Democrat News

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Sen. John Kennedy said yesterday that the president does not get to decide whether furloughed federal workers are entitled to back pay. Via The Hill:

“It’s not up to the president,” Kennedy told reporters, when asked at the Capitol about the Trump administration “not necessarily committing to back pay” for the federal workers. “I mean, his opinion matters, but Congress has got to appropriate the money,” he continued, according to a video posted online by a CBS News reporter. “Read the Constitution.”

Asked about the legality of denying federal workers back pay, Kennedy said, “We’ve always paid back pay to the military and federal workers, and Congress has already, always appropriated the money, and we will this time, in my opinion.”

A draft memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) raised the possibility that furloughed federal workers may not be entitled to back pay from their time off during the government shutdown, Axios first reported. The draft memo hinges on an aggressive interpretation of the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 — which President Trump signed during the last government shutdown — and argues the law does not automatically guarantee back pay to all furloughed employees

.

If there’s one thing we can say, it’s that Trump is no longer making decisions. Project 2025’s Russell Vought is in charge.

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Two armed men wearing bulletproof vests with “POLICE” stenciled on them showed up Wednesday at the Florida home of Cathy O’Gara while she was getting her 11-year-old granddaughter ready for school. Via the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

She greeted the men, who didn’t identify themselves or the agency they were with. They asked if her husband, James O’Gara, lived there and if they could speak to him about a postcard he’d sent to Florida CFO Blaise Ingoglia with the brief message: “You lack values.”

It was a scary “big red flag moment” for the O’Garas, a retired couple who are politically active supporters of progressive candidates, vocal critics of President Trump’s immigration policies, and helped to organize a local No Kings anti-Trump demonstration in June.

“Anything is possible, if you can send a postcard and have this happen,” Cathy O’Gara said.

With the help of the Largo Police Department, they found out the officers were investigators with the criminal division of the state’s Department of Financial Services, which Ingoglia oversees.

A spokesperson said the visit was a “precautionary measure given the current political climate.”

Yeah, I can see why a postcard from two progressives saying “You lack values” would seem like a threat to a Republican.

“In light of recent events and with political violence on the rise, ensuring the security of public figures and maintaining public safety is increasingly important,” said Sydney Booker, his communications director. “While it is unfortunate that law enforcement must sometimes go the extra mile to ensure public safety, let it be known that it is a direct result of an increasingly hostile political environment.”

She said Ingoglia was unaware of the postcard and did not “have any involvement in the threat assessment.” Ingoglia did not return a call seeking comment.

Yeah, and if you believe that, I have some wetlands in the Everglades to sell you for a trailer park.

Ingoglia is the public face of the DeSantis crackdown on alleged wasteful spending and spiraling property taxes. Ingoglia was in Sanford for such an event on Tuesday.

The O’Garas, who have been critical of those efforts, sent the postcard to Ingoglia after a news conference he held in St. Petersburg in August.

“I expected them to show up eventually because I’m an organizer, and it follows the state of play these days,” said Cathy O’Gara.

They’ve also sent emails to DeSantis and state Attorney General James Uthmeier, criticizing their support of President Trump’s mass deportation policy, calling it “unlawful” and “un-American.”

Then there was this:

After some small talk, one of the officers remarked that O’Gara had been in the infantry during Vietnam, James O’Gara said.

“I was literally scared at that point,” he said. They obviously didn’t just check his name in the white pages or voter rolls, he continued, but had dived deep enough to find his military records. After a few more minutes of idle chatter, they left, he said.

When Cathy O’Gara drove her granddaughter to school moments later, she saw two unmarked Black Ford Broncos parked down the street, which led her to believe more than two agents were sent to their house.

Cathy printed out a letter and showed it to 40 of her neighbors. “I am trying to get people to see what is happening,” she said. “They could have easily taken him away under false pretenses.”

What a buncha pants-pissing manbabies these “tough” Republicans are.

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In what can only be described as a bizarre segment on CNN, Stephen Miller declared the president had plenary authority and then stopped himself, standing mute for several seconds before CNN host Victor Blackwell cut away.

Here’s what happened with the seconds noted:

BLACKWELL: The district judge’s ruling blocking the deployment of National Guard in Oregon legal insurrection.

0:06
BLACKWELLDoes the administration still plan to abide by that ruling?

0:12
MILLER: Well, the administration filed an appeal this morning with the 9th Circuit.

0:16
MILLER: I would note the administration won an identical case in the 9th Circuit just a few months ago with respect to the federalizing of the California National Guard.

NARRATOR: The administration did not win that case

0:25
Under Title 10 of the US Code, the president has plenary authority.

— SEVEN SECONDS OF SILENCE —

0:32
BLACKWELL: Stephen?

0:35
Stephen, Hey Stephen, can you hear me?

0:44
It seemed, Stephen, I apologize.

0:45
It seems like we’re having a technical issue.

What happened there? Miller wasn’t frozen, he just froze, right after he declared absolute authority for Trump. “Plenary authority” is defined as “…power that is wide-ranging, broadly construed, and often limitless for all practical purposes. When used with respect to public officials, the more popular term is plenary power.”

Title 10 refers to the armed forces and the Commander-in-Chief role. It does not allow for plenary authority. Did Miller glitch out because he was assuming invocation of the Insurrection Act? Or did someone forget to reboot him?

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Stephen Miller’s immigration policy–let’s face it, he’s the one running it–is so cruel even the Pope took time to say you can’t call yourself “pro-life” and be so viciously anti-immigrant. MIller’s family, and especially his cousin, Alisa Kasmer, most certainly agrees.

“Kasmer rightly describes Miller as ‘hollow,’ ‘cruel,’ and ‘a curse.’ She discusses panic attacks, depression, and other ills brought on from watching a cousin she once loved, and whom she babysat, become..to use my words: a virulent, shit-house rat genetically spliced with Japanese Murder Hornets and suffering from more than a mild case of The Rage Virus from 28 Days Later.

Miller, quite simply, is a Nazi. And that’s actually not an ad hominem. It’s a descriptor. His jihad is responsible for 300 ICE terrorists’ attacking a five-story Chicago apartment complex last Tuesday night. Kidnapping crying children, some almost naked, yanking them out of their apartments and away from their parents, to be left in random spots in the building to ball.”

Watch the video, and go read the Substack for more! Don’t forget to Subscribe!

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Crank up the Benny Hill theme song and let the belly laughs commence.

As President Trump’s summer of immigration raids turns into a fall of occupation, I need some — and who knew his deportation machine could bring them? To watch videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in action failing bigly is like watching “Star Wars” Stormtroopers constantly misfiring or bonking their heads despite the full backing of the emperor himself.

Have you seen the one where two masked agents struggle to subdue a Latino male on a lawn while a small dog barks from behind a fence? And when the agents grab onto his T-shirt, he slips out of it, grabs his discarded hat and darts away like Bugs Bunny humiliating Elmer Fudd?

Or what about the reel where a handcuffed white man, evidently a protester, dressed in all-black walks alongside his captors before spinning off them like Saquon Barkley evading a tackler as he disappears into a crowd — but not before a fellow protester filming the scene offers his comrade an enthusiastic back slap?

You can get your jollies with a Dave Chappelle special, or by catching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth trying out his Gen. Patton impression before another group of stone-faced generals, but it’s better to settle on yuks that matter — chortles that provoke as much hope as humor.

It’s a reminder that martial law-hungry Trump’s would-be empire is not all powerful. And that Americans can still snicker in the face of official wrong — and should.

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion,” Kurt Vonnegut supposedly said, adding that he “prefer[ed] to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

When you see la migra unable to kick down the front door of a Nicaraguan immigrant at a Fontana apartment just a second after the man shut it in their faces, you just have to giggle at a scenario straight out of the Keystone Kops. And then there’s the viral clip of a food delivery driver on his bike cussing out a phalanx of armed Border Patrol agents in downtown Chicago last month.

“I’m not a U.S. citizen!” the guy yells, daring someone to detain him. Someone finally barks “Get him!” as a bunch of agents feebly give chase; the man pedals away like he’s a Tour de France champion with a peloton hot on his trail. The defeated agents run like they’re wearing concrete boots with skates on them as their quarry makes his escape.

These videos are balm and inspiration for our dark times and they’re even better with a soundtrack — I’ve seen people remix them with jaunty Mexican banda classics such as “La Chona” or “El Sinaloense.” The best ones use “Yakety Sax,” the high-energy romp so many of us Yanks remember as the tune that Benny Hill used when ending his eponymous show with a bunch of people chasing after him after yet another comedic misunderstanding.

Because that’s what all these immigration crackdowns are: sick charades. Armed men grabbing tamale ladies? Tough guys too scared to show their face? Billions of dollars spent on all this? All one can do is laugh at the absurdity of it all to keep from weeping.

Those videos are sadly just a drop in the toxic river of posts showing immigration agents brutalizing migrants and citizens alike that long ago drowned out almost anything else on my social media feeds. That’s why each of those ICE-as-ignoramuses videos is a treasure and why I see so many of my friends share. They bear witness that Trump’s deportation leviathan not only is not invincible, it’s also beatable.

The videos are especially important as a repudiation of one of the Homeland Security Department’s main propaganda planks: use slickly produced clips to glorify la migra as badass avengers with attempts at humor as fundamental to their mission. A recent one consisted of a close-up of one of those vents above your airplane seat that regulates air circulation while the plane’s captain welcomes the viewer to “ICE Air” over the intercom.

“Next time, come to America legally or don’t come at all! Thank you!” the captain announces in a goofy voice.

Cue the “Simpsons” clip of Bart tossing a cake that reads “At Least You Tried” into the garbage.

What Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her writer’s room of revanchists don’t get is that only the worst of the worst ever root for Goliath. That means the joke is on them every time they march through peaceful neighborhoods like “Call of Duty” knockoffs. Scenes like that don’t strike fear in anyone; they just expose the buffoonery behind the bravura. That’s why we need to share anything that captures them flailing around as much as possible.

Humans have laughed at tyrants going back to the days of the ancient Greeks. Yet I’ve also seen some pro-immigrant activists insist now is not the time to laugh, even if it’s at ICE’s expense. To them, Otto Santa Ana says they’re missing out on a valuable tool in the fight for our democracy. He’s a retired UCLA Chicano studies professor who’s working on a book about the nature of humor, down to its biology.

“The people who are laughing at ICE are not contrary to the people who are standing on the front lines,” he said. “The mocking allows us to redirect that frustration into something positive. We both laugh at the perpetrator and bond with other people laughing. When it reaches viral levels, we know that our community takes joy in it — and our community needs any joy right now.”

Santa Ana chuckled as I described some of the better videos I’ve seen. He turned me on to more. When I asked whether republishing those clips with ironic songs represented a new front in political humor, he said they reminded him of Martin Luther, the man who sparked the Reformation by calling out the moral and financial rot of the Catholic Church at the time. Part of his strategy was publishing a heretical, hysterical song against the pope based on a German folk tune that ensured people would listen, sing it and allow his critiques against the Catholic Church to spread faster and further.

“Today’s videos are just another manifestation that technology can be used to embolden us, to unify us,” Santa Ana said.

“The act shifts the public narrative of ICE from scary and powerful to laughable and weak,” he added. “And the oppressed sense their moral superiority vindicated against an evil.”

He concluded: “The authoritarian feeds on fear and ignorance and when people who can stand up for their rights articulate it humorously, it helps to bring the henchman down.”

You heard the profe, America. Go find the latest ICE Follies, and tell everyone you know!

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On Saturday, a home belonging to a South Carolina Circuit judge burned to the ground. Three people, including the judge’s husband and son, were hospitalized with serious injuries.

The cause of the fire was not immediately clear. An investigation is underway.

Obviously, the harm and destruction were terrible things. But what turned that particular tragedy into something more frightful and ominous is the fact the judge had been targeted with death threats, after ruling against the Trump administration in a lawsuit involving the state’s voter files.

Last month, the judge, Diane Goodstein, temporarily blocked South Carolina from releasing data to the U.S. Department of Retribution, er, Justice, which is turning over tables in search of “facts” to bolster President Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 election.

Among those who criticized the decision, which was reversed by South Carolina’s Supreme Court, was Harmeet Dhillon, the San Francisco attorney who now heads the Justice Department’s beleaguered Civil Rights Division.

Here’s a short quiz. Using professional norms and human decency as your guide, can you guess what Dhillon did in the aftermath of the fire?

A) Publicly consoled Goodstein and said the Justice Department would throw its full weight behind an urgent investigation into the fire.

B) Drew herself up in righteous anger and issued a ringing statement that denounced political violence, whatever its form, whether perpetrated by those on the left, right or center.

C) Took to social media to troll a political adversary who raised concerns about the targeting of judges and incendiary rhetoric emanating from the Trump administration.

If you selected anything other than “C,” you obviously aren’t familiar with Dhillon. Or perhaps you’ve spent the last many months in a coma, or cut off from the world in the frozen tundra of Antarctica.

The cause of the fire could very well turn out to be something unfortunate and distinctly nonpolitical. Faulty wiring, say, or an unattended pot left on the stove. South Carolina’s top law enforcement official said a preliminary inquiry had so far turned up no evidence that the fire was deliberately set.

What matters, however, is Dhillon’s response.

Not as someone with a shred of sympathy, or as a dogged and scrupulous seeker of truth and justice. But as a fists-up political combatant.

The timing of the blaze, the threats Goodstein received and the country’s hair-trigger political atmosphere all offered more than a little reason for pause and reflection. At the least, Goodstein’s loss and the suffering of her husband and child called for compassion.

Dhillon, however, is a someone who reacted to the 2022 hammer attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband not with concern but rather cruel and baseless conspiracy claims.

By then, Dhillon — a critic of Trump before he won the 2016 Republican nomination — had shape-shifted into one of his most vocal backers, a regular mouthpiece on Fox News and other right-wing media. Her pandering paid off with her appointment to the Justice Department, where Dhillon is supposed to be protecting the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans — not just those in Trump’s good graces.

There’s plenty of tit-for-tat going around in today’s sulfurous climate. Indeed, the jabbing of fingers and laying of blame have become something of a national pastime.

The administration asserts left-wing radicals are responsible for the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and a sniper attack on the ICE field office in Dallas. Those on the left blame Trump and his venomous vassal, Stephen Miller, for the incineration of Goodstein’s home.

When Neera Tanden, a liberal think-tank leader and prolific presence on social media, suggested there might be a connection between the blaze and Miller’s hate-filled rhetoric, Dhillon responded like a juvenile in a flame war. “Clown … grow up, girl,” Dhillon wrote on X.

When a spokesman for Gov. Gavin Newsom pointed a finger at Dhillon and her criticism of the South Carolina judge, Dhillon seized on some over-the-top responses and called in the U.S. Marshals Service. “We will tolerate no such threats by woke idiots, including those who work for @GavinNewsom,” Dhillon said.

All around, a sad display of more haste than good judgment.

That said, there is a huge difference between a press staffer getting his jollies on social media and the assistant attorney general of the United States playing politics with personal calamity.

And, really, doesn’t Dhillon have better things to do — and better ways of earning her pay — than constantly curating her social media feed, like a mean girl obsessing over likes and followers?

Worse, though, than such puerile behavior is what Dhillon embodies: an us-vs.-them attitude that permeates the administration and treats those who didn’t vote for Trump — which is more than half the country — as a target.

It’s evident in the talk of shuttering “Democrat” agencies, as if federal programs serve only members of one party. It’s manifest in the federal militarization of Democratic-run cities and the cutting off of funding to blue states, but not red ones, during the current government shutdown.

It’s revealed in the briefings — on military plans, on operations during the shutdown — given to Republican lawmakers but denied to Democrats serving on Capitol Hill.

Dhillon is just one cog in Trump’s malevolent, weaponization of Washington. But her reflexively partisan response to the razing of Judge Goodstein’s home is telling.

When the person in charge of the nation’s civil rights enforcement can’t muster even a modicum of civility, we’re living in some very dark times indeed.

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California Sen. Alex Padilla is among the highest-ranking Latinos in U.S. politics today, but it took a pair of handcuffs to make him famous.

How’s that for a comment on America 2025?

Padilla, you may remember, was tackled and cuffed by federal officers after attempting to ask a question of Homeland Security Czarina Kristi Noem at an L.A. news conference in June, when the National Guard first made its appearance on our streets. Noem later claimed Padilla “lunged” at her — which he did not — using the classic Trumpian technique of erasing reality with blame, especially when it comes to brown people.

Padilla told me that “from day one of this administration, I have tried to speak truth to power,” and if getting tackled forced people to “have no choice but to now start paying attention … that could be helpful, because the general public knows it’s wrong.”

U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi recycled the incident on Tuesday when Padilla attempted to question her during a congressional hearing, voicing concern about the weaponization of the Department of Justice. Bondi refused to answer multiple questions, instead invoking the Noem defense.

“I find it interesting that you want order … in this proceeding now,” Bondi said. “You sure didn’t have order when you stormed Secretary Noem at a press conference in California, did you?”

Again, no storming, no lunging, not even a feint. Really, if anything can be said of Padilla, it’s that he’s a guy who likes order. An MIT-trained engineer, he’s known for being calm to the point of boring — in the best of ways. Who wouldn’t want a bit of boring in their politics today, if it’s seasoned with compassion and common sense?

Calm, of course, does not mean a lack of conviction. As the government shutdown limps to the end of its first full week, Padilla took a few minutes to fill me in on why Democrats shouldn’t back down, and why he won’t — whether the issue is healthcare, immigration or the collision of the two, which is at the heart of this shutdown.

Republicans would like voters to believe that undocumented immigrants are throwing parties in our emergency rooms, racking up free services while shoving U.S. citizens out to the sidewalk. In reality, there’s not a lot of good data on how many ER visits involve undocumented folks because doctors are more focused on saving lives than checking immigration status. But one Texas study found that about 2% of all hospital visits in a three-month period involved people without documentation. That’s in a state with a high number of undocumented folks, so take it for what it’s worth — hardly a scourge.

Padilla and Democrats would like to stay focused on an actual crisis — healthcare premiums for low- and middle-income folks are about to skyrocket in coming weeks if Congress doesn’t keep the Obama-era subsidies that make the premiums affordable. Padilla wants voters to understand how dire this is.

“This is not a what-might-happen-next-year concern … this is a now concern,” Padilla told me.

“Open enrollment is opening,” he said. “People are setting their premiums and have to make choices of where to sign up for healthcare and at the cost right now, and so it does need to be immediately addressed.”

In case you think this is partisan show, far-right MAGA cheerleader Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) agrees with Padilla. That’s when you know things are getting weird.

“Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!” Greene wrote on social media, breaking with her party on the issue.

That’s about the only thing that Padilla and Greene may ever agree on. Padilla is the son of immigrants who met in L.A. and later obtained legal status. He was born in Southern California, making birthright citizenship core to his identity at a moment when Trump is asking the Supreme Court to end it. His isn’t just an immigrant story, it’s a California story, and it’s never far from his mind.

He was recently asked if he regretted fighting with the Biden administration over proposed immigration reform that lacked pathways for immigrants, especially Dreamers and others who have been in the United States for years if not decades, to become citizens. Would it have been better to sell them out, leave them in limbo, but fix the border before Trump could exploit it?

“Of course not,” Padilla told me. Rather than shrink under attack, Padilla said he’s holding his ground.

California is one of a handful of states that does in fact offer healthcare to undocumented people, though budget shortfalls forced Gov. Gavin Newsom to scale back that plan.

No federal dollars are used for that undocumented healthcare — it’s solely state money. And Padilla supports it.

“There are some states that choose to use state funding to provide that care, and I agree with that, because it’s much smarter, from a public health standpoint, to help prevent people from getting sick or treat people early on, not administer healthcare, certainly not primary care, through emergency rooms,” he said.

Padilla said it’s rich that the very workers deemed essential during the coronavirus pandemic, the workers who kept food on tables, deliveries going, and cared for our young and our elderly, are now “the primary target of Trump’s massive deportation agenda. So whether it’s in the vein of the healthcare question, whether it’s in the vein of the indiscriminate raids by ICE and other federal agencies, that’s the cruel irony.”

The Trump administration raised Padilla’s profile inadvertently, but the newfound fame has had a somewhat unexpected consequence: Frequent speculation that he may run for governor when Newsom terms out in 2026.

Padilla said he hasn’t “made a decision on that and not making any announcements right now.”

Instead, he’s focusing on helping to pass California’s Proposition 50, which would rig election maps to potentially create five more Democratic seats in the midterm elections, with the hopes of taking control of at least one house of Congress, an effort he says is “critical to reining in this out-of-control administration.”

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Former Rep. Katie Porter, the 2026 gubernatorial candidate who has a narrow edge in the polls, raised eyebrows Tuesday when footage emerged of her apparently ending a television interview after becoming irritated by a reporter’s questions.

The footage shows CBS Sacramento reporter Julie Watts asking Porter, a Democrat, what she would say to the nearly 6.1 million Californians who voted for President Trump in 2024, and the UC Irvine law professor responding that she didn’t need their support if she competed against a Republican in the November 2026 runoff election to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom.

After Porter highlighted her experience winning a closely divided Orange County congressional district, she grew palpably irritated by Watts’ follow-up questions on her dismissiveness about needing support from voters who supported Trump.

“I feel like this is unnecessarily argumentative. What is your question?” Porter said.

Watts responded that she had asked every other candidate similar questions in relation to Proposition 50, the redistricting ballot measure that Newsom and other California Democrats put on the ballot in a special election for November.

Porter said she would seek every vote she could win, but then grew testy over follow-up questions.

“I don’t want to keep doing this. I’m going to call it,” Porter said, saying she objected to multiple follow-up questions. “I want to have a pleasant, positive conversation. … And if every question you’re going to make up a follow-up question, then we’re never going to get there.”

She later said, “I don’t want this all on camera.”

Porter, a protege of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, won election to Congress in 2018 and gained attention for grilling executives and using a white board to explain complex policies. The 51-year-old unsuccessfully ran for Senate in 2024 and returned to teaching law at UC Irvine.

On Tuesday night, Porter’s campaign said that the interview continued for an additional 20 minutes after the heated exchange, but did not offer further comment.

The former congresswoman’s Democratic rivals in the 2026 gubernatorial race seized on her comments, and Democratic strategists not associated with any candidate in the race also cringed.

“When you’re governor, you’re governor of everyone, not just the people in your party. It’s a bad look to say you don’t want or need votes from certain Californians, even those you really disagree with,” said Elizabeth Ashford, who served as a strategist for Govs. Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger as well as former Vice President Kamala Harris when she was the attorney general of California.

“But, also, even good candidates have bad nights,” Ashford added. “This was a miss for Katie, but not every interview is going to go great.”

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This has ramifications for future breakthroughs: “John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments revealing macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy quantization in superconducting circuits, laying the groundwork for quantum computers and sensors.”

Gizmodo has a great article on this:

On the centennial of modern quantum mechanics, the Nobel Committee awarded the year’s most prestigious physics prize to an experiment that demonstrated how quantum effects play out on large scales—including inside your smartphone.

Imagine throwing a tennis ball against a wall. Millennia of both scientific and anecdotal observations teach that the ball will likely hit the wall and bounce back. In the quantum world, however, that isn’t always the case. There, the ball might pass straight through the wall and appear on the other side—a phenomenon referred to as “tunneling.”

Size is a tricky concept in quantum mechanics, but very simply speaking, “microscopic” scales in this context generally refer to that of a single particle. By contrast, “macroscopic” refers to a large number of particles. Quantum mechanical effects appear to fade on the macroscopic scale, hence why a tennis ball—comprised of a gazillion particles—typically doesn’t pass through walls.

But the Nobel-winning experiment created a highly sophisticated, superconducting circuit that enabled electrons inside to move through the system as if they were a single particle, filling the entire circuit. The electrons in the system tunneled through a thin layer of non-conductive material—and thus, the circuit, which the researchers had described as being “big enough to get one’s grubby fingers on,” is a macroscopic demonstration of a microscopic, or quantum, phenomenon.

Read the whole article; it’s fascinating.

Open thread.

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WATTERS: All right, you have Trump here talking to 10,000 Navy guys, and then you have Kamala whining that she didn’t get blown out. What kind of contrast was that this weekend?

CROWLEY: What a difference the presidency makes, Jesse, right? I mean, we are now totally over that destructive, stupid era of toxic masculinity, and now we’re in an era of real masculinity, thanks to the bold, muscular leadership of President Trump, and our Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.

We saw that in bold relief yesterday. What an incredible day. I was there. I was so privileged to speak before the president. We had over 20,000 people there, sailors, admirals, Gold Star families, veterans. We had some Marines there as well. They went wild. They love this commander-in-chief. They love the First Lady. They love this administration.

Why? Because of respect for them, for the American people, for our constitution, and for real American strength. Jesse, this is what all of these military anniversaries and big birthday parties are about. It’s about celebrating 250 years of American strength and military might. We are so back, Jesse.

WATTERS: It’s gonna be so great next year, especially when we celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States. And we were fighting in the Octagon at the White House, and we’re gonna have all these celebrations with statues and great men and great patriots and women.

It’s really great that the election went the way it did. But Kamala says, Monica, no, it was a tight one.

CROWLEY: I don’t know what she’s on here, Jesse, but in no way, or form was the 2024 election close. Maybe in her own mind, but she may be delusional. No, of course, the president won in a landslide. And he certainly has a mandate and that’s exactly what he’s exercising here on behalf of the American people.

And you see it in this America 250 celebration over the next year, going straight into July 4th. I’m so honored to play a big role in this. This is about celebrating America’s foundational principles, limited government, fiscal responsibility, individual freedom, and American power and strength. All of the great gifts that the founding fathers gave to us.

The other side is drowning, Jesse, because they have rejected that for decades wholesale and they see the success of this messaging, these policies coming from this administration and they have simply no answer for it.

The American people are naturally aspirational and optimistic. They love what they’re seeing from this administration. Well, more to come.

WATTERS: It’s going to be a big, beautiful birthday party and I can’t wait. Monica, thank you so much. It’s always great to see.