President Donald Trump is reportedly considering an executive order to secure American elections without relying on Congress passing legislation. Trump has directed his counsel’s office to explore if he could develop an executive order requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration and photo identification at polling locations across the country, MS NOW first reported. The Washington Post reported that Trump is preparing a 17-page executive order to declare a national emergency over elections and ban mail-in ballots and voting machines, on the basis that they are susceptible to foreign interference. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief white house strategist, told The Daily Signal the president should declare an emergency to secure elections ahead of the 2026 midterms. “It’s the president’s duty as commander-in-chief to declare a national security emergency and take all necessary precautions today to ensure the safety of the November elections—I just pray we are not already too late,” Bannon said. It is unclear if the president can use an executive order in this way, as the Elections Clause of the Constitution gives the state legislatures and Congress, not the executive branch, the power to regulate elections. But Cleta Mitchell, chairwoman of the Trump-friendly Election Integrity Network, told The Daily Signal the president is not going to do anything that is not fully based in law. “I’ve had no conversations with anyone that would suggest in any way that the president is going to issue some kind of illegal order that’s not based in law,” Mitchell said. “He hasn’t done that yet.” Democrats and the corporate media like to portray the president as being willing to issue orders without legal footing, but that’s not what he does, Mitchell said. Mitchell cited Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias, who responded to reports of the executive order saying, “My team and I have been anticipating this for months. It is unconstitutional and illegal.” “The media should note: Last time he issued an EO about voting, we sued and won,” Elias said. “If Trump issues such an order we will sue again, and we will win again.” Though a judge earlier this year blocked Trump’s Executive Order 14248 strengthening voter citizenship verification, Mitchell is confident the order was legal, and the judge’s ruling will be overturned. “Something is not going to be issued by President Trump and coming from his White House that is not fully grounded,” according to Mitchell. “He hasn’t done that previously, and he’s not going to do it now.” No matter what’s in the executive order, Executive Director of the Honest Elections Project Jason Snead expects to see litigation. “Almost no matter what is ultimately in the order, it will be challenged in court,” he said. Snead thinks an executive order could legally encourage states to pass voter ID laws. “There’s a lot that could be done to nudge states towards enacting voter identification laws,” Snead said. “The states have primary regulatory authority in this space and then Congress, as far as congressional elections are concerned, as there’s a certain amount of leeway under the Elections Clause to make or alter state regulations.” “I don’t think that we should discount the role of states here,” he added. The president’s turn to executive authority to secure elections comes after Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., seemed to rule out using the talking filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act. The SAVE America Act would institute national requirements of proof of citizenship to register to vote, as well as photo identification to vote in federal elections. The act doesn’t have the 60 votes to pass the Senate unless Thune invokes the talking filibuster, a procedural maneuver that would only require 50 votes for the bill’s passage. “If we were to go down that path, it’s very hard to pivot and get back to open up the government,” Thune said of the talking filibuster Wednesday. “There just isn’t the support for doing that at this point,” he added. Trump asked lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act in his Tuesday State of the Union. “The cheating is rampant in our elections. … We have to stop it, John,” he said. “We have to stop it.” The post Can Trump Use Executive Authority to Require Voter ID? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Colorado Democrats have filed a bill that could make it the first state to decriminalize prostitution, and critics warn that the bill would make the Centennial State the “Wild West” for purchasing sex and lead to an increase in human trafficking. “We have a billion-dollar budget shortfall here in Colorado, and so there’s a lot of talk about budget and affordability and cost of living,” Jarvis Caldwell, the Republican minority leader in the state House of Representatives, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. “This isn’t the Republicans’ idea of making things more affordable, by making it easier to sell yourself for sex,” he quipped. While some rural areas have legalized prostitution in Nevada, the entire state has not done so. Similarly, Maine decriminalized the selling of sex, but not the buying. Caldwell noted that Colorado had the tenth highest rate of human trafficking in the United States (both in the raw number of cases and as a per capita rate) in 2023, according to the Colorado-based Common Sense Institute. He also cited a 2012 study from the London School of Economics finding that foreign countries that legalized or decriminalized prostitution had higher rates of human trafficking. Caldwell argued that legalization involves setting “rules and guidelines” to regulate a practice, while a “full-on decriminalization” like this bill offers, “just makes it really the Wild West.” “It’s a no-holds-barred, no one has to worry about it whatsoever, which is obviously going to drive up demand on the buyer side, and … if you don’t have enough ‘sex workers’ for the demand side, that’s where you get your human trafficking increase,” Caldwell said. Decriminalizing Prostitution The bill, SB26-097, requires the statewide decriminalization of “commercial sexual activity among consenting adults.” It decriminalizes both the selling and the purchasing of sex statewide, and preempts cities and localities from criminalizing the world’s oldest profession. The bill repeals state laws imposing criminal penalties for prostitution, soliciting for prostitution, patronizing a prostitute, and a prostitute displaying herself in public. It preserves two criminal penalties: those for using intimidation or menacing to convince someone to become a prostitute and for pimping. The American Civil Liberties Union has called for the decriminalization of prostitution, which it calls “sex work,” claiming that criminalizing prostitution makes it harder for prostitutes to access health care and other services and “feeds an out of control mass incarceration system.” The Daily Signal reached out to the bill’s Democrat sponsors in the Senate—Nick Hinrichsen and Lisa Cutter—and the House—Lorena Garcia and Rebekah Stewart—for comment, and they did not respond by publication time. Concern for the Children Erin Lee, the co-founder and executive director of Protect Kids Colorado, agreed with Caldwell’s concerns. Lee sued her daughter’s Fort Collins school for allegedly violating her parental rights by encouraging her daughter to transition behind her back. “I’ve been working really hard to fight child sex trafficking because my girl got put on the conveyor belt of gender trafficking and then it opened my eyes to how many child victims there are in this state,” Lee told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. The bill would decriminalize “holding a place of prostitution and window displays, so talk about normalizing this practice on Main Street for children,” she said. “It just becomes a normal facet of life for children walking down main street to see a place of prostitution, Amsterdam-style.” (Amsterdam, the capital city of the Netherlands, is known for its red light district.) “Given OnlyFans culture—these kids are already being brought up to think that it’s normal to sell yourself and everything is highly sexualized for teenagers—I believe it’s a step on the run towards pedophilia,” Lee warned. Macy Petty, a legislative strategist with Concerned Women for America, told The Daily Signal that Colorado legislators seek to “normalize the buying and selling of humans.” She warned the legislation “places prostituted women in dangerous situations, increases the risk of violence and exploitation, and reduces women to commodities for sexual purchase.” Colorado a ‘Testing Ground’ for Radical Bills Caldwell, the minority leader, noted that Reps. Garcia and Stewart previously sponsored HB25-1312, a bill that would have removed kids from parents’ custody if the parents refused to honor the children’s transgender identities. While the bill ultimately passed, Democrats substantially amended it following national outrage. Chase Davis, lead pastor at The Well Church in Boulder and leader of the Christ Over Colorado movement, told The Daily Signal that the Centennial State has “become their testing ground for bills like this.” Davis recalled the HB25-1312 debate last year, in which Colorado Democrats compared concerned parents who opposed transgender ideology with the Ku Klux Klan. Davis warned that many Colorado Democrats “just want to punish Christians.” He recalled the saga of Jack Phillips, the Colorado Christian baker who faced discrimination claims when he refused to craft a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding. “Last year, they compared anyone who doesn’t believe in radical gender ideology as equivalent to the KKK,” he noted. “They have no interest in partnering with evangelicals—they have nothing but contempt for them.” When asked if he would describe the bill as groundbreaking, Davis said, “It is groundbreaking only in the sense it’s going to open portals to hell … letting out demons in our state.” The post Colorado’s First-in-the-Nation Bill to Decriminalize Prostitution Would Increase Human Trafficking, Critics Claim appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Most Americans share President Donald Trump’s view that illegal immigrants should be deported, but generally disapprove of his immigration tactics, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found. The six-day poll, concluded on Monday, illustrates both the broad appeal of Trump’s focus on immigration enforcement and the widespread disapproval of his tactics. Some 61% of respondents – including 92% of Republicans and 35% of Democrats – said they “support deporting unauthorized immigrants.” Trump’s stand on the issue helped him win the 2024 presidential election as he accused Democratic politicians of favoring “open borders.” Sixty-three percent of Democrats said they do not support deporting illegal immigrants, compared with 7% of Republicans. During Tuesday’s State of the Union address, Trump tried to reclaim the narrative on immigration. Trump on Tuesday said his focus was on criminals, noting, “We’re getting them the hell out of here fast.” Some 60% of Americans – including a fifth of Republicans and nine in 10 Democrats – think immigration agents have gone too far, the Reuters/Ipsos poll found. Among people who do not identify with either party, 65% think authorities have gone too far. These independent voters could be a critical swing group in November when Republicans will try to maintain their thin majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate. Disapproval of Trump’s tactics is particularly high among Black and Hispanic Americans, two slices of the electorate that Trump made progress with in the 2024 election. Seventy-four percent of Black respondents and 72% of Hispanics said they did not like how the administration was handling deportations, compared with 51% of white respondents. Since February 2025, Trump’s overall approval rating among Hispanic Americans has dropped by seven percentage points to 29% in the latest survey. Among Black Americans it has ticked 2 percentage points lower to 14%. Among white Americans it is down 4 points to 49%. Significant internal divisions have opened in both political parties over immigration enforcement. Among Republicans who support deportations, 23% said they were uncomfortable with the current tactics employed by immigration officers. Democrats, besides being divided on whether illegal immigrants should be deported at all, also disagree on whether to disband the Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of the Department of Homeland Security, known as ICE, a central enforcement body.  Some 63% of Democrats said ICE should be abolished, while 30% disagreed. The share in favor was a significant increase from a 2018 Reuters/Ipsos survey that showed 44% of Democrats supporting the idea. The latest survey showed only a third of independents back getting rid of ICE, little changed from 2018. Only a handful of Democratic congressional candidates this year have called for abolishing the agency, with centrist organizations such as Third Way warning that embracing the idea could hurt Democrats at the polls in November. The latest Reuters/Ipsos survey, which was conducted online, gathered responses from 4,638 U.S. adults nationwide and had a margin of error of two percentage points. Reuters contributed to this report. The post Most Americans Back Trump’s Deportation Goals, Reuters/Ipsos Poll Finds appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Feb 26 (Reuters) — Vanguard Group will pay $29.5 million and bolster its passive investing approach in order to settle a suit by 13 Republican state attorneys general claiming the fund manager and rivals violated antitrust law through their climate activism. The suit in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas has been closely watched as a test of how far Republicans from energy-producing states would push Wall Street firms they accused of overemphasizing environmental matters. In a press release one of the plaintiffs, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, said Vanguard “agreed to strict passivity commitments” prohibiting it from dictating the strategy of companies in which it invests or to push shareholder proposals related to environmental or social issues.     Vanguard said the deal reaffirms “the passive nature of our index funds.” The terms provide an easy off-ramp for Vanguard of Pennsylvania but may be more difficult for its Texas co-defendants BlackRock of New York and State Street of Boston to accept. The states sued the three firms in late 2024 over actions like their membership in industry trade groups focused on climate change, which the Republicans said served to reduce coal production and boost energy prices. The firms had pushed back, saying among other things that a remedy the plaintiffs once suggested, having the funds divest from coal companies, would only harm the industry. All three remain major fossil-fuel industry shareholders, rejecting calls they boycott coal and oil stocks over climate concerns. STAYING HANDS-OFF Among the three, Vanguard has been clearest it seeks only a passive role in running companies held by its well-known products like the Vanguard 500 index fund. In 2024, for instance, Vanguard offered concessions to federal energy regulators similar to Thursday’s agreement, like offering to not submit shareholder proposals. “They’re an index fund firm. They don’t want to divest from stocks and not be able to track their indexes,” said Vanguard investor newsletter editor Jeff DeMaso. Vanguard has already adopted some settlement terms as policy, like the expansion of a program allowing its fund investors to shape how Vanguard proxy votes are cast. It and the others also supported fewer shareholder resolutions on matters like corporate emissions or workforce diversity. The companies face less regulatory pressure in turn, including avoiding new regulations from the Trump administration and BlackRock’s removal from a Texas investment blacklist. A representative for Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, another plaintiff in the case, said via email that while Vanguard has made some adjustments, “those adjustments must continue and are binding” now. Bird’s office hopes “more companies in the financial sector will follow suit.” In his press release Kobach said BlackRock and State Street “remain defiant.” A BlackRock spokesman declined to comment. In an emailed statement, State Street said that “the lawsuit remains baseless and without merit.  There was not, and is not, any collusion here aimed at coal prices.  This settlement does not change that.” A spokesperson also noted that like BlackRock and Vanguard, State Street runs a program allowing retail investors to influence proxy votes. (Reporting by Ross Kerber. Additional reporting by Nate Raymond. Editing by Franklin Paul, Jane Merriman and Andrea Ricci ) The post In Texas, Vanguard Settles Antitrust Suit for $29.5 Million Over Climate Activism appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Susan Rice, the former U.N. ambassador under the Obama administration, national security adviser, and also served in various capacities with former President Joe Biden, gave an interview on a podcast with Preet Bharara. He is that very liberal federal prosecutor that developed quite a name for himself in New York, going after, I think, targeted a lot of people based on their politics. But nonetheless, it was one of the strangest interviews because she flat out, candidly, with no reservations, sent a message to people who were conservative, Republican, or Trump supporters, and she used “Game of Thrones” imagery. “You’ve taken the need of [President] Donald Trump. You have allowed him to bully you.” She was talking about the so-called elites in the academic world, in the corporate world, in the institutional world. “And we’re not going to forget,” she says, “that you did that. And you better have your documents ready because when we come back into power, we’re going to … ” And the implication was: take you to court, make you pay, shake you. I don’t know what she was talking about, but it was a direct threat. But here’s what’s strange about it: Start with Susan Rice herself. If you look back through her latter years with the Obama administration, it was nothing but a complete disaster. She was the one that, you remember, that the CIA and the Obama administration wheeled out on a Sunday afternoon to explain the Benghazi attack that killed the four Americans at the annex and the consulate. Five times she told the American people that those attacks were spontaneous, and they were because of some right-wing Coptic video maker who caused it all. That was not true. That was a preplanned, either an al-Qaeda or ISIS or some type of radical Islamic preplanned assault. People knew what they were doing. They were well armed. They were well organized. Why did she go out five times and mislead the American people? Because the Obama administration had been warned prior that their security was too lax and they did not want to give the impression that that attack was preventable, which it was. She was the one that also assured us, Americans, that when former President Barack Obama issued those red lines and said if Bashar al-Assad and his Syrian forces move WMD around or still have it, that’s going to be intolerable, i.e., I’m going to take it out. When they didn’t do that and they backed out, and we knew they had it, she lied to the American people and said, essentially, that they no longer had WMD. Remember also she wrote, just wrapping up her career, she wrote a little memo to herself in the last weeks of the Obama administration about Michael Flynn. She went to a meeting, and it was pretty clear in that meeting they had planned to subvert the incoming administration with the false narrative of Russian collusion and that somehow Mike Flynn, the national security adviser-designate, had been colluding with the Russians, but that was not true. But then she wrote a fake memo to herself suggesting that they hadn’t really done that, that it was all up and up. And then, of course, she and others had requested the unmasking of people related with Trump in otherwise confidential files. So, she doesn’t have a good record. That’s why she didn’t have a high-profile position in the Biden administration. But there is also some real problems with what she said. She never said to corporate America, to the academic world, to the institutional world, to the political world what they had done wrong. She just said, “We’re going to come back. People don’t like Trump. It’s our turn to come back. We’re not going to play by the old rules. No, no, no. We’re going to be tough. You better get your … ” Well, what had they done? What had they done? If she’s implying they let people off, or they laid people off that were associated with DEI, that was in accordance with the Supreme Court ruling barring race-based preferences in academic life. If she means that Donald Trump does not have the authority to issue an executive order stopping DEI, the whole idea of executive orders goes back to the beginning, almost to the republic. But more importantly, Barack Obama was the one who said, “I have a pen and I have a phone and I’m going to use it.” And that’s when he lost control of Congress and he issued, up until that time, almost the greatest number of executive orders. So, if she’s not going to tell us that anybody committed a felony or misdemeanor, and yet she’s going to punish them, that doesn’t sound too legitimate. How does she know, secondly, that she’s going to come back into power? The polls are very volatile. Donald Trump has made, as we’ve talked before, a vast investment in the economy. Inflation is down, unemployment is down, gross domestic product is solid. Foreign investment is at record levels. So is energy production. And when the “Big, Beautiful Bill” is fully enacted and filters its way through the economy, you’re going to see enormous stimuli given reductions in the tax code, reductions in the deductions that you have to make for the IRS, no tax on tips, etc. It’s going to have an enormous effect, and it’s going to come into effect before the midterms. We don’t know what the world is going to look like abroad in Ukraine, in Cuba, in Iran. It may be that Donald Trump is able to solve two or three or all of them. November’s a long way away, so I wouldn’t be so sure, Susan Rice, that you will win the November elections, much less, if you are alluding, as I think you were, to 2028. If you heard Marco Rubio’s speech to the Munich Security Conference and you’ve seen JD Vance in the 2024 election take down almost every hostile reporter that interviewed him, they’re going to be a very formidable team. And I don’t see anything quite like that with Gavin Newsom. I don’t see it with AOC, especially after her performance at the Munich Security Conference. I don’t think Pete Buttigieg is a viable candidate. So, we’ve seen Kamala Harris, very uninspiring. Maybe Josh Shapiro. But given the antisemitic nature of the new Democratic Socialist Party, I doubt, as we saw with the vice-presidential selection in 2024, I doubt that he would have a chance to be the nominee of the new Democratic Party. And finally, when you talk about retribution, where have you been, Susan Rice? Who were the people who tried to take Donald Trump off 25, 26 state ballots … unprecedented? Who were the people who for the first time in history impeached a president twice? Who were the people who tried him as a private citizen when he was out of office in the Senate? Tried to convict him. Who were the people behind the Letitia James frivolous lawsuit that tried to bankrupt him with almost a $500 million fine because he took a loan out with a Deutsche Bank and they claimed that he overvalued the assets, which the Deutsche Bank said he didn’t? That he paid the interest on time to the profit of the bank who had no complaint? Who was Alvin Bragg trying to shoehorn a federal offense onto a state law and said that Donald Trump’s non-disclosure with Stormy Daniels was a federal campaign violation? Who were the people behind the crazy E. Jean Carroll persecution lawsuit that may have cost Donald Trump $90 million? Who were the people behind Jack Smith, who was knee deep along with the FBI and knew about that with Merrick Garland, the raiding, the Mar-a-Lago … the home of Donald Trump? And the idea that Donald Trump violated some confidential agreement with the government when an archival dispute when Joe Biden had taken materials that were confidential and classified from his days in the Senate in three or four, much less secure, places? Who’s behind all that? Who’s behind Fani Willis when a person calls the registrar and says, “I know there’s votes there, find them,” as a lot of candidates do to every registrar when they feel that they’re not adequately looking for votes that have been cast. There was a lot of things to be suspicious about in Georgia and turned that into a felony. All of those prosecutors were politically minded, biased, and ultimately found themselves in their own ethical dilemmas. But who did that? My point is, Susan Rice, your party has already taken out retribution. You were the ones that politicized the Department of Justice. You were the ones, going back to 2015 and ’16 with Russian collusion, 2020 with laptop disinformation. Your entire career of the Democratic Party—your career, Hillary Clinton’s career, Barack Obama—has been to destroy Donald Trump. So, we don’t need lectures on retribution. You’ve already tried to practice retribution against Trump. And I don’t think you’re going to be in a position of power necessarily in the Congress in 2026, and I have a pretty good idea you won’t come back to power in 2028. But otherwise, you really displayed your true nature and put your cards on the table. And I don’t think that your opponents are going be naive once they understand what your true intentions are, which are completely vengeful and incoherent. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Susan Rice Signals Retribution but 2026 and 2028 May Not Be Her Time appeared first on The Daily Signal.