This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.  Sami Winc: So Victor, Donald Trump was actually a lot easier on his Secret Service and the others that were protecting him that night than actually you were.   He was interviewed by Norah O’Donnell. And he kind of said in that interview, and this is incidental to other things, but, well, you know, things happen and nothing goes quite as you expect in life, and he was kind of philosophic about it.  But I was wondering your thoughts on the interview. She seemed to want to bring out what the manifesto said, by the shooter, that Donald Trump was a pedophile, rapist, and traitor.   And he said, this is a shameful question to ask. Of course, I am none of those things. And you shouldn’t have this job. He was really combative. I loved it. And he was—that the lock—she asked him about the mocking of law enforcement, and that’s where he was kind of good on it, by the shooter saying, that this level of incompetence is insane.  Victor Davis Hanson: It’s not the, again, it’s not the individual officers. You could see the way they reacted, tactically, in that room. As soon as they heard the first shot, they jumped up and they dispatched people into the stairway. Go downstairs. They could tell where the sound came from. They got everybody out. They protected them. That wasn’t the problem.   The problem was that if somebody’s running by you and you have some agents there with firearms and you shoot five times and they’re all missing, that’s a problem. And you should not—that shouldn’t be in that venue with Trump.  I know it seats 2,500. I’ve been there for a White House Correspondence thing. You know it’s kind of a maze. But strategically is the breakdown. They didn’t have anybody to organize correctly, a means of security to get in and out of that hotel. If that guy got off the train with a suitcase with a shotgun and all that stuff, and he had to go through the main door of the hotel to check in, he wouldn’t have been able to go in there. And if they had everything covered, all the exits, he would not have been able to go in.  Winc: You know what you’re reminding me of, the guy in Las Vegas who got into that room on the upstairs. But he was there for an entire week before. So you know how long before would they have to, I think Donald Trump’s right about that, building that ballroom on the White House. It really would solve the problem.  Hanson: Yeah. I mean, everybody said, well, wouldn’t have a hotel—I got so—there was somebody in National Review—I’m not trying to single him out, but he said, oh, you know, it’s a terrible idea because it’s a government building. You can’t have private—come on. You can have a government-related event by the White House, even though it’s a private foundation, you can allow them to come into the government [building].   They rent all sorts of facilities from the government. They can do that. And it’s an advantage not to have a hotel because that just gets rid of a lot of your worries, that you don’t have to look at every single room. They all have to come to your place, bulletproof windows, cameras everywhere, completely designed for security. And I don’t know why they don’t do it. I know why they don’t do it, but it’s after this.  As far as Norah O’Donnell, I mean, she’s been humiliated by so many people. I think JD Vance and people.   But think about it, it would be as if FDR is doing a fireside chat and all of a sudden, I don’t know, Edward R. Murrow in World War II says, could I read you something? Here’s what  [Joseph] Goebbels said about you. And he said, you—and this is, I’m almost quoting verbatim what Goebbels would say—Rosestein, the Jewish puppet, has caused a whole war and attacked us and is committing atrocities, and we’re fighting the Bolshevik communist Jews. All this crazy stuff. And what would Roosevelt say? Oh, let me reply to that. How could you reply to it?  So nobody would do that. But she was airing a manifesto. It’s really weird because the press was always telling us when the trans shooter in Tennessee had the manifesto that basically said, from the little bit that leaked out, that trans was great, and anybody who opposed trans—and they hate he/she, she/he hated Christians. Oh, we can’t let that out because it might incite people against trans. Oh no.   But we can voice this thing because it will incite people, because he’s going to—I can get on national TV that Trump is the cause of his own assassination attempt. Trump didn’t have to be—let’s check it off—pedophile, rapist, traitor. And she wanted to get that out. And then she wanted to say, how do you feel about, basically, if you translate what she was saying, here’s the subtext. It wasn’t much—  Hey, Mr. President, how do you feel now that you committed rape and pedophilia and you were a traitor, what came around went around to you. And you got a boomerang. Do you feel like that was—that’s what she was saying.  Winc: Yeah. She was saying she agreed with this guy’s manifesto because, it in turn reflected hers, the Left’s ideas   Hanson: about Donald Trump.  And as I said, it was a petri dish. Where did she get this? Well, she got it from all these people repeating it ad nauseam. Jimmy Kimmel every night. Robert De Niro. Jeremy Raskin, Tim Walz when he went over to that Commie Social conference in Barcelona. And he trashed the United States and trashed our military effort, while we’re fighting. And said that it was fascism. That was the eighth time, seventh or eighth time, he’s called Trump a fascist.  So if you keep doing that, and doing that, and doing that, and you inundate social media and communications with all of these alleged stuff, then somebody’s going to say, well, I want to be a Luigi Mangione, because the coolest guy, Hasan Piker—he’s got a weird little great Islamic first name. He’s part Turkish, he’s kind of DEI and he drives an $80,000 Porsche and he is a multimillionaire and his parents were multimillionaires and he’s a commie. This is great. He is cool. Well, when they echo all of that, then they come out of the woodwork.  Where did they get it originally? Well, it’s a petri dish. If you go through the rapist—the rapist came from Judge Kaplan,in the E. Jean Carroll case. That was a complete travesty. And if you want to read about it, as I said to Jack, I wrote about it in Counter-Revolution at length.   It was the biggest travesty of a thing I’ve ever read in my life. She’s completely—they had a bill of attainder, which is illegal. The New York Legislature, just to hurt Trump, passed a law that said for one year there will be no statute of limitations on sex allegation crimes. And that was for her. And then she immediately filed it, and she didn’t know the date. She didn’t—anyway, my point is that, that thing was a joke. And they acquitted him of rape.  They said he was guilty of sexual assault. And they don’t know what happened. And that he said, she said. She said she accompanied him willingly to a dressing room and they closed the door, and they engaged in contact. But she felt he went too far. So they called that sexual assault, according to no witnesses, nothing.  Winc: No. And a Left-wing jury,   Hanson: And she said her favorite—in, you know, ten years, later or 20 years later, said her favorite show was The Apprentice.  And she thought Donald Trump was great. So when she saw him, he was a celebrity. She thought even then. But my point is that, that’s what the judge said. Well, he wasn’t convicted of rape, but it was equivalent to it. It wasn’t. Or they would have convicted him. And then [George] Stephanopoulos got that and said, rapist, rapist, rapist, rapist, rape. 11 times. And lost that—They had to settle.  Winc: That was CBS.  Hanson: I thought it was ABC.  Winc: Was that ABC? Well, said that CBS was paying him millions. He was on 60 Minutues. Donald Trump said…  Hanson: Well, they are too. Yeah, they both are, I think. And then pedophilia came from the Epstein files. All these people said he is holding the Epstein files. And they never said why [Joe] Biden held it for four years. Well, there were a lot more Democrats in the Epstein files than Republicans. And one of the victims said that Donald Trump, and so did [Gislaine] Maxwell, had nothing to do with it, with the sex crime. But they issued that Democratic talking point.  Traitor, that came from—James Clapper said that Donald Trump was [Vladimir] Putin’s poodle. And so did [John] Brennan. He said he was working with the Russians. All of them did during Russian Collusion. That was all debunked, even [Robert] Mueller couldn’t prove it.  So they were all lies. And she wanted to get those lies on national TV and then say, if you hadn’t—Mr. President, if you hadn’t been a rapist, a pedophile, and a traitor, you probably wouldn’t have been shot. How do you feel about that? And that’s what made him get angry.  Winc: Yeah. And he didn’t let her do that because he just said, those are all demonstrably untrue. And nobody that was a professional interviewer would ever do that. You are the worst interviewer. It was a fascinating interview to watch. I recommend it to everybody.  She deserved it.  Yeah, she deserved every bit. Donald Trump really gave it to her.  Hanson: The thing about Trump is—everybody gets angry   Winc: that he can be rude and uncooth but just ask yourself real quickly—she would have done that with any other president, that was a Republican. She would.  She wouldn’t have done that with any …  Hanson: I think she would have.  Winc: You think?  Hanson: If she could go—they did it—they tried to do that with George W. Bush, with the National Guard. And they said he was a coward. And they tried to do it with George H.W. Bush. He was a war hero, and they tried to—I think—a guy wrote article in—I don’t know which magazine—and he said he had bailed out too early and he got his two people killed. And it was crazy.  But my point—and if you look at what they said about [John] McCain. He can’t remember which house—he has 11 houses. He doesn’t know where he is. And he had an affair. With Romney, they said he hazed people in high school. He put his dog out there. Remember that? All that stuff.   But none of them would have ever said to a reporter, you should be ashamed of yourself. That is disgusting. And that’s why people voted for Trump, because they were tired of the Marquess of Queensberry rules. That every Republican candidate, whether it’s the losing track of Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney, or it was the winning track after, Reagan and George H.W. and George W., they didn’t want to get down and fight in the gutter. And I’m not saying it’s the gutter, but they didn’t want to get dirty.   And the last guy that wanted to get dirty was Lee Atwater. And he got dirty. And he destroyed Michael Dukakis and tore off his—he called it the bark. Boston Harbor ad, Tank ad, Willie Horton ad. And he got Bush elected. And then they thought, I’m never going to do that again. I would rather lose nobly than win ugly. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of video analysis by The Daily Signal’s Senior National Security and Legal Analyst Mehek Cooke.  Louisiana v. Callais is the test case, but the real fight is in the Southern House map. This is why the Supreme Court ruling matters far beyond one state, one district, and one congressional map. This was not a technical redistricting case. This is actually the beginning of a national fight over whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act can continue to be used as a legal crowbar to force race-based districts that often produce Democratic seats. The left wants to frame this as the Supreme Court gutting voting rights—that is furthest from the truth, and that’s not what happened. The court said something much more basic. The Voting Rights Act protects access to the ballot. It does not give politicians on either side a blank check to sort Americans by race or political advantage. That is why this ruling is so politically explosive, especially for Democrats, because they spent years using the redistricting playbook that was simple: identify racial disparity, demand a race-based district, call it civil rights, and lock in the political benefit. And the Supreme Court just made that playbook much harder to run. In Louisiana v. Callais, the court actually held the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district. Because the Voting Rights Act did not require that map. Louisiana could not use compliance with the Voting Rights Act as a compelling interest to justify race-based line drawing. The results are clear: the map was unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. And that actually matters because the control of the House may come down to five to 10 seats. And every district line, every court ruling, and every map is going to matter for this midterm and beyond. And Democrats know this. This is exactly why they’re not fighting to persuade voters. They were actually trying to change the battlefield before voters even show up to vote. They go to court, they demand a mid-decade map change, they push racial formulas, and they call it representation when it helps them win power. But, hey, when Republicans draw maps for partisan advantage, Democrats call that a death to democracy. That is hypocrisy. Democrats do not hate gerrymandering. They hate gerrymandering when it doesn’t benefit them. They do not hate courts intervening in elections. They only hate courts that do not deliver Democratic outcomes. That’s exactly why they’re having a meltdown over the Supreme Court decision. And they don’t hate changing the rules. They only hate it when Republicans learn how to play by the rules that Democrats created—and win. And this ruling exposes all of it. So the real question is: What happens to—not only in Louisiana, but what happens across the South based on this decision? Louisiana is the cleanest example because it’s the case itself. The court struck down the 2024 map that created a second majority-Black district. Now, that doesn’t mean that every majority-minority district in America is just going to disappear tomorrow. That is not the right way to describe it, but it does mean that states now have stronger arguments that the Voting Rights Act cannot be used as a shield for race-first redistricting—unless the law really requires it. And that’s the key line: The Voting Rights Act protects voters. It does not authorize racial engineering. Now let’s look at what happened in Florida right after this case. Florida is the first major political response to the Callais era. Republican leaders immediately understood the House map. They see an opening to revisit districts that were previously defended under race-based theories by Democrats. So it’s safe to say Florida didn’t wait for the dust to settle. Florida actually looked at the ruling and understood the political consequences immediately. Now, Florida still has its own constitutional redistricting rules. They have to look at the Constitution and their process. I’m sure there will be litigation, so this isn’t over, but Florida shows Democrats exactly why they’re worried. The Supreme Court changed the legal weather, and Republican-led states are already asking how far can they go. And then there’s Alabama. Alabama is where the Left won one of the biggest recent redistricting victories. A court-ordered map actually helped to create a second Black-opportunity district, and that, again, helped Democrats. But after Callais, Alabama Republicans have a much stronger argument that the old Section 2 theory is weaker. We need to be precise here, though: Alabama doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to have an overnight 2026 change. There are still court orders, timing issues, election deadlines, but again, Alabama is now a future battlefield. And the line is simple here: Alabama is where the Left won the last redistricting war, but Louisiana may be where the legal theory actually starts to collapse here for them. Then we look at Tennessee. Tennessee shows how fast this political world understood the decision. The ruling came down, and Republicans immediately began discussing whether Tennessee’s Memphis-based Democratic district should survive in its current form based on the Supreme Court decision. That meant the Callais ruling instantly, again, became a political tool. Tennessee is at a pressure point. The court has moved, and Republicans saw an immediate opening. The same thing with Mississippi, matters here too, because this ruling in Mississippi is not limited to congressional maps. The governor of Mississippi has actually called a special session to redraw Mississippi Supreme Court districts. And that tells us all something, something very important: that the Callais decision is already being understood as a new legal framework for race-conscious redistricting fights at a state level, too. Now, again, this is going to be tested. This is not a new rule of the game. When race drives the map, the state will have to prove the law actually requires it. Political convenience is not enough. Racial balancing will not be enough. A party’s desire to protect a favorable seat will not be enough. Look at Georgia. Georgia is the future battleground. It’s not an immediate change, but it is more politically competitive, and there’s actually several Democratic-held seats that have a large Black population. The Callais ruling, again, gives Republicans a stronger argument that racial composition can’t be treated as a controlling factor forever. Again, this does not mean every map is going to change tomorrow, but it does mean that every race-based defense gets a harder look. And then there’s South Carolina. South Carolina, again, it’s not an immediate redraw here either, but it is a warning sign. South Carolina has already been part of major litigation over race and congressional maps. Callais gives Republican mapmakers a stronger argument when Democrats continue to claim that the Voting Rights Act requires race-based protection of certain districts. South Carolina is actually going to show the new legal fight. Democrats will always call Republican maps racially based, and Republicans need to start pushing back and say partisan advantage is not the same thing as racial discrimination. And after Callais, that distinction matters more than ever. And this brings us to what this is all about: the midterms. This is not an overnight redraw of the entire South, but it is something more important. Because now we’re looking at a new legal map for every future redistricting fight, and Democrats know that. The House may come down to five to 10 seats. They know that race-based litigation has helped protect the seats, but that old playbook has been thrown out the window by the Supreme Court. This is exactly why Republicans shouldn’t be on the defensive about this ruling. The message is simple: one person, one vote—not one racial category, one political outcome. Districts should serve citizens. Citizens should not be sorted to serve districts. That is the contrast, and that is something every Republican should repeat over and over again. And Democrats have a major hypocrisy problem. They have spent years saying democracy dies when Republicans question elections, but they question the legitimacy of every court that rules against them. Democrats have spent years saying institutions must be protected, those are their words, but when they lose at the Supreme Court level, they threaten court packing. Democrats have spent years saying maps must be fair, but when they have power in blue states, they redraw, redesign, manipulate maps to squeeze out every possible Democratic seat. So spare Americans the lecture about democracy, because this isn’t about democracy at all. It’s about control and it’s about power. When the rules hurt Democrats, they call the rules racist—that’s their playbook. When courts help Democrats, they call it justice. When courts stop Democrats, they call it extremism. Just see what they’re saying about the Supreme Court today. The left’s real fear is not the Supreme Court ended voting rights, because it didn’t. The Left’s real fear is that courts weakened one of their favorite ways to manufacture House seats—calling everything racist. The Voting Rights Act was meant to protect access to the ballot. It was never meant to become a Democratic seat-protection plan. That is the line Republicans should repeat over and over again. Most Americans don’t want to be treated as a racial inventory. They don’t want their communities to be carved up by political lawyers who see them as race first, then voters, and last as citizens. They want fair elections. They want equal rules. They want representation to actually answer to the people and not to these racial formulas. That is why the ruling matters. Louisiana is the test case. Florida is the first response. We’re going to see Alabama is going to have a pending fight. Tennessee is a pressure point. Mississippi shows this goes far beyond even Congress, as they’re looking at Supreme Court races there. Georgia and South Carolina show where the next round of litigation could go. This ruling may not redraw every single seat before November, but it does change the rules of engagement for every map fight after November. And if the midterms come down to a handful of seats, this decision may be remembered as the moment the Supreme Court stopped race from being used as a backdoor to political power. And here’s the bottom line: Democrats thought Section 2 was a mapmaking machine, and the Supreme Court reminded them through this ruling it is a voting rights law. The court did not end voting rights. It actually ended the idea that voting rights language can be used to justify racial gerrymandering whenever it helps one political party. And Americans today are seeing that we are not racial categories. We are citizens first, and the Constitution does not exist to help politicians draw themselves back into power.

The hardline conservative faction of the House of Representatives is frustrated with the Senate, which has brushed aside House legislation reforming federal surveillance and banning the creation of a central bank digital currency. Going forward, these House Republicans are concerned the Senate may also choose to ignore their ambitious farm legislation, all while the SAVE America Act—which would require proof of citizenship and photo identification in federal elections—has lost momentum in the Senate. “The agenda of the American people is suffering and lagging behind and the Senate, unfortunately, is just responsible for that,” Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., a member of the House Freedom Caucus said Thursday. However, House hardliners are not taking their anger out on Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., whose standing appears to have strengthened with the conservative faction. Historically, the head of the party in the House is the punching bag on which the rank-and-file take out their frustrations. Instead, these conservatives are declaring a war of words against the Senate, arguing that the House has proven its competence. House Republicans delivered huge priorities for the country in the last few days:The Farm Bill to bring certainty and relief to rural AmericaFISA reauthorization to detect national security threatsFULL funding for the Department of Homeland Security — including border… pic.twitter.com/PuJAfRR0ar— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) April 30, 2026 “The discord is not over here” in the House, Perry said. “The discord is between the two bodies.” It was a marathon week for the speaker, who helped end the 75-day shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, pass a massive new “farm bill” to score wins with farmers ahead of midterms, extend an expiring federal spy power, and set up a process which will inject funding into immigration enforcement. The Senate Gets Its Way But in a few instances, the Senate simply bossed around the House. The House overcame major disagreements to pass a three-year reformed extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).  House privacy hawks, who argued the surveillance program has been abused to spy on American citizens, won reforms and advanced a ban on the creation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), which Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, has called a “dystopian surveillance tool.” But the Senate refused to consider this framework, which Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., called “dead on arrival” in his chamber. Let's be clear: @HouseGOP has been doing its job.We've passed the SAVE America Act multiple times, yet where is the Senate?It's time for @SenateGOP to quit punting and do their job. The American people are waiting. pic.twitter.com/Ny9WRyiaCv— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) April 30, 2026 “They won’t even put it on the freaking floor for a debate,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, ranted Thursday. Instead, the Senate sent the House a 45-day clean extension of the program to buy time for further negotiations, which the House passed. Gathered outside the Capitol, members of the House Freedom Caucus expressed to reporters their displeasure with the Senate’s lack of interest in passing House bills. When lazy Senators refuse to do their job, the House should not reward them.@RepKeithSelf pic.twitter.com/wRkGZ0V1kd— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) April 30, 2026 Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, told reporters he would fight for the House’s work, including if the Senate attempts to advance its own farm bill that ignores House priorities. “I am positive,” he said. “The [digital currency ban] is still alive. We’ve got FISA now still alive… Let’s just push on. The Senate will respond to the people if they push hard enough.” Johnson’s Conservative Backing On Friday, several of these hard-liners spoke in defense of the speaker. The Speaker has a 3 seat margin, yet we’ve passed tax cuts, welfare reform, cut green scam subsidies, SAVE America, Farm bill with some reforms, Flat discretionary spending, FISA with reforms & a CBDC ban,” Roy said on X in defense of Johnson’s record. “Speaker Mike Johnson entered the week with the liberal media gloating about how he could never deliver on the three major issues the House had to deal with this week — FISA, funding our border, and our much-needed Farm Bill,” wrote House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris on X, adding that he “delivered all three of these.”

Republican and Democratic family ecosystems are increasingly different from one another, especially on how they balance work and family. A survey of how family life has become a partisan faultline is useful in today’s hyper-charged environment, not least to inform rhetoric and politics. Consider this a one-stop shop for the latest surveys on “The Woman Question.” Republicans marry earlier than Democrats. Total fertility rates among Republicans are markedly higher than they are among Democrats, as is expected fertility. Ditto for marriage rates. Gaps among the young are even more pronounced. Around 75% of liberal women under 35 were childless in 2024, compared with around 40% of conservative women, according to research based the General Social Survey. In 2010, the difference was only 5%. Democratic moms balance work and family differently than Republican moms. Nearly three-fourths of self-identified liberal women with young children work full-time, compared to only about a third of conservative women. Only 16% of liberal women with young children stay at home and just 10% have side-hustles. In contrast, 36% of conservative women with young children stay home and 20% work part-time. These actions reveal preferences. Almost half of self-identified liberal women (46%) would rather work full-time even when young kids are young, while only about half as many similarly-situated conservative women (28%) prefer full-time work. Republican women attend church more frequently and profess belief in God at higher rates than Democratic women, especially among those born after 1980. Liberal women are lonelier and less happy than conservative women. Married liberal women are unhappier than conservative married women too. Self-identified liberal women take antidepressants at much higher rates, claim to have mental health conditions at much higher rates, are politically active in much higher rates, and jettison friendships over politics at much higher rates than conservative women. Democratic women are more likely to pursue independence and self-actualization, while most Republican women see the self and their family as more interconnected. Republican women are, according to one academic study, even more attractive than Democrat women. These differences affect electoral politics. Single women are now a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, while married women have moved modestly but consistently toward Republicans. In the most recent election, more than two-thirds of single women voted against Donald Trump, while Trump carried roughly 60% of married men, the majority of married women, and nearly half of single men. These numbers have been pretty consistent since 2012. The cohort of single women on the left stands apart as the most ideologically extreme segment of the electorate, holding far-left views on a host of social issues, including immigration, DEI policies, affirmative action, abortion, global warming, and gender ideology. Republican women (both single and married), by contrast, are more mainstream, though not monolithically so. The vast majority of Republicans do not believe in preferential hiring and promotions for women (70% of Republican men and 53% of Republican women), while only 32% of Democratic men and 20% of Democratic women think companies should not engaged in such practices. Democrats are more likely to run women for office; Republicans politically platform fewer women. Sixteen of 47 Democratic senators are women (34%), while 10 of 53 Republican Senators are women (19%). Ninety-four of the 215 Democratic House members are women (44%), while only 31 of the 220 Republicans are (14%). Similar gaps exist at the state level, according to my calculations. America currently has 7,386 state legislators. 4,981 are men and 2,405 are women. 868 Republican legislators are women (21%), while Democrats are closely divided with 1,602 women (49.5%) and 1,631 men. Political changes reflect different expectations from marriage and marital roles. Republican women worry about the feminization of men and are more likely to hope their husbands serve as loving providers, while Democrat women prefer allies and mere friendship in marriage. According to a Manhattan Institute survey, two-thirds of Republicans think society is “too feminine” and hope for more masculine thinking (78% of Republican men and 58% of Republican women), while only one-third of all Democrats share the same view. Almost 40% of conservative women favor a return to “traditional gender roles,” while fewer than 5% of liberal women do. In 2024, 68% of Democrats thought “men have it easier in the US today,” up from 49 % in 2017, while only 32% of Republicans in 2024 agreed. The Democratic and Republican sexual ecosystems are not entirely distinct, of course. Some Democrats still marry young, have children early, and stay at home. Likewise, some Republican women desire to pursue full-time work like their Democrat sisters but still vote Republican. For decades, however, the overall direction had seemed clear: Republican women drifted more slowly toward the Democrat vision of womanhood. Now increasingly Republican women, especially younger women, have either stayed put or moved in a somewhat more traditional direction while Democrat women are becoming significantly more liberal in actions and in thought. Precisely what this growing divide means for politics and, indeed, American culture should occupy scholars, political parties, and all concerned citizens. It will affect political tactics, public policy and public rhetoric.

President Donald Trump is lifting the 10% tariff on whiskey from Britain, as a parting gift to King Charles at the end of his four-day royal visit to the United States. “The King and Queen got me to do something that nobody else was able to do, without hardly even asking!” Trump declared Thursday on Truth Social. “I will be removing the Tariffs and Restrictions on Whiskey having to do with Scotland’s ability to work with the Commonwealth of Kentucky on Whiskey and Bourbon, two very important Industries within Scotland and Kentucky,” Trump said. “People have wanted to do this for a long time, in that there had been great Inter-Country Trade, especially having to do with the Wooden Barrels used.” BREAKING: Donald Trump has lifted all tariffs on Scottish whiskey and bourbon following a request from the King pic.twitter.com/AaHt73GdTf— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) April 30, 2026 The news was celebrated in Kentucky. “For generations, Kentucky and Scotland have been close partners in crafting the world’s most sought-after whiskies,” Kentucky Distillers’ Association President Eric Gregory said in a statement. “This action restores reciprocal, tariff-free trade between our historic spirits and is especially important for Kentucky, as Scotch distillers have long been the largest export market for Kentucky’s used bourbon barrels.” Chris Swonger, president and CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council, said the national trade association was “very pleased” with the president’s decision. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., agreed the announcement was “welcome news,” noting that “95% of the world’s bourbon is produced in the Commonwealth.” On the other side of the Atlantic, British trade minister Peter Kyle also welcomed the move, saying, “This is great news for our Scotch whisky industry, which is worth almost £1 billion in exports and supports thousands of jobs across the U.K.” The world’s top spirits maker and owner of the Johnnie Walker brand, Diageo, said Friday it “warmly” welcomed the news that the U.S. and Britain had agreed to restore tariff-free trade for Scotch whisky. Diageo’s stock rose 3% in Friday morning trading. King Charles himself “sends his sincere gratitude” for the decision, a Buckingham Palace spokesperson said. “His Majesty will be raising a dram to the President’s thoughtfulness and generous hospitality as he departs the U.S. after a most enjoyable state visit for both Their Majesties in this special anniversary year.” Reuters contributed to this report.