Republicans are entering midterm campaign mode with an emphasis on messaging about affordability. As President Donald Trump recently kicked off a speaking tour on affordability in Pennsylvania, Republicans on the Hill are attempting to do their part to make America more affordable. The Trump Factor Last Tuesday, Trump made his first stop in a new tour of House swing districts, where he personally took on Democrats’ claims to be the party championing a lower cost of living. “I have no higher priority than making America affordable again,” Trump said at Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, located in the state’s hotly contested 8th Congressional District, which is represented by Rep. Rob Bresnahan, R-Pa. “That’s what we’re going to do. And again, [Democrats] cause the high prices and we’re bringing them down.” Trump, however, has previously suggested that the affordability narrative pushed particularly by Democrats is a hoax. The domestic trip comes after months in which Trump has held few large campaign-style rallies, instead spending much time at his residences and travelling abroad. Vice President JD Vance also appears to be mindful of the importance of swing districts in the upcoming elections, as he is scheduled to rally in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District this Tuesday, where Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, R-Pa., won by just over 4,000 votes in 2024. Historically, midterm elections take away representation from the party in the White House. With narrow majorities in both the House and Senate, Republicans will have to buck that trend to maintain their trifecta. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has spoken about the strategy Trump will employ, saying in a recent interview that Trump will emphasize his importance in the elections in order to mobilize turnout from his base. “Typically in the midterms it’s not about who’s sitting at the White House,” Wiles said. “You localize the election, and you keep the federal officials out of it. We’re actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot because so many of those low propensity voters are Trump voters.” Trump has previously proposed holding a “Midterm convention” to tout the accomplishments of his administration. His next major opportunity to speak to the American people will likely be his joint address to Congress in 2026. GOP Congress Taking Action on Affordability In Congress, Republicans have worked to advance health care legislation to counter Democrats’ claims that the GOP will allow major premium increases if President Joe Biden’s boosts to Affordable Care Act premium tax credits expire at the end of the year. The push comes after Democrats messaged heavily on health care affordability throughout the shutdown and Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City on a platform of government intervention to lower costs. Last week, Senate Republicans attempted to bring to a vote a bill from Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, which would put in place of premium tax credits new health savings accounts that would have funds deposited by the Department of Health and Human Services. The funds could not be used for abortion or gender-transition procedures.  In theory, the Cassidy-Crapo bill would widen plan options for consumers and prevent money from going directly to insurance companies. However, it failed by a 51-48 vote. In the House, Republicans have rolled out a health care package of their own, which will appropriate money from the Treasury for a cost-sharing reduction program. House Republican leadership aides say could lead to substantial premium reductions. The bill also includes provisions requiring pharmacy benefit managers to be more transparent with employers, as well as provisions ensuring employers “can protect themselves from catastrophic claims” through access to stop-loss insurance plans. Republicans’ success or failure in branding themselves as the party championing premium affordability could be crucial in the midterms. Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell contributed to this report. The post Make America Affordable Again: Trump, GOP Look to Lower Costs as Midterm Year Approaches appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler discuss former President Joe Biden’s failure to make sure our adversaries in Syria paid a cost for attacking Americans, and the failure of so many immigrants to say “thank you” for all we do. Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from 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.  Jack Fowler: [President] Donald Trump tells ISIS we will retaliate after the ambush that killed three U.S. troops in Syria. Victor, anything you want to say about that? Victor Davis Hanson: I don’t know if we have the whole story, but it seems to be somebody that was supposedly training with them, or they knew, or somebody in the government. That happened a lot in Afghanistan. It just raises the same question.  I think we have 900 soldiers in Syria. And I think the former ISIS members who have now flipped and are trying to form a government in Syria and who ousted the Assad dynasty are supposedly pro-American, and they are supposedly, according to Trump, outraged at this and will punish them. We lost deterrence in Syria during the Biden administration.  I’m not blaming him solely, but for four years they staged over 130 attacks originating in Syria on American bases, security positions, and we didn’t do much of anything. And we basically established this principle that if you want to kill an American, nothing’s going to happen to you.  So, Donald Trump is going to have to find a way to disabuse people of that, and we’ll see what he does. But if he can’t, then you can’t put Americans over there as sitting ducks like we did in Lebanon. And [President Ronald] Reagan took everybody out of Lebanon. That probably was a bad sign, a reaction to the destruction of the embassy and the barracks in 1983. But if you are going to put Americans over there, then you have to tell their enemies, “If you kill these people, we’re going to make life very uncomfortable for you.” And there’s nothing more uncomfortable for radical Islamists, because we got about a quarter-million of them here on campuses, to tell them, we really have no problem with you. But if you’re associated in any way with these movements, or let’s just say there’s certain countries, and Trump has named them.  I just don’t think there’s, at this point in this time, there’s no need. We have enough people coming in. There’s no need to bring in people from Gaza, from the West Bank, from Morocco, Algeria, Libya, I don’t know, maybe Jordan, maybe not, maybe some of the Gulf places, but there’s no reason. We have enough people. Why would we bring anybody in from Somalia? There’d be no reason to do that. We have enough people here.  And we’ve already proven that A, we can’t vet them, and B, they’re not honest, they, as a group, immigrants, about who they are and what they are here for, and that they will all be self-supporting, or they have a patron that will support them. And when you have 75% to 80% of the Somali community on public assistance, and they’re committing fraud in addition, then only a [Minnesota Gov.] Tim Walz would say, we want more people like this. What Tim Walz said last week, Jack, was, basically, if I could translate his gibberish: We have 75% of the Somalia communities on public assistance, and they’ve created the greatest welfare fraud in the United States, a large group of Somalis. And we want more people just like that. Fowler: Who refuse to assimilate. Actually, maybe culturally can’t assimilate. We certainly know they won’t assimilate.  Hanson: Well, if you come over from a country, the difference, as I said before, between a Judeo-Christian country, where that is the majority religion, and an Islamic, where it’s the overwhelming religion, is one of tolerance. If you are in an Islamic country, I’ve been in a lot of them, and you just watch, you can’t be an apostate, an atheist, agnostic. It’s just almost impossible. You at least have to profess you’re devout Muslim.  Here in the United States or a Western Europe, you can do whatever you want. And that’s the difference. So, except for these petro sheikdoms that have all this money, that’s why people are not flocking to Egypt, they’re not flocking to Morocco, Algeria, they’re not flocking to Tunisia and Libya, they’re not flocking to the West Bank. They’re not flocking to any of these places if they’re not Muslim and Arab. They’re just not doing it.  They’re coming here because they have a particular view. They want the security, the freedom, the prosperity of the United States or Western Europe. But they want it in a cocoon, as an enclave, so they can continue to have all of their traditional customs and values, but with the major exception, they won’t be poor. They won’t be monitored by the government. They won’t be attacked by their tribal rivals. They’ll be safe. They’ll be rich. They’ll be healthy.  When they get a problem like I have they just will go right into a university research hospital and, bam, three hundred thousand dollars for a procedure or something that’ll be paid for. And then they can vote for somebody like [Rep.] Ilhan Omar, who says this is a trashy country and the dictatorship is worse than the one she left. That’s where we are.  Fowler: Yeah, how would you say, “Out of the many one h— no!” in Latin? I know e pluribus unum, but I don’t know how to say, “H—, no.” Hanson: I get it, you know. I get really upset because I think I’ve been in two ERs and maybe, I don’t know, seven or eight offices, doctor’s offices, and maybe 10 scanners the last six months.  And I can tell you this is a wonderful country because in every single place there were sizable numbers of people who did not speak the English language, and they were immigrants. The one that I just got out of Friday night after a procedure had a sign, Jack. It was really ecumenical. It said, “You point to the language you speak.” It was at every desk. There were 20 of them. I didn’t even know some of the languages, Mongolian, etc. And for somebody to say this is a terrible country, or it’s trashy, or to see people in Los Angeles waving the Mexican flag and burning the American flag, it just sickened me because this country is so … Joe Biden let in 12 million people, and then he went to the beach and fell asleep. But he didn’t say to himself, “Who’s going to house them? Who’s going to feed them? Who’s going to pay for their [sicknesses]?” And then they all have medical problems.  Are they just gonna go to Cedar Sinai and walk in the door and say, “I don’t have any health insurance. I have a kidney stone. Can you give me $50,000 worth of free treatment? And if you don’t, you’re a racist”? Yeah, that’s what it was.  So, it was a good country. It was generous. It was magnanimous. But we don’t ever hear any thanks for what we do.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Victor Davis Hanson: ‘We Never Get Any Thanks for What We Do’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

By having its kangaroo court in Hong Kong convict media magnate Jimmy Lai of trumped-up national security charges, China has reminded the world it’s still a communist dictatorship where human dignity, let alone human rights, have no place in the regime’s considerations. On Jimmy Lai, Trump says he asked China's Xi to consider his release. "He's an older man, and he's not well, so I did put that request out." pic.twitter.com/v7gbfJMpC5— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) December 15, 2025 Taiwan, take heed: China’s communist leaders would also destroy your island and take away your freedom. China destroyed Hong Kong, even though it promised the former colonial power, Britain, and the world, it would respect its separate system for 50 years after Britain handed the city to Beijing in 1997. The conviction of Lai under the national security law that Red China imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 is a sham. President Trump should work to reverse this verdict through diplomatic channels and next time he meets China’s dictator Xi Jinping, in an encounter expected to take place next year. The U.S., in fact, is directly implicated in the case. The 800-page verdict by three judges selected by China’s satrapy in Hong Kong said that Lai had extended a “constant invitation” to the U.S. government to bring down the Chinese government. Lai denied all charges. Indeed, after the law took effect, Lai even stopped calling for sanctions on China to make it comply with its promises to Britain. But the verdict said Lai persisted in his supposed collusion, “continuing though in a less explicit way.” After the verdict, China‘s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office rubbed salt in the wound by calling Lai a “running dog” and a “lackey,” of outside forces. This showed once again, by using language straight out of the Cultural Revolution, that shiny new buildings may litter Shanghai, and the roads of China’s cities may now be cluttered with cars, not bicycles, but China’s leadership today continues to be Maoist. “For a long time, Lai opposed China at every turn, colluded with foreign and external forces, and committed all manner of wrongdoing against Hong Kong and the country,” said the statement. Lai’s 30-year-old son Sebastien told reporters in London that “In the 800-page verdict they have there is essentially nothing, nothing that incriminates him. This is a perfect example of how the national security law has been molded and weaponized against someone who essentially said stuff that they didn’t like.” “This verdict proves that the authorities still fear our father, even in his weakened state, for what he represents,” said Lai’s daughter Claire in a statement. “We stand by his innocence and condemn this miscarriage of justice.” Jimmy is a Roman Catholic, a kind, generous, intensely intelligent man who is a democrat to the core. He used his Apple Daily newspaper to print the truth even after 1997. I know he was warned repeatedly by those close to him to flee Hong Kong. He refused because he is also the most courageous man I know. And I do know him. Jimmy has been a friend for three decades. I used to visit his house in Hong Kong’s Kowloon Peninsula often when I was in Hong Kong with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, enjoy his generosity, and especially the Cantonese cuisine of his personal chef. Sebastien, then a young child, used to run around mischievously while the adults talked. That is what I treasured and miss the most: our long talks about politics, philosophy, and devotion to God. He once said to me, “liberty is like oxygen, you take it for granted until someone takes it away. Then you do everything you can to regain it.”  I can tell you that Jimmy is an extraordinary person, well worth trying to save. Lai Chee-ying washed up on the British colony as a stow away from his native Canton in 1959, when he was only 12. From nothing, he built a business empire. He first started in the garment industry, with the Giordano clothing retailer he founded. China then forced him to get rid of it. He also founded Next Magazine, in 1990, which later became Next Media, parent company to Apple Daily, Hong Kong’s best-selling newspaper. Apple refused to buckle to China’s communists.  They continued to print the truth, which is why this good man—a diabetic who just turned 78—is in solitary confinement, his fingernails reportedly changing color and falling off, as his health rapidly deteriorates. Think about that next time China’s propagandists, and its running dogs right here in this country, in sports, the entertainment industry, and media, try to tell you that China is a normal country. The post Free Jimmy Lai 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. Recently, the Trump administration, as most administrations do at the beginning of their four-year term, issued a National Security Strategy—I guess we would call it a white paper—outlining the approach of the administration to foreign affairs and the protection of the security in the United States. It’s written in a different style than past reports, different than the first term. And it has a lot of emphasis, as most do, on sections of the world. But what has caused the most controversy are two things. Abroad, the report tells Europe that it’s experiencing “civilizational erasure,” and gives advice to the Europeans about what they must do to correct that, but in a manner of brotherly love or help, which the Europeans, of course, will see as condescending and interference into their internal affairs, except they want us to do it in the NATO part of the equation, but not the EU part. And that’s caused a lot of controversy. The other is, the critics feel that it’s not critical enough of Russia and China. But if you read it very carefully, the whole point of its Pacific discussion is to bolster the alliances of Japan and South Korea, and to warn China to keep away from Taiwan and Australia. And then, when we get to the economic domestic aspects of the National Security Strategy, it’s all aimed at China. It’s all aimed at China. It just says that we cannot be a successful, dominant power in the world, and we don’t want any other power to be dominant. And by inference, that’s Russia and China. But on matters of trade, under matters of natural resources, under matters of the South China Sea, it’s aimed at China. And it does say explicitly that the old paradigm that previous, both Republican and Democratic, presidencies had adhered to, namely, the more money you invest from us and put it over there in China, and the more that you import their products here, even though you’re dealing with an asymmetrical trade system—and I think the report uses the word that it’s free but not fair—don’t kid yourself. That ensuing prosperity will not create a huge consumer class who desires freedom and liberty and then will become a force for the democratization of China. That’s not gonna happen. Instead, that foreign exchange extravaganza will be put into the largest ship-building—and I mean military ship-building—the largest aircraft production, and the largest small arms and major arms industry in such a short time that we’ve ever seen. And that’s what China’s doing. And that is outlined. The other controversy is: Why didn’t the National Security Strategy be more condemning of Russian President Vladimir Putin? It says that the Europeans have promised to spend 2% of their gross domestic product on military matters and have promised to increase that to 5%, which would be extraordinary. And of course, the paper says that they should and they must be watched to keep their promises, but it doesn’t really condemn Vladimir Putin in the strongest of terms. Basically, it is saying that the Ukraine war must come to an end. But why is that controversial? It’s the largest war on the European continent since World War II. The dead now exceed Stalingrad. The Ukrainian military’s average age is approaching the late 30s, maybe even 40s. Ukraine has probably lost 300,000 dead, wounded, and killed. The Russians are probably at 1.3 million. So, the inference of the strategic assessment is that war should end before Ukraine is overwhelmed, unless the Europeans suddenly get religion and they wanna spend 5% immediately, and they want to pour sophisticated weapons systems, without restrictions, into Ukraine. But I don’t think the assessment sees correctly that that’s gonna happen. So, it’s pretty common sense. Do you wanna have an ongoing, bleeding Stalingrad or Verdun or Somme right on the borders of Europe? The other subtext is, they want some type—the people, the authors, it’s pretty clear by inference that they would like Russia to be strategically calculated as a foil to China and vice versa. That’s getting back to Henry Kissinger’s we’re gonna be no better friend, no worse enemy to China than it is to Russia, than to Russia, than it is to China. A triangular type of strategic relationship that does not allow those two powers—one with 6,000 to 7,000 nuclear weapons and a huge amount of oil, the other with 1.4 billion people and probably the largest conventional military, other than our own, in the world—to combine, strategically, along with their subsidiaries like North Korea and Iraq. Finally, two things, very quickly. It puts a lot of emphasis on the Monroe Doctrine, the new Monroe Doctrine. And it basically says, why have we allowed Panama to be colonized—the Panama Canal—by the Chinese? Why do we have Russians and Chinese and Iranians involved in narco-terrorism, in the case of Venezuela, maybe Colombia, maybe some other South American illiberal, totalitarian governments? Why are we allowing the Chinese to assemble products in Mexico to evade our tariffs, when Mexico is supposedly a friend, hand in glove is helping the Chinese cheat on tariffs when they’re running $171 billion trade surplus with us, $63 billion in remittances? Probably $20 billion in additional cartel revenues from human trafficking and fentanyl. And then, of course, the main concern of the strategic assessment in the Western Hemisphere is, they’re killing 75,000 Americans a year. A year. And it’s not just a bunch of people who it’s their own fault, why are they taking drugs? It’s a lot of these drugs that are fentanyl and dangerous opiates are laced to look like prescription drugs and, you know, recreational drugs. So, if you have a daughter or son who goes to a party and someone says, “Take a Valium,” that could be fentanyl and kill them. And that’s by intent, on the part of the Chinese. So, it wants to rectify the presence of China, stop the narco-terrorism that’s sponsored by or occurs with the help of Russia and China. And in that matter, it’s a new Monroe Doctrine. And then, finally, very quickly, it says we can’t do any of this if we don’t have a fast-growing economy with plenty of affordable energy that is not dependent on rare earth and other precious minerals and resources being imported by our enemies. And we need a low inflationary, high GDP economy, and we’re going to do that by deregulation, tax reductions, measured reciprocal tariffs, and, of course, much more oil and gas. And the result of that, they feel, will be that the United States, being much more careful not to intervene explicitly—it says in the assessment not to intervene on the ground and get into a Middle East war. And that’s a reaction to $1.3 trillion spent in Iraq, another trillion-plus spent in Afghanistan 20 years later to the most illiberal government in the world, with some of its expatriates shooting and killing Americans here in the United States. And in the hands of the Taliban was what the Afghan misadventure ended up as, as we saw under the Biden administration in 2021, that terrible August. And finally, the Iraqi misadventure, we don’t know how that will end up. It’s probably better than Saddam Hussein. But the question is, we lost a lot of wonderful Americans, we spent a lot of money, and we don’t wanna repeat that. So, it’s not Fortress America in isolation. It’s Fortress America, much better to help its friends and hurt its enemies and be the dominant power in the world today. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Trump’s New National Security Strategy Holds China’s Feet to the Fire appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump has declared fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction.   “With this historic executive order I will sign today, we’re formerly classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, which is what it is,” the president said at the White House Monday. “No bomb does what this is doing,” Trump added.   BREAKING: President Trump just declared FENTANYL a WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION.This critical step unleashes every tool to combat the cartels & foreign networks responsible for flooding communities with this deadly substance—the leading cause of death among Americans aged 18-45. pic.twitter.com/C9YXC53kzK— The White House (@WhiteHouse) December 15, 2025 Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is highly lethal. Even a small amount equivalent to a few crystals of salt can be enough to kill a grown adult. Today, fentanyl remains the leading cause of death for Americans between the age of 18-45.   In the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, drug overdose deaths, primarily driven by fentanyl, spiked to as high as 100,000 or more a year. In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 48,000 Americans died from synthetic opioid—mainly, fentanyl—poisonings and overdoses.  The fentanyl crisis has played a significant role in the policymaking conversations related to securing the U.S. southern border. It has become a common practice of drug cartels to lace other drugs with fentanyl, meaning consumers of the drug often do not know what they are ingesting, which has led to the tragic spike in fentanyl poisonings.   The precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl flow out of China to South and Central America before making their way into the U.S. through ports or land borders. In November, FBI Director Kash Patel announced that China had agreed to take action to stop the flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals out of China.   “These substances are now banned, and they will no longer be utilized by the Mexican drug trafficking organizations or any other [drug trafficking organizations] around the world to make this drug,” the FBI director said, calling the agreement a “historic achievement.”    Customs and Border Protection agents continue to seize fentanyl at the border and U.S. ports, but seizures did decline in fiscal year 2025.   In fiscal year 2023, CBP seized 27,000 pounds of fentanyl. Seizures fell to 21,900 pounds in 2024 and declined again in fiscal year 2025 to 12,000 pounds.   The post Trump Declares Lethal Drug a ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction’   appeared first on The Daily Signal.