Left, Right & Center

Since taking office, President Trump has vowed to seek political vengeance on his opponents. He followed up on this by asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Democratic Senator Adam Schiff. Senator Ted Cruz expressed concerns that all this could potentially impact the GOP down the line. How has political retribution defined our current er...

After the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, both Republicans and Democrats called for unity and understanding — but polarizing rhetoric has continued to escalate. President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and other White House officials have vowed to target the “radical left” for being politically violent. Democratic officials have warned that the White House may try to use the assassination to suppress sp...

Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and commentator, was shot and killed while hosting an event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. Utah Governor Spencer Cox says it was a political assassination. Kirk, 31, co-founded the conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA, when he was 18. His visit to Utah Valley University was the kick-off for his “American Comeback Tour,” during which he planned to host political d...

The Trump administration announced that it will withhold $5 billion in foreign aid that Congress had already allocated. The “pocket rescission” is Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought’s latest move to give the executive branch control over America’s spending. House Democrats call it an unlawful attack on Congress’ power of the purse. The Trump administration has also imposed tariffs and selected U.S. att...

National Guard troops have been on the streets of Washington D.C. for about two weeks, and in June, they were deployed to Los Angeles during anti-ICE protests. Now, President Trump is threatening to send them  to Chicago, which he calls a “killing field.” Some Americans are embracing Trump’s expanded use of the National Guard, while others call him a dictator. According to the Chicago Police Department, homicides have drop...

President Trump says he wants to end mail-in voting and voting machines. The Constitution outlines that state governments manage their elections, but in a post on Truth Social, Trump said that the states simply serve as agents for the federal government. "They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do," he wrote. Any change to t...

President Trump promised to address crime in Washington, D.C. following an attack on a former DOGE employee. This week, the president put his plan into action. He ordered the deployment of 800 National Guardsmen to patrol the District. The guardsmen will be joined by members of a number of federal agencies. Is there more to the president’s decision than enforcing law and order?

The president will shift his focus from D.C. t...

President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Erika McEntarfer, after the organization released its July jobs report. Trump claimed that several reports under  McEntarfer had been manufactured to hurt him and his economic agenda. But will the firestorm around the jobs report hurt the credibility of the next commissioner?

A pair of House members have called out their respective parties in th...

Leaders in France, Canada, and the U.K. have stated they would recognize and call for Palestinian statehood at the next General Assembly of the United Nations. The calls from world leaders come on the heels of troubling images of starvation and famine in Gaza. President Trump has long been an ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but Trump also pushed back against Netanyahu’s claims that there was no starvatio...

President Donald Trump continued to air his grievances with the mainstream media this week. First, he filed a $20 billion defamation suit against The Wall Street Journal. The suit claims that a “bawdy” birthday letter to Jeffry Epstein that the paper attributed to Trump is a fake. The president took to Truth Social to demean the paper and its owner Rupert Murdoch. Amid his social media rant, he celebrated previous victorie...

Prior to his re-election in 2024, Donald Trump committed to releasing files related to several controversial investigations, including the Jeffrey Epstein case. Epstein was an alleged sex trafficker who died while in prison in 2019. Epstein’s connections to prominent figures and the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death created fodder for conspiracy theorists on the right. Last week, Trump’s DOJ and FBI announced ...

Authorities were still searching for survivors of the deadly July 4 floods in Central Texas when some Democrats started asking whether President Donald Trump’s cuts at the National Weather Service exacerbated the disaster. Republicans, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, accused those Democrats of “partisan finger-pointing.” How early is too early to talk about accountability? And is a nuanced policy conversation to prevent ...

Congress signed into law the “Big Beautiful Bill” this week. The bill survived slim margins to passage through the Republican-led Senate and House. GOP Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina was one of its strongest holdouts, citing the nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts outlined by the bill. His opposition created a war of words with President Trump and led Tillis to announce he would not seek re-election. Senator Tillis ...

President Trump’s decision to strike Iran has sparked debate in Congress over the executive branch’s ability to take military action without authorization. The strikes Trump ordered last week were in line with recent precedent. But some critics and supporters alike are calling for restrictions to his ability to take further action in Iran. House Speaker Mike Johnson called the debate ill-timed, and openly questioned the co...

President Trump has plans for securing peace after Israel launched a war with Iran. However, he’s keeping them to himself. A lack of clarity on whether the U.S. will support Israel has created a divide amongst interventionist and isolationist wings of Trump supporters. Which direction will Trump’s often-touted “America First” policy lead the U.S. in?

The federal government’s mass deportation efforts have expanded to work si...

Protests in Los Angeles sprang up this week as residents sought to deter ICE raids in several neighborhoods. The raids are part of a larger “mass deportation” program Trump promised to enact on the campaign trail. Recent polls show that mass deportation maintained popularity amongst a majority of voters, but will the images coming out of LA change the perception of immigration policy?

California Governor Gavin Newsom and LA...

President Donald Trump has made the “big, beautiful bill” a hallmark piece of legislation for his administration. However, the bill’s most vocal opponent has been one of Trump’s closest allies. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and former head of DOGE, has called out the bill for increasing the debt ceiling. Musk has been pushing for legislators to kill the bill. In a press conference with German chancellor Friedrich Merz...

The Trump administration has faced over 200 lawsuits in its first four months. The legal challenges range from deportation orders to Trump’s direct attacks on Harvard University’s funding. The White House has called the judges overruling their policies a “threat to the will of the American people.” Could Trump be making an enemy of the judiciary branch to help create a stronger executive?

The battle between Trump and Harvar...