Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author. Last week’s blockbuster jobs report, with more than 265,000 jobs added when including upward employment revisions, […]
Trump projects confidence in Iran nuclear deal despite unresolved uranium enrichment disputes and a fragile ceasefire that nearly unraveled.
US President Donald Trump renewed his claims of momentum toward ending the conflict with Iran, after brokering a halt to hostilities between Israel and the Islamic Republic and easing tensions that had threatened to derail broader peace efforts.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan went on Fox News to warn that a key national security law is heading toward expiration Friday — and acknowledged that his own side may not be able to stop it.FISA Section 702, which Jordan described as responsible for more than 50 percent of the nation's most sensitive intelligence, is set to expire this week. Democrats are blocking reauthorization unless President Trump removes Bill Pulte from his role as Acting Director of National Intelligence. Jordan admitted to host Maria Bartiromo the two sides are at an impasse."It's a standoff," Jordan said.Pulte, who simultaneously serves as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, was installed as Acting DNI by Trump over Democratic objections that he lacks an intelligence background. Democrats have made his removal a condition for their votes on reauthorization.Jordan framed the Democratic position as political obstruction. "They're using this as leverage," he said. "This is typical Washington games. They want to play politics with national security."He defended Pulte as someone Trump trusts "to get the intelligence community back on track and focused on real threats, not going after conservatives or political opponents."But with the deadline days away and no deal in sight, Jordan's own description of the situation — a standoff — raises the possibility that a surveillance program Republicans have repeatedly called indispensable to national security could lapse because of a personnel dispute of the administration's own making.pic.twitter.com/q2QFsy4Z1Q— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) June 9, 2026
President Donald Trump shut down midtown Manhattan Monday so he could take a nap at the NBA Finals. After getting loudly booed by attendees at Madison Square Garden, Trump was spotted snoozing in his box seats next to Knicks owner James Dolan and his granddaughter Kai Trump.DONALD TRUMP HAS FALLEN ASLEEP AT THE NBA FINALS IN MADISON SQUARE GARDEN. pic.twitter.com/rFrW6c4cME— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) June 9, 2026It seems that a tense game three between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs wasn’t enough to pique the president’s interest. It’s not particularly surprising, considering that Trump has repeatedly been seen dozing off during press conferences, bill signings, and Cabinet meetings, among other apparent instances of cognitive decline. Trump’s nap came amid his highly disruptive trip to Midtown at the taxpayer’s expense and New Yorkers’ apparent dismay. Authorities closed 10 blocks around Madison Square Garden to traffic and pedestrians ahead of Trump’s arrival. The Secret Service and TSA, along with the NYPD, heightened security protocols at MSG. Attendees were forced to arrive hours early, and without any bags. And perhaps worst of all, the New York Knicks were forced to cancel their rambunctious watch party outside the stadium. Clearly the vibes were off: the Knicks lost by four points, ending a 13-game winning streak.
Panelists on MS NOW's "Morning Joe" sounded the alarm over President Donald Trump's latest election fraud lies.The president had proclaimed that GOP candidates in the Los Angeles mayoral race, including former reality TV star Spencer Pratt, have been "cheated" after losing last week's primary election, and "Morning Joe" co-host Mika Brzezinski was aghast that House Speaker Mike Johnson and other high-ranking Republicans are going along with his claims."It's diabolical," Brzezinski said. "Unless you are waiting to become speaker of the House, and then you patiently wait for California to come in, that is hypocrisy at the highest extreme, performative hypocrisy ... Explain for us how California's slow vote-counting process, which Mike Johnson is fine with when it benefits him, is now diabolical, even though it's driven by the state's heavy reliance on mail voting, and it delays the final results for 30 days. I don't get it."California is a large and populous state that relies heavily on mail-in voting that can take longer to count, and The Dispatch's David Drucker said Trump was exploiting that laborious process and the conservative social media bubble for his own political purposes."The city of LA is seven points more democratic than the state of California, so you tell me how a Spencer Pratt is supposed to win this race," Drucker said. "It's just exceedingly unlikely, and even though he mastered the attention economy of this campaign and had people all over the country and particularly in Washington thinking, 'How can this guy lose? Look at his ads.'"Trump's false claims about California's election have also been echoed by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), and the panelists lamented that Republicans are too afraid to challenge the president even when he's clearly lying."It really sucks for democracy," said Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei. "This is the stuff you see happen in a broken country, in a third-world country where they've not been able to govern effectively. Every time you call into question whether or not our elections are valid, you weaken the soul of the country, and that's why this is damaging."If the president or his GOP allies had evidence of fraud, VandeHei said they should present it, but he warned they appeared to be laying the groundwork to challenge potential election losses this fall – just as Trump attempted to overturn his own election loss in 2020."This is the 250th year of this country," said veteran diplomat Richard Haas. "Here we are, we're meant to be honoring celebrating the Declaration [of Independence], and we probably right now are facing, in some ways, the most concerted assault, potentially, hopefully it won't happen. But these rumblings, this is really worrisome stuff. This is preparing the ground, as you say, for serious pushback against, I think, the a free and fair election this November. So people ought to take this seriously." - YouTube youtu.be
A three-time Donald Trump voter expressed concern that the MAGA movement he built won't last beyond him.Melik Abdul, a D.C.-based public affairs professional and Republican strategist, published a column for Newsweek sounding the alarm on a recent move made by the 79-year-old president he supports that threatens his political movement and the GOP itself."Watching him hand the nation’s spy agencies to Bill Pulte this week, a housing official with no intelligence background, I keep landing on a harder question: What’s left of Trump's legacy if he’s willing to burn it all down?" Abdul wondered. "That’s the part getting lost. Trump wasn’t elected only to win. He was elected on the promise that a working-class, multiracial coalition could outlast him and remake the Republican Party for good."Abdul argued that Trump was the first generational figure the GOP has produced since Ronald Reagan, but he expressed doubts that his MAGA movement would endure for decades the way the 40th president's conservatism defined the party until Trump came on the scene."The trouble isn’t that the base has soured. It hasn’t," he wrote. "The trouble is that the administration has turned inward, chasing fights that thrill the faithful but build nothing durable. Renaming the Kennedy Center. A transgender service ban. Tariff brinkmanship. These play well with the people who were never going anywhere. They’ve done little for others in that 77 million Americans who actually put Trump back in office, most of whom don’t treat any of it as an existential crisis.""That’s the cost of governing by applause," Abdul added. "You spend capital on symbols and end up with a second term carrying more asterisks than the first."Most of those fights have ended in losses, Abdul pointed out, and he flagged other "self-inflicted damage" the president has caused."Voter ID and proof of citizenship are genuinely popular ideas. But Trump turned the SAVE Act into a loyalty test he knew the Senate would never pass," Abdul wrote. "There were never 60 votes, and no appetite to end the filibuster to find them. It was red meat. And it helped end John Cornyn’s career. Cornyn’s sin wasn’t disloyalty; he co-sponsored the bill. His sin was not being MAGA enough, fast enough."Trump punished the GOP incumbent by endorsing his scandal-plagued rival Ken Paxton, throwing the Senate race into doubt for November, and he may have stalled his agenda by engineering primary losses and adding more members to the pool of lame-duck Republicans who have no reason to stick with him."A lame-duck senator who’s been told he isn’t wanted owes the White House nothing," Abdul wrote. "That isn’t loyalty. It’s leverage, and Trump just handed it away."Pulte is the most glaring example, Abdul wrote. His resume might qualify him to run a housing agency, which he currently does, but he lacks even the most marginal background in intelligence or national security, and Trump must spend massive political capital to get him confirmed as director of national intelligence."Movements built entirely around one man don’t survive him," Abdul wrote. "A movement that can’t name a successor isn’t a realignment. It’s a personality. And personalities expire."Trump's coalition appears unlikely to survive him, Abdul warned, because he has shrunk the GOP down to himself and his personal grudges and priorities."You don’t protect a legacy by burning down everything around it," Abdul wrote. "You protect it by naming an heir—and so far, the only one Trump has named is himself."
President Trump on Monday said two crew members who were aboard a U.S. attack helicopter when they crashed near the Strait of Hormuz are “fine.” The two crew members, whose AH-64 Apache helicopter was patrolling regional waters, were rescued within two hours after they crashed near Oman’s coast, according to U.S. Central Command (Centcom). The…
A Trump megadonor got demolished on live television Monday night after demanding the country trust his voter fraud claims — then refusing to cite a single source to back them up.Hal Lambert, a Republican megadonor and regular on CNN's "NewsNight," clashed with CNN commentator Charles Blow and anchor Abby Phillip over President Donald Trump's long-debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen.Lambert insisted there were "problems" in Georgia and Arizona. As he fumbled for specifics, Blow had heard enough."Oh my god!" Blow exclaimed."What were they, Hal? It's been six years," Phillip pressed.Lambert never answered. He pivoted to fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, and H-1B visas instead. Blow wasn't buying it."The more that you lie, the more we're going to push back on the fact that you are lying," Blow fired back. "You don't have a single source in your whole body."Blow then wielded the conservative Heritage Foundation's own Election Fraud Database against Lambert. A Brookings Institution analysis of Heritage's data found that in Pennsylvania, the group had to reach back 30 years — spanning 32 elections and more than 100 million ballots — to scrape together just 39 fraud cases. None changed the outcome."In 30 years, they've tracked 32 elections, 100 million votes. They have found 39 total cases of voter fraud," Blow said. "So you think the Heritage Foundation is absurd?"Lambert's response: "That's absurd! That's absurd! That's absurd!"The Brennan Center for Justice has found the Heritage cases represent a "molecular fraction" of total votes cast nationwide. Just 10 cases of in-person voter impersonation appear across the entire database.Phillip finally called it."To be honest, Hal, you're not saying anything of substance," she said.Lambert's exit line: "We'll see what the viewers think."