DO YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP. Salena Zito: Bill Maher’s red-state hate will help get Trump re-elected.

WANT MORE TRUMP? THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP:  The lunatics are coming out in droves. Maybe Maxine Waters is crazy enough to think she can pardon this guy…

“A criminal complaint shows Key is accused of telling an intern who answered the phone, “I’m going to find the Congressman’s kids and kill them. If you’re going to separate kids at the border, I’m going to kill his kids. Don’t try to find me because you won’t.’[…]Key’s social media pages show he is very politically active. He volunteers regularly for the Democratic Party of Martin County and has volunteered many hours for Planned Parenthood, according to a friend of Key’s.”

Of course he does.

DO YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP: UCLA and the Atlantic think conservatives and populists have nothing to contribute to understanding America.

WANT MORE TRUMP, CALIFORNIA? HEADLINES LIKE THIS WILL GET YOU MORE TRUMP: Illegal immigrant who has been deported five times is found NOT GUILTY of murdering [Kate Steinle], 32, on San Francisco pier in slaying that became rallying cry for Trump’s stance on sanctuary cities.

DO YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE ARTICLES LIKE THIS ARE HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP: Let’s Ban Men From Workplaces.

DO YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP:

I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, and Bing as my fallback. Instead of Gmail, I spend a few bucks a month with a reliable web-hosting service and own my own domain with 1,000 email addresses and unmetered bandwidth. There are no Google apps on my phone to report my every movement and all my metadata back to the mothership.

These are easy steps almost anyone can take to rid themselves of this meddlesome priest.

YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP. Chelsea Clinton, the epitome of ‘white privilege’, lectures white parents about racism.

DO YOU WANT MORE TRUMP, BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP: A New York Times column about the need for mass deportations of native-born Americans, because they don’t live up to Ruling Class expectations. “Bottom line: So-called real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones: newcomers who are more appreciative of what the United States has to offer, more ambitious for themselves and their children, and more willing to sacrifice for the future.”

Yeah, it’s not serious. Except that, really, it pretty much is. The problem with all the immigration talk is the strong sense that the ruling class wants to dissolve the people and elect another, one more tractable to their schemes. Stuff like this doesn’t help, though I suppose NYT readers think it’s clever. But unpack it a bit — and break down which classes of native-born Americans are pulling down the averages — and it looks pretty awful.

Plus: “Because I’m the child of immigrants and grew up abroad, I have always thought of the United States as a country that belongs first to its newcomers.”

YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP. Cashman: Flag flap shows reporter’s out in left field. “This is how crazy 2017 has become. The American flag is now, according to one NBC Sports baseball writer, a political statement. Delicate NBC snowflake Craig Calcaterra was triggered Sunday when a giant American flag covered the field at an Atlanta Braves game, with Old Glory gracing the Jumbotrons, and a stirring military flyover to cap it all.”

DO YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP:

“Oh shut up” is now my preferred response to “Everything is racist.”

YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP:

YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP. 2016: The Year The Campus Culture Wars Jumped The Shark. Judging by the apparently complete lack of awareness of this fact on the part of university folks, I predict that 2017 will be worse. And Donald Trump smiles.

DO YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP:

YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP. ‘Sick of These White Men Crying RACIST’: Radicals Defend Black Teens Held in Facebook Torture Case.

OH, 2016, COULD YOU GET MORE SURREAL?  Black Father-Daughter Trump Electors Receive Death Threats, Called Bigots for Supporting Trump.

GOTV: Donald Trump’s ground game may be more robust than you think.

For all the grief it gets, the RNC has done yeoman’s work putting Trump’s ground game together for him.

YOU REALLY NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST:

The story behind the New York Times’ 1903 claim that human flight was between one and ten million years away is even worse than it looks.

Once you understand the backstory, you realize that the New York Times story is not really about flight at all but about how elites and… https://t.co/6JlRT1nja8

— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) April 5, 2026

Tweet continues:

Once you understand the backstory, you realize that the New York Times story is not really about flight at all but about how elites and credentialed “experts” mistake their own failures for the boundaries of possibility.

The New York Times did not dismiss the possibility of powered flight at random. There was a very specific reason behind it. At the time, America’s most prominent scientific authority, Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Langley, had been showered with large amounts of taxpayer funding to build an aircraft, the Langley Aerodrome. Despite all the money, institutional backing, and elite prestige, Langley and his team could not get it to fly, culminating in a series of very public failures, the last on December 8, 1903.

So when the New York Times declared that flight was millions of years away, what it was really saying was that if the most credentialed and well-funded “experts” cannot do it, then it cannot be done.

A mere nine days later, the elites’ proclamation of impossibility lay in ruins. Two totally unknown bicycle mechanics from Ohio achieved the first powered flight using improvised parts, a few hundred dollars of their own money, and sheer persistence.

The story of flight is, at its core, a story of the triumph of American individualism over elite credentialism. The fact that it was the New York Times that inadvertently delivered the proof is the most fitting conclusion imaginable.

At the link in the headline above, back in 2024, PJM alum Paula Bolyard wrote:

In an October 1903 article, the New York Times predicted it would take “one to ten million years” for man to develop a working “flying machine.”

We all know how that turned out. Sixty-nine days later, on Dec. 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made their historic first successful flight in the heavier-than-air Wright Flyer in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.

The New York Times was wrong then, and they continue to be wrong about many important things. One of the most dangerous in recent years was the Russia collusion story, for which they were awarded a Nobel Prize. For months before the 2016 election, the Times shouted Russia, Russia, Russia! from the rooftops, even after it became clear that the story was a psyops pushed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That was the real “election interference,” not the nonsense the Times was pushing.

There were also the myriad conspiracy theories: Hunter’s laptop was fake, Trump told people to inject bleach into their lungs and suggested they take horse pills, and conservatives (especially the scary Christian ones) are the biggest threat to democracy anyone has ever seen.

More recently, the Times, desperate to protect Joe Biden, claimed that videos showing him to be frail and confused are “cheap fakes.”

Having learned nothing from their mistake regarding terrestrial flight, in 1920, the Gray Lady mocked the idea of space flight: The Correction Heard ‘Round The World: When The New York Times Apologized to Robert Goddard.

And on January 13, 1920, the New York Times published an editorial insisting that a rocket couldn’t possibly work in space:

“That professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution [from which Goddard held a grant to research rocket flight], does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”

Goddard pushed back against the wave of criticism in a Scientific American article later that year, but Newton’s Third Law doesn’t apply to public relations, and his response was mostly drowned out by the attacks. He retreated from the public eye, and from most interaction with other scientists, but continued his research.

Eventually, of course, Goddard would be vindicated by the 1944 launch of a German V-2 guided ballistic missile. But it took until July 17, 1969, the day after the launch of a crewed mission to the Moon, for the New York Times to take back its harsh words. The 1969 correction is almost comically dry and conspicuously doesn’t mention the Apollo mission.

“Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere,” the Times editors wrote. They added, “The Times regrets the error.”

On the flip side, don’t get the Timesmen started gushing over those nice young men from Austria and Georgia:

● In 1922, The New York Times published its first article about Adolf Hitler. The reporter, Cyril Brown, was aware of his subject’s anti-Jewish animus but he wasn’t buying it.

● The Times’ necrophiliac 1953 obit for one of the 20th century’s most brutal mass murderers was headlined: Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State.

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE? Niall Ferguson: Brace Yourselves. A Recession Is Coming.

Investors should be used to the whiplash by now. The pattern ought to be familiar: The president makes a bold pro-Israel military move in the Middle East. Israel’s principal adversary retaliates by restricting the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf. The economic consequences look so grim—the nightmare combination of stagnation and inflation—that the president hastily switches to diplomacy.

I want nothing to do with the juvenile journalistic debate about whether, by postponing on Monday his threatened attacks on Iranian power plants, Trump “chickened out” the way he rolled back the tariffs in April last year—the way he always chickens out. Please. He doesn’t always chicken out. He carries out roughly half of the threats he makes, which is a pretty effective strategy in game theory, so long as your adversaries are risk averse, which most of them are. Trump most certainly is not. (When the guy who used to run George Soros’s hedge fund says that Trump has “a very high risk tolerance, much higher than mine,” that’s telling you something.)

The reason the pattern of the past four weeks should be familiar is that something very similar happened in 1973–74. The catalyst was Richard Nixon’s decision to airlift a colossal military aid package to Israel—the counterpart to Operation Epic Fury in 2026. Nixon wanted to tilt the balance of power in the Middle East decisively in Israel’s favor following the Arab states’ surprise attack on Yom Kippur, October 6. The retaliation took the form of oil price hikes by the Middle Eastern oil producers, culminating in an embargo on oil exports to the United States imposed on the orders of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia on October 17. The ultimate effect was to nearly quadruple the price of oil on the world market.

Nixon, Kissinger, and other senior officials in the administration had been warned that this might happen. As Martin Indyk showed in his excellent 2021 book, Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, they had ignored those warnings. Kissinger was dismayed at the situation he now found himself in. As he complained to his staff on October 26, in the 19th century, the Western powers would simply have invaded Saudi Arabia and carved up its oil fields. “The idea that a Bedouin kingdom could hold up Western Europe and the United States would have been absolutely inconceivable,” he fumed. Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger even drew up a plan to occupy the Arabian oil fields “as a last resort.”

Stunned by the economic consequences and their likely political costs, Nixon instructed Kissinger to get the embargo lifted. The secretary of state made his first trip to Riyadh on November 8. For all Kissinger’s skill as a negotiator, and for all the shuttle diplomacy he undertook, it took more than four months to get the embargo lifted, on March 18, 1974. By that time, the energy supply shock had been enough to push the U.S. economy—and much of the rest of the industrial world—into recession. Is something similar happening right now as a result of Trump’s war?

Related: “Goldman Sachs just bumped its U.S. recession probability to 30% from 25%, underscoring how quickly things are moving.”

GENTLEMEN, START YOUR AIRBRUSHES! Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years.

Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.

He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”

The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. Ms. Murguia said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.

Recently, more than 50 years later, Ms. Murguia learned that a street near her home in the Central California city of Bakersfield was in the process of being renamed. City officials want to name it in honor of her abuser.

Cesar Chavez Boulevard.

Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977. He was in his 40s and had become a powerful, charismatic figure who captured global attention as a champion of farmworker rights.

The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.

The questions raised by The Times about Mr. Chavez, one of the most consequential figures in Mexican American history, set off immediate reverberations and alarmed and disturbed his allies. Even before this article was published, upon learning of the reporters’ inquiries, the U.F.W. canceled its annual celebrations honoring Mr. Chavez, a response to what the union he once led called “profoundly shocking” accusations.

The Atlantic attacked Chavez in 2011, with an article headlined, “The Madness of Cesar Chavez” which noted that Chavez’s last days were chaotic, to say the least:

To understand Chavez, you have to understand that he was grafting together two life philosophies that were, at best, an idiosyncratic pairing. One was grounded in union-organizing techniques that go back to the Wobblies; the other emanated directly from the mystical Roman Catholicism that flourishes in Mexico and Central America and that Chavez ardently followed. He didn’t conduct “hunger strikes”; he fasted penitentially. He didn’t lead “protest marches”; he organized peregrinations in which his followers—some crawling on their knees—arrayed themselves behind the crucifix and effigies of the Virgin of Guadalupe. His desire was not to lift workers into the middle class, but to bind them to one another in the decency of sacrificial poverty. He envisioned the little patch of dirt in Delano—the “Forty Acres” that the UFW had acquired in 1966 and that is now a National Historic Landmark—as a place where workers could build shrines, pray, and rest in the shade of the saplings they had tended together while singing. Like most ’60s radicals—of whatever stripe—he vastly overestimated the appeal of hard times and simple living; he was not the only Californian of the time to promote the idea of a Poor People’s Union, but as everyone from the Symbionese Liberation Army to the Black Panthers would discover, nobody actually wants to be poor. With this Christ-like and infinitely suffering approach to some worldly matters, Chavez also practiced the take-no-prisoners, balls-out tactics of a Chicago organizer. One of his strategies during the lettuce strike was causing deportations: he would alert the immigration authorities to the presence of undocumented (and therefore scab) workers and get them sent back to Mexico. As the ’70s wore on, all of this—the fevered Catholicism and the brutal union tactics—coalesced into a gospel with fewer and fewer believers. He moved his central command from the Forty Acres, where he was in constant contact with workers and their families—and thus with the realities and needs of their lives—and took up residence in a weird new headquarters.

Located in the remote foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains, the compound Chavez would call La Paz centered on a moldering and abandoned tuberculosis hospital and its equally ravaged outbuildings. In the best tradition of charismatic leaders left alone with their handpicked top command, he became unhinged. This little-known turn of events provides the compelling final third of Pawel’s book. She describes how Chavez, the master spellbinder, himself fell under the spell of a sinister cult leader, Charles Dederich, the founder of Synanon, which began as a tough-love drug-treatment program and became—in Pawel’s gentle locution—“an alternative lifestyle community.” Chavez visited Dederich’s compound in the Sierras (where women routinely had their heads shaved as a sign of obedience) and was impressed. Pawel writes:

Chavez envied Synanon’s efficient operation. The cars all ran, the campus was immaculate, the organization never struggled for money.

He was also taken with a Synanon practice called “The Game,” in which people were put in the center of a small arena and accused of disloyalty and incompetence while a crowd watched their humiliation. Chavez brought the Game back to La Paz and began to use it on his followers, among them some of the UFW’s most dedicated volunteers. In a vast purge, he exiled or fired many of them, leaving wounds that remain tender to this day. He began to hold the actual farmworkers in contempt: “Every time we look at them,” he said during a tape-recorded meeting at La Paz, “they want more money. Like pigs, you know. Here we’re slaving, and we’re starving and the goddamn workers don’t give a shit about anything.”

Chavez seemed to have gone around the bend. He decided to start a new religious order. He flew to Manila during martial law in 1977 and was officially hosted by Ferdinand Marcos, whose regime he praised, to the horror and loud indignation of human-rights advocates around the world.

By the time of Chavez’s death, the powerful tide of union contracts for California farmworkers, which the grape strike had seemed to augur, had slowed to the merest trickle. As a young man, Chavez had set out to secure decent wages and working conditions for California’s migrant workers; anyone taking a car trip through the “Salad Bowl of the World” can see that for the most part, these workers have neither.

That didn’t stop his bust being displayed in the Oval Office during President Obama’s third term. But apparently, it’s now time to banish Chavez to the memory hole:

But now his views on illegal immigration are inconvenient and his inability to defend himself is convenient. https://t.co/a91gGu9uhT

— @instapundit (@instapundit) March 18, 2026

UPDATE: Torpedo aimed at Trump circles back yet again:

So, Democrats spent more than a year stirring up dubious claims about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and, it appears, this scandal-mongering inspired victims of a late Democrat hero to come finally forward and speak out. Ironic boomerang! https://t.co/LPMeuxowmv

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) March 18, 2026

MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE:

OK, so the Abraham Accords. Taking down the Venezuelan cartel/dictatorship. Finally a response in the Iran War, the mullahs thought we were stupid and weak, they were right. Now Cuba.

You do get he's basically walking on water. Making every elected hack, bureaucrat and diplomat… https://t.co/iMOyB7xwA0

— Northern Barbarian (@xnoesbueno) March 15, 2026

Tweet continues, “You do get he’s basically walking on water. Making every elected hack, bureaucrat and diplomat of the last 40 years or so look like dithering incompetent fools, when they weren’t actively and despicably enabling said dictatorships, that is. Could it all go wrong? Yeah. But for the first time since Ronald Reagan blew up the Soviet Union, someone’s trying.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related thoughts here. “If the public realizes you can actually solve problems, there will be more pressure to do that — rather than just manage them endlessly.”

ILYA SHAPIRO: Two Decades in the Swamp.

On Election Night, you could barely think over the sound of people rushing to update their résumés. Uber drivers found themselves doing more therapy than driving. George Washington University administrators scrambled to set up “support rooms” with puppies and crayons. Democrats resumed questioning the legitimacy of presidential elections.

Trump entered office promising to “drain the swamp,” which, in practice, meant hiring half of it, firing a quarter, and leaving the rest to leak confidential information to cable news. He governed like someone live-tweeting a traffic accident he was also causing. Every 3 am post was an experiment to see how much chaos the bond market could absorb before breakfast.

Then came the Russia investigation—America’s performance-art piece about alleged collusion with ex-Commies. Half the city believed that the Kremlin had written Trump’s speeches; the other half believed that the deep state had orchestrated the whole thing to relive Watergate and get book deals. The only clear winners were white-shoe law firms that now had “Special Counsel” on speed dial.

The opposition rebranded itself as the “Resistance,” though having the media, universities, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the federal bureaucracy on its side didn’t make much of a case for heroism. Women’s marches filled the city with pink hats, while cable news operated on the premise that every Trump tweet was a constitutional crisis—even as the Mueller Report landed like overcooked lasagna at Cafe Milano.

The Right discovered it liked having a brawler in the White House. Years of media bias, bureaucratic overreach, and cultural condescension had primed GOP voters for someone who would punch back. Trump supporters flocked to the Trump International Hotel, which served as a kind of embassy for Red America.

In 2018, Trump seated a Supreme Court justice, Brett Kavanaugh, after confirmation hearings that began like a poorly conceived political drama and ended with protesters in Handmaid’s Tale costumes. He would appoint two more justices who’d also read The Federalist Papers. Combined with tax reform, deregulation, and a deep bench of originalist judges, the Court picks were his most durable achievements. My book on the politics of judicial nominations, Supreme Disorder, came out four days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. The timing was morbidly auspicious, but my publisher claims he has an alibi.

At home, our first child arrived just in time for that crazy 2016 election. Our second commemorated the 2018 midterms. Nothing sharpens your view of public policy like strapping toddlers into car seats as you listen to a podcast about the Administrative Procedure Act. And the boys’ earliest memories of civic life involve adults shouting about collusion, impeachment—something about a phone call to the Ukrainian president and a possible Netflix pitch—and whether the president had been too harsh to a CNN correspondent.

Then came 2020.

Read the whole thing.

HMMMM: Trump’s Axing Of Evil Ends Both Neocon And Mad MAGA Ideology.

There is no pretending that in the contest of ideas in the Trump universe, the Mark Levins and the Lindsey Grahams have not won, and the Tucker Carlsons and Marjorie Taylor Greenes have not lost. The “Let Reagan Be Reagan” routine, the notion that the president’s “evil advisers” are always conning him into betraying his true principles, won’t go far when it comes to Trump. Nobody believes Donald Trump is not his own man and can be bamboozled by those he has hired. Trump never stops being Trump.

A Carlson podcast several months ago, garnering 1 million views on YouTube, is entitled “It’s Time to Decide: America First or Lindsey Graham’s Psychosexual Death Cult.” In it, Carlson claimed that Graham has been talking about “killing Americans on behalf of another country, a foreign power,” meaning Israel. It’s actually nothing new for Carlson, to whom Graham has been a bane for years. According to Carlson, Graham’s positions on national security are explained by his lack of a wife and children, the cause of an absence of concern for the future.

This weekend, Carlson called Trump’s attack on Iran “absolutely disgusting and evil” and claimed that, as regards MAGA, it will “shuffle the deck in a profound way.” It is hard not to see Trump returning that fire, even though his vice president, J.D. Vance, is Carlson’s close friend, a fact that may have led to Trump putting the Ohioan on the ticket in 2024.

Will the MAGA movement crack up, parts of it turning against the two-time president for betraying their isolationism? It’s difficult to see it happening over their leader vanquishing the preeminent terrorist enabler in the world, a regime that has murdered thousands of Americans, in what is, as Trump called it, “a noble mission.” Losers lie, and Carlson’s attacks on a hawk like Graham consist of dubiously contending that he takes pleasure in bloodshed because he advocates sticking the U.S. military on fanatical killers. More likely his and like voices will soon become less relevant – especially if Trump targets him for ridicule as a kook, even if the insults are subtler than his lambasting of “Marjorie Traitor Greene.”

It is said that Donald Trump is obsessed with securing his place in history, and that it has influenced some of his decisions for the worse. But giving the 92 million people of Iran a chance at liberation is likely to push far aside President Trump’s moral shortcomings and erratic style. As regrettable as they may be, they will be of as much pertinence in the eyes of history as George Washington’s wooden teeth.

Not least of which: We Have Now Redeemed Ourselves As a Nation From Desert One. “The failure of Operation Eagle Claw was almost certainly one of the key reasons Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 election. The hostages were released on the same day that President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated; the Iranians obviously realized that there was a new sheriff in town, and that Reagan wasn’t going to play patty-cake. The hostages had been held by the vicious savages in Iran for 444 days. When Ronald Reagan took office, American families all over the nation were able, finally, to take down all those yellow ribbons.”

The Simpsons we’re joking with the “History’s greatest monster” riff about Carter, but in retrospect, not by all that much, though:

Using French intelligence surveillance of Khomeini's speeches and activities, Giscard tried desperately to dissuade Carter but Carter obstinately, arrogantly insisted that Khomeini should return because he was "a man of peace". The last 47 years belong to Carter personally. https://t.co/UnrpVZUnpz

— Robert M. Cutler (@RobertMCutler) March 4, 2026

This op-ed is one of the most disgusting things any ex-President has ever done.https://t.co/ORJ457jnQT pic.twitter.com/z9VE5aKJKV

— Everybody is Insane (@colorblindk1d) March 5, 2026

MARK HEMINGWAY: Model City: Portland’s Journey From Symbol of Chic to Shabby.

If you’re familiar with the recent history of Portland – I am a third-generation Oregonian who has lived in the city – it was once the epicenter of urban cool. In 2009, there was so much tourism that The Oregonian newspaper ran a column headlined, “Sorry, NYT, We’re Just Not That Into You,” grousing that all the glowing national press about the city was making it harder for locals to get into their favorite restaurants. By the time the popular comedy show “Portlandia” premiered in 2011, the city was a genuine cultural phenomenon.

Last fall, after the city acquired a reputation for crime, homelessness, and dysfunction, Oregon politicians rushed to media outlets to assure the nation that the city was not literally on fire. They were responding to comments from President Trump, who said, “the place is burning down, just burning down,” following violent protests outside of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. CNN ran a “fact check” on Trump’s multiple statements about the city burning.

Oregon politicians were probably right that the president’s hyperbole was not helping defuse a tense situation. And unlike other cities famous for urban blight, Portland is still a beautiful place to live. Located at the base of 11,000-foot-tall Mt. Hood, and built around two major rivers, it has one of the most spectacular natural settings of any city in America. Last fall, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden traveled around the city and posted videos highlighting the picturesque neighborhoods to show that Portland can be a wonderful place to live, in contrast to Trump’s claim that the city is “war-ravaged.”

But in a figurative sense – and at least one literal sense – Trump is right. Portland is constantly on fire. In the year following July 2024, Portland had 6,268 fire-related incidents – and 40% of the fires in the city are a direct result of Portland’s out-of-control vagrancy.

Even city leaders feel the heat. In 2024, Portland City Councilor Rene Gonzalez’s car burned in a fire that authorities believe was intentionally set while it was parked in front of his family’s home. No one was arrested, but a website associated with Portland’s notorious Antifa network claimed responsibility. Then last October, a fire consumed a carport belonging to Portland City Councilor Candace Avalos, burning her car and damaging the side of her house. Authorities eventually determined the fire was started by a vagrant trying to stay warm.

The city also has much more sophisticated criminal problems. As Minneapolis uncovers evidence that it has lost billions of dollars in fraudulent schemes by the city’s Somali community, Jeff Eager, the former mayor of Bend, Oregon, has published a series of alarming reports revealing that Portland may have a similar large-scale problem with its welfare programs – some of it connected to more menacing kinds of organized crime.

Read the whole thing, which has rare bipartisan approval:

When even Joe Scarborough is forced to acknowledge it
You know you knocked it out of the park.
@Heminator dissects the diseased carcass of once-great Portland. https://t.co/3YRWhQZE6u

— Jim Hanson (@JimHansonDC) February 7, 2026

UPDATE:

Portland, Ore. — A KATU news crew walked around downtown to see how things had improved and was immediately threatened with violence. pic.twitter.com/hVpY90KLz6

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) February 27, 2026

CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN: Over a quarter million federal jobs reduced in 2025 from nearly two dozen agencies.

As a result of a concerted effort by the second Trump administration to reduce the size of the civilian federal workforce, the total staff of 23 of the largest executive-branch agencies shrunk by roughly 3% in the first half of 2025, with 144,000 additional jobs cut by year’s end.

The numbers come from a newly released report from the Government Accountability Office, which was tasked with tracking staffing changes across 24 federal agencies in the first half of last year. One agency did not provide the requested data, so data from 23 agencies is included in the report.

The president issued several executive orders in the first few months of 2025 directing much of the executive branch to trim its workforce, as well as a memorandum that put a hiring freeze on federal civilian employees. (The memorandum did include exemptions for the military, immigration enforcement, national security and public safety positions.)

Despite several ongoing lawsuits challenging the reduction in force, altogether, the 23 agencies shrunk by a total of more than 134,000 employees, or about 6% of their total workforce from January through June 2025. However, during that same time period, those agencies brought on nearly 66,000 new hires, or roughly 3%, for a total reduction of about 3%. As of June, according to the office, the federal government still employed more than 2.2 million people.

That’s still too many. Keep cutting until NoVa is practically emptied out and Virginia is red again.