Neal Pollack

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” William Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 116, and he appears to have been prophetically talking about the very special relationship between President Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.  The first meeting between the two leaders a few months ago was friendly. But today’s press conference, before a tariff negotiation lunch, was essentially a cuddlefest. Carney called Trump a “transformative president.” Trump joked about the upcoming “US/Canada merger,” and said the two countries had “natural conflict and natural love,” like in any marriage.  The problem, Trump said, “is that they want a car company, and we want a car company. It’s a natural business conflict… nothing wrong with it.

“Today we end the War on Warriors,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, author of the book The War On Warriors, tweeted this morning. Today was the day that Hegseth really became Secretary of War, addressing, along with President Trump, a full gathering of top military brass in Quantico, Virginia.  “This is only an esprit de corps,” the President said, as he set sail from the White House for the event. “Do you know what that is, an esprit de corps? This is only a spirit. These are our generals, our admirals, our leaders, and it's a good thing, a thing like this has never been done before, because they came from all over the world. And there's a little bit of expense, not much, but there's a little expense to that. We don't like to waste it.

The morning after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, FBI Director Kash Patel stood in a Utah conference room, the state’s Governor Spencer Cox looking appropriately somber behind him, and uttered these words: “To my friend Charlie Kirk, rest now, brother. We have the watch. And I’ll see you at Valhalla.” A Hindu speaking to a dead Christian in front of a Mormon governor, none of them soldiers, invoking a mythical heaven for Norse warriors: ain’t that America? Yet beyond the absurd and harmless cognitive dissonance, there is a more serious question: does Kash Patel actually “have the watch?

In the United States, despite an attorney general who appears unclear on the concept, we enjoy the freest speech laws of anywhere in the world. Not so in the UK, where police casually drop by to harass citizens about their Internet activity. They visited the wrong cottage this summer, as we see in a video released this week by the UK’s “Free Speech Union”. The Thames Valley Police paid a visit to the home of “an American cancer patient and Trump supporter,” who wasn’t having it. “You can come in,” she said, “but you’d better have a damn good reason for being here.”They did not. “I’ll have Elon Musk on you so quick your feet won’t touch,” she said, in a statement that may have carried more weight in June than it does today.

Charlie Kirk’s senseless murder on a Utah college campus yesterday led to an instant and disgusting avalanche of celebration from a small minority on the extremely online left. But Kirk’s friends and allies also rallied to pay tribute to the slain conservative activist. They know what we lost. President Trump gave a four-minute message from the Resolute Desk and Truth Social, “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!

The Atlantic published the first excerpt of Kamala Harris’s expensive memoir "107 Days" this morning, leading with a lickspittle editor’s note from Jeffrey Goldberg. According to Goldberg, the Harris we read in this book is: “blunt, knowing, fervent, occasionally profane, slyly funny. As you will see in the following excerpt – and throughout this newsworthy book – she no longer seems particularly interested in holding back.” In this short excerpt we learn that Vice-President Harris repaired our supposedly broken relationship with France, mais oui, and also did a good job as “border czar.” She says so herself, and we have only her to thank.

As he often does when things get a little hot in the kitchen, President Trump went after Rosie O’Donnell again yesterday. "We are giving serious thought to taking away Rosie O'Donnell's Citizenship," he wrote on Truth Social. O’Donnell, he said, is "not a Great American," layering that on top of what he said in July, that Rosie is "not in the best interests of our great country." I don’t think anyone other than her closest associates would argue that Rosie O’Donnell is “Great,” but she is, technically, an “American.” If the Trump Administration wants to revoke citizenship for every mediocre celebrity who criticizes the President, well, then, Hollywood is going to have to do some fast outsourcing. Let’s think about who else is on the chopping block.

Maybe you heard that Donald Trump died over the weekend. First, the internet began to buzz over some bruising on the President’s hand during an executive-order signing ceremony. Then people started noticing that no one saw Trump on Friday, and that he didn’t have any events scheduled over the weekend. J.D. Vance gave an interview with USA Today in which he said, “if, God forbid, there's a terrible tragedy, I can't think of better on-the-job training than what I've gotten over the last 200 days.” Trump has become so ubiquitous in our lives that there was only one conclusion to reach from his temporary semi-absence: He is dead. A TikTok video making that claim got 600,000 likes. There were tens of thousands of Twitter posts on the topic, almost trying to will it into reality.

“WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA?” President Trump posted over breakfast. “Seems like a Purge or Revolution. We can’t have that and do business there. I am seeing the new President today at the White House. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!” Trump wasn’t talking about the global box-office success of K-Pop Demon Hunters, and wasn’t warning about the proliferation of zombies on the Train to Busan. Instead, word had reached Trump of recent raids by the government of newly-elected liberal South Korean President Lee Jae-myung on some conservative churches, including the Unification Church. These were related to documents about the coup that embroiled the country last December and nearly toppled Lee’s newly-elected government.