ArcaMax

WASHINGTON -- Almost everything the Democrats and big media told the country about the vaunted character of former President Joe Biden is collapsing.

Biden framed his run for the White House in 2020 as "a fight for the soul of the nation." A smitten chattering class was all on board.

In October 2020, New York Times columnist David Brooks ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- I've often railed at Democrats' failure to revamp federal immigration law during the two years President Joe Biden enjoyed a Democratic Senate and House. When they had the chance, they squandered it. Now it's the Republicans' turn at bad one-party rule.

President Donald Trump and the GOP Senate and House have a chance to check ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump started the first major international travel of his second term in Riyadh, where he publicly bonded with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Pundits call the crown prince, the nation's de facto leader, MBS. Trump calls him "Mohammed."

Trump used the moment to call on the kingdom to join the Abraham ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney aced the Oval Office Exam during his sit-down with President Donald Trump Monday.

Washington's relations with Ottawa have been testy of late.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump delighted his die-hard base to no end with his talk about making Canada America's "51st state." It was a classic Trump ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Forget rehabbing Alcatraz, President Donald Trump, as you proposed on social media over the weekend. It's not worth the years and treasure that would be needed to turn the popular tourist destination back into a maximum-security prison for the worst federal offenders.

Instead, think Nevada.

Nevada delivered six Electoral ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- I've been having flashbacks about Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who killed three innocent people and wounded 23 during a 17-year killing spree. In 1998, Kaczynski pleaded guilty and agreed to a sentence of life without parole. He killed himself in 2023.

It turns out Luigi Mangione, who stands accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this bombshell during Wednesday's White House Cabinet meeting: "We had an office in the Department of State whose job it was to censor Americans."

Rubio offered that he is surprised a federal agency monitoring the social media posts and commentary of American citizens is not a bigger story.

...Read more

WASHINGTON -- In all my years of covering immigration politics, I've never seen this kind of clarity. During a White House press briefing Monday morning, Tom Homan, President Donald Trump's border czar, had a message to migrants living illegally in the United States: Go home.

If you don't, he explained, we'll find you, we'll prosecute you and...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Bryan Riley is not a fan of President Donald Trump's tariffs -- and that's painful for him. "I want him to succeed," Riley told me. "I work at the National Taxpayers Union."

The NTU is hardly an anti-Trump institution. But as director of NTU's Free Trade Initiative, Riley fears the Trump tariffs are "undermining his prospects ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Salvadoran migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the rope in the tug-of-war between the Trump administration and progressive Democrats who don't really want to see Washington enforce federal immigration law.

Abrego Garcia sneaked across the U.S. border around 2012 -- under President Barack Obama. Last month, President Donald Trump ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump's ties to Nevada penetrate beyond the high-brow donor class.

The latest moment showcasing his connections to the Silver State came during Thursday's Cabinet meeting. A reporter asked Trump about the release of Russian-American ballerina Ksenia Karelina in a prisoner swap with Russia. Trump revealed that he...Read more

WASHINGTON -- "A nuclear Iran isn't just a threat, it's the threat," Mark Dubowitz of The Foundation for Defense of Democracies warned in the new podcast, "The Iran Breakdown."

Ahead of arms talks Saturday in Oman, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian claimed Wednesday that his country is "not after a nuclear bomb."

Who believes that? ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- "Don't be a PANICAN," President Donald Trump cautioned on social media. Critics have questioned the universal tariffs he unleashed last week, and Americans have had to steel themselves before checking the balance of their 401(k)s.

The Trump tariffs came fast and larger than expected. The markets responded.

Now Republicans and ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Former President Joe Biden is a bitter man whose ambition outstripped his abilities while Vice President Kamala Harris was unusually loyal. Those are two of my takeaways from the 2024 campaign autopsy book "Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House," by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.

By comparison, the drama that ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump likes to troll Canada. He has been threatening our neighbor to the north with additional tariffs, and he thinks it's funny to dangle his dream of turning our longtime trading partner into America's 51st state.

And yet Wednesday in the Rose Garden, when Trump declared a national emergency and announced a 10...Read more

WASHINGTON -- It's not what DOGE is doing; it's how DOGE is doing it. That's been the Beltway take on the dream child of Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, the Department of Government Efficiency. Or, "the so-called Department of Government Efficiency," as The New York Times put it.

That's probably why Musk and DOGE lieutenants sat down ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Over the past 48 hours, President Donald Trump's national security team has looked like a pack of amateurs.

On Monday, The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that he somehow got plugged into a group text among President Donald Trump's national security top guns as they went over plans to bomb the Houthi ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- After reading in Monday's New York Times story about actor Mel Gibson's failure to have his gun rights restored, I asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt at the press briefing that afternoon about the administration's take on restoring gun rights for offenders who have served their sentences.

The story interested me ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Luigi Mangione, the Ivy League graduate charged with fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk in December, has pleaded not guilty in connection with the killing. Like all defendants, Mangione enters the courtroom with the presumption of innocence. But if a jury finds him guilty of the capital ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Kudos to President Donald Trump's administration for canceling $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University "due to the school's continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students."

"Since Oct. 7, Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and antisemitic harassment on ...Read more