Despite last-minute negotiations, federal leaders have once again entered another federal government shutdown, as funding has lapsed for the Department of Homeland Security. To eventually re-open DHS, Congress will have to resort to an increasingly common financial legerdemain: funding the federal government through a last-minute “continuing resolution” rather than an on-time vote before the start of the fiscal year, which began in October. Rather than make the hard financial choices to fund the budget on time, which could involve cutting spending on popular programs or increasing revenue through taxes, Congress is fond of punting the decision another year. In doing so, Congress often raises the federal debt ceiling in tandem with passing a continuing resolution (which it did again last July), relying on increased government borrowing to make up the difference. This concerning phenomenon isn’t new. If Congress doesn’t get its act together, 2026 will mark 30 straight years since it last passed a fully funded budget on time. It took former President Bill Clinton declaring “the era of big government is over” after a painful midterm election for his party to deliver a full federal budget in September 1996. Unfortunately, Clinton was wildly wrong on that score. Since his pronouncement three decades ago, the federal debt has skyrocketed from approximately $10.7 trillion in 1996 to more than $37 trillion today, alongside a similar increase in the size and scope of the federal government. In 1996, debt accounted for 66% of U.S. GDP; today, it is 124% of GDP. In light of these concerning statistics, perhaps our trend of recent federal government shutdowns could be seen as a positive–a way to highlight the increasingly unsustainable nature of federal spending, and an opportunity to cut wasteful spending and balance the budget? Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out that way.  The current shutdown centers on the politics of increased funding for DHS and its subagency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In a funding bill totaling nearly $1.2 trillion dollars, Congress shut down the government over approximately $10 billion for ICE funding–less than 1% of the total bill amount. At our government’s current rate of overspending, the federal debt increases by roughly $10 billion every 36 hours. The October 2025 federal government shutdown was similar. Congressional negotiators debated the potential extension of premium subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, leading to a 43-day shutdown, the longest ever. Eventually, the government was funded–but not before the federal debt would have grown by about $266 billion. There’s no free lunch carrying this debt. It costs $355 billion annually just to maintain interest payments–19% of total federal spending in fiscal year 2026. Instead of playing politics over trivial amounts of federal spending, our leaders should tackle the debt’s real causes, including ballooning interest payments, growing entitlement programs, and other mandatory spending. The fact that they don’t reflects on our nation’s concerning lack of economic literacy. Economic literacy is the understanding of the core economic principles that govern our lives, and how to apply them to everyday economic decision-making. Every American, whether a busy parent or a member of Congress, should possess basic economic literacy. Unfortunately, our political debates often reflect a lack of understanding of opportunity costs, tradeoffs, incentives, and other key economic concepts relevant to the federal budget. My organization, the Foundation for Teaching Economics (FTE), works year-round to address gaps in our nation’s economic literacy. FTE hosts in-person and online programs for high school and middle school teachers, equipping them with the tools to teach economics to their students. Each year, more than 1,500 high school teachers participate in these programs, educating an estimated 175,000 students annually.  By fortuitous timing, FTE just kicked off our winter schedule with a relevant program–Making Sense of the Federal Budget, Debt & Deficit. The seminar helps educators teach the economic way of thinking to help students understand the spending choices facing American policymakers. To get a handle on the ever-growing federal debt and stop the current shutdown/overspending cycle, we must continue to support programs that increase economic understanding across society and promote the economic way of thinking among America’s next generation of leaders. Only by understanding these critical concepts can we maintain sound government policies that enable economic growth–a must-have if we’re ever to meet our growing obligations on the deficit and debt. Though FTE’s programs typically serve high school teachers and students, we’re happy to make an exception for any member of Congress eager to attend and learn how to avoid the next budget crisis. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Learning Economic Literacy Through Another Government Shutdown appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Trump administration is employing “Nazi” propaganda tactics to spread “big lies” about the Iranian regime, a senior Iranian official claimed one day before scheduled nuclear negotiations between the two governments. “Professional liars are good at creating the ‘illusion of truth,’” Esmaeil Baqaei, a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry of Iran, wrote on X Wednesday morning just hours after President Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address where he made a case for action against Iran. Baqaei accused Israel of joining the United States in using “Nazi” propaganda tactics. “‘Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth,’ is a law of propaganda coined by Nazi Joseph Goebbels,” Baqaei wrote on X. “This is now systematically used by the U.S. administration and the war profiteers encircling it, particularly the genocidal Israeli regime, to serve their sinister disinformation [and] misinformation campaign against the Nation of Iran.” United States and Iranian officials are scheduled to hold talks in Geneva on Thursday over Iran’s nuclear program, and Trump says he prefers to solve the controversy through “diplomacy.” However, he pledged Tuesday night he “will never allow the world’s number one sponsor of terror … to have a nuclear weapon.” “Since they seized control of that proud nation 47 years ago, the regime and its murderous proxies have spread nothing but terrorism and death and hate,” Trump said of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni. The U.S. has moved a significant number of military resources into the Middle East since the start of the year, including the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the U.S. Navy’s largest aircraft carrier, is working its way toward the region and is currently docked at the Mediterranean island of Crete. The buildup of U.S. military resources in the Middle East comes about eight months after the U.S. struck Iran’s three key nuclear facilities during Operation Midnight Hammer, which “obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” according to the president. But now, Trump says Iran is working to rebuild its nuclear program. “After Midnight Hammer, they were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons program, in particular nuclear weapons, yet they continue. They’re starting it all over,” Trump said during Tuesday’s address. Satellite images over Iran show new activity at key Iranian military sites, and images show Iran has buried the tunnel entrances at one of the nuclear sites the U.S. bombed last year, Reuters reports. Trump claims Iran has “sinister ambitions” to restart its nuclear program and has developed weapons that could reach U.S. military bases in Europe. The president also accused the Iranian regime of killing “32,000 protesters in their own country” during anti-regime protests that began at the end of December. “We are in negotiations with them; they want to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words: ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon,’” Trump said. Iran’s response to Trump’s remarks casts doubt on the ability of the two nations to reach a diplomatic solution during negotiations Thursday. “Whatever they’re alleging in regard to Iran’s nuclear program, Iran’s ballistic missiles, and the number of casualties during January’s unrest is simply the repetition of ‘big lies,’” Baqaei said. “No one should be fooled by these prominent untruths.” Professional liars are good at creating the 'illusion of truth.'"Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda coined by Nazi Joseph Goebbels. This is now systematically used by the U.S. administration and the war profiteers encircling it,…— Esmaeil Baqaei (@IRIMFA_SPOX) February 25, 2026 Trump has a “number of tools” at his disposal to ensure Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon, Vice President JD Vance said on Fox News Wednesday morning, adding that he hopes Iran takes this into consideration during negotiations on Thursday. The U.S. has leveled a number of sanctions on Iran and Iranian officials in recent weeks. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced new sanctions on “over 30 individuals, entities, and vessels enabling illicit Iranian petroleum sales and Iran’s ballistic missile and advanced conventional weapons production.” “Iran exploits financial systems to sell illicit oil, launder the proceeds, procure components for its nuclear and conventional weapons programs, and support its terrorist proxies,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. “Under President Trump’s strong leadership, Treasury will continue to put maximum pressure on Iran to target the regime’s weapons capabilities and support for terrorism, which it has prioritized over the lives of the Iranian people,” Bessent said ahead of Thursday’s negotiations. The post Iran Accuses US, Israel of Using Nazi Tactics to Spread ‘Big Lies’ Ahead of Negotiations   appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On Sept. 26, 1960, something strange and irreversible happened to American politics: Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy faced each other in the first televised presidential debate, and two entirely different realities emerged from the same event. Those who listened to the debate on the radio believed Nixon won: his arguments were sharper, his command of policy superior. Those who watched on television saw something else: a pale, sweating man effortlessly outshone by a bronzed, perfectly tailored vision of American vitality. Same event. Two media. Two completely different truths. That night, the country discovered something it has never been able to unlearn: the image does not illustrate the argument; the image is the argument. Substance does not precede its representation; the representation is the substance. Once you understand this, you cannot unknow it, and those who fail to understand it tend to lose. No event in American civic life makes this clearer than the State of the Union. Before a single word is spoken, the meaning is already fully present. The cabinet processes in first—in this case, Marco Rubio, then Scott Bessent, then Pete Hegseth—a grammar of power made flesh, the executive branch literally assembling itself into legibility before the nation’s eyes. Then the president appears framed between the vice president and the speaker on the elevated dais, a visual trinity. And then the clapping—rhythmic, metronomic, tribal—the percussion of a nation manufacturing its own consensus in real time. The State of the Union does not report on America. It performs America into being, briefly, in that room, and the performance is the reality. This is precisely why Biden’s 2024 State of the Union, widely celebrated as a success, was actually the opening act of his destruction. He exceeded expectations. He projected energy. Democrats exhaled. A special counsel had recently described him as an “elderly man” with a “poor memory,” and the speech seemed to refute that verdict. The Democratic Party convinced itself that the image had been corrected. But this is the trap the image always sets for those who think they control it: you can curate the sign, but you cannot own what it means to the people who receive it. The State of the Union chamber is a terrarium: a sealed, perfected environment where teleprompters, lighting, and exhaustive rehearsal produce a controlled simulacrum of presidential vitality. Democrats saw the simulation and mistook it for the real. They forgot the Nixon lesson entirely. When Biden met Trump on the debate stage—uncontrolled, unscripted, the terrarium gone—the real reasserted its authority: The frozen pauses; the sentence that dissolved into silence; the vacant eyes. No policy position survives that image. Trump entered the chamber last night in a dark suit, American flag pin anchored to the lapel, the flag wall behind him a studied field of red, white, and blue—repeating, stacking, layering until the eye receives it as the texture of the room itself, nationalism become wallpaper, the nation made into its own backdrop. And the tie: that specific arterial red, blazing against the darkness of the suit. This is not fashion only: Red is blood still moving, fire still burning, vitality made visible and worn at the throat. When Trump declared that America was “the hottest country in the world,” the room had already made that argument in color before his words arrived. The sign preceded the statement; the statement confirmed the sign. This is the complete circuit. The camera, on Fox News at least, cut to Secretary of War Hegseth the moment Trump said, “The state of our union is strong.” Hegseth: The most bitterly contested cabinet member, the man whose confirmation had been the loudest battle, a video having recently circulated of his bench-pressing. The word and the image thus arrived simultaneously, each completing the other, collapsing the distance between the claim and its evidence until they occupied the same second of television. The State of the Union, at its most potent, does not argue. It demonstrates; it arranges the room so that what’s said and what’s seen become a single, indivisible event. The Olympic hockey team entered the gallery directly above the president—khaki pants, blue sweaters with white USA font, gold medals catching the light—and the chamber roared: USA. USA. USA. That chant is not a political argument. It’s the nation saying its own name out loud and recognizing, in the act of saying it, that it exists, that it is one thing, that it is here. The gold medalists stood above the president like knights in a medieval gallery, their medals gleaming, their presence a physical ratification of everything being claimed below. When Trump announced that the goalie—the last line of defense, the man whose singular function is to hold the line—would receive the nation’s highest civilian honor, the room did not need to decode the symbolism. The symbolism decoded itself. The awards that followed were the speech’s most honest text. Capt. Royce Williams, the Medal of Honor. Petty Officer Scott Ruskan, who pulled 165 people from Texas floodwaters on the Fourth of July—the nation’s own birthday, 165 strangers saved because help was possible and so help was given. These men are not ornaments to the speech. They are the speech. They are the answer to the question the whole ritual asks: What is the state of our union? The state of our union is a rescue swimmer who jumped into the flood repeatedly. Everything else—the tariff debates, the budget lines, the executive orders—is preface to this. Alas, what refused to rise? Not a single Democrat stood when Trump affirmed that the government’s first obligation is to protect its citizens. Not a single Democrat stood for the mother of a murdered daughter sitting in the gallery above them. No framing, no surrogate, no press release issued the following morning can rehabilitate the image of a chamber full of seated people in the presence of a grieving mother. The body’s refusal to rise is its own sign system, and it communicates with a clarity that language cannot match and cannot undo. Every American watching read it—not as political analysis, but viscerally, the way the senses read threats or coldness or contempt, through channels older than rhetoric. The Democratic Party had calculated that standing would hand Trump an image he didn’t deserve. What they failed to calculate was that not standing would hand him a far more powerful one. They thought they were withholding a sign. They were, in fact, producing one. A nation’s story does not require unanimous participation to become real. Every Golden Age in history was contested while it was happening. The chant doesn’t need every voice. The image doesn’t need every body. It needs only to be sufficient—enough people standing, enough medals gleaming, enough red blazing against the flag wall—for the representation to harden into reality, to become the ground on which everyone must subsequently stand, whether they helped lay it or not. Trump said “Golden Age,” and the crowd roared, and the hockey players stood gleaming above him, and a rescue swimmer rose to his feet for 165 lives. In that convergence, something was produced that is more durable than any policy or news cycle: an image of America that America recognized as itself. Not as it is in every particular, but as it insists on being, as it reaches toward, as it knows itself when it says its own name out loud in a crowded room. The Golden Age is not a promise about the future. It’s a claim about the present, staked entirely in the image. And the image, as Nixon learned too late and Biden’s party forgot too soon, does not wait for the facts to catch up. It arrives first. It arrives as reality. And then everything else arranges itself around it. The post Trump’s SOTU: The Golden Age as Its Own Evidence appeared first on The Daily Signal.

When presidents stand before a joint session of Congress, they like to declare that “The state of our union is strong.”  President Donald Trump can say those words and mean them. Millions of Americans agree.  Thirteen months ago, the border was open to anyone willing to cross it, including criminals, cartel operatives, and nearly 300,000 unaccompanied children, thousands who are now considered unaccounted for. Three years of inflation had wiped out wage gains, pushed up rents, and made the grocery store anxious territory for families watching every dollar.  Illogical gender-identity and DEI policies in schools and sports were threatening fairness and the safety of women and girls. The Biden administration’s policies made things worse at every turn—opening the border, killing American energy, rejecting biological reality, and handing our economic future to our rivals.  That was a little more than a year ago. The progress since then has been nothing short of staggering.   Inflation, which hit 9.1 percent under the previous administration, plummeted to 1.7 percent in the last three months of 2025.  Energy production is at record levels—real money back in the pockets of families who had grown accustomed to watching their purchasing power shrink.   At the southern border, illegal crossings dropped 87 percent in 2025, to their lowest level since 1970. We are once more sovereign over our frontiers. Communities that bore the costs of those lawless years—the ones that saw their schools overwhelmed, their hospitals strained, their streets where parents stopped letting children play outside—feel the difference now.  None of this happened by accident, and none of it was unopposed. It happened because the Trump administration chose to act where others had only talked: producing American energy, securing the border, putting American workers and families first. And it held the line against an implacable establishment that fought against America First policies every step of the way.  The men and women of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection are doing some of the hardest law enforcement work in America—removing violent criminals, dismantling trafficking networks, and upholding immigration laws written to protect American families. They are doing it in courts that have tried to stop them, in cities whose officials have defied them, and on streets where they have been shot at, doxxed, and assaulted. They deserve an administration that stands behind them without reservation. Today they have one.  Securing the border and securing prosperity for American families are the same fight. This administration is writing new trade rules—framework agreements with the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and partners across the Western Hemisphere—that put American workers first.  In the past, American trade policy served Beijing and Brussels. Not anymore. The January numbers alone told a story of prosperity: 130,000 new private sector jobs, unemployment at 4.3 percent, wages up 3.7 percent.  The American people didn’t give this administration a narrow mandate.  Seventy-seven million Americans didn’t vote for a down payment. They voted for the American Dream—restored, permanent, and passed on.  The work ahead is vital: executive actions codified into law, energy dominance made permanent, federal DEI mandates permanently rolled back, and trade relationships and policy wins built to outlast any single administration.  The president also called on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, “common sense, country saving” legislation that requires a photo identification when voting in federal elections, because a secure border means nothing if the ballot box isn’t.  Finishing these tasks honors and protects the American people and safeguards an America First future for generations to come.   Respecting the American people also means respecting their hard-earned money.   No person’s monthly electrical bill should increase because of AI data centers. This administration has advanced a new ratepayer protection pledge requiring technology companies to build and operate their own plants rather than shift the costs onto taxpayers. In many cases, this strategic move will decrease electricity costs for taxpayers.   The next chapter gets written in state capitals as much as in Washington. Governors and legislators are taking up the America First agenda on energy, parental rights, law enforcement, and more. Families who have seen what these policies deliver are eager for more.  Four in ten young Americans say they are barely getting by. That number is the mission, and it is the barometer of success. The young couple who can afford to get married and start a family. The dad whose overtime check goes somewhere other than the utility bill. The mom who finally feels safe letting her kids walk to school again — because ICE showed up when her city wouldn’t.  Over 90 percent of the America First agenda has been enacted or advanced in a single year. And we know how to finish what we began.  The American Dream was always real. Americans never stopped believing in it—even when everything around them argued otherwise.  Today, this administration is doing exactly what America First was called to do: defend the interests of the American people without trying to run their lives. The past year made the case. This administration will see the promise through. As Trump said in his address to Congress, the state of the union is strong and the best is yet to come. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Promises Made, Promises Kept: The Return of an America First Future appeared first on The Daily Signal.

What is the state of the union in the 250th year of America’s independence? Seeing the country’s strength and prosperity today, the signers of the Declaration of Independence would probably agree with President Donald Trump that this is “the golden age of America.” Their last-ditch effort to save their way of life by breaking away from the most powerful empire on earth not only succeeded, it led to the creation of a republic that would more than once save European civilization itself. “The revolution that began in 1776 has not ended,” the president said in his peroration last night, and his entire address served as an urgent reminder of what the revolution’s political significance really is. For decades Americans have been taught to understand their revolution in essentially left-wing terms, as a rejection of traditional government—i.e., monarchy—and the beginning of a new, radically egalitarian morality. Thomas Jefferson may not have known it when he wrote “all men are created equal,” but the implication of his language was that all people are so equal we can’t tell who’s a man or who’s a woman. It’s taken us 250 years to understand that, but all American history has been the story of progressive liberalism’s germination. Trump, in this view, is an almost unaccountable aberration. Perhaps he is an importation of “European conservatism” or fascism—he is of German immigrant roots, after all. Liberals are certain they know how history will judge Trump because history came to an end with themselves. The future is only the enfolding of their ideas: time’s catching up to forward-thinking. Yet when Trump spoke last night of a revolution that hasn’t ended in 250 years, he was not attempting to curry favor with his opponents. The revolution he invoked is not akin to the French Revolution nor the Bolshevik Revolution nor the many left-wing revolutions of the past two centuries and more. On the contrary, the nation born of the American Revolution has long frustrated the ambitions of leftist revolutionary powers like 1790s France and the Soviet Union. The American Revolution was undertaken in the defense of self-government by British subjects who had lived for generations under largely self-chosen local authorities. If the revolution involved the rejection of the British tradition in some respects, the Americans also had a certain conservatism of their own, and their reluctance to sever their relationship with the king was one expression of it. The Declaration of Independence was a long time coming, and when it did come, it was framed not in terms of aspiring to progress but rather as an acceptance of “the necessity which constrains [the colonists] to alter their former Systems of Government.” A staunch Tory like Samuel Johnson might accuse the colonists of Whiggish radicalism, but the Americans themselves largely rejected the radicalism of the French republic of letters. Although the French Revolution broke out a decade after our own, the battle lines of that conflagration had already been drawn by the philosophes. And while the philosophes had their sympathizers in America, as in Britain, the American Revolution was more in keeping with the traditional spirit of British politics than it was with the spirit of French philosophy. The fact that the Americans habitually drew upon the language of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and British opposition writers from the following generation demonstrates how grounded in the past their politics could be. The American revolutionary commitment to self-government is antithetical to radical philosophy for the simple reason that however sinful or flawed ordinary voters might be, they are not as perverse as a society’s “advanced” thinkers tend to be. Self-government empowers a modicum of common sense, patriotism, and religious belief against the rigorously wrong moral and intellectual systems dreamt up by progressives. The practical result is the election of figures like Trump in defiance of liberal opinion. The president enumerated a great many accomplishments and new initiatives in his remarks last night, the longest State of the Union address yet delivered. This was more than just an update on his activities in office, however, or even on the state of the country here and now. It was also a report on the ongoing battle between rival interpretations of America. Though it may have sounded like a line that could have been included in almost any State of the Union address, when Trump said, “Together, we’re building a nation … where government answers to the people, not the powerful, and where the interests of hard-working American citizens are always our first and ultimate concern,” the meaning in the context of the president’s politics was clearly quite specific: “the powerful” are those responsible for the high-crime, high-inflation, high-immigration, and otherwise disastrous policies condemned in the rest of the president’s remarks. The powerful are those who want to substitute their own ideology for the interests of “hard-working American citizens.” America marks 250 years of citizen self-rule this year, but those who would like to abolish the distinctions between citizen and foreigner—or male and female, criminal and innocent—are as persistent as ever. This president, as his remarks last night attest, isn’t looking for a compromise between the spirit of ’76 and the spirit of “progress.” He’s on the side of a revolution that does not serve a radical philosophy. The post Trump’s SOTU Was a Defiant Commitment to American Self-Rule Over Ideology appeared first on The Daily Signal.