• Does America have the stomach for Trump’s deportations? Now that the Ivory Tower is feeling President Donald Trump’s deportations, the Left is fully mobilized. The effort centers on Mahmoud Khalil, who has been detained by ICE for leading protests on Columbia’s campus that “aligned to Hamas.” Defenders of Khalil talk about so-called Palestine and “anti-genocide” activism, but in reality, these protests were weapons in Hamas’s war of extermination against Israel. Prior to his arrest, Khalil was a lawful resident of the United States with a green card. Trump has made his stance on pro-Hamas protesters in the U.S. very clear: If you aren’t a citizen, you’re gone. Nevertheless, a Manhattan federal judge has frozen Khalil’s deportation until the court orders otherwise. This fight is just ramping up, and the question is whether the American people have the stomach for Trump’s righteous stand against terrorist sympathizers.

• Trump’s sketchy Labor nominee confirmed: First, let’s stipulate that Donald Trump has put together a remarkable cabinet of disruptors and reformers. But Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who was confirmed 67-32 by the Senate yesterday, is neither a disruptor nor a reformer. Instead, she’s a nod toward Big Labor, as her hostility toward liberty-based right-to-work laws demonstrates. Just three Republicans — Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, and Ted Budd — voted against confirmation, and Teamsters President Sean O'Brien suggests why. “As the daughter of a Teamster,” said O'Brien, “Lori Chavez-DeRemer knows the importance of carrying a union card and what it means to grow up in a middle-class household.” It’ll be interesting to see whether Trump’s gambit pays dividends with the labor vote in the 2026 midterms.

• X cyberattack: On Monday, X owner Elon Musk acknowledged that the site had been hit with a “massive cyberattack.” He explained, “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing.” Later, in an interview with Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow, Musk said, “We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the ecosystem with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” Since becoming part of Donald Trump’s team, Musk’s companies have increasingly been the target of nefarious actions.

• Zelensky’s mea culpa to Trump: It wasn’t long after getting booted from the Oval Office by Donald Trump that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky began to regret his insolence, according to a letter of apology sent by Zelensky to Trump. “He apologized for that whole incident that happened in the Oval Office,” said Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff. The Ukrainians, though, seem to dispute whether an apology was issued. A top Zelensky aide previously told a French news outlet that his boss wouldn’t apologize. Regardless, Zelensky is now under pressure both to sign a minerals deal with the U.S. and to agree to a peace deal with Russia. And as Trump made clear to Zelensky during their Oval Office blowup, he’s in no position to make security demands on the U.S.

• Another WaPo columnist exits the paper: The deputy editorial page editor at The Washington Post, Ruth Marcus, has resigned in protest of owner Jeff Bezos’s directive to promote personal liberty and the free market. Marcus was one of the Post’s top political columnists, but she elected to leave the paper after accusing chief executive and publisher Will Lewis of killing her article criticizing Bezos. The socialism-favoring Marcus claimed Bezos’s decision “threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable.” That is an ironic take, given the opposition to conservative views being given space within mainstream media.

• CBP One app for self-deportation: The Biden administration infamously used the controversial CBP One app as a ticket for fast-tracking migrants into the U.S. However, the Trump administration has creatively reconfigured the app into a system that promotes and facilitates self-deportation for illegal aliens. As DHS Secretary Kristi Noem explained, “The CBP Home App gives aliens the option to leave now and self-deport, so they may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream.” However, she warned, “If they don’t, we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return.” Illegals may want to take the offer seriously, as the Trump administration has ramped up its prosecution of those illegally entering, charging more illegals in two months than the Biden administration did over four years.

• China launches another AI: The global artificial intelligence race is heating up, with China recently rolling out Manus AI. Manus is categorized within the industry as artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system whose cofounder Yichao “Peak” Ji describes as not “just another chatbot or workflow” but “a truly autonomous agent” and “the next paradigm of human-machine collaboration.” DeepSeek surprised the tech world, and now Manus has Silicon Valley in a panic. According to former National Security Commission on AI contributor Craig Smith, “The fear is that Manus represents the industrialization of intelligence — a system so efficient that companies will soon find themselves forced to replace human labor with AI not out of preference, but necessity.” Smith contents that China is leading the world when it comes to developing autonomous AI agents.

• Top universities to SCOTUS: Pound sand: Immediately after the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions, we suggested that it’d be “foolish to think that these leftist universities are simply going to honor the Rule of Law and cease their discriminatory admissions practices,” and that universities across the country would soon “map out an end-run around this right-wing outrage.” Sure enough, as Renu Mukherjee reports at City Journal, “Admissions data reveal that Yale, Princeton, Duke, and several other highly selective schools enrolled fewer Asian students in their Classes of 2028 … than they did in their Classes of 2027. Black enrollment at these schools, by contrast, remained virtually unchanged.” Clearly, “diversity” is a higher calling among these leftist academies than abiding by the Constitution.

• RFK Jr. says we’re poisoning ourselves with ultra-processed foods: Steak ‘n Shake would seem an odd place for a meeting with a newly minted HHS secretary who’s committed to ending the childhood obesity epidemic in America, but there was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., talking to Fox News’s Sean Hannity about the need to fix our food supply. “We want to do everything that we can to incentivize these companies to be transparent,” said RFK, “to switch over from ultra-processed food, and to be part of this movement to make America healthier. We are poisoning ourselves, and it’s coming from … principally, these ultra-processed foods.” Kennedy has already met with major food producers like General Mills, Heinz, Kellogg, and Kraft to discuss how to improve food safety and restore consumer trust.

• Trump throws cold water on Chauvin pardon: When asked about the calls coming from the Right to pardon Derek Chauvin, Donald Trump responded, “No. I hadn’t even heard about that.” Even if he had heard about it, Trump might’ve been wise to deny it. Chauvin’s case is a thorny issue due to the racial lens through which it was presented by the media. Was Chauvin given a fair trial? Nope. However, the problem with a pardon is that while Chauvin is being held in federal prison on federal charges, he was also convicted in the Minnesota justice system, and a federal pardon from Donald Trump would not alleviate that. As our Douglas Andrews explains, sending him to state prison would likely be life-threatening, and Chauvin wouldn’t want that result.

Headlines

• Federal judge orders Trump administration to pay “unlawfully” restricted USAID funds (Fox News)

• Trump raises Canadian steel, aluminum tariffs to 50% (CNBC) | Dow extends losses, falls 400 points (CNBC)

• Trump says Thomas Massie “should be primaried” (NY Post)

• Court-martial convenes for convicted Pentagon leaker Jack Teixeira (Washington Examiner)

• Humor: RFK Jr. announces Seal Team Six has neutralized the Kool-Aid Man (Babylon Bee)

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