WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump, the very man who branded former President Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe” during the 2020 and 2024 campaigns, has been caught on camera seeming to nod off—during Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting and a recent Oval Office event. Critics on the Left are gleeful. Let them have their jollies. Because one of these old men is not like the other. Trump, 79, has presided over nine Cabinet meetings this year. Biden, 83, held nine Cabinet meetings during his four years in office. During a Tuesday interview, DealBook founder Andrew Ross Sorkin brought up Trump’s health. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent brought up “one of the greatest scandals” of all time: the media’s lack of coverage of Biden’s “diminished capacity.” Noting that Trump just held a lengthy Cabinet meeting and phoned him twice at 2 a.m. last week, Bessent argued, “For 10 months, the Biden administration did not have a Cabinet meeting. How are you going to invoke the 25th Amendment if the Cabinet secretaries never see the president? Which they didn’t.” While cable news channels are all over clips of Trump seemingly nodding off, they weren’t exactly profiles in courage with Biden who, in 2020, campaigned for the White House from the privacy of his Delaware home. Biden’s lockdown campaign was followed by a COVID-19 presidency known for hospital masks, school closures and talking up working from home. Trump plowed through COVID-19. He understood the importance of getting Americans back to work. I’ll never forget the October 2020 evening when Trump returned to the White House after spending 72 hours at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he was treated for the coronavirus. After Marine One touched down on the South Lawn, Trump walked up the long, crescent-shaped South Portico stairs and, from the balcony, took off his light mask and saluted in a show of will and resilience. From day one of his second term, Trump went after bad regulations. Just this week he proposed rolling back car fuel efficiency standards. His Make America Healthy Again campaign has taken on the childhood disease crisis. His robust enforcement of immigration law has discouraged illegal border crossings. No small feat: Trump brokered a Gaza ceasefire deal that resulted in Hamas’ release of the surviving 20 Israeli hostages. Trump talks to the press almost daily. In 2022, The New York Times reported that Biden had given 38 interviews during a fixed point in the presidency compared with 116 for Trump’s first term, 198 for former President Barack Obama, 71 for George W. Bush and 75 for Bill Clinton. It’s not just the media. Biden was cloistered even from his own staff. In the tell-all book “Original Sin,” Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson write of the insider who told them, “Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.” At Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, Trump was engaged, not asleep at the switch. He hopscotched from one issue to the next. Yes, at moments he seemed to be fighting to keep his eyes open. Rather than react defensively, however, Trump confronted the age question.  “I’ll let you know when there’s something wrong,” Trump offered. “There will be someday. That’s going to happen to all of us. But right now I think I’m sharper than I was 25 years ago. But who the hell knows?” Is Trump cognitively sharper than he was 25 years ago? Probably not, given his age. But he knows more about the presidency and the world, which has made him remarkably effective. And there’s no mystery as to who’s making the decisions in this administration. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Sleepy Donald Trump? Umm, No, He’s Not Joe Biden appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump made quite the stir in recent days after declaring he does not want Somalis in the U.S.   Somalia “stinks and we don’t want them in our country,” according to the president, who added that Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who is Somali, is “garbage.”   Trump’s comments come after news broke that a fraud scheme among Minnesota’s Somali population cost taxpayers over $1 billion. Authorities are investigating multiple plots in which Somalis are alleged to have stolen taxpayer money by claiming social services benefits.   “Nonprofits tied to the Somali community claimed to have fed tens of thousands of nonexistent hungry children, claimed to have provided services to non-existent homeless, and claimed to have provided therapy for nonexistent autistic Somali children,” according to the White House. “Kickbacks were paid, lavish lifestyles were funded, and money was sent overseas–some of it even allegedly funneled to a terror group.”  Additionally, Trump has paused all visas for Afghan nationals. This happened after a man from Afghanistan, who has been living in the U.S. since the fall of Kabul in 2021, shot two National Guard members near the White House the day before Thanksgiving, killing U.S. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom.    And after Trump vowed to pause immigration from “developing nations countries,” the U.S. has frozen all immigration applications for foreigners from 19 counties, and is reviewing applications that were approved during the four years of the Biden administration. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed on Fox News Thursday that the list will be expanded to “over 30” nations, but did not specify.   For now, the list includes: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Burundi, Chad, Cuba, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, and Yemen.   On today’s edition of “Problematic Women,” we discuss Trump’s heightened immigration crackdown, and why assimilation is nonnegotiable.   Plus, what is going on with the narco-terrorist boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific? We break it down. And Sabrina Carpenter is mad at the White House for using her music in an immigration enforcement video. All this and more on this week’s show!   The post Who Gets to Be an American? Trump Has an Answer   appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: 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 VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.  In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Winc discuss a recent phenomenon in New York City where prosecutors are going after people who defend themselves with unlicensed firearms and what the ousting of the Oxford Union president-elect says about the current state of higher education across the western world. The post Victor Davis Hanson: Why Alvin Bragg Refuses To Recognize the Awesome Power of the Second Amendment appeared first on The Daily Signal.

I am very willing to criticize President Donald Trump. From tariffs to some of his pardons to his behavior, I am not willing to serve as an apologist or yes-man. He is surrounded by those who will not truly challenge him. We all know the difference between superficial pretenses of pushback and genuine pushback. I suspect he doesn’t actually like pushback once he has embraced a bad idea like tariffs. While I am willing to criticize the president, and such criticisms have cost me jobs and opportunities over the years, there are also many things he has done that I agree with. As an aside, the poor man zone of punditry on the Left and Right is being the person willing to praise and criticize from inside the tent. Going all in and all against is what sells. Nuance does not. But let me now make a nuanced case for the president. The legally meritorious argument is simply stated. Narcotics trafficking is a federal crime. Drug traffickers have been running drugs into the United States for decades and it has all along been treated as a crime. Recently, the Trump administration quietly took into custody 55 senior Mexican cartel members, who are now being housed in supermax prisons. Therefore, because Congress has designated narcotics trafficking across borders as a crime, the president lacks the power to change a crime into an act of war. As a result, blowing up the boats of narcotics traffickers is not a legal act and redesigning them as “narcoterrorists’ does not get around legal definitions that make the act a crime, not an act of war. I must dissent. Over the past several years, we have reliable and credible information that the Chinese communists have funneled the chemicals and materials into Central and South America to make drugs much more potent and lethal. The drug traffickers are entering the United States and both addicting and killing Americans with the drugs. Additionally, over the past decade, as the United States focused more on the Middle East than the Western Hemisphere, the drug cartels in Central and South America have increasingly intermingled with various governmental regimes, which are complicit in the trafficking of drugs and the killing of American citizens. The drug traffickers as a stand-alone enterprise, may be criminal narcotics traffickers, but in collaboration with the Chinese communists and nation-state regimes south of our border, they have become narcoterrorists. Kill them. The president is reasserting American dominance of the Western Hemisphere and that must mean breaking up the ties between the drug cartels and nation-states. During the Joe Biden administration, though they have attempted to revise history, Biden named Kamala Harris as his border czar. She went to Central America to explore the “root causes” of the mass illegal migration stream headed into the United States. Cartel and gang violence dominated the discussions, but the Biden administration treated Nayib Bukele as a pariah for solving his nation’s crime and violence problem. Bukele transformed El Salvador from one of the most violent to one of the safest nations in Central America. He showed that yes, contrary to what Democrats claim, we can incarcerate out of the crime and violence problem. Not only did the Biden administration treat Bukele as a pariah, but they lied about the wave of mass illegal immigration into the United States, insisting the borders were secure, and did little to stem the tide of fentanyl and other drugs flowing into the United States. Trump has closed the border, embraced Bukele, and gone to war against the cartels that were already at war with us. Just because they speak Spanish, not Arabic, and do not blow themselves and us up, makes them no less terrorist enterprises than Al Qaeda or ISIS, but unlike those Islamic organizations, the cartels also control nation-states through proxies. Trump is right to wage war on them. But it is also why he should not have pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was one of the drug cartel ring leaders. The president’s policies are right, but he keeps sending the wrong and mixed messages. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post At War With Cartels appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The State Department and a congressional delegation have engaged with a top-ranking Bosnian official who earlier this year reportedly touted potential cooperation with the government of Iran for military industry development.  The same official, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Defense Minister Zukan Helez, also smeared Heritage Foundation Research Fellow Max Primorac over his congressional testimony this week.  Last week, the U.S. Embassy to Bosnia and Herzegovina promoted a meeting Helez had with two members of Congress, Reps. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and Donald Norcross, D-N.J.  Rep. Mike Turner and Rep. Donald Norcross met with Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Minister of Defense Zukan Helez and Deputy Minister of Defense Aleksandar Goganovi? today to discuss our shared interest in a secure and stable BiH, and to highlight the importance of our continuing… pic.twitter.com/JY6AkMwKOa— US Embassy Sarajevo (@USEmbassySJJ) November 25, 2025 The embassy, which used “BiH” to refer to the Balkan state, said the members of Congress and Helez discussed “shared interest in a secure and stable BiH, and to highlight the importance of our continuing U.S.-BiH security partnership, which has secured 30 years of peace in BiH, bolstered regional stability, and enhanced economic opportunities for citizens of both the United States and Bosnia and Herzegovina.” In May, Helez met with Brigadier Mahmoud Mohaghagh Pour, the non-resident military envoy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Sarajevo Times reported.  “Minister Helez emphasized that he will never forget the assistance to Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Iran provided during the war years, when it was most needed,” the outlet reported. “He noted that he believes that Iran and Bosnia and Herzegovina can also cooperate in the field of military industry development, taking into account all political circumstances and the state structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” The report went on to say: “Pour announced to Minister Helez an invitation for high-level delegations from BiH and Iran to exchange visits, with the aim of considering the possibility of establishing closer bilateral cooperation between the Ministries of Defense of BiH and Iran.” Helez is an “extremist,” and “Iran’s point man in the Balkans,” said J. Michael Waller, senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy in a post on X Friday.   Why is US Embassy promoting Bosnia's Islamic extremist defense minister Zukan Helez? Helez is Iran's point man in the Balkans. In league with jihadists, Helez executed Christian prisoners. @RepMikeTurner @DonaldNorcross https://t.co/F2NMslhiel— J Michael Waller (@JMichaelWaller) December 5, 2025 Waller also noted that Helez verbally attacked Max Primorac, a senior research fellow with The Heritage Foundation, after Primorac testified before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe. Helez called him the spawn of “fascists” and “Nazis”, Waller noted.  Immediately after @Heritage foreign policy veteran Max Primorac testifies in the House to defend the president's foreign policy agenda, Bosnia's defense minister Zukan Helez calls him the spawn of fascists and Nazis. The @USEmbassySJJ is promoting Helez. @DeputySecState https://t.co/qBimgVl3mz— J Michael Waller (@JMichaelWaller) December 5, 2025 Primorac said the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo has not criticized the Helez statement. A former official in the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, Primorac said that embassies typically defend Americans.  “Helez is sending the message to anyone in the future, you criticize us, we will come after you,” Primorac told The Daily Signal.  He also blames the embassy more than the members of Congress for the meeting, since embassies have the background information on officials.  “The embassies arrange meetings for congressional delegations. They put these guys in a compromising position,” Primorac said. “There are no new political employees in the embassy there. Nothing has changed from the Biden administration.” The Daily Signal reached out to the State Department, as well as to the offices of both Turner and Norcross, but did not get a response by Friday afternoon.  The Daily Signal also reached out to the Bosnia and Herzegovina Embassy in the United States by phone and email, as well as Bosnia’s Ministry of Defense and the office of the prime minister by email. None responded by publication time.  Primorac wrote a Heritage Foundation report in July detailing some of the historic ties between the Balkan nation and Iran.  “Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps established long-term ties to Bosniak leaders, especially those in the intelligence services,” the report explains. “Thirty years on, these ties remain as BiH’s Muslim leaders have revived wartime ties with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood while undergoing radicalization via years of external funding of hardline imams.” “The May 2025 visit of a high-level Iranian defense official to meet with the BiH’s Muslim minister of defense prompted a sharp rebuke from the Trump Administration,” Primorac’s report continued. “The radicalization of BiH’s Muslim authorities reached its apex last month [June 2025] when they cancelled the biannual meeting in Sarajevo of the Conference of European Rabbis, calling their meeting ‘morally offensive’ as ‘support will be sent to the occupier [Israel]… who commits genocide against the innocent population of Gaza.’” The post Why Are US Officials Promoting a Meeting With an Ally of Iran? appeared first on The Daily Signal.