“We’re in the midst of the quietest government shutdown in American history. For 34 days, funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been blocked in a standoff over the Trump administration’s deeply unpopular immigration enforcement, something the White House has finally realized is such a public opinion disaster that they’ve stopped calling it mass deportation. The biggest public-facing side of this shutdown is Transportation Security Administration workers, who have now worked without a paycheck for a month. But aside from frustration about longer airport security lines, there’s been little pressure on Washington to end the impasse. On Wednesday, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) had his confirmation hearing to run the department that currently has no funding. While his rhetoric was softer, he didn’t really offer many thoughts about the issues in the dispute.” (03/19/26)
“All eyes are set on U.S. President Donald Trump’s escalating war against Iran, but on the home front, things are not going well. Nearly one year after he launched a barrage of steep tariffs on what he called ‘Liberation Day,’ economists have crunched the numbers for 2025 — and they are not looking good for the White House. By Trump’s own yardstick — his three goals of making foreigners pay for doing business with the United States, narrowing the U.S. trade deficit, and punishing China — tariffs have clearly failed.” (03/19/26)
“Many consider J.D. Vance the heir apparent to Donald Trump’s MAGA legacy and the man to beat in the 2028 Republican presidential primaries — a state of affairs the Republican foreign policy establishment has never liked. Hawks have long worried that the vice president is too much of a foreign policy restrainer for their tastes (though Vance has often sounded more like neoconservatives in Trump’s second term). Still, neocons were giddy last week when polling showed that Marco Rubio’s numbers had improved against Vance, with the secretary of state being hawks’ main man in the 2016 GOP primaries and a figure who could repurpose ‘MAGA’ as the neoconservatism of old (though Trump seems to be doing this already, making Vance’s supposed 2028 inevitability less clear). But there could be more than one neocon champion in 2028.” (03/19/26)
“The official response to my column Monday about the FBI’s failure to prevent four recent Islamic terror attacks has been unsatisfactory, to say the least, and the personal attacks by FBI Director Kash Patel’s private PR operatives have been downright deranged. None of which is reassuring when it comes to the FBI’s preparedness to handle a heightened terror threat on home soil. It’s not Patel’s fault that our foremost domestic counterterrorism agency has been degraded and politicized under his predecessors, but it’s his job to fix it fast and his defensiveness suggests a problem. The most alarming case involves Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a convicted ISIS terrorist who was on supervised federal release when he yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ and opened fire on an ROTC classroom at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., last Thursday, killing the instructor before being killed himself.” (03/19/26)
“One Year After is the fourth story I’ve read now where the end of the world is revealed as a primitive society with none of the modern conveniences we take for granted. We are so dependent on our electronic devices and on the electrical grid that it hard to imagine what life would be like without them. But what would cause such an event?” (03/18/26)
