Karine Jean-Pierre

The much-awaited Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky went off the rails Friday. What was expected to be the signing of a deal that granted the US privileged access to Ukrainian natural resources unraveled into a shouting match — as well as a masterclass in diplomatic self-immolation from the visiting Zelensky. At one point, Vice President J.D. Vance told a visibly cross Zelensky: “Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems.

Two months after former president Donald Trump went into the lion’s den to be interviewed at the National Association of Black Journalists, Vice President Kamala Harris made her own appearance at an NABJ event. With her sit-down coming just days after a second attempted assassination against Trump, Harris was asked if she has full confidence in the US Secret Service to protect her.She responded by flipping the question to accuse Trump, the victim of the attempted assassination, of fomenting hate and violence toward other groups of people and thus making them unsafe.“You can go back to Ohio,” Harris said. “Not everybody has Secret Service. And there are far too many people in this country who are not feeling safe.”“Yes, I feel safe.

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.

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley finally notched her first win in the GOP presidential primary, winning the Washington, DC contest by about thirty points, or 598 votes. Haley picked up nineteen delegates in the contest and now trails Donald Trump by 201 delegates.  The nation’s capital is arguably the worst place Haley could have achieved her first victory. The Trump campaign immediately used it as proof that she is in bed with the political establishment and fundamentally a candidate that can only win with the support of the consultant and donor class.

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a Republican speaker of the House is facing ire from the Freedom Caucus that is mad about a deal he’s cutting with Democrats, who run almost the entire government.2024 picked up right where 2023 left off, with the narrow GOP House majority stuck between a Freedom Caucus-shaped rock and a hard place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With at least a partial government shutdown looming, Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposed budget deal strikes many as almost exactly what former speaker Kevin McCarthy’s intra-party foes used as their alleged final straw against him. The Freedom Caucus, which went from loving Johnson to comparing him to John Boehner in slightly over a month, called Johnson’s $1.

It took a few weeks, but Republicans got their act together and did the impossible: elected a new speaker of the House, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson. Johnson and his team have an incredible amount of work ahead of them — from funding the government to fundraising for House Republicans. What’s particularly noteworthy to me in the hours ahead of Johnson becoming speaker is the all-out effort Democrats and their media mouthpieces are making to define him — mostly by spreading provable misinformation.  Johnson’s Democratic counterparts on the Judiciary Committee immediately lashed out at him for being a member of the Freedom Caucus, which is an outright lie.

The Biden administration has repeatedly told the public that Hunter’s lucrative consulting business doesn’t matter unless it is directly connected to his father. That’s true. Moreover, they add, that connection is not just unproven, it cannot be proved because it didn’t exist. That’s false, although the mainstream media has repeated it faithfully. But even the most feckless are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain this awkward lip-syncing with the White House press office. Actually, the Biden grifting operation extends well beyond Hunter to include multiple family members. It always centered on Joe’s public position and the political access it ensured, first as the sitting vice president and then as a prospective Democratic nominee after Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre didn’t mince words this week when defending her boss. When asked by a reporter about Biden’s adeptness at handling different communication settings, Jean-Pierre stated matter-of-factly, "I would tell you this: the president is the best communicator that we have in the White House.” President Biden rarely communicates with the press corps or with the American public. The old man yells at his teleprompter about McDonald’s WiFi, talks to ghosts and constantly calls people by the wrong name. Just this week, he claimed that he had traveled one million miles a day on Amtrak — not a joke. In the same speech, the great communicator referred to Maryland’s first black governor Wes Moore as “boy.

It was supposed to be so different. Sturdy old Scranton Joe Biden at the helm. Honesty, decency, unity. What a joke. Lawyers for Biden have now all but confirmed that he illegally possessed classified material. The American people have serious questions — and if Biden can’t or won’t answer them, he should not be president of the United States. It would be one thing if Biden proclaimed his own innocence, but he doesn’t. He hasn’t said he was never holding America’s secrets in his garage: his lawyers admit it. If a mid-level Pentagon employee played so fast and loose, they’d be saying a tearful goodbye to their kids before a prison stint. What’s going on here?

So where are the FBI SWAT teams? Will they be raiding Joe Biden’s private office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement as they raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach home? Of course not. Sure, it turns out that there were classified documents in Biden’s office dating from his time as vice president. But only Trump and Trump-friendly people get the full klieg treatment from the Deep State’s Geheime Staatspolizei.   We do not yet know exactly what is in Biden’s documents, though news reports acknowledge that some of the material was marked “sensitive compartmented information,” also known as SCI, a designation used for “highly sensitive information obtained from intelligence sources.

President Joe Biden doesn’t answer many questions without his handler-approved list of reporters. So when he does occasionally go rogue, you can rest assured his answers are coming from the heart. Last week, when Fox News reporter Peter Doocy — or as Joe likes to call him, the “one-horse pony” — asked the president why he didn’t plan on visiting the border during his trip to Arizona, Joe had a rare moment of honesty. “There are more important things going on,” he shouted on the White House South Lawn. Arizonans — and the rest of America — might disagree. A Gallup poll earlier this year showed that 41 percent of Americans worry “a great deal” about illegal immigration.