Washington Examiner editor-in-chief Hugo Gurdon joins chief political correspondent Byron York to discuss the six Democratic Senators that released a video for service members from the US military to not follow unlawful orders. The Pentagon has threatened Sen. Mark Kelly for a court martial. Any movement in the Russia and Ukraine peace deal and what it would take.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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