Juan Merchan

One of the outcomes of November’s election is that Americans can once again trust their own eyes and call out the obvious when they see it. President Biden long ago lost the mental acuity to serve as the nation’s chief executive. Progressive causes like climate change, diversity hiring and transgender men participating in women’s sports are ridiculous. And highly dubious prosecutions seemingly launched as political weapons are exactly what they appear to be. In a Friday morning double-header Americans witnessed in real time the crumbling of the last two vestiges of the lawfare campaign against former and future president Donald Trump. What were once touted as a dream of the left to bring down a king will at best be reduced to obscure footnotes in the annals of history.

President-elect Donald Trump’s appointees for his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are planning to crack down on employees who work from home — those who are left, anyway, after the duo’s round of “large-scale firings.”In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out “the DOGE plan to reform government,” in which they purport to “reverse a decades-long executive power grab” while “following the Supreme Court’s guidance.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee yesterday that the government pressured his company to censor content during the Covid-19 pandemic and said he regrets following their wishes. The committee described his comments as a “big win for free speech.” Meta produced thousands of documents for the committee’s investigation into alleged government censorship and Zuckerberg wrote the supplemental letter to outline what he had learned during the process. “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” he said.

The 2024 primary season is slowly coming to a close — and last night’s marquee election saw a rare big win for the left-wing Squad in the House of Representatives: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar vanquished an underfunded opponent in the Democratic primary to avoid the fates of Congressmen Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman.Following the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, the pro-Israel community was galvanized to challenge some of the most openly anti-Israel members of Congress. It successfully trained its fire on Bush and Bowman, who both carried major liabilities unrelated to foreign policy.

Donald Trump’s sentencing in the controversial New York “hush-money” case, which was set for July 11, has been postponed. “The July 11, 2024, sentencing date is... vacated,” reads a letter from Judge Juan Merchan to the former president’s defense team. “The Court's decision will be rendered off-calendar on September 6, 2024 and the matter is adjourned to September 18, 2024, at 10 a.m. for the imposition of sentence, if such is still necessary, or other proceedings.

Welcome to Thunderdome. So I want to open with a caveat: Fox News is my employer, and anything I say that is critical of their pollsters should be understood as distinct to their pollsters, and not to the network as a whole. That said, their pollsters have occasionally been... very wrong. Who can forget the ludicrous Indiana Senate poll from 2018 that envisioned a dead heat between the candidates in a race the Republican won by seven points? So the point is, everyone can be off on occasion. But right now, the Fox prognosticators are out with a poll that shows Joe Biden up, and the opinions about the economy up as well. It’s been a shift that is notable over the past month. For Republicans, this may come as a shock, or they might dismiss it.

 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.

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.

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.

Among the many great lines in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, is this mournful observation from “The Dry Salvages,” the third of the bunch: “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” How much happens to us that we only half register or undergo without really twigging its significance? One example that is both pedestrian and historical: the criminal trial in Manhattan of Donald Trump.  As I write, Trump is leading slightly in the polls, which means he is not only at the head of the chief opposition party, but also that he represents an existential threat to the future of the regime that is persecuting — er, prosecuting him.  The trial, brought by Soros-funded district attorney Alvin Bragg is often described as being about “hush money,” i.e.

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.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed to shock a CNN reporter when he said in a recent interview that he could make the argument that President Joe Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than former president Donald Trump. “Him trying to overthrow the election clearly is a threat to democracy,” Kennedy said about Trump. “But the question was, who is a worse threat to democracy and what I would say is... I’m not going to answer that question, but I can argue that President Biden is.”Kennedy pointed out that he recently won a court case in which he accused the Biden administration of weaponizing federal agencies to censor the political speech of Americans.