Politics

When Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the first foreign leaders to congratulate him were Israeli officials. Now, as he embarks upon his first overseas trip, Trump is visiting Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – and forgoing a stop in Israel. It increasingly seems apparent that Trump is pursuing an American First foreign policy that treats Israel not as a vital ally but a nettlesome supplicant. In pursuing this course, he is returning to an older Republican foreign affairs tradition that has seen a variety of presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George H.W. Bush, treat Israel with skepticism, if not antipathy. For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this turn of events comes as a rude surprise.

“We do not need loud, forceful communication,” said Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born American prelate Robert Prevost – at his first press conference on Monday, “but rather communication that is capable of listening and of gathering the voices of the weak who have no voice.”  His Holiness, who opened by thanking the 6,000 attendees in English before delivering his remarks in superb Italian, also called for freedom for imprisoned journalists, urged members of the Fourth Estate to avoid “ideological or partisan” language in their work and admonished them to pursue a “path of communication in favor of peace.

In America, we are told justice is blind. Hennepin County wants her to peek. Last week, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Minnesota’s Hennepin County Attorney’s Office after prosecutors were instructed to consider race and age during plea negotiations. County Attorney Mary Moriarty defended the policy as an effort to address “racial disparities” in the criminal justice system. But good intentions don’t excuse bad policy – and this one sends a dangerous message: that some people are less accountable for their actions because of the color of their skin. As a black conservative, I am fully in favor of thoughtful criminal justice reform.

President Donald Trump is continuing his consistently inconsistent stance on abortion as his administration’s Justice Department has asked a federal court in Texas to dismiss a case aiming to increase regulations on mifepristone, an abortion pill shown in some rare cases to involve serious health risks. Trump has claimed many times in the past to be pro-life, even saying in 2016 that “there has to be some form of punishment” for abortions.

“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” So goes the bartenders’ refrain to customers at closing time. The Trump administration is issuing that same call to millions of illegal immigrants, beginning with the most violent (and those caught staying with them). You can’t stay here. It’s a wildly popular stance, but it is running into predictable problems. The first is that rounding up the millions here illegally is costly, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous. That problem was vastly increased by Joe Biden’s deliberate decision to open the southern border, allow millions of people to cross it illegally and then lie to the public and Congress about what his administration was doing.

Was the first American Pope ushered in on a wave of suspect, last-minute betting? Something odd seems to have been happening on at least one online gambling platform – Polymarket – in the minutes before the new Pope was announced. I know because I happened to place a bet just before Pope Leo XIV walked out on the balcony of St. Peter’s – and watched the odds dramatically shortening before my eyes.   Before his election as Pope, Leo was Cardinal Robert Prevost. I’d barely heard the name until a week ago, when I joined a tour of the Vatican laid on by the Holy See press office. We were not, disappointingly, to be shown the Sistine Chapel, the world’s most splendid polling station for the few days of a papal election.

It was around 3 p.m. last Tuesday when I’d finally heard enough. Karoline Leavitt, for the love of your movement, stop bringing podcasters and influencers into the White House briefings. It’s not good for anyone, not the administration, not for conservative nor new media, and it’s certainly not good for all the righteous goals that got Trump elected in the first place. Take TikTok’s Link Lauren, aka “MAGA Malfoy,” who had the opportunity so few get to ask Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt a question in person at the White House.