Germany is rearming, and last month the German government announced plans to become the strongest conventional army in Europe by 2039. This is a goal that the Trump administration broadly supports, because they want our European NATO allies to become less dependent upon the U.S. for security. Simultaneously, the Trump administration has become a surprisingly outspoken defender of the German far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland, known by its initials AfD. In February 2025, JD Vance met with Alice Weidel, the AfD co-leader and the party’s candidate for chancellor. In September 2025, Weidel came to Washington and met with officials from the U.S. National Security Council, the State Department, and Vance’s office. In February, an AfD member of the German Bundestag met with Pentagon officials.

Meet some of the beneficiaries of President Biden’s mercy. Unless you live near Wilkes-Barre, Pa., you’ve probably never heard of the “Kids-For-Cash Scandal.”

This judge took more than $2 million bribes to send kids to for-profit juvenile prisons with sentences disproportionate to their crimes, and one of the kids killed himself.

He's out and free four years early, thanks to Biden.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… Former Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora "made about $450,000 off bribes, including trips to Las Vegas, prostitutes and an infamous outdoor stone-fired pizza oven installed in the backyard of his Independence home. Dimora was initially sentenced in 2012 to 28 years in what was, at the time, one of the Ohio’s most expansive corruption cases in history."

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

When’s the last time you saw a college campus with a protest against the Chinese government’s ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs?

Or Russia kidnapping an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 Ukrainian children over the course of the war, sending them deeper into Russian-occupied territory or to Russia, and a couple hundred have been shipped off to a boot camp, where the Russians are training them to become child soldiers against their own homeland?

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… When’s the last time you saw a college campus with a protest against the Taliban and its nightmarish oppression of women? How many college students even know that the Taliban has now banned all women from public spaces — banned their faces, banned their voices?

Anybody seen any campus protests against the Iranian government’s rapidly increasing rate of executions — in August, 29 executions in one day?

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

One final factor really makes me think that Biden is in a condition where his staff believes he must not be seen by the American public. It’s that he made an announcement that ranks among the most important and consequential statements from a president in history in a letter posted on Twitter/X.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… He didn’t do it on camera. We didn’t hear his voice. We didn’t see him at all on Sunday. As of this writing, Biden hasn’t been seen Monday, and is not scheduled to make any appearances today. Biden’s last public event was a radio interview with Univision at 12:15 local time in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

You've probably noticed the consequences of Disney’s belt-tightening all over the media world.

https://t.co/ox4HHg0oWrnationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…






This morning, the Wall Street Journal reports new trouble at one of the company’s most iconic, lucrative, and reliable moneymakers, the theme parks:

wsj.com/articles/disne…

You could argue that there are three American magazines that are so iconic, so central to the last century of American media and public discourse, that they are instantly recognizable just by the color of the border on their covers.

https://t.co/surhZJMzr7nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…




The one with the yellow border, which has been around for 135 years, no longer has any full-time staff writers, and soon it will stop appearing on your newsstands — presuming you can find a newsstand anymore.

https://t.co/7VjPavmqS4nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

If my job required me to risk life and limb to fight fires that traced back to gender-reveal parties and nutjob professors on arson sprees, I’d be livid about the persistent pattern of bad judgment around fire in heavily wooded areas, too.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… So I can’t entirely begrudge Clare Frank, who served as California’s first female chief of fire protection, for writing an op-ed in the New York Times today, with the headline, “We Suffer Too Many Fools Who Start Wildfires.”

nytimes.com/2023/06/08/opi…

It’s not hard to find voices who want the smoky orange haze over the northeastern U.S. and Canada to be an environmental morality tale with a human villain.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… A somewhat-overlapping group of people are speculating, without any supporting evidence, that these forest fires were deliberately set by someone in some sinister plot.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

A year ago, the PGA tour saw the golfers joining the alternative league as taking an action that was barely one moral step above treason.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… The PGA could have kept its objection to LIV within the realm of finance. It's not particularly noble, but everyone would have understood.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

Way back in March of 2022, I looked at the various ways Russia could use its tactical nuclear weapons in an attempt to win a decisive advantage in Ukraine.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… There are ways to attempt to minimize the radioactive fallout from the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, but even if you detonate a nuclear weapon underground, radiation can leak with fatal consequences for a long time.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

Well, this is a dumb rejoinder. The objection is not to the existence or use of executive orders, but Trump's terrible record of going back to make sure his executive orders were carried out.

https://twitter.com/BerryRazi/status/1664833011664457729

rollcall.com/2019/04/18/mue…

So far, there is no sign that any U.S. or multinational company is rethinking its decisions to do business in Uganda, despite the country’s enactment of laws that will put a person in prison for five years for attempting to have homosexual sex.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… I’d argue that the most compelling objection to corporate America’s Pride Month is that it represents big companies’ support for the rights of gays in the cheapest and most consequence-free way possible.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

Up until a few days ago, in the country of Uganda, it was literally a crime to identify yourself as gay, lesbian, transgender, or nonbinary — a crime that carried a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… Left, right, or center, I’d like to think that we could all agree that if you say, “I’m gay,” your government’s response should not be to _put you in prison for two decades._

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

Trump's increasingly bizarre contradictory statements about Disney - first DeSantis was the aggressor, then Disney was woke but it was DeSantis' fault - reveal the dirty little secret that Trump doesn’t really know what he thinks about a lot of topics.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… Trump doesn’t say how he would stop Disney from becoming “woke,” but he merely asserts that it would be, and will be, easy to do. Probably just as easy as ending the Russia–Ukraine war in one day. Or as easy as ending birthright citizenship within 1 day.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

These are apparently the sorts of thoughts that consume the mind of one of the four people most likely to take the oath of office on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… The former president seems to think it is a real power move to call the Florida governor “Rob.” I suppose this is a demonstration that DeSantis is so unimportant that Trump can’t be bothered to remember his first name.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

If you feel like Biden's policies responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine are getting more praise, more credit, and easier grades than they deserve... well, apparently you and I aren't alone.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… We've noticed the plan appears to be to intermittently try to sound like Winston Churchill while sending weapons systems at a snail’s pace, months and months after the Ukrainians have said they need those weapons systems.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

I think it’s way, way too early for any panic for Ron DeSantis or his supporters. But there are some ominous chords being played in the early campaign soundtrack.

nationalreview.com/corner/the-opp… I get that DeSantis wants to peel away 10, 20, 30% of Trump supporters, and thus is either going to emphasize his similarities to Trump or only hit Trump from the right for a while. But a big part of DeSantis' appeal is turning the page from Trump.

nationalreview.com/corner/the-opp…

Nashville police chief John Drake held a press conference Tuesday and said that the parents of the shooter told the police the shooter had been in a “doctor’s care for an emotional disorder.”

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… The parents reportedly told police that they believed their daughter should not own guns & did not believe that she had any; they believed their child had purchased one gun & sold it. The shooter reportedly told her parents that she had sold the firearm.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

First, everybody weighing in on those WSJ survey results ought to read @PatrickRuffini's assessment of the methodology...

https://twitter.com/PatrickRuffini/status/1640687180392669184

@PatrickRuffini Second, the chart that is going viral illustrates the dramatic drop in the percentage of respondents who said that certain values were “very important.” You’re not going to get any argument from me that this is bad news.

nationalreview.com/corner/are-ame…

In today's Morning Jolt, more from my interview with Paul Clement, the former solicitor general representing Fox News in the defamation lawsuits filed by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… In Brian v. Richardson, one of the key points was that the claims appeared on the op-ed page and thus were sufficiently labeled as opinion. Clement argues that this is comparable to the claims on programs like that of Lou Dobbs.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…

Also in today's Morning Jolt...

TikTok, and perhaps social media as a whole, have created an entire incentive structure to spotlight the most abnormal behavior people can imagine, particularly among young people.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo… If you do the things you’re supposed to do in life — love your family, be a good friend, work hard, play by the rules, help others when they need it — the TikTok algorithm just isn’t that interested.

nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…