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President Trump’s call for a new US census that excludes illegal immigrants has stirred up exactly the kind of debate this country needs – but not necessarily in the way he’s proposed it. Let’s be clear: the spirit of Trump’s order is right. It’s outrageous that congressional seats and federal funding are based, in part, on populations that include people who entered this country illegally. Sanctuary states like California, New York and Illinois benefit politically and financially from shielding those who bypassed our laws, while law-abiding states are left underrepresented. The American people have every right to demand that representation reflect citizenship, not lawbreaking.But even as I share the outrage, I can’t support the tactic.

I have been going to the farmers market in Martha’s Vineyard for nearly half a century. I buy corn, tomatoes and homemade products. Until last week every vendor at the market treated me with respect and loved to have my business. I spent about $100,000 on farm and home products over the years, so I was shocked when one vendor refused to sell me their pierogi. It turns out that this particular vendor, Krem Miskevich, doesn’t approve of Zionism – that is support for Israel’s right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people. To be a Zionist does not require agreement with Israel’s policies or actions – just its right to be. I strongly believe in Zionism. It is an essential aspect of my religion.

It was an all-caps kind of evening for the President. “RECIPROCAL TARIFFS TAKE EFFECT AT MIDNIGHT TONIGHT!” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social last night, minutes before the clock struck 12am. “BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, LARGELY FROM COUNTRIES THAT HAVE TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF THE UNITED STATES FOR MANY YEARS, LAUGHING ALL THE WAY, WILL START FLOWING INTO THE USA. THE ONLY THING THAT CAN STOP AMERICA’S GREATNESS WOULD BE A RADICAL LEFT COURT THAT WANTS TO SEE OUR COUNTRY FAIL!” The Santa imagery is interesting, and fitting. For decades now, one could be forgiven for thinking some kind of magic was being conjured up, as consumer choice skyrocketed while prices plummeted at the same time, and once-deemed luxury items became accessible for the vast majority of households.

A bleached white conference room, somewhere near Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. On one side sits Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader, in his soldier-boy outfit. On the other, Russian President Vladimir Putin in dark suit and tie. And in the middle, a beaming President Donald J. Trump. "People said this could never happen," he says, as Zelensky and Putin stare awkwardly at the floor. "But it’s a beautiful thing." A White House memo lands in inboxes across the world: "THE PEACEMAKER-IN-CHIEF..." Pure fantasy, perhaps, but Trump does have an almost cosmic ability to get what he wants – and he really wants to end the war in Ukraine. Last night, having spent weeks telling the world how "disappointed" he was with Putin, Trump abruptly announced "great progress" in US-Russia dialogue.

Donald Trump remains the master of political reality 200 days into his second term. His administration drives the headlines, not the other way around. Take the fracas that erupted over last week’s downward adjustment to the previous month’s employment numbers. Any other president would have been put immediately on the defensive, desperate to justify his performance to the whole country. Trump simply fired the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics – and all the headlines since then have been about the firing, not the numbers. Not only is President Trump not a prisoner of the press, he’s not a prisoner to his own legacy. In his first term, Trump involved America in no new wars. Less than six months into his second term, he took America to war with Iran.

“Trump in high heels” is how Congresswoman Nancy Mace described herself earlier this week when she announced her candidacy for governor of her home state, South Carolina. We don’t know whether Trump in high heels already exists because we still haven’t seen the Epstein Files. But let’s not assume the worst, and let’s examine Mace’s claim at face value. Does she really have Trumpian qualities?  Like Trump, Mace has some idiosyncratic political views, while also going hard in the paint with the antiwoke rhetoric that has helped restore the Republicans to national dominance. Mace was the first female Corps of Cadets graduate from the military college The Citadel, where her father was on the faculty, and published a memoir about the experience in 2001.

An absolutely ghoulish spectacle unrolled on YouTube yesterday, as disgraced former CNN Trump gadfly Jim Acosta “interviewed” teenager Joaquin Oliver. The problem is that Joaquin Oliver was killed in the Parkland shooting in 2018. This interview took place with an AI simulation of Joaquin. On what would have been Joaquin’s 25th birthday, his father, Manuel Oliver, released this Black Mirror monster into the world. To make matters worse for the AI simulation, it had to talk to Jim Acosta. On the one hand, the stream, as of this writing, has barely 6,000 views. The average seven-year-old Roblox streamer does better than that. However, the interview is so deeply disturbing, so bald-facedly manipulative, that it deserves scrutiny.

The Spectator and Douglas Murray have today won a defamation claim brought by Mohammed Hegab, who "lied on significant issues" in court and gave evidence that "overall, is worthless." The judge rejected Hegab’s claim because the videos he publishes are ‘at least as reputationally damaging to him as the article’ Hegab, a YouTuber who posts under the name Mohammed Hijab, claimed that an article published in September 2022 about the riots in Leicester, England, had caused serious harm to his reputation and loss of earnings as a result.

L.W., a transgender girl, her parents, and her doctor agreed that it would be good and medically appropriate for her to receive gender-affirming hormone therapy. The state of Tennessee, where L.W. lived, passed a statute in 2023 prohibiting transgender minors from receiving such treatment. Did the statute discriminate against L.W. on the basis of sex? The US Supreme Court said it didn’t. In 2023, the British government planned to send to Rwanda people who tried to get to the United Kingdom on small boats and then seek asylum. Would that policy violate the asylum seekers’ human rights because the conditions in Rwanda were unsafe? The UK Supreme Court said it did.