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Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen finally took the stand Monday in the so-called “hush-money” trial against his old boss in Manhattan. Cohen’s testimony has been much hyped by Trump’s critics, as the legal claim is that Trump improperly claimed payments made by Cohen to adult film star Stormy Daniels as legal expenses instead of campaign expenses. Cohen testified that his former client signed off on everything that he did, indicating that Trump directed him to pay off Daniels and suggesting that he would have known that they shouldn’t be marked down as a legal expense or retainer in the company books.

 Independent presidential candidate and former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted this week that he supports “full-term” abortions. In a sit-down interview with former ESPN reporter Sage Steele, RFK said that while he doesn’t think women should abort their children in the eighth month of pregnancy or beyond, he wouldn’t prohibit them from doing so.  “Even if it’s full-term,” he said, later adding, “I think we have to leave it to the women rather than the state.” RFK’s position is extreme, no matter how you slice it. The majority of Americans believe there should be some restrictions on abortions; only 37 percent believe abortion should be legal in the second trimester and just 22 percent say it should be legal in the third trimester.

Welcome to Thunderdome. It’s been clear since day one that Joe Biden was more scared of the progressive left than anyone else. His White House was incredibly fearful of a challenge from Bernie Sanders or a Squad member within the 2024 primary and the damage it would do to the Democratic coalition and his own re-election hopes. So the White House swung left — not just on economic policy, where he threw everything behind massive expenditures that pleased leftist politicians, pundits and people who have shrines to FDR in their houses, but on social policy as well, where he embraced the culture war issues of abortion and the trans agenda and hung on tight.

President Joe Biden has been straddling an incredibly thin line when it comes to his stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict. The president historically has been supportive of the US’s alliance with Israel but his posture has been tested by a vocal pro-Palestinian contingent in the Democratic Party; in the Democratic primaries, they voted “uncommitted” to send a message to their party’s leader and in recent weeks have showed up on college campuses to demand university administrations divest from Israel. Biden has responded by remaining vocally pro-Israel but inching further away from Israel from a policy standpoint.

The biggest question in politics right now has to be: why is Kristi Noem doing this to herself? Let's do a quick recap. The South Dakota governor is your classic Tea Party-era politician, running for Congress in 2010 and beating an incumbent Democrat. When she arrived in Washington, she was a reliable Republican vote for the anti-Obama House majority — anti-tax, pro-Keystone, anti-abortion, pro-balanced budget, drill baby drill. Her congressional career was pretty unremarkable. She decided after winning reelection in 2016 to run for governor — and won handily despite doing it in a tougher year for Republicans across the board. Winning the governorship elevated Noem's national profile and the quick follow-on of the Covid pandemic raised her even higher.

The Democratic National Convention is set to take place in downtown Chicago in a little over three months and Democrats are hard at work scheming to prevent handing any easy political wins to their Republican opponents. It’s already a problem that Chicago is a poster child for the left’s failed gun-control policies (nearly three dozen people were shot, at least seven of whom were killed, over the weekend and gang violence prompted the city to cancel its West Side Cinco de Mayo celebrations despite the city having some of the strictest firearm regulations in the country).Chi-town is also notorious for its political seediness, and the shamelessness with which its party bosses operate is on full display in DNC preparations.

If a motion to vacate the speaker of the House fails resoundingly, does it make a sound?The answer is, of course, yes — with a Capitol Hill press corps that loves nothing more than pitting all-too-willing Republicans against one another. Next week, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is poised to finally pull the trigger on her quixotic quest to oust Speaker Mike Johnson — but she’s likely to be left holding a bag of small-dollar donations and press clippings, which is what her detractors think she is actually motivated by.On one side of the push to oust Johnson is a trio of Greene, Thomas Massie and Paul Gosar.

Welcome to Thunderdome. When Joe Biden ran for president, he did the same thing he always does when he does anything: invented an obviously fictional story casting himself as a rescuing hero. In his framing of the situation, he — a lifelong politician who has demonstrated nothing but constant ambition for the White House — was a reluctant candidate pulled from the sidelines by the roaming threat of a dangerous Orange Man and his tiki-torch-carrying supporters in Charlottesville. Biden wasn’t running because he’d been trying to get the job for decades; he had the nobler purpose of healing the soul of the nation.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump gave a wide-ranging interview to TIME magazine. The article finally dropped on Tuesday and contains lots of interesting little nuggets about what Trump’s plans are for a second term, were he to defeat President Joe Biden this fall, and how his mindset has changed from his first go as president. Reporter Eric Cortellessa notes the Mar-a-Lago chief’s attitude shift in his opener: “Donald Trump thinks he’s identified a crucial mistake of his first term: he was too nice.”This sentiment will be music to the ears of populist hardliners who felt the former president conceded too much, too often in his first term.

Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests are inspiring a nationwide movement while the Democratic Party finds itself split in two. A group of twenty-one House Democrats called on Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, to end the encampment or resign as progressives such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman joined in the Manhattan university’s protests Friday.The Democratic Party struggles with clashing opinions regarding the broader conflict as well as concerns over electability — particularly as “uncommitted” voters sent a message to President Joe Biden in the primary over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

The two big stories du jour are 1) the continuing campus assault on sanity, brought to you by the pro-terrorist “death-to-America-Death-to-Israel” lobby, and 2) the circus of the nationwide legal manhunt against the once and future president of the United States, Donald Trump. Regarding the former, this video showing two Columbia students displaying their solidarity with brave protestors at NYU sums up one portion of the insanity: Interviewer: Why are you protesting?Protester #1: I don't know. I’m pretty sure there's something about Israel [turns to friend] Why are we protesting?Protester #2: I wish I was more educated.Protester #1: I'm not either.

It’s been a banner week for armchair lawyers. Here’s what you need to know about Donald Trump’s trials in New York City and before the Supreme Court.In the Big Apple, where Trump has scored rave reviews in bodegas and from construction workers. This week, David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, confirmed what Ted Cruz long suspected during the 2016 campaign — that the tabloid was deeply plugged-in with the Trump orbit, even to the point of manufacturing conspiracies that Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.“We mashed the photos and the different picture with Lee Harvey Oswald and mashed the two together,” Pecker said. “And that’s how that story was prepared — created, I would say.

Welcome to Thunderdome. There’s really no question now that Israel will be a major issue driving protests at the summer conventions, particularly at the DNC in Chicago. The scene that’s played out on Ivy League campuses over the past several weeks can easily be transported to the outskirts of the Chicago convention, where media presence alone will be beneficial for protesters and sympathetic Democratic politicians could provide aid and comfort. As someone who enjoyed getting teargassed in Minneapolis in 2008, and was profoundly disappointed at the Rage Against the Machine non-protests in 2016, I’m eager for the test. Tim Stanley shares his thoughts: One: Biden owns the Middle East conflict even as he denounces the casualties.

President Joe Biden signed the foreign aid package, which features $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, on Wednesday after the bill swiftly moved through Congress. The breakdown of aid is as follows: $61 billion for Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel and $8 billion for Taiwan.Speaker Mike Johnson infuriated some of his Republican colleagues by even negotiating on the legislation, let alone bringing it to the House floor for a vote; he previously said he would not move any foreign aid until Democrats agreed to give additional funds for border security. Instead, after the Senate rejected the border security bill HR-2 and Johnson rejected the Senate-negotiated immigration package, the speaker made moves to go ahead with sending money abroad anyway.

Raucous anti-Israel protests at Ivy League Columbia University — which have spread to other campuses following the administration’s crackdown on encampments erected by student activists — are becoming a hot topic on Capitol Hill.Republicans are eager to point out the protests are merely a symptom of the larger rot within academia; college administrators for years tolerated left-wing activists breaking university policy (and often rewarded them for their efforts) while resisting the representation of conservative voices on campus. This posture has allowed radical, hate-filled movements to foment among increasingly progressive student bodies.

Did Iran’s ayatollah have the worst birthday ever? His eighty-fifth kicked off with a bang, as Israel retaliated after Iran’s unprecedented strike across the Jewish state that featured a failed barrage of lethal drones over the weekend. What comes next from Iran remains anyone’s guess — but the Israeli response, which struck an Iranian military but not nuclear site, served as an undoubted shot across the bow to the largest state sponsor of terrorism. The message was that it can’t attempt to directly attack Israel’s homeland without consequences and that Israel has the capability to attack Iran’s nukes if they so please. Iranian proxies, like Hamas, not only invaded Israel on October 7, but have been plaguing global shipping routes for months.

Welcome to Thunderdome. It’s obvious that when it comes to 2024, Donald Trump doesn’t want the race to be about the culture war issues that he views as a major drag from the past few years of elections, with abortion at the top of the list. He’d rather it be a race about immigration, the economy, and oddly enough, his own persecution by the Deep State (which motivates his core supporters, but not many others). What’s clear is that in the aftermath of his statement on abortion, Republicans aren’t taking up Trump’s call.

The Senate kicked off its impeachment trial for Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday as Democrats quickly dismissed the charges.House Republicans voted to impeach Mayorkas in February for failing to enforce federal immigration law and lying to Congress when he said the border was secure. The two articles of impeachment were finally delivered to the Senate yesterday, and although Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued that the body has a duty to hold a full trial, senators voted along party lines just a few hours after the start of the trial to dismiss Mayorkas’s alleged “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.” They dismissed the second charge — “breach of public trust” — in short order, as well.

The Department of Veterans Affairs came close to banning the iconic photo of a sailor kissing a dental nurse following America’s triumph in World War Two last month. The decision was quickly reversed after a leaked memo sparked backlash from the public. But a whistleblower in the department tells The Spectator there’s much more to the story: the VA’s rash decision to remove the photo followed years of accusations of predation and harassment against supervisors in the department’s diversity office. “The very appearance of sexual harassment or something that even looks inappropriate, now, it's like, ‘OK, let's get rid of it,’ the whistleblower told The Spectator. “And I think we're walking on eggshells here, because of what happened to all these senior level officials.

A week after the death of O.J. Simpson, America has a new Trial of the Century — perhaps the first of many. Jury selection is currently underway in a Manhattan courtroom as presidential candidate Donald Trump faces charges from New York County district attorney Alvin Bragg of faking business records to conceal payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Daniels says that she was paid $130,000 by Michael Cohen in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election in order to not talk publicly about having sex with Trump a decade previously, shortly after his third marriage to Melania and the birth of their son Barron. This is the first trial of a former US president.