Candace Owens

Ivanka Trump gave a rare interview yesterday, appearing on the Diary of a CEO podcast. The show, hosted by the British entrepreneur Steven Bartlett, embodies the mix of individual hustle and mental health awareness that is rapidly becoming the dominant mode online. “You’re a bit of an empath, right?” asked Bartlett during a segment on business negotiation tactics. “Oh for sure,” answered his guest. Trump came across as a frazzled and slightly besieged figure. She was tired of the “nasty swirl of social media” and the “gladiatorial” aspect of politics. She claimed to have found solace in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, the treatise on stoic philosophy now much in vogue among people like Bartlett.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani met Trump in the Oval Office yesterday to pitch a huge New York City housing initiative – and secure the release of a Columbia University student from ICE custody. Mamdani’s communications director said that Trump was “very enthusiastic” about the plan to build 12,000 new affordable homes in Sunnyside, Queens, by using over $21 billion in federal grants. What’s more, the student, who happens to be a photogenic young woman, was freed. Results all around. Zohran and his team gave Trump a prop newspaper with the headline “TRUMP TO CITY: LET’S BUILD,” a play on the 1975 New York Daily News cover – “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” The headlines made a clear case for how much the people would love Trump if he went ahead with Mamdani’s plans.

President Trump will deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term tonight – and the White House social media team want to whet your appetite. “The White House digital team will transform all its social channels into ‘Trump TV’ – a 12-hour retrospective of the year since President Trump’s last address to Congress,” Axios reports. Your correspondent can’t help but feel Team Trump is missing a trick. The most transfixing thing to show the American people before the address isn’t “Trump of the last 12 months,” it’s “Trump live.

Who will be the Democratic party’s Joe Rogan? That is the $20 million question facing the party, as Democrats try to recover from the last election, when the podcasters had the power. Setting aside Rogan’s status as a longtime backer of both the Democrats and Bernie Sanders, the party’s plan to win back heterosexual, cisgender young men reads like a Barnard gender studies thesis. The plan’s codename, SAM, stands for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” and sets out to “study the syntax, language and context that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” Some free advice from Cockburn: normal young men don’t use words such as “syntax” in their everyday speech.

Brett Cooper, former host of The Comment Section on the Daily Wire, has sparked rumors after liking a controversial Instagram post by former colleague Candace Owens. Speculation follows a clip from Piers Morgan Uncensored last month in which Owens accused Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being a war criminal with “genocidal ambitions.” Owens told Morgan, “I want to use my platform to say that I believe they are intentionally executing a holocaust.” Cooper liking Owens’s post raised questions: does Cooper agree with Owens’s take on the war in Gaza? Could this be tied to her departure from the Daily Wire? And does she plan to collaborate with Owens moving forward?

Are books about Tucker Carlson not guaranteed bestsellers? That’s the claim of Politico’s Michael Schaffer today, who revealed that Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind by the New York Times magazine’s Jason Zengerle has been shelved by Little, Brown & Co. According to Schaffer, “the cancellation stems at least in part from the belief that Carlson, once the biggest name on cable, no longer has the kind of cultural footprint to warrant a pricey, complicated book by a top-shelf writer.” Tucker Carlson, publishing house poison?

Candace Owens’s watch at the Daily Wire has ended. The news came in the form of an X post from Wire CEO and Lady Ballers star Jeremy Boreing this morning: “Daily Wire and Candace Owens have ended their relationship.”  “The rumors are true — I am finally free,” Owens tweeted shortly after, along with a plug for her Locals page, a link to a site where you can donate her money and a pledge of more to come.  The separation comes shortly after Owens said she’d “stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man,” making her exit a big win for trans rights. As they say en France, quand on vient pour la reine, il ne faut pas la manquer.

NBC anchors play with traffic Spotted: NBC News anchors Chuck Todd and Hallie Jackson furiously waving cars under a parking garage gate after the State of the Union address. Cars started to pile up at a broken pay station before an enthusiastic Jackson, who hosts Hallie Jackson NOW, yelled down the ramp for everyone to line up bumper-to-bumper so they could follow each other out before the gate closed in between cars.  “I feel bad,” Jackson lamented as one car missed the cutoff. Joe Biden uses human shields to avoid Pelosi: source Never fear, “Uncommitted” voters. It turns out Joe Biden may have more in common with Hamas than previously thought.

Ever since the House Ethics Committee released its damning report on George Santos yesterday, the chatter has been non-stop. Yes, it appears the flamboyant fabulist used campaign funds to subscribe to sex workers on OnlyFans — but whose content is Santos paying for?  Two early claimants have emerged on Twitter/X. First, from plus-size porn star Leila Lewis. “THIS GUY WAS SUBBED TO ME HAHAHAHA,” she tweeted, following up with “i rated his dick 😭😭😭.” An unenviable prospect.  The other comes from Twitch streamer Soogz1, who boasts 2.3 million Twitter/followers. “my top spender 🥹🫶,” she wrote yesterday, along with a screenshot purporting to show that a user called George Santos had spent $435,621.13 on her content — $340,752.

South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace has been floated as a potential vice presidential pick for Donald Trump. If her remarks at a prayer breakfast this week are anything to go by, she’d be a great fit, as she shares the Donald’s knack for scandalizing evangelicals. “I woke up this morning at 7,” Mace told the group Thursday morning. “Patrick, my fiancé, tried to pull me by my waist over this morning in bed and I was like, ‘No baby, we don’t got time for that this morning. I gotta get to the prayer breakfast, and I gotta be on time.’” An online furore followed, with some puritans pearl-clutching over the fact that Mace, a divorcée, was bragging about having premarital sex. “I go to church because I’m a sinner not because I’m a saint!