In the final weeks of the 2024 presidential election, President Donald Trump was doing nonstop rallies, many of them outdoors despite an assassination attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, that left him bloodied after a bullet struck his ear.

The rallies felt more like festivals than political events, with crowds gathering hours early amid music and pageantry. Local heroes, union leaders, elected officials, and retired military officers cycled through as warm-up speakers, firing up the audience between tracks like Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” Village People’s “YMCA,” and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” Trump’s walk-out anthem.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Democrats are about to learn the same lesson Republicans have several times before them: like a nuclear war, nobody wins a government shutdown.

That’s not for lack of trying. The federal government has been shut down for more than 40 days, as it took 15 Senate votes for Democrats to relent and allow a short-term funding bill to pass.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Politicians tend to be somewhat triumphalist in moments of triumph. So Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani could have been forgiven for a little exaltation as he spoke to his electrified supporters after winning the New York City mayoral election.

But his oration was more than that. He was downright sinister, glorying not just in his achievement but in having laid low his vanquished enemies and stuck it to others besides. He took off his smiling campaign mask and revealed his venomous self.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

House GOP leadership has leaned into attacking New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani at their daily government shutdown press conference.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), referencing House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s (D-NY) endorsement of Mamdani last week, said this “dangerous ideology” is what is “motivating them” in reference to the government shutdown.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

President Donald Trump’s tearing down of the White House East Wing’s facade has faced criticism, but the renovation is only the latest of over a century of redesigns.

Several of these involved tearing down or gutting significant parts of the White House, to a greater extent than the most recent ballroom renovation. The White House itself was quick to respond to outrage over pictures of the East Wing facade being torn down by a backhoe, arguing it was the continuation of a “proud presidential legacy.”

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week saw the debut of a new alliance in the ongoing resistance to President Donald Trump. New York Attorney General Letitia James, already a hero on the left for the 2022 lawsuit she filed in an attempt to cripple Trump’s business empire, joined Democratic Socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in a rally that was nominally about Mamdani’s campaign, but also about James’s defense against mortgage fraud charges brought against her by the Trump Justice Department. And in a larger sense, it was about the face of the Resistance in the second Trump administration.

James’s message was defiance, defiance, defiance. “I know what it feels like to be attacked for just doing your job,” she shouted, as James shouts a lot in her campaign appearances. “But I also know what it feels like to overcome adversity. And so I stand on solid rock, and I will not bow, I will not break, I will not bend, I will not capitulate, I will not give in, I will not give up. You come for me, you gotta come for all of us.”

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you listen carefully, you can hear two distinct sounds — one of anxiety, the other of laughter — coming from Washington, D.C. Each is muffled but not very well.

The first is of timorous Democrats promising to keep the federal government shut until Republicans add $700 billion more to the national debt. They want to hang tough, but they know they are between a rock and a hard-left place.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Vice President JD Vance took center stage Wednesday at the White House press briefing on the first day of the federal government shutdown, during which he insisted that Democrats were responsible for the impasse on Capitol Hill.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Vance as her special guest minutes before the briefing started, signaling Vance’s lead role in President Donald Trump’s response to the battle with Democrats. Vance spent Wednesday morning doing a heavy slate of television hits, attempting to shoulder Democrats with the blame for the shutdown.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

TRUMP’S EPIC UN ADDRESS. How to describe President Donald Trump’s speech to the United Nations on Tuesday? Epic, extraordinary, unprecedented — whatever term you prefer, Trump’s address was a sledgehammer of a message delivered to allies and adversaries around the world.

The most striking passages were directed at allies, particularly those in Europe, and they focused on two enormously consequential and controversial issues that Trump called a “double-tailed monster”: migration and energy.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

NEW YORK ON THE BRINK. Next year will bring the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and with it, an irresistible angle for journalists and commentators: New York‘s first Muslim mayor marks anniversary of devastating radical Islamic attack on city.

That mayor will be, of course, Zohran Mamdani, the socialist candidate with a huge lead over a fractured field in the Nov. 4 mayoral election. A series of recent polls suggests that, barring some huge, incredible, world-shaking unforeseen development, Mamdani will be elected mayor less than two months from now.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.