rep. brian fitzpatrick

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie teaches Secretary of State Marco Rubio a history lesson in response to his speech about Western civilization, arguing that the values he claims to defend are the very ones the Trump administration is undermining.

In a video titled "Marco Rubio does not know a thing about 'Western civilization,'" Bouie took apart Rubio's October 7 speech in Greece, in which the secretary of state praised the ancient Greeks as the foundation of Western science, philosophy, religion, and political thought.

During the speech, Rubio complained that Western nations had become ashamed of their accomplishments, with the tearing down of monuments and nationalism becoming "a dirty word."

But Bouie argued that Rubio's version of history conveniently leaves out facts about how modern democratic values developed.

"The bigger point to make here is that Western civilization as a concept is incoherent," Bouie said.

He stated that the American founders did not consider ancient Athenian democracy to be a simple example that could be copied. On the contrary, political allies like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, who helped author the Federalist Papers, were concerned about the risks of direct democracy and preferred a system of representative government.

Bouie also directly opposed Rubio's idea that the Western intellectual tradition had followed a direct line from ancient Greece to Christian Europe.

"There's a huge chunk of time where the center of classical learning, of the inheritance of the Greeks, of the Romans, passed to the Arab world, to the Muslim world, to the Caliphate," he said.

Bouie noted that much ancient scholarship survived through preservation and translation outside Europe, complicating the idea of a self-contained Western tradition.

He also questioned Rubio's complaints about the removal of monuments, giving the Confederate statues being taken down in Charlottesville, Virginia, as examples.

"Is that the Western civilization that Marco Rubio thinks we all have to be defending?" Bouie asked.

The columnist maintained that the principles usually associated with the modern West—such as individual liberty, religious tolerance, and democracy- arose as a result of long-standing political struggles rather than because of some fundamental cultural characteristic.

Bouie also directly opposed Rubio's idea that the Western intellectual traditions had followed a direct line from ancient Greece to Christian Europe.

"There's no essence that makes people outside of the West unable to appreciate values like liberty, freedom, democracy," he said.

For Bouie, the most troubling contradiction was political, not historical. He accused Rubio of celebrating democratic ideals while serving a president whose actions, in his view, contradict them.

"The irony of this speech is that Rubio is choosing to reject them," Bouie said, continuing: “He is rejecting the actual values that mark whatever it is that we want to call the West. The movement he is working on behalf of is rejecting those values. The man he works for is rejecting those values.”

"They're fetishizing the West and rejecting whatever it might be that makes that formation distinct," he continued.

Bouie ultimately rejected the idea that those principles belong exclusively to one civilization.

They "aren't a Western inheritance; they're a human inheritance, something that we all are entitled to," he said.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to immediately stop running the Department of Homeland Security’s taxpayer-funded love-letters to Donald Trump — but then there was more, reports Above the Law.

On Sunday evening, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rochon of the Southern District of New York granted a temporary restraining order and a stay under the Administrative Procedure Act in the Common Cause-led challenge to a $20 million taxpayer-funded campaign ad blitz containing ads like “God Made Trump.” The money funding the ads was issued by Congress to DHS for border security.

Rochon halted DHS’s purchase order with its ad vendor, LMD Agency, stayed the Office of Management and Budget’s $20 million apportionment, and barred the department from spending Congressionally-appropriated funds on the ads.

“And because she could read a calendar, she ordered the government to ‘cancel or cause to be cancelled any slot, placement, reservation, or arrangement for the airing or dissemination of the challenged advertisements, including those placements for the evening of October 11, 2026.’ The order was effective as of 6:45 p.m. Sunday,” reports Above the Law Senior Editor Katheryn Rubino.

But the administration then managed to violate that order within hours because, according to its own lawyers, “nobody at DHS checked their email,” reports Rubino.

On Monday, plaintiffs in the case ratted out the federal government’s seeming indifference to court orders, telling the court the ads kept running into Sunday night, and they even aired early Monday.

Rubino offered no mercy for the DOJ’s excuse they tried to use in their subsequent court status report, which they filed Monday evening:

“As Your Honor is aware, the Court emailed the TRO to the parties yesterday at 6:46 p.m. Counsel for the Government emailed the TRO to agency counsel at 7:58 p.m. Agency counsel did not become aware of Government counsel’s email until this morning. The undersigned apologizes to the Court and the plaintiffs,” the DOJ argued.

“Sorry, just seeing this!” said Rubino, summarizing the Trump federal government’s reasoning.

The New York Times reported that President Donald Trump personally instructed his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads praising him and his presidency, which set in motion the $20 million contract that used funds from the Department of Homeland Security, according to people familiar with the matter.”

NBC News later reported that federal sources said Trump did not even alert administrators that their budgets would be footing the bill for the ads

“They didn’t sign off on it,” an official said of CBP leaders. “They were thinking, ‘There’s no way they’re going to try to take the funding from CBP for those ads.’”

Kansas suddenly seems like it could very well flip away from Republicans in the midterms, and according to a new focus group of Trump voters from The Bulwark, it all comes down to how "deeply unpopular" the Trump-backed incumbent Republican is.

Sarah Longwell is the publisher of the anti-Trump conservative outlet, The Bulwark, and is also one of the most experienced political focus group testers in the business. On Tuesday, she released a new report about her findings after speaking with Kansas voters who broke for President Donald Trump in 2024, pressing them for their thoughts on GOP Sen. Roger Marshall and his Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton, a pastor who has surged in recent polls.

"Hamilton isn’t winning just because he’s a pastor, or because conservative Christians in Kansas see a kindred spirit in him. It’s more complicated than that," Longwell explained. "He’s winning because he’s shrewdly presented himself as a benign Democrat in a state that’s deeply Republican and at a time when Republicans are desperately trying to polarize the electorate. On top of that, Hamilton’s opponent is deeply unpopular, providing Hamilton with even more of a cushion to avoid the voters’ wrath. It’s a perfect storm."

She explained further that "Even compared to how we’ve heard similar voters discuss Republican incumbents this year, this group’s verdict on Marshall was harsh," and that any sense that they might break for Hamilton was less about how much they liked him and more about how much they "just aggressively disliked Marshall."

"I don’t have much respect for Roger Marshall just because I think he knows what to say and how to say it to the people that he’s talking to . . . and then he goes and does his own thing," Melanie, a 53-year-old respondent from Garnett, said. "He’s a doctor by medical trade and he is definitely supporting Big Pharma and he is not backing medical research. There’s a lot of things that I’ve struggled with him on. . . . With that, and how he’s supported Trump, I’m not a big fan of his at all—at all."

“All I hear now is about how he’s got the little cabin in Kansas . . . just to buy his residency, but he truly lives in Florida. . . . I don’t know if he’s being—if Marshall’s being truthful about his residency," Susan, a 68-year-old respondent from Baldwin City, added.

"I originally voted for [Marshall] because he’s pro-life. Other than that, I really don’t know a whole lot about him," Amanda, a 41-year-old respondent from St. Marys, told the focus group. "I don’t know that he’s made a big difference in a great positive way, ’cause, like, we still have really high property taxes, all kinds of taxes. They call us the high-tax point on the prairie. I have an aunt in Minnesota, and it’s like you would think liberal Minnesota would have higher taxes than us—they don’t."

Longwell made particular note that these opinions about Marshall were not exclusively based on his alignment with Trump. They did not just mention him being too loyal or too different from Trump, or being too MAGA or not MAGA enough; "they also had specific reasons for disliking Marshall."

"So, yes, Democrats are competitive because the Republican is a schmuck," Longwell concluded. "But Hamilton also has run a smart race that has allowed him to benefit from Marshall’s failings. His years of ministry as a megachurch leader, in particular, can be tied to his strong showing in the polls. Because it turns out that talking to big, diverse audiences about weighty and important issues is a transferable skill between the pulpit and politics."

Judge Ana Reyes has issued a temporary restraining order barring President Donald Trump's administration from taking any further action on East Potomac Park and its golf course after it tore out more than 400 trees.

On Monday, the administration was hauled into court as a very angry judge "screamed" at the Trump lawyers for flagging the tree teardown notice at 4:55 p.m. on a Friday before a holiday weekend. It took 24 hours, and the trees were gone.

The judge made it clear she felt "lied to" by the administration after giving it a very long leash, saying she trusted it to keep the court informed. Ignoring a court order like that infuriated Judge Reyes, and she was expected to come down hard on her ruling.

Norm Eisen, whose firm Democracy Defenders represents the clients in the case, celebrated on social media, revealing that the restraining order was granted.

"Court has halted the Trump admin tree removal at E. Potomac Golf Links, where we are contesting the dumping of toxic East Wing debris & creation of a hideous Trump golf course," he wrote. "Huge win for clients & cocounsel Democracy Forward, Lowell & Assoc, & us at Democracy Defenders."

The toxic debris he's talking about came from the East Wing of the White House, where Trump similarly began bulldozing the historic building during the government shutdown. They then dumped that debris onto the golf course to use as "filler" in Trump's revitalization project. There were concerns that none of it was tested for toxic chemicals, asbestos and other things before being dumped on the land.

What is next is whether she was angry enough to hold Trump officials in contempt of court.

While the trees matter to those in Washington, the key part of the case is that the court's demands were broken, adding to a long pattern of behavior. The administration has refused to comply with orders in New Jersey (more than 50 times), Minnesota, Rhode Island, Illinois and several in Washington, D.C.

While administration officials like Stephen Miller have tried to say that federal judges have no place in golf course construction, the issue is about the administration breaking a court order. That can land a lawyer or official in contempt of court. Sometimes that means a hefty fine and other times it can mean jail.

So, when it happened again over the weekend, Judge Ana Rayes was understandably irate. She spent the holiday, when the courthouse would normally be closed, hunting for the person responsible.

Conservative writer and commentator Mark Wallace is calling President Donald Trump's agreement with Vladimir Putin both a moral and strategic failure for the United States.

In Sept. 2025, Trump told Fox News, “If you want to win, don’t buy oil from Russia.” Now he's doing exactly that.

In a column for iPaper, Wallace explained that Trump's deal to buy a minuscule amount of diesel from Russia reverses years of Western economic pressure designed to deprive the Kremlin of revenue for its war in Ukraine and its broader campaign of sabotage and aggression.

"The latest display of 'the art of the deal' represents a new low, even for the White House’s most erratic and self-indulgent occupant in its more than two centuries," he wrote on Tuesday, referencing Trump's famous book.

Wallace concedes that sanctions have been imperfect, but Russian oil still reaches the global market through workarounds. Now, instead of holding the sanction violators responsible, Trump is caving into his own claim that to win he can't buy oil.

Wallace pointed to President Volodymyr Zelensky, who described Trump's diesel purchase as “an investment” in Russia’s war. He added that Putin would likely repay with “further terror" on his people. Ukraine has been responding in kind to Russia's attacks by hitting Russian oil refineries. It has made a huge difference and may have prompted Putin's proposal to sell Trump diesel.

"Such an agreement is pure foolishness from a president visibly flailing in the face of soaring diesel prices, driven by his own misadventure in the Gulf," wrote Wallace. "The amounts involved would provide only enough fuel for a few days of domestic consumption, so Trump has sold Western solidarity, the vestiges of American decency and Ukrainian lives for nothing more than a fig leaf for his self-inflicted political troubles."

He thinks that Trump likely fell for Putin's lies again. The Russian president falsely claimed he agreed to the ceasefire, and Trump announced the diesel, which experts believe will do little to ease high pump prices. Mere hours after the ceasefire was announced and into the following day, Russia was still bombing Ukraine's power grid. It wasn't long after that "drones slammed into Ukrainian gas and other energy facilities, just as they have done for years on end," wrote Wallace.

He made it clear that no one in the world has a reason to believe what Putin says or trust him.

"The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet, with the CIA and humanity’s largest spy satellite network at his personal disposal, has the least excuse of all to be gulled by such a tyrant," Wallace complained. "Yet he falls for Putin’s lies again and again, whenever they suit his agenda or his self-image."

He wondered if Trump thought it would get him a ticket to the Nobel Peace Prize, which he lost to someone who helped fight genocide legally.

Wallace closed by blasting, "Add it to the list of Donald Trump’s many, many deals. It was a dreadful idea to start with; his interlocutor was a liar and a killer who could not be trusted at the best of times, and the grandest achievement it purported to deliver evaporated faster than a Russian refinery on a clear day. If this is the art of the deal, thanks but no thanks."

President Donald Trump is sinking deeper into "despair" as he and the GOP are overcome by "extreme panic," one former Trump staffer wrote for The i Paper, adding that he knows from experience what comes next.

Miles Taylor previously worked in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump's first term, rising to the level of chief of staff before departing in 2019. He first gained notoriety after publishing an anonymous New York Times op-ed claiming to be part of a movement within the White House resisting the president's worst impulses. Now, he has emerged as an outspoken critic of his former boss, making numerous media appearances to offer his own unique perspective on Trump's political machinations.

On Tuesday, he published his latest piece for The i Paper, explaining why it is clear that things are not going well for the White House and the Republican Party overall.

"You can tell how a campaign thinks it’s doing by its closing argument in the final weeks," Taylor wrote. "Candidates who believe they’re winning talk about their record. Candidates who believe they’re losing throw everything at the wall, including the kitchen sink. Three weeks out from the U.S. midterm elections, Donald Trump and his allies are in a state of extreme panic. His opponents are cautiously celebrating this apparent validation that the MAGA movement is on the ropes. But I watched this US president lose up close, when I worked for him, which is why I see the panic as an ominous sign, too."

Amid all of the signs that Trump is scrambling for something, anything that might sway midterm voters, Taylor said that he was feeling overtaken by a grim sense of caution and deja vu, explaining what happened when Trump faced similar headwinds in his first term.

"The last time Trump believed he was losing, he searched for any voice near him that was willing to whisper back reassuring lies that he hadn’t really lost," Taylor wrote. "Indeed, in December 2020, he was in such denial that he summoned outside advisers Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne to the Oval Office to hear their pitch for seizing the voting machines from the election he had just lost. White House lawyers spent hours fighting them off. Weeks later, Trump spoke to a rally of MAGA followers who then marched across town and stormed the Capitol – although he did not make a direct call for violent action."

He continued: "These outsiders are what I call Trump’s 'crackpots cabinet.' As his anxiety about the midterms swells, he’s consulting with these flunkies about his options. The one that has me most worried is Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk and conspiracy theorist convicted of election interference. Trump spent a year pressuring Colorado’s governor to let her out of jail; within weeks of her release, she was having lunch at the White House with the President. Last Monday, according to Trump ally Ed Martin, she was back in the Oval Office discussing election 'plans,' which the White House won’t confirm or deny."

Taylor also detailed a conversation that he had with former chief of staff John Kelly as Trump's 2020 desperation became undeniable. Kelly said it was unlikely that Trump would "concede gracefully" if defeated, adding, "Nothing would please me more than if he chained himself to the Resolute desk, and they have to go in and cut the chains and carry him away in a straitjacket."

"The end result wasn’t far off," Taylor concluded. "This time, the people who’d happily hand him the chains are back in the Oval Office. They’re whispering in his ear again. And they’re telling him that desperate times call for desperate measures."

The Trump Justice Department has gone to the Supreme Court with a strange case about whether a Nigerian man who says he was forced to cook for armed militants should be denied asylum because he fed them.

The Court agreed to take on the DOJ’s appeal in the case of Izuchukwu Ozurumba, whose meals he fed to a group known as the Unknown Gunmen were deemed by immigration authorities to be 'material support' for terrorism, according to a Bloomberg Law report.

Ozurumba's plight began in Nigeria in 2022, when he took a job he thought was fairly normal cooking at a remote camp. He soon found out that the people running the camp were part of a militant group that had a history of violence against the police and politicians.

According to the court records, he prepared three meals a day for 15 to 17 camp leaders. The armed guards would prevent him from leaving, and his employers eventually stopped paying him. He was there for about six months in total, three of which were without pay.

He finally escaped on a shopping trip, fleeing at a petrol station and hiding in the bush for two days. However, that wasn’t the end of his ordeal with the terror group. Ozurumba claimed that he was threatened and that men from the group attacked him with sticks and knives after he had left a church service. He eventually made his way out of Nigeria and entered the US in 2023, where he applied for asylum, claiming he was in fear of further attacks.

An immigration judge rejected his application in 2024, finding that cooking for the group amounted to material support to a terrorist organization. The Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed that decision, finding no exception for someone who provided such support under duress.

However, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, giving him a shot at getting asylum.

Writing for the majority, Judge Wynn concluded that Ozurumba was “simply a captive laborer” and that his cooking didn't in any way contribute to the terrorist activity. Wynn warned that if you treated every meal as terrorist support, it would “collapse the statute into absurdity.”

Judge Julius Richardson dissented, arguing that providing thousands of meals sustained the group's leadership and thus equaled material support.

The Trump administration appealed, arguing that the Fourth Circuit's interpretation was at odds with decisions in other circuits and could lead to "serious confusion" in the enforcement of immigration law.

However, in another twist, Ozurumba was deported to Nigeria in April 2025, months before the appeals court ruled in his favor.

That decision overturned the removal order a little too late but did not grant him asylum or require his immediate return to the US.

The Supreme Court will now be deciding just how far the terrorism related asylum bar goes, including in the case where the person who allegedly provided the support was held against their will.