Is This the Politics We Want?

By Michael Wear

Sunday, February 08, 2026

 

President Donald Trump returned to the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday to use and abuse that forum as he has in the past. As he has with so many other institutions in our civic life, Trump has thrown the very viability of the prayer breakfast into question.                 

 

I have attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast often over the past two decades. When I served in the White House, I helped the president prepare for the event. The National Prayer Breakfast is not a perfect event by any means, but it plays a powerful, and potentially edifying, role in our politics, as I wrote about extensively in my first book.

 

Historically, one of its functions has been to position presidents and political leaders in such a way that they are humbled. Typically, the breakfast leads a president to offer remarks that reflect on the ways he has fallen short, and to acknowledge the nation’s reliance on grace that politics and politicians can’t provide.

 

The breakfast places our political conflicts in the context of a bigger story and reorients the purpose of politics toward higher, better ends. The American people get to see elected officials from both parties pray with and for one another. They pray for the good of the country and of the world together.

 

In 2008, President George W. Bush spoke of how, in prayer, “We grow in meekness and humility.” He shared how prayer helped him meet the challenges of the presidency. In 2011, President Barack Obama reflected that “In this life of politics when debates have become so bitterly polarized, and changes in the media lead so many of us just to listen to those who reinforce our existing biases, it’s useful to go back to Scripture to remind ourselves that none of has all the answers—none of us, no matter what our political party or our station in life.”

 

The prayer breakfast has its flaws, as does every politician who has spoken at it. Like so many other events in Washington, the prayer breakfast can also be a place to network, to be seen, to advance oneself or one’s cause. It is disheartening to see politicians attend the breakfast and nod their heads to appeals to civility, only to return to their offices to issue incendiary statements and bad-faith press releases. It can be difficult to hear from politicians who speak at the breakfast in support of policy views you view to be in tension with—if not outright contradiction to—how you apply your faith to public policy. Like so many of our institutions, the event largely relies on the intentions and character of those who attend and those who speak at it. But this is the primary weakness of so many of our institutions and our politics: It can’t completely get around the character of its participants. 

 

But it was not until Donald Trump that a president went to the breakfast to make so much of himself, and so little of God. And he does it every year.

 

To object to Trump’s conduct at a forum like the National Prayer Breakfast does not require, and cannot be excused by, one’s party affiliation or preferred policy agenda. His behavior can’t be rationalized by the idea that “we elect a president, not a pastor.” When Trump enters religious settings, he does not just bring disagreement—which would be his right. No,  he shows up to co-opt the gathering—and the faith itself—for his purposes.

 

It was at the 2020 National Prayer Breakfast during his first term, following a keynote address by Arthur Brooks on the dangers of contempt and Jesus’ imperative of “loving your enemies,” that Trump mocked Jesus’ teaching. He later would do the same at a memorial service for one of his most stalwart supporters.

 

On Thursday, at an event that intentionally features Republican and Democratic members of Congress and that purposely recruits and welcomes Democrats to attend, Trump used the podium to express that he “doesn’t know how a person of faith can vote for a Democrat. I really don’t. And I know we have some here today and I don’t know why they’re here.”

 

At a breakfast convened by people who believe in the power of the Holy Spirit, Trump took credit for having “brought back the word Christmas,” and declared “religion is back now hotter than ever before.” He claims a lot, this president, and demands Christians give him their gratitude in return. This includes the release of Mariam Ibrahim, a persecuted Sudanese Christian, who was imprisoned and sentenced to death in Sudan. “I did that,” Trump claimed. “I did that. I did that with one phone call, actually.” One problem: Ibrahim was released in 2014, more than two years before Trump would become president. He didn’t bring back Christmas, religion, or Mariam Ibrahim. But he demands Christians’ loyalty. He mocks Christians’ deepest beliefs to their face, then tells them they’re lucky to have him.

 

There is little new to be observed about Donald Trump. He is remarkably transparent about who he is and what he cares about. But, increasingly, I have been reflecting on the choices Americans have to make that do not center Trump, the choices that are not obfuscated by the essential binary nature of most elections. These are the choices that can’t be answered by saying, “At least he isn’t as bad as [Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris].” 

 

Will we be impressed by politicians who simply do not lie as brazenly as Trump does? Will we feel privileged to have candidates who are better at obscuring their disdain for large swaths of the American people? Will we embrace Trump’s use of government to punish and marginalize those who oppose him, and grant the government’s imprimatur to those who support him? Will we accept that all of our worst impulses, all of our most tender divisions, will serve as mere fodder for campaigns and playthings for political strategists?

 

This last decade of American politics cannot become the new standard. If it does, few of our institutions will survive. I know people who have attended and served at the prayer breakfast for decades and walked out of it Thursday. I don’t think they walked out merely because of what Trump said, but because they could see how what Trump was saying was changing, revealing, and defining the whole atmosphere of the event.

 

This is the danger, of course. That everything will orient around this man. That he will succeed in making everything subject to his interests and his whims. He’s willing to do it with God, and he’s certainly willing to do it with the country. Our nation’s choice about whether to elect him is in the past, but the choice we have to make about whether we will become like him is ongoing.

 

Trump’s remarks forced that choice on people in the room at the prayer breakfast. They had to decide whether they would turn to the Democratic friend they invited to the breakfast, and tell them Trump was wrong and that they belonged there as much as anyone else did, or to let Trump’s bullying go unanswered. House Speaker Mike Johnson has to decide whether he will object to Trump, who seems to think it’s overkill for the speaker to dedicate his meal to God in prayer, leading an event to “rededicate America as one nation under God.”

 

Trump was at the prayer breakfast because he is the president. He is who he is. The real question is what culture, what norms, what commitments are present at the prayer breakfast that can stand up to Trump’s influence. His very presence there must prompt reflection: What do we really believe? What are we willing to stake our reputation on? What are we willing to accept, and what will we not tolerate? What kind of people will we be? What do we really want?

 

Of course, these are the kinds of questions we all must answer anew. Our political, cultural, and educational institutions must answer these questions. We must answer these questions in our communities, in our families, in our hearts. We can no longer allow ourselves to consider politics as something that happens to us. Politicians, influencers, and conflict merchants must not set the standards for our conduct or our expectations for what our politics can become.

 

There is no better year than 2026, the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, for Americans to recover their sense of civic agency. Doing so opens all kinds of opportunities. But if we choose instead to continue to allow ourselves to be captivated by personality unmoored from principle, binary choices will be all we will have left. It’s a great republic we have, if we can keep it.

Why the Outrage Over the Cuts at the Washington Post Is So Annoying

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, February 05, 2026

 

I have been trying to put my finger on exactly why I have found the outrage over the cuts at the Washington Post so annoying, and in searching for that answer, I have instead found a whole fist. So here goes: The outrage over the cuts at the Washington Post is annoying because the gap between the self-regard of those who were fired and the contributions of those who were fired is so enormous as to beggar belief. On days such as yesterday, Twitter is filled to the brim with “I was just laid off” posts, as though one had stumbled upon a battlefield strewn with the wounded — except, unlike on a battlefield, the wounded are all talking to one another in cloying, self-congratulatory tones. The result is a veritable web of grotesque and sycophantic encomia that does not stand up to even the slightest evaluation.

 

Don’t believe me? Click through on one of those posts, scroll past the pinned advertisement for the newspaper’s union, and look up the user’s name in the Post’s archive. If you do, you’ll typically learn that the person who is being praised as a “brilliant” and “talented” journalist who did “great work” has a job description like “sits at the intersection of civil rights and cooking,” that they wrote four things in the last two months, and that two of them were about how alligators are racist. This — not the second coming of Shakespeare — is what Jeff Bezos was supposed to pay for in perpetuity as penance for having been a useful member of society.

 

Today, a bunch of whiners are demanding that Americans cancel their Amazon Prime subscriptions and subscribe to the Washington Post instead. But why, exactly, would they do that? If Amazon went away, most people’s lives would be worse. If Andrea Cluney-Funey, of the Immutable Characteristics newsletter, were to go away, most people either wouldn’t notice or, in some cases, they would actually be better off for the change. What was lost yesterday was not America’s soul but yet another division of the mediocre worker bees who staff the sprawling progressive blob that we mistake for our national institutions. We can afford that as a country — and at a rate greater than 30 percent, too.

 

And before, in a fit of anger, you write to me to tell me that I’m not important either, please understand that I wholeheartedly agree. I’m not. I’m just a guy. I like doing what I do, but if I were hit by a train tomorrow, the wider world would go on quite happily without me and my writing. I’m not indispensable. I’m not synonymous with the American Republic. And I’m certainly not entitled to the largesse of others if, for whatever reason, they don’t wish to hand it over to me. A whole bunch of journalists have reacted to the changes at the Post by insisting that American democracy is now destined to “die in darkness,” or that “authoritarianism” is ineluctably on the way, or that the incident represents an Important Moment in American History — as if, last night in Omaha, Happy Hour at Jim’s Bar was ruined by a parade of shellshocked office workers asking each other, “Did you hear about Bob Hale from the Climate section?” But, of course, this is all immeasurably stupid and self-serving and, as with most of the ideas that are collectively entertained by our press corps, it ought not to be taken seriously by anyone.

How Religious Liberty Sustained America

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Thursday, January 22, 2026

 

As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, a familiar claim is repeated with growing confidence: Religion is fading from American life. Faith, we are told, has retreated into the private realm. Public Christianity is an anachronism. Modern America, like modern Europe, is supposedly learning to live without God.

 

The statistics appear persuasive at first glance. Church attendance has declined. Denominational loyalty has weakened. Many Americans now describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” or as simply unaffiliated. From this, commentators conclude that Christianity no longer shapes the nation’s moral or political imagination. This conclusion is mistaken.

 

What has declined is not belief itself, but institutional trust. What has weakened is not Christianity’s influence, but the willingness of many churches to speak with theological integrity. Remove the fashionable assumptions, and a clearer reality emerges. Christianity didn’t merely accompany the American experiment. It formed it. It constrained power in ways no other civilizational inheritance had managed before. And it continues, even now, to shape American arguments about liberty, justice, and authority — sometimes faithfully, sometimes perversely, but never insignificantly.

 

***

 

From the beginning, the United States presented itself as something unprecedented yet deeply rooted. In recent years, it has become common to claim that America was never truly Christian, that its founding was purely secular, or even rooted in hostility to faith. That claim collapses under scrutiny. The Declaration of Independence was drafted by men who were overwhelmingly Christian — some orthodox, others deists, all formed by the moral language of the Bible. They argued fiercely over theology and shared no single creed. What bound them together was not doctrine, but formation: a common moral grammar shaped by Christianity, whether confessed, inherited, or assumed.

 

The Declaration appeals to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” rather than to kings, bloodlines, or ancestral destiny. It speaks of truths that are self-evident because they are not invented by governments. Human beings, it insists, are endowed with rights. Those rights are not granted by the state. They preexist it. Governments exist to secure them, not redefine them.

 

This distinction is decisive. It is also unmistakably biblical. What mattered to the Founders was inheritance, not theological uniformity. Even those who identified as deists didn’t reject Christianity’s underlying framework. If anything, they assumed it. They rejected ecclesiastical coercion, not biblical anthropology. Their God was still a lawgiver. Their universe was still ordered. Human beings were still morally accountable creatures, not raw material for political experimentation. This is why the Declaration speaks of duties as naturally as it speaks of rights. Liberty, in this framework, is inseparable from responsibility. Free people must govern themselves, or freedom gives way to license and ends in rule by force.

 

Holding elections is not what makes America exceptional. Democracies are common, and many have proven fragile. The American republic is different because it treats liberty as prior to politics. Liberty is not dispensed by government; it precedes it. The purpose of the republic is to preserve a condition already assumed, not to manufacture freedom. That purpose didn’t come from ancient Greece or imperial Rome. It didn’t come from China, Japan, or India. It came from a religious tradition that insisted that power itself is limited.

 

In the Old Testament, political authority is never absolute. Kings rule, but they do not reign as gods. They are anointed, yet accountable. When the prophet Samuel warns Israel about monarchy, he describes, in almost clinical detail, the harms caused by unchecked power, what it costs a people: It takes sons and daughters, fields and flocks, labor and life. The warning is theological as much as political. All power belongs to God. When men claim it for themselves, oppression follows. This principle runs through the Hebrew Scripture with unsettling consistency. Pharaohs are humbled. Nebuchadnezzar is brought low. Even King David, chosen and beloved, is condemned when he abuses his authority. No ruler, however exalted, stands above judgment. No state may absorb the soul.

 

From this vision emerges a concept that modern thinkers later called negative liberty: freedom from domination, from arbitrary rule, from coercion. Liberty is defined as protection against being mastered by another rather than the ability to satisfy every desire. It is restraint, not indulgence. America chose this understanding deliberately.

 

This biblical suspicion of concentrated power explains something that modern readers often miss: why liberty in the American tradition is defensive rather than expansive. It exists to prevent injustice, not to guarantee happiness. The Founders imagined the state as a necessary restraint on fallibility rather than a vehicle for human perfection. This assumption mirrors the Old Testament view of human nature, which is neither naïvely optimistic nor nihilistic. Man is capable of good but prone to corruption. Power magnifies that tendency. Therefore, power must be divided, slowed, and constrained.

 

The New Testament deepened rather than displaced this inheritance. Christ does not arrive as a political revolutionary, yet His teaching quietly undermines every claim to absolute authority. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” He says, “and unto God what is God’s.” With that sentence, political power is relativized. Caesar is not divine. The state has limits. Conscience belongs elsewhere.

 

***

 

This separation between political authority and ultimate allegiance did not exist in most civilizations. In imperial Rome, the emperor was divine. In ancient Greece, the polis subsumed the individual. In much of Asia, cosmic order and political authority were fused. Japan, well into the 20th century, treated its emperor as a god incarnate. When the United States confronted Japan in World War II, American officials struggled to comprehend a system in which surrender was inconceivable because defeat would deny the divinity of Emperor Hirohito.

 

The Founding Fathers did not have Hirohito in mind when they debated religious liberty. Nor were they inspired by Mohammed. Their arguments unfolded within a Christian civilizational context. They weren’t weighing Christianity against Islam or Buddhism. They were negotiating among Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, and Methodists. The disputes were intra-Christian. That context matters, especially now.

 

The idea that rulers themselves are bound by law found early political expression in England. The Magna Carta didn’t create liberty out of thin air. When rebellious barons forced King John to accept limits on his authority, they were invoking an older moral claim: that kings are subject to judgment. Property could not be seized arbitrarily. Justice couldn’t be denied at will. The rule of law, as a concept, emerged from a Christian insistence that power must answer to something higher than itself. These developments unfolded unevenly across Europe, but they found their fullest institutional expression in England. Over time, courts asserted independence. Parliaments constrained monarchs. Still, Europe paid dearly for religious conflict. Sectarian violence and political repression scarred the continent for generations.

 

Many early Americans were the heirs of that exhaustion. They fled enforced uniformity. They crossed an ocean not to abandon Christianity, but to practice it freely. When they built their new society, they refused to nationalize faith while also refusing to banish it. The Constitution reflects this balance. It is remarkable not because it imagines human beings as virtuous, but because it assumes the opposite. Power is divided. Authority is checked. Liberty is preserved by restraining rulers, not trusting them.

 

This is why the Constitution reads less like a manifesto and more like a restraint system. It doesn’t proclaim human goodness, but it does anticipate human abuse. The separation of powers, federalism, and judicial review aren’t merely clever mechanisms; they’re moral judgments embedded in law. They assume that no individual, faction, or institution should be trusted with unchecked authority. This skepticism is biblical. It reflects an anthropology shaped by Scripture rather than utopian theory.

 

The constitutional amendments that followed sharpened this commitment. Due process. Innocent until proven guilty. Protection against unreasonable searches. Freedom of conscience. Freedom of speech. These are not abstractions. Quite the opposite. They are defenses against tyranny. They rest on the assumption that the state is not the final arbiter. The First Amendment, in particular, is often misunderstood. It doesn’t exile religion from public life. Instead, it prevents the state from coercing belief. Faith, in the Christian understanding, must be freely chosen or it is meaningless. Conscience cannot be commanded without being destroyed.

 

When Americans later confronted slavery, it was not secular ideology that supplied the most powerful moral critique. It was Christianity. Abolitionists didn’t argue merely from efficiency or progress. They argued from Scripture. They insisted that every human being bore the image of God and that bondage was an offense against both man and the Creator. The same pattern appeared in struggles against segregation and in movements for women’s legal equality. Christian language, Christian reasoning, and Christian imagery animated these efforts. They were imperfect. They were often resisted by other Christians. But the vocabulary came from the same source. Christianity has always constrained power by reminding the powerful that they are not gods. That constraint still matters, even when it is imperfectly applied.

 

The Christian voting bloc played a decisive role in the election of Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2024, not because he embodied Christian virtue, but because many believers saw him as a barrier against an aggressively secular political culture. When he survived an assassination attempt, a significant portion of the Christian public interpreted it as providential. Such interpretations discomfit secular observers, but they reveal how deeply biblical categories still shape American instinct.

 

Christian influence is also visible among the young. On college campuses once dominated by credentialed cynicism, students now cite Old and New Testament passages at public events. Before his assassination, Charlie Kirk spoke unapologetically about faith, framing Christianity not as rebellion or nostalgia, but as a source of order, discipline, and meaning. Charlie is gone, and his loss is profound. The mission, however, continues. His wife, Erika, has carried it forward with quiet authority and a courage that deserves recognition.

 

Even ideological disputes on the American right increasingly turn on biblical interpretation. Arguments over immigration, foreign policy, and national obligation often ask not only what is strategic, but what Scripture permits. Should the United States maintain unconditional alliances? What does the Bible say? Can a nation erase its borders in the name of compassion? Again, Scripture is invoked. The debate over whether Jesus was a refugee — and the insistence that, if He was, it would obligate Christians to oppose border enforcement — reveals how easily theology is repurposed for contemporary policy arguments.

 

What’s striking is that even movements hostile to Christianity cannot escape it. American progressivism doesn’t resemble the militantly atheist communism of China or Cambodia. It is saturated with Christian language, however distorted. Christ is recast as a socialist. Scripture is reread through racial, sexual, or ideological lenses. Every cause demands a gospel. The distortion is obvious, but it reveals something important. Even those who wish to dismantle America’s foundations feel compelled to appeal to Christian authority. The Bible still exerts gravitational pull.

 

***

 

That pull cannot sustain endless corruption. When churches become activist hubs and sermons become political lectures, believers disengage. Eighty percent of Americans still profess belief in God, yet less than a third attend church regularly. However, as noted earlier, Christianity has not lost its relevance. Many churches, though, have abandoned theological fidelity, and that has driven worshippers away. Congregations want formation, not activism masquerading as faith. Catholic youth, in particular, are returning to traditional liturgy, drawn by reverence, discipline, and continuity.

 

There is a widening gap between church leadership, often politically progressive, and congregations that are markedly more conservative. The assumption that American churches are uniformly right-wing falls apart on contact with reality. If anything, the imbalance has long tilted the other way. Much of the institutional church leadership has spent decades absorbing the language of progressive politics, often more fluently than the language of theology. The Founding Fathers, were they to wake today, would be appalled by this confusion. They would recognize in it the same temptation they sought to restrain: the urge to fuse righteousness with power. Yet they would also be heartened. They would see Americans who refuse to surrender judgment, who insist that liberty is not self-justifying.

 

America has experienced repeated religious revivals. They were disruptive events. They unsettled complacency, challenged authority, and reordered public life. There is no reason to assume that such renewal is confined to the past.

 

At 250 years, the American experiment remains unfinished. Its endurance has always rested on a vital insight: Liberty does not sustain itself. It requires limits that power alone cannot supply. Christianity provided those limits, and it can do so again. As an American citizen, I am deeply grateful for that inheritance. Whether America chooses to recover it will shape not only what kind of nation it becomes, but the kind of republic it remains.

CNN’s Love-Hate Relationship with Citizen Journalists in Minnesota

By Becket Adams

Sunday, February 08, 2026

 

CNN has a complicated relationship with citizen journalists.

 

Whether the network hates or loves them, it might not surprise you to hear, depends on the beat. Take its recently published 2,000-plus-word profile on two Chicago teens who now dedicate their lives to tailing ICE agents and recording their “hateful” conduct.

 

The gist of the article, as CNN presents it, is this: These two teens, Ben, 17, and Sam, 16, are saints. They have answered the call of civic duty, devoting themselves completely to exposing the wickedness of federal immigration officers. Armed only with a GoPro camera, these amateur videographers and their dedication to exposing ICE’s “blatant disregard for human rights,” especially in Minneapolis, set an example for the rest of us.

 

Elsewhere in Minnesota, there is another amateur videographer. His name is Nick Shirley. Except, instead of documenting alleged ICE human rights violations, he’s committed to investigating the full extent of the state’s Somali fraud schemes, which are estimated to total around $9 billion — that’s $9 billion stolen from both the state and federal governments. In a way, Shirley is like the Chicago teens. He’s an amateur, he has a camera, and he says he feels a civic duty to expose serious, systemic injustice.

 

The main difference between Shirley and the teens, however, is that few in the mainstream press take the former seriously. Mostly, he’s treated with something bordering on contempt, especially at CNN. The Chicago teens, by contrast, are portrayed by the network as scrappy freedom fighters on a mission to take on the machine. This heroic depiction includes several quotes from the brothers, who face little, if any, pushback or even basic fact-checking from their profilers.

 

The quotes include:

 

·         “[Federal agents are] constantly pushing people and beating them up, kneeing them in the face when they’re down on the ground, or shoving their head into ice or pavement so that they’re scraped up.”

 

·         “With the greater number of agents, it felt like an invasion through your streets. Just caravanning around, grabbing any brown or black person walking down the sidewalks.” (The profile includes a flat denial of this from DHS.)

 

·         “Every day we see how blatantly wrong it is and how hateful it is. There needs to be this little sacrifice for people to go out there and document and stand up for what’s right.”

 

Of course, federal immigration agents’ conduct in Minneapolis has faced considerable scrutiny, including now from President Trump himself, who has shaken up the leadership on the ground and pulled back agents after two U.S. citizen activists were killed in confrontations with immigration-enforcement officials.

 

But the above quotes face little scrutiny from CNN, giving the clear impression that the network intends for them to be accepted as fact.

 

Regarding the federal “lawlessness” the boys have personally witnessed and recorded, the profile describes a single incident in which ICE agents restrained and pepper-sprayed a protester. Despite the vivid language used in the article, CNN is still compelled to include this line: “It’s unclear what started the clash, or what led the agents to restrain and spray the protester.”

 

Even though it’s unclear from the video who or what triggered the incident, young videographer Ben can be heard shouting, “This is what happens when they have ICE in Minneapolis. They don’t know how to do their job!”

 

You know what they say: Children are often the best at recording information but the worst at interpreting it. However, in this case, the recording itself isn’t that good either.

 

There are additional problems with the article, including that it describes the teens as “trained” ICE watchers without clarifying who trained them, what the training involved, or if the training relates to their claimed mission. The article mentions a growing “network of 5,000 trained civilians who monitor immigration enforcement.” What that training entails is up to you to figure out.

 

There’s also a disconcerting passage where CNN reports that the brothers’ responsibilities include tailing “suspected federal vehicles,” “writing down license plate numbers,” and “sending immigration agents’ locations in group chats with other observers.”

 

Boy, I’d sure like to know what happens with all that vehicle-tag information, where it goes, who disseminates it, and whether it’s being stored or fed to other activist groups. Unfortunately, those kinds of details aren’t included.

 

Now, unlike its paean to the Chicago brothers, CNN’s coverage of Nick Shirley, who produced a viral video in which he claims to have uncovered evidence of rampant fraud perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora, was much more incredulous.

 

The video “includes limited evidence for the creator’s allegations,” warned one report.

 

CNN host Elex Michaelson clarified on-air: “CNN is now looking into Shirley’s claims and has not independently verified his accusations.”

 

“YouTube content creator Nick Shirley posted a viral video now that’s claiming to find widespread fraud in Somali-run childcare centers,” warned host Brian Abel. “Shirley has created anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim videos in the past. His latest post [provides] limited evidence.”

 

One report brands Shirley as a “MAGA journalist.” Host Abby Phillip labels him a “MAGA YouTuber,” adding that his videos “are performative.”

 

“YouTube content creator Nick Shirley, who has created anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim videos in the past, posted a video alleging widespread fraud,” she added elsewhere. “. . . It includes limited evidence, though, to support the claims that it makes.”

 

When Shirley himself was interviewed by the network, reporter Whitney Wild demanded of him, like an actual newswoman, “How do you know that you’re right? How do you know that all the allegations that you’re making are true? Are you 100 percent sure?”

 

These are good questions. One can’t help but wonder where this energy was when CNN produced that profile in which the main characters asserted that ICE agents are “grabbing any brown or black person walking down the sidewalks.”

 

Lastly, here’s a quote from a CNN personality about the events in Minnesota. Your task is to guess whom she is talking about: “Like, who gave this guy license to go around . . . these random vigilante justice-seekers who ordained themselves like some sort of law enforcement expert?”

 

That’s a quote from former MSNBC host Tiffany Cross, and, funnily enough, she’s not talking about all the self-declared “legal observers,” the protesters who’ve set up their own roadblocks and checkpoints, the people who’ve chased strangers from public establishments because they think they look like federal agents, or the folks who’ve actively impeded federal officers performing their duties.

 

She’s talking about Nick Shirley (you guessed it!), who knocks on doors and makes supposed daycare workers uncomfortable.

 

Factoring in CNN’s more recent coverage of amateur videographers in Minnesota, the network doesn’t actually seem to object to Shirley’s methods, despite the protests of its personalities. CNN simply objects to the subject matter.

Donnie Demands Dulles

By Jeffrey Blehar

Friday, February 06, 2026

 

This post is in response to Trump Wants Dulles International Airport and New York’s Penn Station Renamed After Him

 

By Jim Geraghty

 

I’d like to add a brief word on one of the more outrageously predictable stories out of the Trump White House. (And there are so very many this Friday afternoon — Trump posted and deleted a racist video portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes over on Truth Social, then had his spokesman blame it on “staffer error.”) NBC News reports that apparently the president is holding up millions of dollars of already-appropriated federal transportation funding for New York and New Jersey, and has informed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer that he will release it in exchange for either Dulles International Airport (in Northern Virginia) or Penn Station (in New York City) being renamed after him.

 

I know that my colleague Jim Geraghty already touched on the absurd vainglory of this earlier in the morning, but since it’s my professional goal to own the “Trump Names Stuff After Himself” beat, I feel required to offer my two cents as well. Let’s clear away the obvious point first: If true, this is conduct unbecoming of a president, even as it is entirely in keeping with Trump’s prior behavior. (See: the soon-to-be-shuttered “Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center.”) The president is a proud shakedown artist and is completely shameless about it — just ask Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Machado. So I don’t doubt for a moment that Trump floated this quid pro quo, knowing what I already do about the man’s character and governing philosophy. As former Illinois Governor (and Trump pardonee) Rod Blagojevich might have observed, “Federal funding is a valuable f***ing thing, you don’t just give it away for nothing.”

 

I’m just amused at how sweepingly egocentric Trump’s demand is: He wants one or both of two of the East Coast’s major transportation hubs named after himself, so that every day blue-state elites have to fly or train into and out of a place named after someone they loathe. How did he arrive at Dulles Airport in particular? Does Donald Trump even know who John Foster Dulles is? (Answer: a key architect of America’s Cold War strategy as well as NATO — an organization Trump has notably little respect for.)

 

My guess is via process of elimination: He’d have preferred to demand Reagan National Airport be renamed after him instead, but even MAGA might spit the bit at the idea of Trump’s name replacing the Gipper’s. And while a man of Trump’s stature surely deserves to have his name added to JFK Airport in New York, he’s already tried to efface President Kennedy once, and that didn’t go so well. (To be fair, I wouldn’t mind if they shut JFK Airport down for the next two years for “repairs” — the place is cursed.) Trump could demand naming rights over EWR, but I suspect that even he would feel embarrassed to see his name associated with Newark.

 

Honestly, I’m less upset about this than about Trump’s many other bizarre mini-scandals, for the simple reason that, as a former D.C.-area native, I consider Dulles Airport to be one of the most odious cesspools in America. I would not be caught dead flying into or out of that ill-designed monstrosity, one of the most hideous airports in America to navigate. (I’m convinced that if the rest of America had to experience the inconvenience of “people-movers” we would witness a spontaneous populist uprising.) Naming it after Trump feels almost appropriate in that sense, like naming a sewage treatment plant after him. He won’t get what he wants, but if he did, it would veer close to karmic justice in my mind.

Trump Wants Dulles International Airport and New York’s Penn Station Renamed After Him

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, February 06, 2026

 

The president of the United States is withholding congressionally appropriated federal funding for a major infrastructure project, in violation of the law, because he wants existing transportation hubs to be renamed after him.

 

The Trump administration asked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for the Washington region’s Dulles International Airport and New York’s Penn Station to be named after President Donald Trump in exchange for releasing the federal funds required to build a long-delayed tunnel between New York and New Jersey, multiple sources told NBC News.

 

The administration halted funding for the $16 billion Gateway project at the start of the federal government shutdown last fall. But even though the shutdown ended in November and the full appropriations packages passed this week, the administration has yet to release the money. . . .

 

White House budget director Russell Vought said at the time that he was stopping funding for infrastructure projects to “ensure” it wasn’t used “on unconstitutional DEI principles.”

 

When the president repeatedly expressed gleeful celebration after the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, I wrote that he “cannot discern moral right and wrong through a person’s actions, like a normal human being.” When the president texted Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre that “considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” I wrote, “In a saner and better world, we would be having a serious discussion of the 25th Amendment of the Constitution right now.” I’ve repeatedly pointed out that Trump told the Iranian protesters “HELP IS ON ITS WAY” and no help has arrived for 25 days now.

 

I know, I know. I’m the one who has “Trump derangement syndrome.”

Goodbye, Kostyantynivka

By Andrew E. Busch

Sunday, February 08, 2026

 

Our first sight of Kostyantynivka (or, in the Russian appellation, Konstantinovka) came at about 6 a.m. on a late July day in 2003. Our overnight train from Kyiv had pulled into the station, and the local education minister was waiting for us on the platform. My wife Melinda and I had traveled to meet a little girl, three years old, who would soon become our youngest daughter.

 

As we stepped off the train, our host met us eagerly, walked us to her waiting car, and had us driven to the orphanage to meet Katerina, who was still sleeping in her crib. Our lives would never be the same.

 

Train station in Kostyantinivka, Ukraine

 We spent the next nine days in Kostyantynivka. The judge who had to approve the adoption was on vacation. The orphanage nurse, prematurely a widow, decreed that there was no hotel in town worthy of us, so, at her insistence, we lived for the next week and a half with her, her teenage daughter, and her pensioner mother in the modest but well-cared-for apartment that they shared. No kinder or more gracious hosts could be imagined. Every day, the mother worked in the kitchen to feed us; every evening, she urged, “kushai, kushai” — “eat, eat.” Meanwhile, the daughter told us of her desire to learn English and study in the United States, and the nurse went back and forth with us to the orphanage to spend time with little Katya.

 

Father and daughter

 Kostyantynivka was a town of nearly 70,000, a somewhat run-down industrial hub in Ukraine’s Donetsk region that had once manufactured elements for the Soviet space program. A faded mural celebrating Sputnik still graced the side of a multistory Khrushchev-era apartment building. The nurse’s daughter’s school had served as a field hospital for the Red Army during World War II. The park nearest the nurse’s flat sported a playground reminiscent of its 1970s American counterpart: lots of metal, worn paint, and no mulch. Ukraine had been governed since independence by old apparatchiks with a lean toward Moscow, but by the looks of Kostyantynivka, they hadn’t done much for the Russian speakers of the east.

 

Early on, we also met Katya’s grandmother. She was still the girl’s legal guardian, and to complete the adoption, we needed to get the grandmother’s permission. She told us she had been praying for us for months, not knowing yet who we would be, and she invited us to go with her to her Baptist church. The church was old, as were many of the congregants. It was far from the only long-standing Baptist church in eastern Ukraine. They had persevered through Soviet times, and now they were free. (Since 2014, Baptist churches in the occupied parts of eastern Ukraine have been closed by the Russians, and the pastors beaten or jailed.)

 

Eventually, the judge returned and approved the adoption, and we bid Kostyantynivka adieu. We left behind the orphanage, the Baptist church, the nurse, her mother, her daughter, and Katya’s grandmother, as well as Katya’s half sister, who remained in Ukraine under her grandmother’s care.

 

The year after we adopted Katya, Ukrainians protested the fraudulent election of Viktor Yanukovych, leading to a revote and a presidential victory for the pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko. Three years after that, we returned to the country when I taught for a semester on a Fulbright at the Diplomatic Academy of Ukraine. Kostyantynivka was not too different, but it seemed a bit less dingy. The nurse’s daughter hoped to apply for a program with the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. Even in Donbas, many of the young looked to the West with hope.

 

A few weeks after we returned home from my Fulbright, the nurse’s daughter, filled with promise, was killed by a drunk driver. When we visited again the next year, our last time in the city, we put flowers on her grave.

 

When pro-Russian “separatists” supported by Russia and led by Russian military intelligence operative Igor Girkin launched their campaign in early 2014, they briefly swept into Kostyantynivka. In short order, the Ukrainian army swept them back out. And so things stood until the full-scale Russian invasion that began in February 2022.

 

Now, Kostyantynivka is on the front lines of war, one of a line of “fortress cities” holding back the invaders. Like Bakhmut and Pokrovsk, the industrial city we knew is now mostly rubble and burned-out shells of buildings. Its 70,000 residents have been reduced to 4,000, its apartments collapsed, its churches blasted, and its metallic playgrounds mangled.

 

Kostyantynivka, Ukraine (Photo: Oleksandr Rodichev)

 The nurse’s mother doubtless went to her reward years ago and is instructing Saint Peter to eat up. The last we heard of the nurse, she had remarried and moved to Mariupol. We hope she survived the deadly Russian siege of that city early in the war, but we have no way to find out — and we wouldn’t try if we could. If she is still there, receiving a message from American friends would land her in a filtration camp or in one of the FSB torture chambers dotting occupied Ukraine.

 

Katya’s grandmother died a few years ago, but Katya has remained in contact with her half sister, who has a daughter and whose husband served for years in the Ukrainian army fighting against the Russians. Katya’s birth parents also reemerged, to her surprise, with a new young daughter of their own. The whole family fled for a time to Dnipro, deeper into Ukraine; they returned to Kostyantynivka when the front seemed to stabilize, and then left again when conditions deteriorated. Those Russian speakers, like hundreds of thousands of others, had no desire to be “liberated” by Putin’s army of thugs and rapists. Now, there is nothing to return to, even if they wanted to.

 

Kostyantynivka, Ukraine (Photo: Oleksandr Rodichev)

 Kostyantynivka was never a city of grace and beauty, like an Odessa or a Lviv. It had its quirks and its shortcomings, to be sure, like the tree limbs that were inserted into manholes to keep people from falling in because the covers had been stolen for scrap metal. But it was a home to 70,000 free people who mostly wanted to be left alone to build their lives and their community as circumstances permitted. I weep for it. Every civilized person should. The Ukrainians may lose the city to a Russian offensive of mindless “meat assaults,” or they may hold onto it with a determined defense. But it is nobody’s home anymore. And no one should be confused about who bears responsibility. Kostyantynivka is an unambiguous casualty of Moscow’s war of imperial ambition.

 

Kostyantynivka, Ukraine (Photo: Oleksandr Rodichev)

 Whatever the future holds, the destruction of Kostyantynivka is a lesson for those with eyes to see. The “root cause” of this war is that Putin and the people around him cannot imagine a world in which the Ukrainians are not vassals of Moscow. For them, the operative principle is “rule or ruin.” And the Ukrainians are not inclined to surrender what they still hold in Donbas without a fight. Kostyantynivka and cities like it are not just their land, and not just their strongest line of defense. The ruined homes of their people rest on that land, along with their deferred dreams, factories that once gave them sustenance, churches where they worshipped, and even the graves of their children.