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The State Department is dodging any questions about the ongoing feud between Spain and the U.S. over the use of its military bases.

Speaking to CNN on Thursday, a State Department spokesperson was asked about the back and forth between the two countries, but refused to comment.

A few days ago, Spain announced that President Donald Trump's attacks on Iran violated international law and their agreement for the use of air bases.

“Spanish military bases will not be used for anything that falls outside the agreement with the United States and the United Nations Charter,” said José Manuel Albares, Spain’s foreign minister, in a Sunday interview.

However, on Wednesday, the White House press secretary suggested that Spain had backed away from the assertion.

“With respect to Spain, I think they heard the president’s message yesterday loud and clear, and it’s my understanding, over the past several hours, they’ve agreed to cooperate with the US military,” Karoline Leavitt told reporters.

The foreign minister responded almost immediately, telling Cadena SER radio, “The Spanish government’s position on the war in the Middle East, the bombings in Iran, and the use of our bases has not changed one iota."

“I have absolutely no idea what that could refer to or where it could have come from,” he added.

“I want to make things very clear to the Spanish people. The ‘no to war’ position remains clear and unequivocal,” he also said.

Tommy Pigott was asked, "So what is the reality?"

"Well, military operations, I will refer to the [Defense Department] and the White House. What I can say from the State Department's perspective is what we're doing to help the American people. We're focused 24/7 on that, our highest priority being their safety and security," said Pigott.

Some Texas Republicans had signaled they hoped their nominee would face Democratic U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett in a Senate race that is now headed for a runoff between incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn and embattled MAGA firebrand Attorney General Ken Paxton. Democratic state Rep. James Talarico’s win in Tuesday’s primary has further complicated matters for the Texas GOP, which now faces a grueling 12-week — and potentially $100 million — brawl to choose its nominee.

President Donald Trump has signaled he does not want that fight, and on Wednesday floated endorsing one of the GOP candidates and asking the other to withdraw from the race.

“The Republican Primary Race for the United States Senate in the Great State of Texas,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “cannot, for the good of the Party, and our Country, itself, be allowed to go on any longer. IT MUST STOP NOW! We have an easy to beat, Radical Left Opponent, and we have to TOTALLY FOCUS on putting him away, quickly and decisively!”

“I will be making my Endorsement soon, and will be asking the candidate that I don’t Endorse to immediately DROP OUT OF THE RACE! Is that fair? We must win in November!!!”

According to Politico, Trump is being pushed by multiple Republicans to endorse Senator Cornyn.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Wednesday that he hopes the president’s endorsement comes “soon,” remarks he made “hours after making his latest plea on Cornyn’s behalf to the president.”

Republicans have “warned Trump that if scandal-plagued Paxton becomes the nominee, it could cost Republicans a seat they have held since 1961. There’s even more GOP anxiety now that state Rep. James Talarico secured the Democratic nomination — a candidate many believe could give Democrats their best chance at flipping the seat.”

But if he puts his thumb on the scale and wipes out MAGA favorite Paxton, Trump’s MAGA base has made clear they will be furious.

Far-right influencer, activist, and provocateur Laura Loomer, who reportedly has ties inside the Oval Office, “made her choice for the GOP nominee clear in a post on X on Wednesday,” The Daily Beast reported.

“JUST IN: President Trump says he will soon endorse in the Texas Senate GOP race, & whoever he doesn’t endorse must drop out,” Loomer wrote. “Hopefully he endorses @KenPaxtonTX, because @JohnCornyn has a long record of being anti-Trump, pro-Islam, weak on illegal immigration, and anti 2A.”

Numerous other MAGA world influencers also urged the president to endorse Paxton.

“Mr. President @realDonaldTrump,” right-wing Blaze TV host Sara Gonzales wrote in a post on X. “I am one of your biggest supporters and I am urging you as someone who is in the Texas grassroots: do NOT endorse Cornyn. It will be one of your biggest mistakes.”

The Daily Beast also noted that conservative radio host Jesse Kelly “called Cornyn, who has held his Texas Senate seat since 2002, a ‘swamp rat,’ and said if Trump endorses him, it would be a ‘total scumbag move.'”

Republican former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a top Trump ally, now an “America First” activist, blasted the president.

“Trump now says he is going to endorse either Cornyn or Paxton and demands that whoever does not get his endorsement must drop out of the runoff. This is wrong and the people of Texas should be able to vote for WHOEVER THEY WANT!!! NOT the candidate Trump demands.”

“People are furious over this and if Trump does this, it could actually be the real reason Texas Senate seat flips blue,” she warned. “Stealing people’s opportunity to elect their leaders by force will definitely piss off voters and will lead to even more sitting it out.”

Democratic insiders often joke that for their party, Texas is like Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football in the "Peanuts" cartoons. Brown famously kept hoping that Lucy would finally give him a chance to kick a football only for her to repeatedly pull the football away when he was ready to kick it — and in Texas, the "football" that "Lucy" keeps pulling away from Democrats is a victory in a statewide race.

The last time a Democrat won a gubernatorial election in Texas was Ann Richards in 1990, and Texas' last Democratic U.S. senator, Bob Krueger, left office in 1993. Democrats perform well in Texas' major cities — from Austin to Houston to El Paso — and in certain congressional districts, but they struggle in statewide races.

Yet some prominent conservatives, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota), Washington Post columnist George Will and former White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews, believe that Texas' 2026 U.S. Senate race could be in play for Democrats if incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) isn't the nominee and Democrats have the right candidate. Democrats now have a nominee in that race: centrist James Talarico, who defeated the more progressive Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) in an early March primary. But it remains to be seen whether Cornyn or the far-right Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will be the Republican nominee.

During an appearance on The New Republic's "The Daily Blast" podcast posted on March 5, veteran Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett laid out the challenges that members of his party face in the Lone Star State. Hackett believes that Talarico is electable, but he was also candid about why Texas is such a struggle for Democrats in statewide races.

"Republicans have done a fantastic job of suppressing the vote in Texas, of keeping voters at home, of making it extremely difficult to vote in the state," Hackett told host Greg Sargent. "And that's why Texas, I think, today has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the country. Texas also has a lot of unaffiliated independent voters out there who have tended over the years to vote Republican. Those voters, I think, in large part, make up areas in the suburbs outside of the major cities and in parts of rural Texas."

Hackett continued, "Texas has a lot of counties, and Democrats have to compete in all of those counties if they want to win. Democrats have not built the infrastructural support needed to compete in every county throughout Texas the way that Republicans have. I mean, they have 30 years of voter suppression and organization that have brought them to this point and kept Democrats out of power for 30 years. If Democrats want to win, they have to go everywhere. They have to compete everywhere. They have to maximize their voters. They have to divide Republican voters, and they have to win over the sizable number — 15 percent or more — of unaffiliated independent voters that are often in the rural and suburban parts of Texas."

Hackett emphasized that if Democrats are going to win statewide races in Texas, they will need the right coalition.

"I think the headline coming out of this primary cycle — beyond Talarico's victory, beyond Paxton and Cornyn headed to this runoff — is kind of the winning Democratic coalition being reassembled, in part thanks to Trump pushing voters toward Democrats, whether that's Latino voters who showed up big time yesterday for James Talarico, or Black voters who turned out strongly for Crockett in a lot of these key areas across Texas," Hackett told Sargent. "I think if Talarico is able to reassemble that winning coalition — if he's able to keep Latino voters on board in the general election, which honestly I think will be dependent on Trump and how he presents his agenda for the next few months — but also, if Talarico is able to make inroads and bring those Crockett voters into the fold of his coalition, if he's able to keep that message that has been resonating in the suburban parts of the state outside of these big cities, among independent swing voters across Texas, of which there are very many."

The Democratic strategist added, "He has shown that he has the ability to assemble this coalition, but he’s going to have to maximize turnout among those key constituencies —Latino voters, Black voters, and I think young voters too."

Kristi Noem might have stepped into a "trap" during her recent Senate hearing as reports suggest Donald Trump is looking to fire her, but according to some on social media, her prospective replacement could be far "worse."

On Thursday, the conservative National Review reported that Trump was "furious" with Noem over her handling of questions about a taxpayer-funded ad campaign while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, and echoed other reports that the president is potentially planning to fire her. Noem was pressed by GOP Sen. John Kennedy as to whether or not Trump approved the $220 million campaign, to which the Homeland Security secretary said that he had.

"It’s just hard for me to believe, knowing the president, as I do, that you said, ‘Mr. President, here’s some ads I’ve cut, and I’m going to spend $220 million running them,’ that he would have agreed to that,” Kennedy said.

As a result of those answers, Trump has privately begun suggesting that he is open to finally getting rid of Noem after months of controversy. Reactions to this report have emerged across social media, with senior CNN political reporter Aaron Blake suggesting that Noem fell for a trap set by Kennedy.

"John Kennedy was basically laying a bunch of traps around Noem and waiting for her to walk into one," Blake posted to X. "Judging by this report, it worked."

"Seems the questioning from Noem’s [Senate Judiciary Committee] hearing that most hurt her standing with the president came not from a Democrat but from a Republican," congressional reporter Benjamin S. Weiss added in his own post.

"It remains unclear whether Trump, known for openly floating personnel changes in private conversations with allies, will follow through on the ouster," Audrey Fahlberg, author of the report from National Review, posted to X after sharing the story. "Trump has so far resisted any high-profile Cabinet reshuffles during his second term, and insisted in early February that he had no plans to remove Noem from her post following her handing of the federal officer-involved fatal shootings in Minneapolis earlier this year."

According to National Review, Trump is reportedly considering staunch MAGA ally and Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin as a replacement for Noem at the head of DHS. According to Democratic strategist and MS NOW contributor Max Burns, this would hardly be much of an improvement.

"Firing Noem to hire Markwayne Mullin is the definition of going from bad to worse," Burns wrote in a post to X.

"Ah so it looks like Markwayne's embarrassing brown nosing may pay dividends," Daily Kos reporter Emily C. Singer wrote in her post reacting to the news.

"If you want someone who won’t say something embarrassing when they get a tough question, this is an… interesting… backup," Benjy Sarlin, senior political editor for Vox, posted in reaction to the news about Mullin.

"Oh Lord. Dumb and Dumber Part III," podcaster Reed Galen wrote in a post to X.

President Donald Trump has caused an "aviation quagmire," one former airline executive and founder said about the war in Iran.

While oil executives are freaking out and gas prices are jumping, Trump has another problem with the global travel industry, CNBC reported on Thursday.

Trump's war against Iran hasn't merely stayed within the borders of Iran. In retaliation, Iran has been using drones to launch attacks all over the region, with one drone hitting Azerbaijan's airport. Another drone hit a British air base in Cyprus.

It means that the stability of any planes flying through the region must take one of two routes: south over Saudi Arabia or north over Georgia, FlightRadar shows. But after a drone hit in Azerbaijan, the southern route might be the only option for a while.

Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday that Asian airlines had a 900 percent fare hike as people from all over the world are desperately trying to get out of the area.

PlaneFinder allows observers to search for aircraft by type, including drones. Users can click on the drones to see who owns them. A report on Wednesday from CNN's Natasha Bertrand revealed that Trump administration officials acknowledged during a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill that they have major concerns about Iran's drone program because they haven't been able to intercept all of them, as evidenced by the six dead American soldiers in Kuwait.

A number of corporate drones have been spotted circling Kuwait, Qatar and the U.A.E. for the past several days. It's unclear if they're being used as private security for the countries, however. One Royal Air Force military transport aircraft was spotted over Qatar on Thursday morning.

CNBC spoke to a Zoey Gong, a Chinese medicine food therapist, who was stuck in Paris, trying to get to Shanghai via Dubai via an Emirates flight. She ended up having to pay more than double the price of her original ticket for another flight home.

"She’s one of millions of travelers swept up in war and other conflicts from Iran to Mexico this year, problems that are threatening the global tourism industry that’s worth an estimated $11.7 trillion to the world’s economy," CNBC reported, citing the industry group World Travel & Tourism Council. "It’s showing that people who are far from falling missiles, drone attacks and other geopolitical flashpoints aren’t immune to ripple effects."

More than a million people have been stranded, the report said, with 20,000 flights being grounded after the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran.

“This has spiraled into an aviation quagmire,” complained Henry Harteveldt when speaking to CNBC. He is a former airline executive who founded the travel consulting firm Atmosphere Research Group.

He went on to say that the strikes have caused “the most chaotic event we’ve seen frankly since 9/11 when the U.S. chose to close its airspace. We haven’t seen anything that has had such a long and geographically widespread impact on travel.”

The administration of President Donald Trump has been successful in chilling the willingness of any firm to take on causes adverse to the administration.

That’s the opinion of Deborah Pearlstein, the director of Princeton University’s Law and Public Policy program. She expressed that view in an interview with Slate on the ramifications of the recent Department of Justice flip-flop on pursuing prior Trump executive orders aimed at several law firms and attorneys.

In those orders dating to last year, Trump targeted law firms and individuals that work with his opponents and causes he doesn’t support. The EO imposition of sanctions threatened to hamper legal business and deny access to federal buildings.

Four separate trial court judges ruled against the administration on the executive orders. But some law firms decided that litigating the matter wasn’t worth it, and offered up millions in pro-bono work to appease the administration.

The DOJ is still pursuing its defense of the executive orders after a brief flip-flop in which it indicated it was not going to appeal the trial court rulings.

No matter the outcome of that litigation, the underlying goal has already been realized, Pearlstein argues.

“The goal of chilling the willingness of any firm to take on causes adverse to the administration has been achieved, and then some,” Peralstein said, citing reporting and studies done so far.

“That’s one of the really important broader lessons in countering authoritarianism," Peralstein continued. "You need a whole toolbox full of tools, and litigation is an incredibly important tool for some purposes, but it doesn’t work for everything. It is entirely possible to win the litigation battle and lose the authoritarian war, and in this particular fight, that’s the direction we’re headed."

Pearlstein said the administration’s desire to enforce its executive orders is a “textbook authoritarian playbook for would-be authoritarians to try to attack any independent institutional source of power that might challenge the authoritarian’s ability to carry out his will. The same reason why the White House and the administration wanted to target major universities, media companies, and the same way they have worked to make deals with major industry that they care about.”

The fallout of the situation will impact such issues as the availability of representation to challenge administration initiatives, Pearlstein added.

Donald Trump has made claims about Iran's nuclear capabilities in an attempt to justify his military strikes against the country, but according to a new analysis from MS NOW, he did so in a way that had an "obvious tell" signaling that he had no idea what he was talking about.

The U.S. began conducting a joint military operation against Iran over the weekend alongside Israel, with counterstrikes so far claiming the lives of six American service members. Trump's justifications for this campaign have been at times vague and inconsistent, with one of his claims from Sunday being that Iran was just "two weeks" out from being able to produce a nuclear weapon.

Writing for MS NOW on Thursday, journalist Jarvis DeBerry noted that while some lawmakers have already disputed Trump's claim, his use of the "two weeks" timeframe was "enough by itself to warrant our skepticism." As he explained, Trump has repeatedly claimed during his tenure that certain deals, plans, or proposals that never came to fruition were just "two weeks" away.

"Major developments — a health care plan, a deadline for Ukraine and Russia to come to terms, evidence that President Barack Obama illegally wiretapped him — are always two weeks away, in Trump’s telling," DeBerry wrote. "But few of his promised developments materialize within that timeframe — if they materialize at all. We’d be foolish, then, not to question Trump’s claim that Iran was two weeks away from possessing such a destructive weapon. And we have every right to be angry at Trump using his 'two weeks' jibber-jabber to talk about something as gravely serious as war."

Famously, in 2018, Trump claimed that a healthcare plan to replace the Affordable Care Act was just two weeks away. In 2020, when pressed again about his plan to replace the ACA, Trump again claimed that his proposal would be ready in two weeks. For many observers, the "two weeks" claim has evolved into a sure sign that Trump has no plans regarding a certain topic or issue, but wants to seem like he does.

In the case of Trump's claim about Iran's nuclear capabilities, Joseph Cirincione, a national security analyst, previously told MS NOW that it was categorically untrue, explaining that the development of an operational nuclear weapon would be, at minimum, “several more months of work" for the Middle Eastern nation.

"Trump’s got to know we’ve heard him claim 'two weeks' many times," DeBerry concluded. "He’s got to know we don’t believe him. That he gave us his 'two weeks' jive anyway is evidence that he doesn’t care about the truth. But more than that, it’s evidence that he doesn’t believe he has to credibly justify to the American people his actions that have already brought death to many — American service members, included."

Many critics of U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to go to war with Iran — a combination of Democrats and Never Trump conservatives — are urging Congress to use the War Powers Resolution of 1973 to rein him in. Trump, they argue, had no business getting the United States into a war via executive order and not getting Congress' input — and the War Powers Resolution is a tool lawmakers need to be taking advantage of.

But former U.S. Rep. Jane Harman (D-California), in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on March 5, emphasizes that Congress has a "far more direct way" to "intervene" in the Iran conflict: "the power of the purse."

"Few in Washington are asking the most obvious question: What has this conflict already cost, and what will it ultimately cost the American taxpayer?," Harman explains. "Between the cost of deploying carrier strike groups and more than a hundred aircraft to the region, and the expenditure of hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles at roughly $2 million apiece, the price tag is reportedly about $1 billion per day. Reuters reported, this week, that the Pentagon is working on a supplemental budget request of around $50 billion focused on replacing weapons stocks."

The former House Democrat adds, "Congress should be preparing now to meet that moment, demanding a full accounting of costs and requiring the administration to define the mission's objectives and a plan to achieve them."

During her years in Congress, Harman, now 80, focused heavily on national security, serving on the House Intelligence Committee and chairing the Homeland Security Committee's Intelligence Subcommittee. Long before that, she was a counsel for the U.S. Defense Department under President Jimmy Carter.

"Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were authorized by Congress," Harman notes, "though the intelligence on Iraq turned out to be deeply flawed…. According to Brown University's nonpartisan Costs of War project, the final bill for Iraq exceeded $2 trillion. Afghanistan cost another $2.3 trillion. Congress needs to confront Iran's costs now, keeping in mind that Iran is only the most immediate item on a much larger bill. In January, President Trump called for a 50 percent increase in the annual defense budget — from roughly $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion — the largest proposed single-year jump since the Korean War. Congress should not wave these numbers through. Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the power to raise and support armies and to appropriate military funds."

President Donald Trump’s administration has humbled some of the largest law firms and highest-paid individuals in the legal profession. And other businesses and individuals that potentially need his grace on their activities have to be watching and wondering if they are next.

That’s the conclusion of a New York Times opinion piece by contributor Jeffrey Toobin, which notes that bullies (i.e., the Trump administration) “are never satisfied with just a single capitulation.”

The lesson to be drawn is that government pressure is effective even when its actions are clearly unconstitutional.

What the opinion piece terms “nonstop chaos” caused by the Trump administration began last year with executive orders targeting progressive law firms that worked for Trump opponents and causes he doesn’t favor. The orders would have created insurmountable barriers to the law firms' corporate activities.

Some of the firms in the cross hairs of those orders opted to settle by offering the administration millions in pro-Bono legal work on favored causes.

Last year, four judges ruled that the executive orders targeting the law firms were unconstitutional. The Department of Justice appealed, but then decided earlier this month that it was dropping the plans.

The next day, the appeals were placed back on.

“The about-face was embarrassing, but it obscured a larger truth of this lamentable episode: President Trump had already won this fight months ago, when the American legal profession — especially its largest and richest law firms — lost. And that’s not funny at all.”

While the legal profession was initially targeted, there’s a broader application underway. The Trump administration has presented the same “extortionate choices” to a variety of targets, including universities and companies.

The implication of the administration's message is clear: “Agree to our unconstitutional demands and sacrifice your principles, or fight back and suffer our wrath in the form of lost patronage and dollars.”

In all of those cases, Toobin argues, “surrender looks — and perhaps even is — the path of least resistance.” But giving in may embolden further actions, “and you don’t have to be a lawyer to see that was a foolish choice indeed.”

Republicans are suddenly feeling very real heat in a state that has long been viewed as one of their biggest strongholds, according to a Thursday report from The Hill, as Democrat James Talarico seems poised to give Democrats their best shot at a big Texas win in years.

Primary elections went down in the Lone Star State on Tuesday, giving shape to one of the most closely watched midterm races in the country. On the Democratic side, state Rep. James Talarico secured the Democratic nomination for the Senate, with polls indicating that he represents the party's best shot this year of winning a statewide seat in Texas. On the Republican side, no candidate received enough of the total votes, necessitating a runoff between incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Cornyn is considered the safest, more traditional GOP option, while Paxton — an outspoken Donald Trump ally with a scandal-ridden tenure as AG — could be the nominee who would put the party's hold on the seat in jeopardy.

Polls have shown that a Talarico-Paxton race would be the match-up most likely to produce a Democratic victory. As that version of the race becomes more and more likely, The Hill reported that operatives within the GOP are growing extremely anxious about how things will play out. Speaking to the outlet, an anonymous party operative said that it is now imperative that the president weigh in with an endorsement, which he has not done as of yet, to tip the race in a direction the GOP can best win.

"Talarico being the nominee makes it more important than ever that President Trump endorses John Cornyn," the operative said.

There has been some optimism, however, since Cornyn secured the most votes of any candidate in Tuesday's GOP primary and outperformed internal expectations. While the results of the primary are still up in the air, some now believe that Cornyn will prevail.

“I think it gets Cornyn over the finish line,” another Republican strategist told The Hill. “I am [optimistic] only because of how Cornyn performed last night. I think everybody’s assumption was it was going to be a more conservative primary electorate, and for a whole host of reasons and variables, most notably a hundred million dollars’ worth, that changed."

They added: “Cornyn comes in with momentum, and I think that momentum also leads to a lot of pressure on the White House and the president to have to make a decision.”

Meanwhile, Dan Eberhart, a Paxton-backing GOP donor, told The Hill that a runoff does not favor Cornyn, given the more heavily conservative voters that generally turn out for them.

"This was Cornyn’s shot to fend off his challenger by getting over 50 percent and he couldn’t do it,” he explained. “The runoff voters will be even less friendly territory for Cornyn."

During the 2000s, Donald Trump's hit real show "The Apprentice" made him famous for the words, "You're fired." Trump went on to do a lot of firing during his first presidency and clashed with quite a few traditional conservatives who served in his administration. But Trump hasn't fired nearly as many appointees during his second presidency, as he has surrounded himself with MAGA loyalists who are unlikely to question him.

According to Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman, however, one Trump loyalist is in danger of being fired: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

In a March 5 column, Sherman reports, "President Donald Trump has quietly asked Hill Republicans if he should fire Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the latest sign of her tenuous standing inside the West Wing, according to multiple Republicans who have spoken with the president. Even Speaker Mike Johnson speculated about the potential for a change at the top of DHS during a recent House Republican elected leadership retreat in Fort Lauderdale, Fla."

Trump, according to Sherman, called some GOP senators following Noem's early March testimony in two hearings: a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, March 3, followed by a House Judiciary Committee hearing the next day.

"Those appearances were marked by extraordinarily bitter exchanges between Noem and Democratic lawmakers, especially over Trump's harsh immigration crackdown," Sherman explains. "But some of the most notable exchanges, especially in the Senate hearing, were with Republicans. Trump was said to be especially upset about Noem’s response when Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) pressed her Tuesday about a government-funded ad campaign that Kennedy said only served to boost her own personal name recognition nationally. ... Under questioning from Kennedy, Noem said repeatedly that Trump personally approved the controversial ad blitz featuring her in the lead role. This has so angered Trump that Noem's future at DHS may be at risk, we're told."

President Donald Trump’s attempt to exact vengeance against his political enemies has been a “Keystone Cops effort,” according to a prominent conservative journalist’s accounting.

“Another big loss for the Trump Justice Department in their Keystone Cop efforts to go after their political foes,” observed Tim Miller of The Bulwark. “For all of you know, the awful fascist advances of this administration, the one thing that continues to bring us joy is just the utter incompetence and failure in their effort to weaponize the Justice Department to get revenge against their political foes.”

Mentioning that Trump and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, vowed to prosecute former President Joe Biden for using an autopen (which he did do, although it is not illegal) and stealing the 2020 presidential election (which he did not do), Miller pointed out that all of those supposed prosecutions have been busts.

“Remember all those? Has anybody gone to jail for any of those yet?” Miller said in his podcast. “Supposedly Joe Biden stole the election in 2020. It's interesting that some of the biggest proponents of that case — Donald Trump, [FBI Director] Kash Patel, Pam Bondi — haven't been able to find any of the ‘perpetrators.’ So nobody's in jail for that.”

Miller focused on Bondi, whose prominence in the case is especially notable because she has been harshly criticized for her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Trump, who had a decades-long friendship with the convicted child sex trafficker and was accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old in the 1980s, denies any wrongdoing. Bondi testified before Congress last month on Trump’s behalf and controversially refused to apologize to the Epstein victims.

"Attorney General Bondi, you apologized to the survivors in your opening statement for what they went through at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein. Will you turn to them now and apologize for what your Department of Justice has put them through with the absolutely unacceptable release of the Epstein files and their information?" asked Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) at the time. Bondi declined to answer the question, instead pivoting to other subjects.

"Bondi repeatedly criticized the administrations of Joe Biden and prior presidents for their handling of Epstein," former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said later. "She accused Democrats of focusing on the files to distract from Trump’s criminal justice agenda and in one bizarre instance even cited the performance of the stock market to defend the president."

Similarly, New York Times opinion columnist and former Republican David French heavily criticized Bondi’s performance.

“The most telling moment [in her testimony] was when she tried to stop questioning about Epstein, which was ostensibly the subject of the testimony, by saying the Dow was at 50,000 … which is about as relevant as saying, ‘Why are we talking about Epstein when the Knicks won last night?’” French said. “ … [H]e really is putting in front of Pam Bondi: ‘Hey, Pam, here is your job in one corner. And here in the other corner is reason, logic, morality, and decency. You have to give up all of those things. But if you do, you can continue to be the attorney general of the United States.’ And this is the test he’s putting in front of basically everyone in Republican politics right now.”

Yet another Republican lawmaker is refusing to seek reelection in 2026, when President Donald Trump’s second term experiences its likely-costly midterm elections.

Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) told reporters on Wednesday that he will not seek reelection, saying in a statement that “after prayer, reflection, and many long conversations, I have decided that I will not seek reelection in 2026. I will complete this term fully committed to my work in Washington, DC, and then step away from elected office.”

He added, “I began this political journey over six years ago with a simple question: Can I do more to advocate for our at-risk children? That question led me into public service, with a focused passion on education where the cancer of hopelessness and training for ‘social advocacy’ has taken hold in too many of our public schools.”

Owens, who has served in the House since 2021, joins a total of 53 US House members and nine US senators who have announced they will not seek reelection this year. Of this group, 37 of the retiring lawmakers are Republicans. Also seeing the writing on the wall, the conservative magazine The Bulwark argued last month that voters are connecting higher prices with Trump’s unpopular tariffs.

“Voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs,” wrote The Bulwark’s Mona Charen. “Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs. Experience has changed their views.”

Robert Kagan, a conservative historian with an extensive history writing about foreign policy, warned CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last month that Trump is planning on rigging the midterms because his Republican Party is likely to do poorly in them.

“The U.S. Congress — both parties — are unwilling to really fight Trump,” Kagan told Amanpour, later continuing that “I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028. I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”

White House spokeswoman Abigail T. Jackson told AlterNet in response to these criticisms that the administration is only trying to root out voter fraud.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered noncitizen voters,” Jackson told AlterNet. “The President has also urged Congress to pass the SAVE Act and other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting. Noncitizen voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

As President Donald Trump slurred his way through a speech about AI, a conservative group urged people to recognize that “something is seriously wrong with him.”

The Lincoln Project shared a clip on X of Trump talking about “the grid.” As he rambles about how “we're fixing the grid,” the president starts to slur, seeming to say “nobody's gonna challenge you or challenge me, I think this was my idea, I said, wait a minute,” although it is unclear. From there Trump says “we will need triple the energy” and continues on that tangent before the clip cuts off.

“No one can say this sounds normal at this point,” The Lincoln Project posted on X. “Something is seriously wrong with him.”

Last month, American psychologist, psychiatrist and former Johns Hopkins Medical School assistant professor Dr. John Gartner told iPaper that he believes Trump may have had a stroke or be suffering from the same Alzheimer’s that struck down his father, Fred Trump.

“The main way to diagnose dementia is that we see a deterioration from someone’s own baseline in these four areas: language, memory, behaviour, and psychomotor performance,” Gartner told iPaper. Referring to a video of Trump weaving as he disembarked a plane to a conference in Davos, Switzerland, Gartner said that this “relates to one of the signs of what I think he has: frontotemporal dementia. That walk is called a wide base gait where he swings his right leg in kind of a semicircle and that drives him to the left. That seems to have gotten dramatically worse recently.”

In addition to possibly being Alzheimer’s, Gartner speculated that “it may be related to the stroke I think he’s had on the left side of his body.”

Gartner is not alone in speculating that Trump has had a stroke. In January Dr. Bruce Davidson, a professor at Washington State University's Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, said he believes the 79 year-old president experienced a stroke "six months ago or more."

"I think his stroke was on the left side of the brain, which controls the right side of the body," Davidson told authors Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz on their podcast. "There are videos of him shuffling his feet, which is not what we’d seen previously when he was striding on the golf course. We’ve seen him holding his right hand cradled in his left. Earlier in 2025, he was garbling words, which he hadn’t done before and which he’s improved upon more recently." He also speculated that Trump’s apparent excessive daytime sleepiness could also be linked to a potential stroke.

New York Magazine’s Ben Terris, writing in February, argued that Trump is able to obscure observations about his health because his past behavior has been so erratic.

"Donald Trump is about to be 80 years old," Terris said. "Just by dint of that fact, it's a worthwhile story to cover. One reason I think that Trump is able to 'get away' with some things that could be signs of aging is that they could also just be signs of Donald Trump being Donald Trump. He has been a chaotic figure for a long time. He's got this rambling way of talking. He says unhinged, outrageous stuff. He did that 15 years ago. He does that now."

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department wants the American people to know that the still-unreleased files of the late Jeffrey Epstein contain “sensationalist claims against Trump.”

The Justice Department officials previously said some files included fake or false materials that were sent to the FBI by the public and may “contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump.”

“The US justice department [sic] is to release nearly 50,000 ‘missing’ Jeffrey Epstein files this week,” reported The Times on Wednesday. “The documents, which are referred to in the tranche released in late January but appear to have been withheld by the department, potentially contain unverified claims about President Trump, including FBI reports detailing a woman’s unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct against him.”

Specifically, the files are supposed to contain FBI memos summarizing an interview with a woman who came forward after Epstein was arrested in 2019. During that conversation, the woman said she had been sexually assaulted by both Epstein and Trump in the mid-1980s when she was a minor.

Despite these allegations, a White House spokesperson told The Times that “just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein.”

Even some of Trump’s fellow Republicans have turned on him on the issue of the Epstein files, including Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

“Release the documents,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Redact the names of the victims. Don’t release photographs, naked or otherwise, of minors. Release the documents. This is not going to go away until there is full disclosure.”

Kennedy continued, “This is not going away until there’s full disclosure and the American people want to know, and they’re entitled to know, who if anyone, did Epstein traffic these women to … and why they weren’t prosecuted.”

Trump’s relationship with Epstein goes back to 1985, when the former purchased his Mar-a-Lago estate near Epstein in Florida. By 1989, Trump was attending a party on a yacht called Lady Ghislaine after Epstein’s associate and billionaire Robert Maxwell’s daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell. In 1992 Trump and Epstein were recorded by NBC News partying with Buffalo Bills cheerleaders and other guests, including many young girls. At one point Trump and Epstein stare at girls on the dance floor and Trump appears to say “Look at her, back there.... she’s hot.” They continued to regularly socialize through the 1990s and 2000s.

According to CNN’s Aaron Blake, Trump’s attempts to bury the scandal have only elevated its profile.

“In a statement, the White House called the allegations against Trump ‘false and sensationalist’ and pointed to a previous DOJ statement that ‘some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump,’” Blake wrote. “But the plausibility of the woman’s claims isn’t the main point; the point is that an increasingly politicized Justice Department — one where a massive banner of Trump was hung last week — did not release documents containing allegations about the president.”

He added, “In a vacuum, that would be problematic. But next to everything else, it’s really bad.”

Karl Rove, a Republican political strategist who famously advised President George W. Bush, supports President Donald Trump’s new war against Iran — but is less impressed with Trump’s messaging.

Praising Operation Epic Fury as “a historic act,” Rove argued for The Wall Street Journal that “the effort has showcased military and intelligence brilliance and gutsy leadership. It began with the American president and the Israeli prime minister. It has continued with leaders of half a dozen Middle Eastern and eastern Mediterranean countries.”

Rove added, however, that “despite all this, the White House must deal with two stark realities: No one knows how this will end, and the war against the mullahs in Tehran isn’t popular at home.” The former Bush adviser pointed out that on average surveys find 41.3 percent of America supporting the way while 48.7 percent oppose it.

“No rally-’round-the-flag effect there,” Rove said. “Support for the president and his policy didn’t get a patriotic boost when the shooting started. Not even as U.S. planes, warships and fighters successfully pounded the leaders of a country that has chanted ‘Death to America’ for some 47 years and backed that threat by spending the country’s oil riches to support terrorism across the globe.”

To solve this messaging problem, Rove urged Trump to “spend more time explaining its actions in Iran and why they’re important to Americans’ interests. That could cause some who hold wish-washy opinions to move into the president’s corner.”

He concluded, “This can’t be just left to the eight-minute Truth Social video the president posted early Saturday morning or to a few brief calls by him to journalists.”

This is not Rove’s first recent criticism of the Trump White House. Last month, Rove argued that the State of the Union message failed to do anything besides energize the MAGA base, which imperils his chances in the upcoming midterm elections.

“Almost everything the president said energized his MAGA hard core. But they aren’t enough to stave off a shellacking this fall,” Rove told The Wall Street Journal. “Mr. Trump should have fixated more on those of his 2024 voters who have since become disenchanted: Those represented by his approval rating’s almost 8-point slide in the RealClearPolitics average since re-entering office.”

He continued, “That isn’t a large slice of the electorate, but those swing voters will decide which party controls Congress for Mr. Trump’s final two years in the White House.”

He similarly criticized Trump for focusing on what he described as “frivolities” instead of issues of immediate concern to ordinary Americans.

"Democrats want this election to be a referendum on Mr. Trump. So they’re happy for him to fill his days attacking the Super Bowl halftime show, posting a map showing Greenland, Canada and Venezuela as American possessions or trashing a U.S. Olympic athlete on Truth Social," Rove wrote. "Every moment he spends on such frivolities is a missed opportunity to advance his cause."

He also felt that Trump failed to connect with ordinary voters during a speech in Iowa last month.

“Mr. Trump made two mistakes,” Rove argued. “The first was straying from the subject for almost half his speech. Victories and stolen elections. Immigration. Introducing politicians on the stage. Attacking his predecessor for multiple sins. Lots of different foreign issues. He went everywhere — and therefore nowhere.”

He added that Trump’s second mistake was having a “triumphal tone.”

“He congratulated himself on ‘the greatest first year of any administration in American history,’” Rove said. “The ‘economy is booming,’ he said. It’s been ‘the best first year of any president ever maybe.’ All this left the impression that the nation’s economic challenges are solved.”

President Donald Trump will need to figure out how to reimburse the tens of billions of dollars it illegally collected in tariffs, and in a way that provides “efficient justice,” according to a senior judge who ruled on Wednesday.

Richard Eaton, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of International Trade, decided in a case filed by the company Atmus Filtration that the trade court’s chief judge had given him jurisdiction over the more than 1,000 companies that have sued for refunds. As such, his decision for Atmus Filtration applies to every company demanding a refund from Trump.

“So there is no danger that another Judge, even one in this Court, will reach any contrary conclusions,” Eaton explained. “To find otherwise would be to thwart the efficient administration of justice and to deny those importers who have filed suit the efficient resolution of their claims, and to deny entirely importers who have not filed suit the benefit of the” Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision that Trump lacked the unilateral authority to impose sweeping tariffs.

In addition to costing Trump tens of billions in refunds, a Center for American Progress study last month determined that America lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs since Trump took office, even though the tariffs were supposed to bring those jobs back.

“Far from the manufacturing sector ‘roaring back’ as Trump promised, the United States has lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs over the past year,” wrote the Center for American Progress’ Allison McManus and Dawn Le. “These actions have pushed the country’s closest trading partners to seek deals elsewhere, including with China: Canada, India, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union have all recently sought new agreements without the United States.”

They added that the tariffs are encouraging America’s past trading partners to seek new deals with less volatile markets.

“Over time, each of these deals will result in markets that were once enjoyed by U.S. suppliers increasingly oriented away from them — and the rules of international engagement increasingly written by foreign governments,” McManus and Le pointed out.

Mona Charen of The Bulwark, a conservative publication, worried last month that the tariffs’ widespread unpopularity could hurt Trump in the upcoming midterm elections.

“Voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs,” Charen wrote. “Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs. Experience has changed their views.”

Fortune’s Steve H. Hanke also wrote last month that Trump’s tariffs betray a deeper philosophical problem with how the president perceives global economics.

“This wrongheaded mercantilist view of international trade and external accounts has its roots in how individual businesses operate,” Hanke argued. “A healthy business generates positive free cash flows, with revenues that exceed outlays. If a business cannot generate positive free cash flows on a sustained basis and cannot take on more debt or issue more equity to finance itself, then it will be forced to declare bankruptcy.”