In Israel, he plans to meet with hostage families and address the Knesset, and in Egypt, he will help lead a summit with more than 20 countries to discuss the peace process in Gaza.

Trump's pipsqueak congressional butler hides behind fake faith to protect pedophilia

The ABC News mainstay sparred with the vice president over claims Border Czar Tom Homan accepted bribes to lobby for government contracts.

Several Arab nations will attend the summit, along with the U.N. secretary-general and the heads of state from the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain.

President Donald Trump plans to greet released Israeli detainees before heading to Egypt for a summit of world leaders. Akayla Gardner reports from Washington, D.C. and David Noriega reports from Tel Aviv.

Billionaire Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, has warned that the United States may be sliding toward a new kind of internal fracture amid deepening inequality, mounting debt and a fracturing global order. In an interview with Bloomberg TV this week, Dalio argued that multiple arenas of conflict are now unfolding simultaneously — including economic, technological, geopolitical, and military struggles. According to him, the U.S. is already witnessing “a civil war of some sort” driven by “irreconcilable differences.” “We’re in wars. There is a financial, money war. There’s a technology war, there’s geopolitical wars, and there are more military wars. And so we have a civil war of some sort which is developing in the U.S. and elsewhere, where there are irreconcilable differences," he said, in remarks highlighted by Newsweek. Dalio laid out what he sees as the five key forces that have guided historical change: monetary systems, internal stability and disorder, geopolitics, natural forces, and technological advancement. He maintained that all five are now under pressure, especially as the U.S.-led world order faces growing turbulence. One of Dalio’s greatest concerns is the swelling U.S. national debt, which now hovers near $38 trillion. He cited the country’s debt-to-income ratio, around 120 percent, as particularly troubling, suggesting that debt servicing could crowd out essential government spending and trigger a “death spiral.” The billionaire investor also sees echoes of the late 1930s in today’s climate. “If you take the most analogous period,” he said, “I would say we’re in a period that’s quite like 1937‑38. You have a debt issue. You have the internal conflicts of wealth and how things should be run. Disorder existed — formed. Democracies stop being democracies. So we’re in a period that’s very much analogous. That’s plenty to worry about.” Dalio stressed that the U.S. is already enduring internal strife over how wealth is distributed and how the country should be governed, and that this polarization is fueling disorder. He warned that the internal political landscape is dangerously fragmented by rising wealth inequality and divergent visions for the future. Dalio is not alone among economists raising concerns. Steve Hanke, a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan, has cautioned that a shrinking money supply could push the U.S. into recession. Meanwhile, Moody’s chief economist, Mark Zandi, has flagged multiple economic indicators as “flashing red,” including signs of strain in consumer spending and labor markets.

On Gaza, President Trump put few, if any, guardrails on Israel’s offensive, bucking international demands for a cease-fire. Then he changed course.

Threats against federal judges in the United States have reached record levels this year, with the U.S. Marshals Service investigating more than 500 threats by September — a surge legal observers say reflects rising politicized hostility toward the judiciary. In an article for the Guardian published Sunday, investigative journalist Jason Wilson argued that El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele is seeking to export his authoritarian playbook to the U.S. by calling on President Donald Trump to impeach “corrupt judges.” Wilson noted that Bukele has made repeated public attacks on the US judiciary — including describing the country as “facing a judicial coup” — and that his latest call was amplified by pro‑MAGA figures such as tech billionaire Elon Musk. He writes that the timing of this intervention is significant, as the U.S. judiciary is already under unprecedented pressure from threats, harassment, and rhetorical assaults tied to the current Trump administration. Wilson cites figures showing hundreds of threats to federal judges in 2025, plus numerous instances of attacks on judges at the local level. The writer traced Bukele’s tactics back to actions his government took in 2021, when loyalist legislators dismissed constitutional court justices and the attorney general to install allies. He argued that although the U.S. system makes removal of judges difficult, the tactic being tested is not direct removal but delegitimisation and intimidation. According to Wilson, the Trump administration is using sustained attacks on the judiciary, repeating claims that courts are not co‑equal branches and targeting judges who rule against it, as a tool to discourage judicial review. He warned that consistent threats and undermining of institutional legitimacy may lead judges to hesitate in decisions that conflict with the administration’s agenda, weakening one of democracy’s key checks. The article quoted Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, who said: “Trump’s threats against judges have definitely driven online vitriol at judges and calls for impeachment. Targeting the judiciary is one more step in Trump’s march towards authoritarianism.” "That march towards authoritarianism has been well-trodden in recent years in several countries, including by Bukele," the article noted.

In an article published in his Substack Sunday, senior journalist and former CNN political commentator Jim Acosta argued that President Donald Trump’s behavior and proposals reflect a degree of mental decline that now demands serious consideration of invoking the 25th Amendment. Acosta said this is not mere partisanship, but a response to what he called mounting and alarming evidence that Trump is no longer fit to lead. "This is not a 'take the keys away from grandpa' (or cell phone) moment. It is time for a serious discussion about the 25th amendment to the U.S. Constitution," he wrote. The 25th amendment establishes a process to fill a vice‑presidential vacancy and allows for a temporary transfer of presidential authority to the Vice President, either at the President’s own written declaration of incapacity or via a declaration by the Vice President together with a majority of the Cabinet Acosta began with what he views as a recent example: a Truth Social post in which Trump claimed, falsely, that “THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD OF JANUARY 6.” He notes that Trump was president at that very moment, making the claim not merely false, but astonishing in its detachment from fact. "If there is one thing Truth Social is good for these days, it is that it somewhat reliably tracks the 79-year old president’s cognitive decline in real time. Just a few weeks ago, Trump apparently accidentally posted on that same account what was supposed to be a DM to Attorney General Pam Bondi, directing her to indict his perceived political enemies," the analyst said. Acosta cataloged a series of episodic lapses: a garbled pronunciation of “acetaminophen” while warning Americans against Tylenol, and Trump’s embrace of conspiracy‑laden claims about autism tied to circumcision — amplified, in Acosta’s view, by his Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Acosta maintained that these instances are not isolated oddities but symptoms of a deeper problem: Trump’s growing fixation on sweeping and unconstitutional powers. He points to Trump’s calls to invoke the Insurrection Act, an antebellum statute allowing the military to intervene in domestic unrest, as a kind of obsession. He argued that no rational president would seriously consider deploying the U.S. military in American cities, especially when violent crime rates are historically low. He warned that this impulse is both unconstitutional and dangerous. "Any consideration of Trump’s alarming mental state was absent from the news coverage surrounding his incendiary speech to the nation’s generals at Quantico late last month, when the president declared that the U.S. military should be sent to American cities for training purposes," he wrote. Acosta further wrote that rational debate about a president’s capacity is not off limits: under the 25th Amendment, the vice president and cabinet could declare the president incapacitated. He lamented that those who would make such a judgment, among them Vice President J.D. Vance and cabinet officials like Kennedy, are themselves political actors with conflicts of interest. “The thought of Trump’s latest ‘dear leader’ cabinet coming to our rescue is an insane notion, to be sure.” The writer framed the moment as a failure of collective will: Americans and institutions are refusing to confront a looming threat. He argued that denying Trump’s mental and behavioral decline is a form of normalization and gaslighting, and that the consequences of inaction could prove catastrophic.

Something dramatic has happened. Many people who consider themselves non-political or independent, or moderate Republican, or who even voted for Trump last November, can’t avoid seeing what’s now come so clearly into the open. And they’re finding it terrifying. They’ve watched Trump order the Texas National Guard into Portland and Chicago, over the objections of the mayors of those cities and the governors of Oregon and Illinois. They’ve heard him call for jailing the mayor of Chicago and governor of Illinois for opposing these moves. They’ve heard him threaten to invoke the Insurrection Act and send federal troops all over America. They’ve watched Trump’s ICE agents drag people out of their beds in the middle of the night, zip-tie them and their children, and haul them away. They’ve seen Trump’s prosecutors indict the attorney general of New York state because she held Trump accountable for fraud. And seen him threaten to do the same to a California senator because he conducted hearings in the House exposing Trump’s role in the attack on the Capitol. They’ve heard Trump say he can kill anyone who he claims is an enemy combatant trafficking drugs. They’ve heard Trump direct the IRS, FBI, and Justice Department against liberal groups that oppose him — George Soros’s Open Society Foundation; ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising organization; Indivisible, the community-based resistance organization. And they watched him take off the air comedians who criticize him — Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel. All across America, millions of people who have avoided politics, or identified as independents or moderate Republicans or even Trump voters, are shaken by what they’re seeing and hearing. It’s no longer Democrat versus Republican or left versus right. It’s now democracy versus dictatorship. Right versus wrong. It’s no longer a war on undocumented immigrants. It’s now a war on Americans. It’s no longer a foreign enemy. It’s now the “enemy within.” Across the land, average Americans are realizing that they too could be dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night by Trump’s ICE agents, or tear-gassed and arrested by Trump’s National Guard, or targeted by Trump’s prosecutors, or shot by Trump’s military. The Big Reveal is that all of us are now endangered. Multiple polls show Trump’s approval tanking, but I think it runs deeper than this. Something dramatic has happened over the last two weeks — as America sees more vividly than ever who Trump is, where he and his trio of lapdogs (Miller, Vought, and Vance) want to take the country, and how we’re all potential targets. The Big Reveal is impossible not to see. Trump and his lapdogs are doing all of this completely in the open. They have no shame. Most Americans abhor what they see, because what they see is abhorrent. This is how the great sleeping giant of America awakens, roars, and puts an end to it. Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

It’s tempting to believe the Democrats are winning the shutdown fight. After all, if Marjorie Taylor Greene, she of Jewish space laser fame, is now the voice of reason, something is surely going their way. On Monday, the Georgia congresswoman tweeted that “WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE ABSOLUTELY INSANE COST OF INSURANCE FOR AMERICANS,” after revealing that her adult kids are going to see their own Obamacare premiums increase by 100 percent. Taylor Greene said “not a single Republican in leadership talked to [the House GOP conference] about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!” The tide seems to be turning. “How can you tell Democrats have the upper hand in the week-old shutdown fight?” said MSNBC anchor and columnist Catherine Rampell. “Marjorie Taylor Greene just endorsed their key demand.” Indeed, others are putting the Democrats’ demand in a larger theory of political change. Symone Sanders Townsend, another MSNBC anchor and columnist, said the Democrats are winning because they are asking for something clearly defined in exchange for their support, not “some abstract principle or unreasonable demand.” She added: Fighting is the only way to win. Progress is never handed over; it is wrestled into being. From the Civil Rights Movement to the labor movement, history tells us that those who wait patiently for justice are the ones left behind. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Democrats are demanding something concrete: health care security for the people they represent. I don’t see any reason to doubt the assertion that the Democrats are currently winning the fight over the government shutdown, as polling suggests broad agreement in blaming Donald Trump and the GOP. I question the cause, though. The consensus among liberals and Democrats seems to be that a concrete “kitchen-table issue” like rising health insurance premiums is pushing public opinion and, therefore, forcing at least one highly influential House Republican to break ranks. But what if it’s simpler than that? What if public opinion is turning against the president and his party, because the shutdown has exposed something true about them? Donald Trump has acted like the Congress doesn’t matter, like the courts don’t matter, like the electorate doesn’t matter, like the law and the Constitution don’t matter. All the while the Republicans have greased the skids of his impunity. That includes the Republicans on the Supreme Court. They occasionally legalized his crimes after the fact. The president has been telling us for going on a decade that the Democrats are part of a vast, secret and malign conspiracy to destroy the country from the inside – the Democrats are now “the enemy within” same as “domestic terrorist organizations” – and that he is not only the solution to America’s problems but America’s retribution. And for the last 10 months, the administration, the congressional Republicans and, to a large extent, the Washington press corps have been talking about Donald Trump as if he were less a man than an act of God whose mandate by “real Americans” shall not be denied. The accumulated effect of all this effort has been turning the president into a tiger burning so brightly there’s no point in resisting him. Yet, despite the hype, the government is shut. The Democrats revealed a tiger made of paper. And all it took was the simple act of saying no. That’s a better explanation for polling that blames Trump. It’s not that the Democrats are making concrete demands. It’s that they’re fighting, period, using Obamacare subsidies as a credible pretext. They are forcing the president to step off, thus proving he’s neither invincible nor inevitable. Mostly, however, they’re proving he’s not what he seems, and the longer this fight goes on, the clearer that will get. Even to Republican voters. And that right there is the thing. From the point of view of the congressional Republicans, there’s nothing wrong with health insurance premiums going up by two or three or four times. They don’t care, even if their own people are suffering. This is evidenced by Medicaid cuts. They will devastate GOP voters, over a decade, out of public view, giving the Republican enough time to devise a plan to prevent their people from knowing Donald Trump and the Republicans have been scamming them the whole time. What they do care about is the shutdown giving the Democrats a chance to link the pain that GOP voters are about to feel to Donald Trump. That risks them knowing that he’s the one hurting them, not the Democrats, as well as knowing that the Democrats are trying to help them. The Republicans don’t care about pain, only the lessons of pain. The consensus right now seems to be that the Democrats are winning the shutdown, because Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to be standing up to the president. (Politico is calling it her “populist rebellion.”) More likely, however, is that Greene is like the canary in the coal mine, an early warning to Trump that something bad is coming, and it’s coming fast, namely, that the Republican Party is about to experience what happens when GOP voters realize what they have done to themselves. She suggested as much. Though she’s the first House Republican to endorse the Democratic side, she’s trying to shield Trump from the coming blowback. “I'm actually putting the blame on the speaker and Leader Thune,” she told CNN today. “This should not be happening ... We control the House and Senate and have the White House." The Democrats are winning, but not because they are sticking to economic issues that affect millions of Americans (including me, by the way). They are winning, because the consequence of their choice to fight has been to expose Trump’s weakness. He’s not what he seems. Perhaps, the same goes for Marjorie Taylor Greene. Though it’s a running joke that she’s suddenly the voice of reason, it’s rational for her to protect Trump. Among the worst things to happen to him and their party would be for GOP voters to learn the truth about them.

Mr. Scavino, one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted advisers and a deputy chief of staff, has been by his side since the 2016 campaign.