Republican News

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This is pretty big news that I really hadn’t seen anything about. I suppose with everything happening in the world right now, it got lost in the sauce. But on any other day the looming possibility of all the commuter trains running from New Jersey into New York City being just-this-close to shutting down would, as Joe Biden would say, be a BFD.

The New Jersey Transit board on Wednesday night pushed the Garden State to the brink of its first major rail strike since 1983, adjourning their monthly meeting without cutting a deal with the agency’s locomotive engineer union.

The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen authorized a strike as early as 12:01 a.m. Friday, which would shut down commuter rail service for roughly 100,000 riders. The union’s leadership reached a tentative agreement with NJ Transit last month, but a majority of the roughly 450 rank-and-file members voted it down.

During the meeting, NJ Transit President Kris Kolluri said he was “supremely optimistic” a deal would be reached by Friday. He has in recent weeks warned New Jersey rail riders a strike could be imminent and said they should prepare to work from home.

Especially when it’s threatening tonight’s Shakira concert in the Meadowlands.

OH, THE HUMANITY!

…Unfortunately for some Shakira fans, the impact of a possible NJ Transit strike will be felt soon.

On Monday, NJ Transit announced it would not provide train or bus service to MetLife Stadium for the Shakira concerts on Thursday and Friday due to the strike threat.

The news could impact hundreds if not thousands of attendees to the shows, in particular Thursday’s show, which is sold out.

I think the NY Post may be understating the effects.

NJ Transit strike appears ever more likely ahead of midnight deadline: ‘It’s going to be ugly’

NJ Transit riders are facing massive service disruptions as the system barrels like a runaway train toward Thursday’s midnight deadline to avoid its first major rail strike in over 40 years.

The Garden State-owned rail service has already festooned stations with screaming-red signage warning of deep service cuts starting at midnight Friday if contract negotiations with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers union fall through.

…NJ resident Lisa Monroe, 53, who works in media, said working for home is not an option for her, and that driving back and forth to the city five days a week will add up to around $425 a week, not including gas.

“Honestly I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said, noting she’s already considering what expenses she can reduce to make it work.

“We have to spend more money on getting to work, just to commute, and your salary is not going to match. My salary is not going to go out with the additional $85 or more a day because of a strike. I have to cut back.”

The NJ Transit Authority is urging the 350K people who take the trains daily to either work from home or get where they need to be now.  They can’t guarantee they’ll be able to do it after tonight, and they certainly have nowhere near the extra buses needed to pick up that kind of slack. It is, after all, the third-largest mass transportation system in the country.

New Jersey Transit urged riders to reach their destinations before the end of the day Thursday or risk being stranded as last-minute talks continued in a bid to avert a rail strike by train engineers that would affect some 350,000 commuters in New Jersey and New York City.

…The system’s advisory provided riders with details on contingency plans that would take effect if engineers walk off the job at 12:01 a.m. EDT Friday. The agency plans to increase bus service, saying it would add “very limited” capacity to existing New York commuter bus routes in close proximity to rail stations and will contract with private carriers to operate bus service from key regional park-and-ride locations during weekday peak periods.

However, the agency noted that the buses would not be able to handle close to the same number of passengers — only about 20% of current rail customers — so it is has urged people who can work from home to do so if there is a strike.

You can imagine people have questions about how that’s going to work.

So if let’s say I get on a train at 11:06pm to go to Trenton, if there is no deal by mid night, is the train just gonna drop everyone off at the next stop? Or do they let the train go as scheduled? Or does that train get canceled?

— PStarzynski Discruntled NYR/NYY/NYG fan ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ (@PeterS_Tech) May 15, 2025

As always, it’s about the money, and both sides are in negotiations with federal mediators in D.C. at the moment, trying to get past the sticking points. One of which is arguing about who makes how much. And, woof – do they want a raise.

…Wages have been the main sticking point of the negotiations between the agency and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. The union says its members earn an average salary of $113,000 a year and says an agreement could be reached if agency CEO Kris Kolluri agrees to an average yearly salary of $170,000.

NJ Transit leadership, though, disputes the union’s data, saying the engineers have average total earnings of $135,000 annually, with the highest earners exceeding $200,000.

If the walkout happens, it would be the state’s first transit strike in more than 40 years. It comes a month after union members overwhelmingly rejected a labor agreement with management.

The union put out a slick little video explaining their side of the labor dispute, and it says they haven’t had a raise in six years. Yeah, that would suck in a molto expensive place like NJ. I kind of doubt whatever valid points they may have will mollify pissed off Shakira fans, though, and I believe there’s also a basketball game or something at the same time. No one will be able to get to anything. Or if they did, getting home could be an adventure.

The BLET National Division has produced a television commercial on behalf of its NJ Transit members, which will run on cable in New Jersey next week. The ad outlines the union’s position on locomotive engineer wages in advance of a potential strike or lock-out at NJT on May 16. pic.twitter.com/K3OQxsdLaO

— Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (@BLET) May 9, 2025

It might take more than a public relations exercise to soothe hard feelings should the union walk out.

A walkout has the potential to really slamma jamma the works for folks who have to get into the city, and I can’t imagine what kind of gridlock Manhattan would see tomorrow.

New Jersey Transit workers are threatening to walk off the job as early as midnight tonight. The looming transportation strike would leave much of the nation’s third-largest transit system at a standstill. @giobenitez reports. pic.twitter.com/bNFmbHAIWU

— Good Morning America (@GMA) May 15, 2025

The way things have been going, I firmly believe the whole of transportation in NJ needs some sort of voodoo cleansing ceremony. Cleanse it with fire and feathers or whatever it takes, if you ask me.

It’s just another day 🎶 https://t.co/tcI7trqo7n

— Bob Scheurle (@BobScheurle) May 8, 2025

And, yes – in case you were wondering, Trump did this.

NJ transit goes on strike tonight at midnight here in new jersey this is pure insanity we never had these issues under @BarackObama @JoeBiden or even @GeorgeHWBush it’s no surprise that it’s happening under @realDonaldTrump the guy can’t govern out of a brown paper bag

— birthday may 20th taurus affair (@moneychase_85) May 15, 2025

Was there ever any doubt?

I hope they settle at the last minute, because there’s no ugly quite like a NY/NJ ugly. 

And no one wants to see that.

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I am old enough to remember when Joe Biden gave us the Best Economy Ever™. It seems like just yesterday, but to be honest, the claims ended sometime around November 5th, 2024, or 191 days ago. 

Now I am expected to believe that under Donald Trump, six out of 10 Americans cannot afford the basics necessary to live a decent life. 

The bottom 60% of U.S. households don’t make enough money to afford a “minimal quality of life,” according to a new analysis. https://t.co/Kc8peRJPUi

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) May 14, 2025

If I took these guys seriously, I would get whiplash. As it is, my neck hurts from shaking my head. 

The gap between what Americans earn and how much they need to bring in to achieve a basic standard of living is growing, according to a new report.

The analysis, from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), looks beyond whether people can afford daily necessities like food and shelter to consider whether they have the means to pay for things like the technology tools necessary for work, higher education, and health and child care costs.

In tracking costs associated with what the group calls a “basket of American dream essentials,” LISEP says its Minimal Quality of Life index provides a truer picture of how Americans are faring than standard economic data, such as the nation’s gross domestic product and jobless rate. The index captures the annual change in the typical costs facing low- and moderate-income households who are looking to maintain a basic quality of life. 

“We analyze these components not just in terms of financial figures but as crucial elements that shape a family’s capability to achieve a desirable standard of living,” the group explains in a paper describing its approach. 

The findings? For the bottom 60% of U.S. households, a “minimal quality of life” is out of reach, according to the group, a research organization focused on improving lower earners’ economic well-being. 

Now, to be fair to CBS, they are indeed reporting on “a new analysis,” just as they do indeed report civilian casualty figures from the “Gaza Health Ministry.” This gives them the cover they need to take one step away from criticisms that they are actual propagandists. 

“We are merely CONDUITS for propaganda,” one could imagine them saying. 

Jake Tapper, who co-authored a new book about “the cover-up” of Joe Biden’s decline, is denying vociferously that he, as a senior member of the Washington media establishment, participated in the cover-up himself. “He’s saying he didn’t know because there was a cover up that was… pic.twitter.com/nOmOQY1a9v

— 2WAY (@2waytvapp) May 15, 2025

Jake Tapper, who co-authored a new book about “the cover-up” of Joe Biden’s decline, is denying vociferously that he, as a senior member of the Washington media establishment, participated in the cover-up himself. “He’s saying he didn’t know because there was a cover up that was so deliciously effective that he couldn’t break the story until now,” says . Hogan Gidley just laughs. “What was covered up? He’s the president of the United States. He can’t get through sentences, he can’t get upstairs, he can’t get downstairs.” 

Which is, of course, total crap. The Pravda Media decides who they find “credible” and what “news” they believe is worth reporting, and using Hamas casualty numbers or a radical-left think tank as authoritative doesn’t just shape what people think, it is intended to. It is propaganda disguised as journalism. 

Of course, it is conceivable that “journalists” whose salaries start in the six figures and end in the 8-figure range probably do think that most Americans are poor. Heck, it wasn’t long ago that Whoopi Goldberg said she is working-class and can’t retire because she needs to make millions to survive. 

Talk about out of touch.
Multi-millionaire Whoopi Goldberg claims to be part of the working-class because she has a job on The View:
“I appreciate that people are having a hard time. Me too. I work for a living. If I had all the money in the world, I would not be here.” pic.twitter.com/g98M4BCFf4

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) November 12, 2024

It is true that America has an affordability crisis, and many middle-class families struggle to get ahead. But that is a long way from not being able to afford a “basic standard of living.” If that were true, the average person in Germany, France, or England would be downright poor. You are not poor if you can afford a $1000 phone and a 75-inch TV. 

It should be easier to get ahead and achieve the American Dream, and we can do many things to reinvigorate the American economy. 

But following the advice of the laptop class on how to get there from here is a grave mistake. They are the ones who exported American jobs, imported millions of foreign laborers to take away working-class jobs, and imposed crushing regulations that made building businesses in America that much harder. 

No doubt, if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, by June 2029 we will have the Best Economy Ever™ once again. 

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Come on, man. We all know the answer to this question — or perhaps better put, answers.

My pal Jim Geraghty raised the issue of the Biden Cabinet’s dereliction of duty regarding Joe Biden’s unfitness for office. Based on reporting in the upcoming book from Alex Thompson and CNN host Jake Tapper, the media outlet revealed that these chief officers of the executive branch knew Biden could not perform reliably as early as 2023. They also knew that White House staff had acted to exclude them from access to the President, even though the Cabinet officials reported directly to him and had Senate-confirmed positions of authority:

Some members of former President Joe Biden’s Cabinet did not believe that he could be relied upon to perform at 2 a.m. during an emergency by the final year of his presidency, according to a new book from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson.

Several secretaries told the authors that Biden’s inner circle grew so small in 2023 and 2024 that even members of his Cabinet weren’t included.

“Access dropped off considerably in 2024, and I didn’t interact with him as much,” said one Cabinet secretary, who explained that instead of briefing Biden, the secretary would brief other senior White House aides, who then briefed the president.

In fact, it got so tight that even White House aides got excluded. But before that happened, they’d also realized that Biden was no longer competent to handle the job:

Tapper and Thompson write that White House aides who once had regular access to Biden would go months without seeing him. At some meetings, others noticed that Biden “would occasionally be mumbling and not making much sense,” according to the authors.

“I don’t think he has dementia,” said a second Cabinet secretary, according to the authors. “But the thing is, he’s an old man. The president can give you four to six good hours a day. When he got tired, sloppy isn’t the right word, but his guard was down.”

What to make of this? Even before we get to the constitutional issue, let us note that it’s not just the Protection Racket Media that has the Now It Can Be Told disease. Every single one of these people now attempting to help reporters sell books had at least a moral a duty to disclose that the president was simply not competent for the job. That includes the aides that saw Biden’s inner circle isolating him and presumably usurping Biden’s authority. They could have gone to congressional leadership to alert leadership of both parties of the crisis, even if they didn’t want to go to the press, to see if it could be handled quietly and with dignity. Instead, they all kept their mouths shut even after Biden (or his regents) launched a bid for a second four-year term in office.

However, as egregious as this is, it pales in comparison to the dereliction of duty by Cabinet Secretaries tasked by Biden and the Senate to uphold the constitutional order. The aides had a moral duty to speak up, but these executive-branch officers had a constitutional duty under the 25th Amendment to take action, as Jim Geraghty reminds us — and CNN ignores:

If the sitting president goes cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, or has some other circumstance that makes it impossible for him to adequately perform his duties, the vice president and the president’s cabinet are supposed to step in and declare that he can no longer perform the role and declare the vice president is taking over. It’s right there in the Constitution, and it has been there since 1967…

It’s one thing if the president’s meetings with members of Congress, foreign leaders, or ordinary citizens grow rarer and shorter. That’s bad, but that’s not a constitutional crisis. But if a president is deliberately avoiding meetings with his cabinet, he’s not around the only people who are empowered by our Constitution to recognize the problems in the president’s mental capacities and take action. 

Exactly. So why did these Cabinet Secretaries allow Biden’s handlers to exclude them from the only person to whom they were constitutionally accountable? Why didn’t they speak up and alert the country to the crisis, especially after Biden (or his handlers) launched his re-election bid? Two explanations come to mind — neither of which makes them look good.

First: These Cabinet agency heads may have enjoyed the autonomy that Biden’s isolation provided them. As long as the Biden regency didn’t order them around, these officials may have preferred to operate entirely independently and without any accountability. What would have happened in a 25th Amendment action that actually succeeded in removing an incompetent incumbent? They would have more supervision and direction, assuming that the replacement didn’t remove them to bring in her own preferred Cabinet heads.

And that brings us to the second reason: Kamala Harris. Even if they succeeded in getting Congress to recognize Biden’s infirmity, the only result possible would have been Harris’ ascension to the presidency, either ‘acting’ or otherwise. Harris might have made some changes to the Cabinet in the aftermath of a Biden removal; Tony Blinken might have gotten the boot in favor of someone even less inclined to support Israel, for instance. Biden had not held any of these officials accountable for their myriad failures in office, especially not Lloyd Austin, who made a grotesque botch of the plan to bug out of Kabul and later went AWOL rather than discuss his not-at-all-unusual prostate issues with the President. Harris might have decided to flex her muscles and remove them from power.

However, that wouldn’t be the real reason for that reluctance. The real reason is that Kamala Harris is every bit as incompetent as Joe Biden, only for reasons having nothing to do with dementia. Harris could not be trusted with the presidency, as voters discovered in 2019 and again in 2024, when in both cycles she couldn’t even be trusted to handle the media, let alone the world. 

If the United States had had a competent Vice President, the Cabinet might have acted to replace a president whose aides and families had isolated for reasons of incompetence. Their lack of action in that crisis is unforgivably cowardly, but also a massive declaration of no confidence in Kamala Harris. And then they stood by while Harris attempted to win office anyway rather than publicly demand an open and democratic process to replace the party’s nominee, compounding their cowardice.

The Now It Can Be Told moment in American public life is nothing short than an utter disgrace to everyone who kept these secrets … and that includes the reporters who buried them until a few months ago and now want to profit off of their exposure. 

Want to hold all of these cowards and cover-up artists accountable? Join our VIP Membership program! Choose VIP to support Hot Air and access our premium content, VIP Gold to extend your access to all Townhall Media platforms and participate in this show, or VIP Platinum to get access to even more content and discounts on merchandise. Use the promo code FIGHT to join or to upgrade your existing membership level today, and get 60% off!

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The entire super secret, 1100+ page report has been leaked to numerous media sources in Germany. 

I can now report the bombshell findings of months of exhaustive investigative research, snooping, and spying by the finest agents available in the German intelligence community and democracy protection racket.

The repercussions of this incendiary, voluminous tome could be characterized as…

 I’m not kidding.

The German police state and ruling junta have completely beclowned themselves. The document produced by the constitutional protection agency (BfV) and used as justification for declaring the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party a ‘right-wing extremist’ group – which enabled legal surveillance of any member and all activities and the first step in banning the party completely – has been exposed as so much gossip, plagiarized news reports, and opinion differences.

No wonder the government backed off almost as soon as they released it. Not only did they drop the classification in less than two weeks’ time – in the face of a lawsuit from AfD and international pressure…

Far-right party Alternative for Germany filed a lawsuit on Monday challenging a decision last week by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency to classify the party as an extremist organisation.

…The AfD says its designation as extremist is a politically motivated attempt to discredit and criminalize it.

…but now the country – and the world – knows the ‘evidence’ comes nowhere near matching the spectacular defamatory claims against the populist party.

German intelligence probe into AfD ends in farce with ‘top secret’ report leak

A controversial top-secret German intelligence report on the right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD) that could lead to a total ban on the insurgent political group has been leaked in full online.

…The report had served as the foundation for BfV’s May 2 decision to categorise the entire AfD as “definitely right-wing extremist”. The judgement by the internal security agency could serve as the basis for a complete ban of AfD – which received 21 per cent of the vote in the recent General Election.

The BfV had previously tried to keep the 1,108-page report confidential with not even AfD itself been given a copy. Only a few passages had been made publicly available.

The German Interior Ministry – to which the BfV reports – had argued that the report contained sensitive sources and intelligence information and that the disclosure could jeopardise the agency’s work.

Mathias Brodkorb, a former SPD state minister refuted that charge. After reading the report, he wrote in magazine Cicero: “It was never about protecting the BfV from espionage, but of protecting it from a critical public. … There are no relevant intelligence sources to protect. The constitution protection agency has practically no intelligence findings on AfD. It relies almost entirely on publicly available sources.”

The report is in large part a compilation of quotes from public statements by AfD politicians, including AfD leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, along with state-level and local representatives. The quotes range from harmless statements to “clearly unconstitutional statements”, wrote Brodkorb. However, the BfV would declare them all without differentiation as anti-constitutional. “This is not only unconvincing, it is patently false,” Brodkorb concluded.

As one German blogger I follow pointed out, the rules for banning a political party are rigorously strict, as they should be. And the threshold for evidence is tremendously high. Thought crimes and spoken opposition are not enough, either. There has to be a physical manifestation of the party in question – and not just isolated individuals – moving to ‘overcome’ one of their three guiding principles.

…We have to be very clear about the standards here. For a party to be banned in the Federal Republic, it must be opposed to the “freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung,” or the “free democratic basic order.” This is an ideological trinity consisting of human dignity, democracy and the rule of law. Pure opposition is however not enough; the offending party must also seek to overcome at least one of these triune deities in an “aggressive” and “combative” fashion. The antidemocratic agenda must moreover be associated with the party as a whole. Practically, this means you need to get party leadership militating aggressively against democracy, and/or the rule of law and/or human dignity.

---

The BfV assessment falls so far short of this standard, you have to wonder if there are saboteurs working secretly to defend the AfD inside the offices of constitutional protection. To say that this thing is s**t would be an understatement.

It’s also really intriguing that while the BfV had legal access to all sorts of surveillance tools to gather information like phone taps, undercover infiltration, and data intercepts, they failed to provide a single example of any AfD skullduggery.

Bupkiss.

…The BfV are legally required to use espionage as a last resort, but the whole point of upgrading the AfD to “suspected right-wing extremist” status in 2021 was to open the door to surveillance and infiltration. This is absolutely necessary for those who want to ban the party, because nothing their politicians have done in public meets the high legal standards for prohibition. The whole hope, this whole time, has been that the BfV have spent the last three or four years hard at work tapping phones and paying informants to deliver proof of crpytofascist right-wing extremism in the AfD. And yet, there is absolutely nothing like that in this report.

The government spies filed AfD members railing against George Soros as proof of ‘anti-Semitism‘ and AfD leader Alice Weidel’s reference to a murderous migrant as ‘one of these knifemen’ as a bona fide ‘xenophobic and anti-minority statement.’

It’s become something of a sport, according to eugyppius, for bloggers and media types to beat each other to unearthing the crazier passages cited in the report as ‘evidence’ against the party.

Here’s another example:

• In the midst of the long aforementioned attempt to convict the AfD of antisemitism, the BfV decide that “globalist” is an antisemitic “cipher” deployed by the party, and that attacking Bill Gates as a “globalist” is therefore antisemitic, because Gates is “perceived as Jewish.”

HOLY CRAP

The Brussels Signal found one of its own to scratch its head in wonder over.

…Weidel referred to the widely publicised case of a German pensioner who had his house raided by police after sharing a meme online in which then Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck (Greens Party) was called a “professional moron”. Weidel called the raid “an element of intimidation”. This statement was subsequently also included in the BfV report as an indication of AfD’s anti-constitutionality.

Another European news source thought to ask why? Why were none of the statements from all the years of surveillance used in the report that was leaked, and then they answered themselves.

It’s pretty awful to think about, too.

…There are multiple reasons. For one, a big part of the apparatus of spy agencies is to obtain information, but not release it to the public. The public may not be able to stomach such personal and private information and the means that were used to obtain it. Since the Edward Snowden revelations, and even before then, we have become acutely aware that we have accepted devices into our lives and homes that can be used to spy on us on a scale never seen before in history. However, even now — even after all this information has been revealed — I believe nearly all of us still cannot quite grasp what this means — nor do we want to.

…The point is that this software and the means for surveilling people are very unsettling. In a privacy-minded country like Germany, revealing the scale of surveillance being used against the AfD may be a scandal within itself, and could taint the entire report, which at the end of the day, should be used to justify a ban of the AfD.

There may have been voices in the BfV who were calling to use secretly recorded data in the report as well, but the agency also knew this report would eventually be leaked and made public. The agency does not appear to want to divulge who they are surveilling, what information they have about them, and how they obtained this information.

…Surveillance is everywhere, it is being practiced by the left, the right, and many foreign governments are also active in the West, collecting data on targets. So, this is not a uniquely German issue by any means. However, if the establishment in Germany becomes truly desperate, there is probably a secret report waiting that includes far more information and personal details than many Germans want to believe is possible.

Police states are such fun, especially when they become ‘truly desperate.’ 

Remember that the next time a Democrat squawks about defending democracy when you disagree with them

Whatever the BfV has on AfD members stashed safely away, the circus surrounding the leaked report has frightened off the newly installed chancellor, who has declared his sudden aversion to political hit jobs.

In another 180°, Friedrich Merz says he’s not in favor of banning the AfD at the moment. It’s hard to read his latest reasoning reversal and not laugh out loud.

In recent months, a ban of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) appeared to be inching closer and closer, but now a key voice has clearly spoken out against such a move.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz has now said that voting on an AfD ban in the Bundestag is not the right path, saying it “smacks too much of the elimination of political rivals.” He said he does not believe the current evidence is sufficient.

He has even gone a step farther, stating that former Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, an SPD politician with far-left sympathies who wrote for Antifa Magazine, was wrong to classify the AfD as “confirmed” right-wing extremist in the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) report. Critics indicate that she rushed the report out at the last minute of her tenure, despite the BfV having no president and despite a lack of any expert review, which she had previously promised would happen.

Speaking to Die Zeit, Merz said; “Working ‘aggressively and militantly’ against the free democratic basic order must be proven. And the burden of proof lies solely with the state. That is a classic task of the executive branch. And I have always internally resisted initiating ban proceedings from within the Bundestag. That smacks too much of political competition elimination to me.”

He’s got to be hugely disappointed.

With these guys, they’re never finished, though. 

It’s always back to the drawing board.

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As Jake Tapper primps and preens while he hawks his new book with Alex Thompson, he is brazenly rewriting his own history of covering up for Joe Biden. 

I didn’t know human beings were capable of the level of audacity and fraud that drives Jake Tapper’s book tour: pretending he’s the angry victim of the WH which prevented him from knowing about Biden’s cognitive decline.

Here’s what he did the day the WSJ article came out: pic.twitter.com/ODSoSxnozb

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 14, 2025

Tapper’s biggest whopper came when he brought two Wall Street Journal reporters to his show who wrote about Joe Biden’s decline. He called them heroes and commiserated with them about how poorly they were treated for simply reporting the truth. 

They were abused mercilessly for saying things that should have been obvious to every sentient person with access to a television or the internet.

CNN host Jake Tapper criticized Democrats for launching a “smear campaign” against two “heroic” Wall Street Journal reporters who reported on former President Joe Biden’s declining health during the 2024 election, calling the attacks “disgraceful” on Wednesday.

Introducing the reporters to his CNN show The Lead, Tapper welcomed “two of the heroic reporters that were covering this intensely during the Biden years, Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes,” who “reported on the decline of Biden’s acuity back in June of last year.”

Tapper then remarked, “I said it last year before the election, and I’ll say it again, the journalism you did was vital, and the smear campaign by Democrats against you two is disgraceful. So thanks for being here.”

Jake Tapper was among those who abused them, though, and didn’t treat them like heroes until he started on his book tour. 

Call it stolen valor, if you will. Rubbing up against people he insulted just a few months ago to associate himself with their courage. When it mattered, he smeared their newspaper as a Rupert Murdoch (read: Republican) outlet. 

He also claimed that the reporting in the Journal was “false,” which is a pretty definitive rejection of the now-heroic reporting back when it mattered. And since the Wall Street Journal is part of News Corp, you really shouldn’t take anything written there seriously, you know. 

The game here is the media and these authors trying to isolate the biggest political cover up in American History down to just like 4 people and a dog around Joe Biden

That’s why they granted anonymity and cooperation to “cabinet secretaries”. Make the blast radius of this as… https://t.co/q7m38WSOAd

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 15, 2025

Except now, you really should. Like Tapper, these “heroic” reporters stood up to the mean, nasty, lying Democrats and their own colleagues to bravely expose Joe Biden’s decline. They did a really great job, just like Jake Tapper, you see. 

If only more reporters were like Jake Tapper, the American people would be better informed!

Oh, please. 

You do have to admire Tapper’s chutzpah, although the costs of brazenly rewriting history these days are very low. Tapper’s viewers will applaud him, his colleagues will call him brave for admitting mistakes, and the rest of us will roll our eyes because we already know that he is a fraud. 

Far from paying a price for his lies, he was able to cash in on the lies back then, and is able to cash in on “exposing” them now because people want the inside scoop. 

It’s good to be a member of the establishment. 

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The NY Post Editorial Board took a moment today to look back at the whole “cheap fakes” phenomenon promoted by most of the media in 2024. In light of the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which confirms Biden was struggling with age-related decline in 2024, the NY Post takes a victory lap. In particular, the editorial board singles out the Washington Post fact-checker column.

If there was such a thing as shame anymore, the Washington Post’s pompous “Fact Checker” column would close up shop.

New revelations in “Original Sin,” a book about President Joe Biden’s decline, show how the White House covered up the obvious — and propaganda outlets like the Fact Checker shamed any media that broke ranks.

Take Biden’s wandering off from a group of world leaders at last June’s D-Day celebrations: The New York Post’s front page read “MEANDER IN CHIEF,” which sent Fact Checker writer Glenn Kessler into a fit of apoplexy: “ ‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead” was his headline.

To be fair, that particular column was co-written by Kessler but the first name on the byline was Adriana Usero who wrote at least two similar articles about “cheap fakes.”

But the one titled “‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead” was aimed directly at the NY Post which had made the video into a cover story.

Today’s cover: Biden wanders away at G7 summit before being pulled back by Italian PM https://t.co/7x25op0b2E pic.twitter.com/onVysLvVqv

— New York Post (@nypost) June 14, 2024

Here’s how the story associated with that cover opened:

Mamma mia, Giuseppe!

President Biden started to wander off during a skydiving demonstration at the G7 summit in southern Italy Thursday, with the host nation’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni pressed into action to pull him back toward the group.

As the leaders of the world’s wealthiest democracies applauded the evening parachuting presentation, the 81-year-old US president’s attention visibly wandered away from where the others were looking.

And here’s how the Washington Post fact-checkers framed that response:

On June 13, at about 1 p.m., the RNC posted a clip it captioned, “What is Biden doing?” The post has been viewed more than 3 million times. Biden is seen with other Group of Seven leaders watching skydivers in Italy, carrying the flags of the nations. Biden turns and walks a few steps to chat with one of the parachutists, the only leader to do so. Then Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni turns him back to the other leaders. In one feed distributed by news services — the one used by the RNC — it’s not entirely clear who Biden is talking to, but an alternative feed, also distributed by news services, makes it clear that Biden is having a conversation.

The New York Post jumped on the RNC clip, posting a story less than two hours later and embedding the RNC post. When the White House cried foul, saying the video had been taken out of context, the newspaper buried that comment in the bottom of the story, while noting that the video feed had been distributed by news services. (None characterized it as the RNC did. C-SPAN, for instance, titled its video: “President Biden & G-7 Leaders Watch Skydiving Demonstration.”)

I guess the simplest way to put this is that everything the NY Post said was true and everything the Washington Post said was also true but with the addition of some special pleading. The fact-checkers aren’t actually checking any facts here. The video shows what it shows. So the NY Post writes this: “President Biden started to wander off during a skydiving demonstration at the G7 summit…” and the Washington Post writes this: “Biden turns and walks a few steps to chat with one of the parachutists, the only leader to do so.” The NY Post is suggesting Biden lost focus and the Washington Post is claiming he had another purpose (to talk to a different parachutist).

The Washington Post is equally upset that a tweet from a Biden administration staffer (see the link above) didn’t settle the matter. The Washington Post notes that the NY Post “buried that comment” as if a tweet from Andrew Bates should have been taken as the final word.

In retrospect it all looks a little different though, doesn’t it. We’ve had statements from several reporters, not just the author of “Original Sin,” who have said the White House lied to them about Joe Biden’s condition in an effort to conceal his decline. In other words, the NY Post was right to downplay the comments from Andrew Bates and to trust its own eyes. The White House crying foul did not explain anything, it was just an attempt to deceive and bully reporters. And when that effort didn’t work on the NY Post, the Washington Post swung into action to bully them further.

I get a little worked up by this particular “cheap fake” because I wrote about it at the time. Here’s what I wrote on June 21, 2024:

So the first problem with this analysis is that there is no fake in this cheap fake. But the bigger problem is that if you actually observe what is happening, it’s extremely clear that Biden did wander off. There is a landing area directly in front of the gathered G7 leaders who are clearly aware there are cameras placed in front of them to capture their reactions to the spectacle. This is a standard photo op and they are supposed to be presenting themselves as a unified group of world leaders. All of them are looking in the same direction except Biden and then, as he looks off to the side, Macron of France also looks in that direction.

Now watch what happens closely. As Biden wanders off to the right of the screen, Ursula von der Leyen from the EU Commission says something that he apparently doesn’t hear. He walks away and she looks over at him. Macron then helpfully steps into the gap that Biden has created from the rest of the group and Italian PM Meloni also walks that way, seeming to catch Macron’s eye as she does so. Basically, the whole group of leaders repositions itself so Biden isn’t off by himself. Finally, Meloni grabs his arm and turns him around toward the cameras. Watch for yourself:

This clip shows exactly what people said it did. It’s Joe Biden wandering away and having to be pulled in by an entire group of leaders who are trying to prevent him from ruining the photo op. And really, they were right to do it because a photo of Biden off on his own or with his back turned to everyone else could become its own story, i.e. America Loses Interest in Euro-Leaders or something of that sort. There’s no escaping the fact that Biden lost focus on what he was supposed to be doing in this moment and everyone there noticed and tried to cover for him.

Here’s the video I was describing.

Here’s the full video of Joe Biden getting lost and wondering away as a parachuter landed at G7.

There’s no defending Biden’s cognitive abilities anymore.

He needs to resign immediately.pic.twitter.com/q03dpnMjEd

— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) June 14, 2024

The context here is not that Joe Biden was talking to someone else. He’s not there as a tourist on vacation. He’s there as the President of the Unites States to do a photo op with European leaders. Looking back, I found that in another one of her cheap fake articles the Washington Post’s Adriana Usero clearly understood how photo ops were supposed to work.

The optics of these endeavors are just as important, beginning the moment a president walks off Air Force One. High-profile leader-to-leader diplomatic visits are especially detail-oriented, with an eye toward striking visuals for the cameras.

Yes, that’s right. The optics are indeed the point of a photo op, especially ones with a bunch of world leaders. So when the most powerful leader in the world turns away to talk to some random guy out of frame that’s a problem. It doesn’t matter that Biden was having a conversation and not disappearing into a bush like Homer Simpson. What matters is he wasn’t on task. He literally wandered off to do his own thing. The other leaders knew it was a problem immediately.

Bottom line: The NY Post was right and the Washington Post was wrong. I was right and the Washington Post was wrong. You (if you were one of the many, many Hot Air readers who also saw it at the time) were right and the Washington Post was wrong. This wasn’t some minor story either. This was the biggest story of the 2024 election. It was the Biggest Lie of 2024 (and 2023 and 2022…). Even a year later it’s worth remembering who got it right and who got it wrong.

This post was originally published on this site

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book on the Biden administration, Original Sin, is out this week, and with it, media falling all over themselves to excuse away their culpability in minimizing what 80% of the country, reflected in polling, saw in Joe Biden – He was too old and infirm to serve another four years as president. 

From the basement campaign Biden ran in 2020, Ed Morrissey and I would comment weekly that the former President had lost at least a step, or if you’re a baseball fan, 10 miles an hour off his fastball, just from four years earlier when he was Barack Obama’s Vice-President. This is despite all the policy differences with which we always criticized, or the fact that Joe Biden, as Ed often put it, was rhetorically 20 pounds of bull excrement in a 10-pound bag when it came to self-aggrandizement. The point is we knew he was slipping then. It didn’t matter. COVID, the lockdowns, the chaos of the economic collapse and job losses were too much for Donald Trump to overcome, and voters very narrowly chose Biden in the hopes he would return the country to normalcy. Only 42,000 between three states determined the outcome of the election, and you have to wonder how much media coverage, or non-coverage as the case may be, had an impact. 

Beltway media had a hand on the scale from the time Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. Tapper’s proposition in Original Sin is that the White House and elected Democrats lied to him. For the moment, let’s give him his premise. 

From the time the transition period began with then-President-Elect Trump, the narrative of Russiagate began to take shape like a hurricane forming in the Atlantic. It gathered strength, because the Democrats lied to media, and media bought the lie, hook, line, and sinker. Here’s Tapper talking about it as if the Russia dossier and story was verifiably true.

BREAKING NEWS: This morning, JD Vance accused Fake Tapper of promoting falsehoods regarding Russiagate.

Tapper refuted the accusation, claiming he never propagated any untruths.

In response, here is a 3.5-minute compilation of Jake Tapper discussing the Russiagate conspiracy… pic.twitter.com/c0s4hHPpV0

— Todd Storm (@Todd_Storm) October 27, 2024

For the next 34 months, media hung onto the narrative as true, because they had no journalistic curiosity to challenge what Democrats were telling them. It wasn’t until both the Mueller report in 2019, and then the Durham report in 2023, before the debunking was finally recognized by media, and then the story just faded away without admitting they were lied to and why.

Late in the 2020 election cycle, a story surfaced in the New York Post about a laptop that was turned into a Delaware shop for repairs, only to discover that the laptop’s owner, Hunter Biden, son of the President, was a drug addict, engaged in a grifting operation off his father’s name that screamed corruption, with 10% for the big guy, and recorded his [personal sexual proclivities that were debased enough to make Caligula and Jeffrey Epstein blush. 

The same media would not report on the laptop story as true. Quite the opposite. The Democrats said the story was a hoax, and the media reported it as such. In Tapper’s case, he refused to go there, because the details were too sordid, regardless of whether they were true or not or what the implications of the corruption involved might be. 

🚨FLASHBACK🚨

On Oct. 22, 2020, CNN’s Jake Tapper declared that the growing allegations made against Hunter Biden following the NY Post’s reporting on Hunter’s laptop were “too disgusting” to repeat on-air and “wildly unhinged.” pic.twitter.com/djhFlDK8kz

— Francis Brennan (@FrancisBrennan) June 24, 2024

Of course, over time, it was proven that the laptop was indeed the property of Hunter Biden, as were the incriminating contents within. Joe Biden ultimately gave him a full pardon in order to keep him from being prosecuted for multiple criminal acts, even after promising multiple times he wouldn’t, and having that promise repeated from the White House Press Secretary. Media was lied to by the White House and elected Democrats. But again, because of the partisan makeup of the Beltway media bubble, there was no intellectual or professional curiosity to get to the truth and find out the reasons why they were told lies.

Going back to the premise of the Tapper/Thompson book, a political reporter in the nation’s capital using the defense that they were lied to about Biden’s decline is a pretty thin and telling defense. Remember Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s asylum defense? It was rejected by the immigration district court and the subsequent appellate court, but his defense for not being deported back to El Salvador was that if returned, he’d be killed by a rival gang. A reporter, especially in this town, claiming he or she are innocent of wrongdoing because they were lied to, is giving their political predisposition away. Being lied to sure didn’t seem to stop them from doggedly pursuing Republicans when they were in power.  

Mark Halperin is one of the few D.C.-based journos out there who are beginning to admit that the media has a real black eye in the ‘credibility with the American people’ department. He saw Biden decline as far back as 2017.

“I don’t understand how there could be a coverup of something that was on television on a nearly nightly basis.”–@MarkHalperin on @AlexThomp and @jaketapper‘s book describing the “White House coverup” of Joe Biden’s decline

Halperin saw Biden’s decline back in 2017.

See here: pic.twitter.com/SexIXtptiL

— Ben Meltzer⏳ (@meltzer_ben) May 14, 2025

That’s great, but not nearly enough. Media in the Beltway adopted the attitude to not believe a word Donald Trump or his administration said during his first term, and have amplified that skepticism in the second term. How many non-scandals have been breathlessly reported on by media about Trump only to have the details come out shortly after shooting the story down? Dozens, the most recent including the supposed scandal of the Qatar 747 being a gift to Trump personally, when in reality, it was a gift to the U.S. Government’s Department of Defense, something that Buzz Patterson has been trying to explain is nothing out of the ordinary. 

I’m going to try one last time.

The Qatar B-747 was built in the US by Boeing. They are offering a newer 747 to replace one of the two current AF-1s that have been flying for 40 years. Which are tired and need to be replaced. The wing based at Andrews has also purchased…

— Buzz Patterson (@BuzzPatterson) May 12, 2025

Also included is the gotcha coverage of the Trump administration is all the Maryland Man nonsense around the aforementioned Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Instead of being an innocent dad just trying to get by, it turns out he is a part of MS-13, engaged in human smuggling, and was picked up with two other members of MS-13 that had drugs on them. No matter, though. Media is willing to believe anything bad about the White House, and assumes anything coming from their staff is a lie. That’s an exact inverse of how they treated the Biden administration’s four years. 

I’ve had a online back and forth with former Meet the Press host and podcaster Chuck Todd, someone I’ve talked to for many, many years. He has, for the entire time I’ve known him, maintained that there’s no bias in the media, and any claims to the contrary, well, he doesn’t have much use for. 

The laziest of conspiracies and analysis is to concoct a “media” in cahoots narrative. It isn’t true, but the algorithms reward folks who spew this nonsense.

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) May 12, 2025

I paused and thought about it, and composed a response. 

Chuck, we’re friends. We’ve talked for years. You’ve consistently defended against there being media bias. That’s like maintaining now that Columbia doesn’t really have an anti-Semite problem. Some things you can just discern after seeing dozens of examples.

What you recognized… https://t.co/LoyXiqui6l

— Duane Patterson (@Radioblogger) May 13, 2025

So now we’re down to proving something that’s obvious to the vast majority of Americans – that there is a bias in the media. I haven’t seen that specific issue polled, but I’d guess the results are about the same 80/20 as whether boys should be allowed to compete in girls’ sports. Some things are just intuitively obvious. But trying to prove it to someone actually part of the bubble is like trying to prove there is wind when you can’t see it with your own eyes. Sure, you can see the trees move, but that can always be explained away. Enter Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post.

It is not a secret that almost every journalist in legacy media votes for Democrats. As did I–the difference was that I was voting for him only for “Not Trump” reasons, so I didn’t have the same desire for him to be all right.

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) May 13, 2025

She was referring to what she knew about Biden’s mental and physical condition and when she knew it. Truth be told, it wasn’t important to her. She was, and is a Never Trumper, so that animated her decision making. There’s zero chance this viewpoint isn’t shared widely in Beltway media. I asked Chuck about this, and whether this might impact his claim that there’s no media bias.

It’s always fascinating to me when partisan folks criticize media they don’t like for being biased. Perhaps the thinking is a criminal is better at identifying other criminals? Point is, I don’t take partisans seriously when they complain about so-called “bias”

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) May 14, 2025

That’s a terrific counterjab to discredit me, but it’s non-responsive. You’ll notice he didn’t address McArdle’s statement at all. His suggestion is because I’m a partisan, something I’ve never disavowed, it’s a disqualifying negative and allows me to identify other disqualified partisans. 

I’m a Christian above all other things political. The road to redemption and salvation, to me, is through admitting my faults and sins, which are plentiful, confessing them, and then seeking improvement to get better and not make the same mistakes again. There is none of that in either the Jon Allen/Amie Parnes book, or in the Tapper/Thompson book, at least from the excerpts released thus far. There certainly has not been a mea culpa offered on the air from Tapper for not realizing sooner the White House lied to him and why he didn’t press harder earlier. He certainly has not accounted for being lied to on Russiagate and the Hunter laptop, either. So at best, he’s repeating the same mistakes. Makes one ask, why?  

Media has a huge credibility problem with the American people. A Gallup study in February showed only 31% of Americans have a general trust of what they get out of media. Just over a third don’t have any trust at all, and another third are mostly negative. There’s only one way out for media to get their credibility back, and finger pointing at Democrats, complaining that they lied, is not the way. 

Jen Psaki in 2022 made this claim while she served the administration as press secretary. 

It’s not just blind quotes. Current MSNBC host Jen Psaki said it from the White House podium: “Sometimes [Biden is] hard to keep up with.” https://t.co/IjGkDpALuc pic.twitter.com/z4OjGPibmL

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) May 13, 2025

So according to the Tapper/Todd paradigm, she lied, right? Why in the world is she still on the air every weeknight on MSNBC in prime time with her own show? Why is former Biden campaign advisor Symone Sanders still running her own show on MSNBC on weekends? Why were they given shows in the first place? 

Where are the tell-all books that get to the bottom of the true scandal of the last quarter century – who was running the country now that it’s been established that the cognitive and physical decline of Joe Biden was much more severe than previously reported? You’ve got a media enterprise in the nation’s capital whose sole job is to challenge the premise of the White House, whomever is in it, and get to the real truth. But we get crickets about who was making consequential decisions for at least the last year of the Biden administration? Why? Logic would conclude that one of the reasons why there’s no journalistic curiosity is because if that truth and scandal were reported as it deserved to be, Kamala’s chances would have diminished further. Her role in the coverup, being one of the people lying to media about Biden’s condition, and she would have been disqualified for office. The Trump margin of victory almost certainly would have been wider, and the House and Senate might have seen larger Republican majorities as a result. 

I don’t frankly care if the Beltway media takes me seriously or not. I know what I know. I saw what I saw daily in Biden media appearances, seldom though they were. I heard what I heard. And I can safely say that after 30 years in this business, I have never experienced Beltway media as in the tank as they were. The Trump effect can be seen in trillions so far in foreign investments coming into the United States. The Trump effect also has caused a lot of reporters to throw objectivity out the window because they view Trump as an existential threat. 

My humble, but sincere advice for my friends in media, and I do have dozens of them that are friends, is it’s hard to take them seriously when they won’t admit their failings in coverage of the Biden regency. If you want to regain trust, go where the story goes, not where you want the story to go. And I’m telling you, the story is who was running the country the last four years, and why there was no accountability in government. Why did the 25th Amendment fail as a failsafe apparatus against an obviously incapacitated president? 

Find me a reporter that gets to the bottom of that, regardless of whether they lean left or right on the ideological spectrum, they’re going to be the first ones that lead the media herd back out of the wilderness. 

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The Supreme Court suggested that they had a real desire to address the issues of jurisdiction and national injunctions imposed at the district-court level. The court scheduled what was essentially a snap hearing on the matter, which arose out of challenges to Donald Trump’s executive order redefining and narrowing “birthright citizenship.” Today is the last day of the term for oral argument, implying even further their desire to address the proliferation of orders at the district level that apply far outside their own jurisdictions. 

After listening to over two hours of oral argument this morning (and counting!), it seems unclear why the court rushed to address it. It’s always a bit of a fool’s errand to guess the outcome based on the Socratic questioning used in oral arguments, but none of the justices — with the possible exception of Clarence Thomas — seemed enthusiastic about the arguments to curtail the practice. If that bears out, it makes one wonder which four justices granted cert, and why.

At first, observers seemed unclear what the scope of the argument would be. Politico wondered how much of this would be on the merits of the EO, and how much would be on process issue:

Will the justices wade into the constitutionality of Trump’s effort to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. whose parents are undocumented immigrants or here on temporary visas? Or will the justices sidestep that legal lightning rod for now and focus solely on a more procedural, yet still momentous, issue: whether lower-court judges will retain the authority to block federal policies nationwide.

“It’s the question that’s on everyone’s minds,” said Columbia Law professor Elora Mukherjee, an expert on immigration law. “I anticipate we’ll see some discussion of the underlying merits, but I am not clear on how much.”

Most cases that come to the court have a precise “question presented” that tees up the legal issue to be resolved. But the birthright citizenship cases arrived as a trio of expedited appeals on the court’s emergency docket, not through the customary briefing process. And when the court took the rare step of ordering special oral arguments on those appeals, it was silent on what question or questions should be addressed.

In the end, most of the discussion centered on the jurisdictional issue. Two of the justices tried digging into the merits by asking pointed questions about the history of the 14th Amendment. Justice Sonia Sotomayor pursued it the hardest, insisting that the Trump policy “violates four Supreme Court precedents.” Sotomayor got so contentious that she kept cutting off answers from Solicitor General D. John Sauer, prompting an intervention by Chief Justice John Roberts at one point, scolding Sotomayor by saying, “I’d really like to hear his full answer.”

Listening to the birthright citizenship oral argument at the US Supreme Court. Justice Sotomayor continues to be argumentative, ask questions without allowing a response and monopolizes the Court’s time. Chief Justice Roberts had had enough and cut her off. Later, he directly…

— Martin Harry (@MartinHarryFL) May 15, 2025

Both sides engaged on the merits to some extent, but in the end, even those discussions ended up in the context of process, mainly in how to address an executive policy that applies nationally but may violate the law or the Constitution. The plaintiff attorney, New Jersey Solicitor General Jeremy Feigenbaum, posited that the issue of jurisdiction is too much of an obstacle when it comes to the ability of states to comply individually when a patchwork of conflicting decisions begin emerging. And frankly, there didn’t seem to be much pushback on that point from any of the justices to Feigenbaum’s point. 

NYT legal reporter Adam Liptak sums this up with fair accuracy:

The justices have been struggling with two contrary impulses. Many are troubled by injunctions issued by individual federal judges that block executive branch initiatives nationwide. But many of them are also troubled by the executive order seeking to ban birthright citizenship and frustrated by the difficulty of reaching the merits, as the Trump administration has only appealed on the first point.

New Jersey’s lawyer may have offered a middle ground, arguing that this is the rare case in which nationwide relief is needed because it is the only way to grant complete relief to the more than 20 plaintiff states.

There may be good test cases to limit district court jurisdiction, but the birthright citizenship issue may not be the best basis for it. It implicates state interests too heavily — which Feigenbaum argued very effectively — and they can’t form a class-action for litigation that some justices suggested would be the way to deal with jurisdiction. Justice Elena Kagan actually spoke to that point near the end, castigating “forum shopping” and considerable frustration at the court. Kagan actually sounded the most hostile to jurisdiction hopping and forum shopping. Kagan does seem interested in curtailing these impulses — but that this case wouldn’t be the proper one to use, largely because the rulings in every jurisdiction have all gone in one direction. 

The hearing is still continuing as this goes live on the site. Sauer still has a rebuttal period left, which means this will likely extend this one-hour argument to somewhere near triple its scheduled length. I’ll update this post with reactions from other analysts, but my impression is that the court may do something about universal injunctions … but not this time. 

Update: Hugh Hewitt sounds a bit more optimistic:

General Sauer had a concise and compelling rebuttal slamming nationwide injunctions allowing district courts to think of themselves as holding roving commissions and issuing snap judgments. I hope SCOTUS brings down the curtain on this surge in such blanket orders. If urgent, a…

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) May 15, 2025

If urgent, a case can get to SCOTUS quickly without the grandstanding of trial judges no matter how great they assess their own constitutional chops.

I certainly agree that Sauer’s rebuttal was perhaps his strongest moment. If the court truly wants to end forum-shopping, this case and today’s arguments offer them an opportunity. However, they seem very concerned about the government’s argument for continuing to enforce its interpretation of birthright citizenship, which suggests that the White House will lose big-league when this gets considered on the merits, likely in the next term. 

Update: Changed the headline for more clarity on “jurisdiction.” 

Update: The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland seems more optimistic that the court may craft some rules from today’s proceedings:

THREAD on broad thoughts from hearing: My “gut” is that SCOTUS will follow what I call the Kavanaugh approach to nationwide injunctions and hold that there are rules & those must be followed and those rules require class certification to provide relief beyond Plaintiffs. 1/ https://t.co/dP9uyCMku3

— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) May 15, 2025

3/ Given that reality, Justice Kavanaugh suggested the argument that we need nationwide injunctions collapses. And as he stressed couple times, there is a rule & those rules must be followed. If you listened to the argument, Justice Kavanaugh’s approach came off balanced & sane.

— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) May 15, 2025

Perhaps. If all of the justices want to put an end to this, there are a couple of options. Creating rules to limit this practice could make sense and would be reasonably separate from the case at hand. That may end up just creating another round of nationwide injunctions as district courts interpret the rules to their own benefit, though, especially in this case where the constitutional meaning and implications of policies that directly implicate the 14th Amendment are the issue. 

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Trump is getting some grudging respect from, of all people, Biden foreign policy aides. 

Who’d have thunk it? For that matter, should we be worried about this startling fact?

President Trump’s recent series of audacious foreign policy moves have astounded even some of his harshest critics.

One Biden administration veteran tells @DavidLawler10: “Gosh, I wish I could work for an administration that could move that quickly.” https://t.co/wi1poKRZU7

— Axios (@axios) May 15, 2025

Well, probably not, because, for the most part, their “awe” at Trump’s accomplishments has more to do with Trump’s ability to get things done than at what he is doing, although they concede that much of what Trump is doing in the Middle East is pretty good. 

President Trump’s recent series of audacious foreign policy moves have astounded even some of his harshest critics.

The big picture: Just in the Middle East and just in the past week, Trump has met with a leader the U.S. officially considers a terrorist, announced he’ll lift all sanctions on Syria, and cut a truce with the Houthis plus a hostage deal with Hamas, both of which excluded Israel.

What they’re saying: Biden administration veterans who spoke with Axios raised questions about Trump’s motivations but grudgingly saluted his boldness.

• “Gosh, I wish I could work for an administration that could move that quickly,” one admitted.
• “He does all this, and it’s kind of silence, it’s met with a shrug,” says Ned Price, a former senior State Department official under President Biden. “He has the ability to do things politically that previous presidents did not, because he has complete unquestioned authority over the Republican caucus.”
• “It’s hard not to be simultaneously terrified at the thought of the damage he can cause with such power, and awed by his willingness to brazenly shatter so many harmful taboos,” says Rob Malley, who held senior posts in three Democratic administrations, including handling Iran talks under Presidents Obama and Biden.

For all the talk about the dangers of Trump’s norm-breaking, even they have to concede that the norms he is breaking have been an obstacle to reshaping a world that has been going to hell. 

It turns out that doing the same thing over and over and not getting the results you want–ever–is a pretty good indicator that the way you have been doing things is not going to work. 

Trump is magic. Seriously. You may or may not always like Trump’s goals, but when he sets them, he tends to bend the world to his will. 

Top House Intel Dem @jahimes: “I’m not in the habit of praising Donald Trump but … I think the president has, in this last week or so, played the Middle East pretty darn well.”

More from his chat with @jmart at our @POLITICOLive Security Summit👇 pic.twitter.com/WdMawOg4wZ

— POLITICO (@politico) May 15, 2025

One thing that is striking is how ill-understood Trump’s methods are, despite the fact that they really aren’t as opaque as the Democrats and the media make them out to be. Trump doesn’t reach out to our adversaries because he likes them; he does so because, if we need something from them, it doesn’t make sense to keep insulting them. 

Trump doesn’t insult our allies because he hates them; he does so because they have felt comfortable taking advantage of us, because that is how it has always been. 

President Trump gave a momentous, epoch defining speech yesterday in Saudi Arabia, which repudiated both Democratic and Republican foreign policy and paved a new way forward. What does Trump’s approach mean for the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel? My @TheFP column: https://t.co/M9JbtcfWjr

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) May 14, 2025

It’s pretty hard to deny that the world went to hell under Biden, and at least one of the reasons is that his team felt bound to use tactics that were bound to fail. Trump’s team doesn’t care about the norms; they care about results. 

Unfortunately, we have yet to see results from Trump’s attempt at peacemaking in Ukraine. While the Biden strategy on the Ukraine war was manifestly awful, Trump’s strategy to end it hasn’t worked yet. It’s early days, but so far, the interaction between Trump and Putin has been an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. 

Still, you have to be amazed at his Middle East successes. Presidents have been trying to move the ball forward for decades there, but only Trump has had any success. 

Even Biden’s folks concede that. Interesting. 

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Here’s another side effect of the Trump anti-DEI campaign I didn’t see coming, and certainly not from this angle – some San Francisco (of all places) non-governmental organizations (NGO) are losing healthy portions of formerly rock-solid funding thanks to their level of DEI-ness.

In San Francisco, I imagine it would be inordinately hard to be an NGO without being woke af, right? I mean, these are the people who practically wrote the ‘how-to’ book on the entire progressive movement. SF denizens are the living embodiment of woke ideological insanity, as it must always ratchet up from the latest outrage and designated victimhood class to create another, in a self-perpetuating grievance and special privilege-class cycle.

The city’s NGOs’ money troubles began shortly after Trump’s inauguration, as the anticipated and formerly uninterrupted flow of federal largesse to organization coffers experienced a sudden ebb, slowing to a trickle if groups were lucky.

Last month, the San Francisco Tech Council received some good news: The nonprofit had won a federal grant worth tens of thousands of dollars to help its effort to boost digital literacy among The City’s older adults.

That was January 17th. Days later, a newly inaugurated President Donald Trump launched a sweeping crackdown on federal programs deemed to support diversity, equity and inclusion, and his administration broadly froze federal funding in part to screen out awards that would go to DEI efforts.

Although those actions have been blocked by the courts, they appear to have paused the Tech Council’s grant — and thrown into question whether the organization will ever receive the money.

The announcement of the grant award in January is the last time Tech Council co-director Karla Suomala heard from the federal agency behind the program, she said. Her organization hasn’t yet received the grant money, and in the face of radio silence, she’s resorted to checking online forums filled with postings from other anxious grant recipients.

“People from across the country are saying, ‘Is this part of the DEI stuff? Are they cutting this?’ — and nobody knows,” Suomala said.

It didn’t help that SF has been in dire financial straits for some time and, at last under the helm of a new mayor, businessman Dan Lurie, was about to enter a cycle of painful fiscal restraint ordered by former mayor London Breed, to try to restore some semblance of balance to the massive hole in their city budget.

…For those leaders, the cloud of confusion surrounding federal funding support couldn’t come at a worse time. Local organizations were already bracing for cuts in funding from The City government, thanks to the across-the-board spending reductions ordered late last year by Mayor London Breed in response to San Francisco’s looming billion-dollar budget deficit.

Cuts to both federal and city funding could put a double financial squeeze on a sector The City relies on to provide a vast array of services for residents — everything from drug treatment to housing support to education programs.

“We don’t have specifics, but we are anticipating that there could be a perfect storm,” said Sherilyn Adams, who leads Larkin Street Youth Services.

The Trump federal cuts were going to smack SF especially hard, as gender ideology has become their stock-in-trade – it pervades nearly every aspect of the city’s life.

…The San Francisco Community Health Center, for example, offers wide-ranging medical services to low- income residents. It focuses in particular on LGBTQ people of color and transgender people, said Lance Toma, the organization’s CEO. Those are among the groups who have benefited from DEI efforts.

The federal crackdown, “really touches on everything that we do,” Toma said.

In late January, Toma received two notices from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention directing his group to put an immediate halt to all programs related to DEI and “gender ideology,” he said.

The notices, he said, were “terrifying to my core.”

…Potential cuts to that funding would have a “devastating impact,” Toma said, that would “stop so much of our programming in its tracks.”

Coupled with losing federal funds for anything related to immigration due to their declared status as a Sanctuary City, these folks were looking at a significant hit to their operating funds. Ones that they knew the new city administration probably would not feel was a priority to try to relieve, as Lurie’s stated goal was first and foremost getting the city’s finances on track.

The NGOs were going to have to make do with what they could raise and depend on the donors they already had, corporate and otherwise.

For instance, in 2015, so flush with cash were they that Mark Zuckerberg and his wife gave the city’s only public hospital a $75M gift – a gift. As part of the donation deal, they renamed the hospital for the couple. It became the ‘Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.‘

Holding true to progressive form, it only took the activists in the city five years to declare that the hospital’s name was an anathema – they simply couldn’t bear it. Of course, taking the name off the entrance would mean they’d have to give the $75M back, so they did what progressives do best – virtue signal while protecting their bottom line.

WE CONDEMN THEE, WE CONDEMN THEE, WE CONDEMN THEE

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s adopted hometown of San Francisco on Tuesday formally condemned the naming of a major hospital after him and his wife, the latest flashpoint in the debate over the proper role for billionaire philanthropy.

The city’s board of supervisors approved the condemnation, a move that reflects the new, increasingly controversial politics of both the tech industry and of its founders. Activists on both the left and the right have grown sharply critical of big tech companies like Facebook. And simultaneously, there is a building backlash movement to charitable gifts from the mega rich.

The 10-1 vote is a manifestation of each of those crosscurrents, which both run particularly strong in liberal San Francisco. The measure has no legal force and is merely symbolic.

Performance theater against the area tech giants, secure in the knowledge that their collective white-boy billionaire guilt would override being miffed at being condemned, and their companies would still cut big, fat checks whenever such were demanded.

But that climate has changed, too. Silicon Valley is a shell of what it once was. Downtown buildings who were once hubs for tech start-ups and established giants are empty, companies are consolidating for profits, lay-offs are common, and the Golden Give Away Goose which had led to huge, lush campuses with insane on-site benefits for workers and massive checks written for charities and ’causes’ without thought is pretty much cooked.

Tech moguls are beginning to behave like businessmen instead of invading marauders, and at last, they are evincing concern about what a different regulatory atmosphere in Washington might do to their company should they continue with their formerly wild, woolly, and autocratic behavior.  

Instead of ignoring Washington as they have for decades, they seem to have come to the realization that this current president can be their best friend or truly their worst enemy, and the former buccaneers are moving with extreme caution.

The newer, more ‘mature'(?) tech behemoth is also swiftly readjusting its corporate posture so as not to draw undue attention from the Trump administration’s all-seeing eye.

This is impacting the groups they used to support without a second thought, particularly in as DEI-woke-soaked a place as San Francisco.

The money river on which these NGO’s depended has been diverted to other ponds.

‘Devastating’: Chan Zuckerberg charity slashes funding for more Bay Area nonprofits

“They are making sure to cut anything that would sound or even be construed as DEI-esque,” one former employee said.

Earlier this year, Juan Hernandez was having exciting conversations with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative about what to do with his next round of funding. Hernandez, the CEO of Creser Capital Fund, had received $500,000 two years earlier from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s mammoth philanthropic organization for his nonprofit, which provides loans to Latino entrepreneurs. Hernandez says his understanding was that the grants would be ongoing, allowing Creser Capital to build out infrastructure and expand deeper into the community. 

But two days after another promising conversation, he learned that his program officer at CZI had been laid off. A month later, on April 15, the organization told him his grant would not be renewed. “That was it: ‘Over, thank you, bye,’” he said. “That was a third of our funding.”

It was a process repeated over and over this spring as CZI — one of the largest philanthropies in the Bay Area, with more than $6.3 billion in assets in 2023 — suspended funding to nonprofits across California, and the country. For nonprofit leaders, there was uncertainty, as CZI signaled a change in its priorities; then panic, as some of its grantmaking staff was laid off; and finally fury, as grants were canceled and plans went up in smoke.

CZI has publicly described this shift as part of a long-planned transition to a more science-focused philanthropy. But internally, employees say, leaders have made clear that the change is a reaction to the Trump administration and a desire to avoid undue attention from Washington.

The NGOs are big mad. They expected the money to keep coming in perpetuity, as it always had.

The Hernandez guy they quote above, who loans out the money given to him, is all torqued because Zuckerberg is only thinking of himself and his bottom line – the nerve.

According to the article, though, the CZI had been warning for years that it was winding down its ‘social advocacy programs’ to turn more resources towards science-based organizations and causes. Either the NGOs didn’t get the message or just didn’t want to hear it.

And, really, who could blame them? The Zuckerbergs had been extraordinarily generous over the ten years since the founding of the CZI.

…The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded in 2015 with the mission of “advancing human potential and promoting equal opportunity,” quickly became one of the largest single donors in the Bay Area, giving almost $7 billion in the form of more than 5,500 grants. Under its three core focus areas — science, education, and community — it has seeded millions of dollars to nonprofits in San Mateo County, where Zuckerberg’s Meta is headquartered, and contributed substantially to movements for criminal justice reform, housing equity, and educational advancement.

Whatever the reason, it appears that Trump’s election gave the Zuckerbergs the impetus they needed to complete the transition, and so their ‘Initiative’ did.

…But on Feb. 18, CZI quietly posted to its website a letter from COO Marc Malandro saying the organization had wound down its social advocacy work entirely, and had “discontinued that funding.”

CZI has since scrubbed all mention of housing affordability and economic inclusion from its website, along with a section on its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Members of its internal DEI team have been “transitioned to new roles and responsibilities,” according to Malandro’s letter. CZI also removed a line from its mission statement saying it wants to “build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future for everyone,” as well as mentions of “improving education” and “addressing the needs of our local communities.”

Employees have anonymously told the Standard that CZI wants to ‘de-DEI-ify.’ 

The non-profits that have lost funding are furious. 

…“I just got a call from our program officer, who didn’t have any control over it at all. She just had a directive from the powers that be that said, ‘This does not align with the mandate to not do racially preferential programming,’” she [Catherine Bracey] said. “Which of course is bulls**t. … They’re just trying to kiss up to Trump.”

Calling it ‘censorship’ among other things.

…“We’re saddened that CZI is moving toward censoring nonprofits, penalizing organizations that recommit to racial justice and social advocacy during these critical times,” Farooq said. “We hope that CZI reconsiders its role in the local nonprofit ecosystem and returns to partnering with the sector in an authentic, courageous, and thoughtful way.”

Everyone’s in a meltdown.

…“I’m disgusted,” said Urrutia. “Organizations that are providing incredible value to communities all of a sudden having the rug pulled out from under them is ludicrous.”

Then again, if it’s not your money, value is in the eye of the guy paying the bills, right?

That is yet another foreign concept to progressives.