confirmed the news in a statement posted to Holtz's X account, saying he passed surrounded by family. Reports had surfaced just over a month earlier that Holtz was in hospice care.
Holtz was a man who built winners everywhere he went. He coached at six programs across four decades, and he led every single one of them to a bowl game. William and Mary. NC State. Arkansas. Minnesota. Notre Dame. South Carolina. No rebuilding years are treated as acceptable. No excuses dressed up as process. Just results.
When President Donald Trump awarded Holtz the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2020, he captured the coach's origins in a single image, the Christian Post reported:
"He grew up in poverty in a two-room cellar, but as Lou says, 'I knew God and my family loved me, and their love was all the wealth I needed. That's everything I needed. That's all I wanted.'"
That wasn't a biography for applause. It was the engine behind everything Holtz did. A man who started with nothing and understood that faith and family weren't slogans but load-bearing walls.
His family's statement reflected as much, describing a life defined by "enduring values of faith, family service, and an unwavering belief in the potential of others." His wife Beth, who predeceased him, was the person with whom he shared what the family called "a life grounded in faith, devotion, and service."
He is survived by four children, nine grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
Holtz's time at Notre Dame, from 1986 to 1996, is what cemented his legend. The 1988 national championship remains one of the defining moments in the history of college football. But his influence stretched well beyond the sideline.
Through the Holtz Charitable Foundation and related initiatives, he poured resources back into communities that needed them. The Lou's Lads Foundation worked to ensure "underprivileged students and legacies have access to the support they need to succeed." The Holtz's Heroes Foundation, which included the Bread of Life Drive and partnerships with the Notre Dame Alumni Association, built what was described as a "global footprint in the fight against hunger."
The Bobby Satterfield Fund addressed what so many charities won't touch directly: "financial strain, mental health hurdles, or physical ailments," along with addiction and the devastation of "unforeseen job loss or illness."
A Notre Dame Vice President for Public Affairs and Communications noted that Holtz directed "attention and support to his hometown, alma mater, Catholic Charities, the Women's Care Foundation, the Center for the Homeless in South Bend, and other worthy organizations through his charitable foundation."
His family put it plainly:
"His influence extended far beyond the football field through the Holtz Charitable Foundation and the many players, colleagues, and communities shaped by his leadership."
In an era when athletes and coaches increasingly mouth whatever platitudes the cultural establishment demands, Holtz never bent. At the 2020 Republican National Convention, he did something almost unheard of for a sports figure: he spoke clearly, without hedging, about his Catholic faith and its implications for public life.
He called the Biden-Harris ticket "the most radically pro-abortion campaign in history." He called out Catholics who supported it as "Catholics in name only" who "abandon innocent lives." And he said plainly that "nobody has been a stronger advocate for the unborn than President Trump."
There was no focus-grouped ambiguity in those words. No carefully constructed deniability. Holtz said what he believed because he believed it, and he understood something that too many public figures have forgotten: conviction is not a liability. It is the thing that makes a life coherent.
The same man who demanded excellence from his players on Saturdays demanded moral seriousness from his country's leaders. That consistency is rare. It is also why millions of Americans saw Holtz not just as a great coach but as a man worth listening to on things that mattered far more than football.
Visitation will be held on March 15 at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the Notre Dame campus, with the funeral mass on March 16 at 1 p.m. The mass will be available via livestream.
There will be tributes in the coming days that focus on the wins, the championship, and the coaching tree. All deserved. But the fuller picture is a man who grew up in a two-room cellar and spent his life proving that character is not circumstance. That faith is not decoration. The measure of influence is not what you accumulate but what you build in other people.
Lou Holtz built plenty.
Kurdish Iranian dissident groups stationed in northern Iraq say they are moving fighters toward the Iranian border and preparing for potential military operations inside Iran, with Kurdish officials telling the Associated Press that the United States has asked Iraqi Kurdish leaders to support the effort.
Khalil Nadiri, an official with the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), said Wednesday that some PAK forces had relocated to areas near the Iranian border in Sulaymaniyah province and were waiting on standby. An official with Komala, another Kurdish opposition group, said its forces could be ready to cross the border within a week to 10 days. The groups are believed to have thousands of trained fighters between them.
The preparations come after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday, triggering a new phase of conflict in the Middle East.
Three Iraqi Kurdish officials told the AP that a phone call took place Sunday night between President Trump and two of the most powerful figures in Iraqi Kurdistan: Masoud Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and Bafel Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. One of the officials said Trump asked the Iraqi Kurds to militarily support Iranian Kurdish groups in operations inside Iran and to open the border, according to Newsmax.
The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan confirmed the call in a statement, saying Trump "provided clarification and vision regarding U.S. objectives in the war." The PUK also added that it "believes that the best solution is a return to the negotiating table."
Spokespeople for Barzani declined to comment.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt offered a more limited characterization of the conversation. Asked about the call and reports that Trump had sought military support for Iranian Kurdish groups, Leavitt said:
"He did speak to Kurdish leaders with respect to our base that we have in northern Iraq."
She denied that Trump had agreed to a specific plan. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, asked Wednesday about reports that the administration was considering arming Iranian Kurdish groups, was similarly careful:
"None of our objectives are premised on the support or the arming of any particular force. So, what other entities may be doing, we're aware of, but our objectives aren't centered on that."
Read those statements closely. Neither is a denial that contact occurred. Neither rules out coordination. What they rule out is dependency. The U.S. is not building its Iran strategy around Kurdish fighters, but it is not discouraging them either.
The Kurdish region has already absorbed a string of drone and missile attacks by Iran and allied Iraqi militias in recent days, targeting U.S. military bases, the U.S. Consulate in Irbil, and the Kurdish groups' own positions. Electricity cuts followed after a key gas field halted operations. The region is feeling the pressure from multiple directions.
Iran, predictably, wants the threat neutralized before it materializes. Iraq's National Security Adviser Qassim al-Araji said in a post on X that Ali Bagheri, deputy secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, had requested:
"that Iraq take the necessary measures to prevent any opposition groups from infiltrating the border between the two countries."
Al-Araji responded by pledging Iraq's commitment to "preventing any groups from infiltrating or crossing the Iranian border or carrying out terrorist acts from Iraqi territory," adding that security reinforcements had been sent to the border. Baghdad is caught between its neighbor to the east and the superpower that still maintains forces on its soil. That is not a comfortable position, and al-Araji's language reflects the tightrope.
The Kurdish opposition to Iran's regime is not new. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran's new theocracy battled Kurdish insurgents in fighting that killed thousands over several months. Under the Shah before that, Kurds were marginalized, repressed, and periodically in revolt. The grievances run deep and predate the current crisis by decades.
In 2023, Iraq reached an agreement with Iran to disarm the Kurdish dissident groups and move them from bases near the border into camps designated by Baghdad. The bases were shut down. Movement within Iraq was restricted. But the groups did not give up their weapons. That detail matters enormously now. The infrastructure was dismantled; the fighting capacity was not.
Reza Pahlavi, the former shah's son, has accused the Kurds of being separatists aiming to carve up Iran. That framing is convenient for anyone who wants to delegitimize an armed opposition without engaging with why that opposition exists in the first place.
The strategic logic here is straightforward. Iran is a regime that rules by coercion, and coercive regimes are uniquely vulnerable to internal pressure. Kurdish fighters with local knowledge, existing grievances, and a willingness to operate inside Iranian territory represent exactly the kind of asymmetric challenge that Tehran has spent years trying to suppress through diplomatic agreements with Baghdad.
Those agreements held when the broader region was relatively stable. That stability evaporated Saturday.
Much of the reporting relies on anonymous Kurdish officials, and the White House is clearly managing the public narrative with precision. That is not unusual when military and intelligence equities are in play. What is clear from the public record is that:
The Kurdish groups themselves are not waiting for permission slips. They have fighters, they have weapons they were supposed to have surrendered, and they have generations of reasons to act. Whether Washington is formally coordinating with them or simply not standing in their way, the effect on Tehran's calculations is the same.
Iran now faces the prospect of fighting on multiple fronts: against the U.S. and Israeli military campaign from the air, and against an indigenous armed opposition crossing its western border. That is precisely the kind of strategic squeeze that changes a regime's willingness to negotiate.
The PUK's statement said the best solution is a return to the negotiating table. Perhaps. But negotiating tables tend to appear only after the alternative becomes unbearable.
Sidney Dorsey, the former DeKalb County sheriff convicted of ordering the assassination of the man who beat him at the ballot box, died Monday night at Augusta State Medical Prison. He was 86. A Georgia Department of Corrections official confirmed Dorsey died of natural causes.
Dorsey was serving a life sentence, plus 23 years on corruption-related convictions, including racketeering and violating his oath of office. He spent more than two decades behind bars for a crime that remains one of the most brazen acts of political violence in modern Georgia history.
On December 15, 2000, DeKalb County Sheriff-elect Derwin Brown was shot outside his Decatur home. Brown was a longtime police veteran who had campaigned on a pledge to root out corruption in the sheriff's department. He never took office.
He left behind his wife, Phyllis, and five children.
According to the local ABC affiliate, prosecutors said Dorsey arranged the slaying after losing a bitter reelection campaign amid allegations of corruption. A jury convicted Dorsey in 2002. Two other men were also convicted in connection with the killing.
At sentencing, Dorsey offered this:
"I do not have the blood of Derwin Brown on my hands."
Five years later, in 2007, he reversed course. Authorities said Dorsey admitted from prison that he orchestrated the killing, telling a prosecutor he had ordered the hit but later claimed he tried to call it off.
Phyllis Brown testified during the sentencing hearing and told Dorsey she did not wish him death.
There is no sugarcoating what happened in DeKalb County. A sitting sheriff, entrusted with the power of law enforcement, used that position to eliminate a political rival. Not through opposition research. Not through a recount challenge. Through murder.
This is the nightmare scenario that makes the public trust in local government so fragile and so essential to protect. Law enforcement authority is among the most consequential powers delegated to any official in America. When someone abuses it, the damage extends far beyond a single crime. It poisons the well for every honest officer and every functioning department in the country.
Brown ran on cleaning up corruption. He won. And for that, he was killed in his own driveway before he could raise his right hand and take the oath.
The justice system did what it was supposed to do in this case. Dorsey was investigated, tried, convicted, and sentenced. He died in a prison cell, not a free man. That matters. In an era when Americans across the political spectrum worry about two-tiered justice, the Dorsey case stands as a reminder that when institutions function, when prosecutors pursue the truth regardless of the defendant's title, the system can deliver.
It took courage to bring a sitting sheriff to trial. It took a jury willing to convict him. It took a sentence that ensured he would never walk free again.
Derwin Brown never got to serve the people who elected him. His five children grew up without their father. No conviction undoes that. But Dorsey's death in prison, after more than two decades, closes a chapter that began with one of the most corrupt acts an American officeholder has ever committed.
The badge is supposed to protect. Brown understood that. It cost him everything.