Americans have a glum view of the economy, but that is not expected to affect their consumer spending as holiday shopping kicks off.   According to a recent Fox News survey, 76% of Americans have a negative view of the economy. At the end of President Joe Biden’s term, this number was 70%. Yet, while Americans appear to be losing faith in the vitality of the U.S. economy, they don’t plan on slowing down their own holiday shopping habits.  The International Council of Shopping Centers reports that between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday, 235 million American adults are expected to spend $127 billion, for an average of $542 a person—a $13 increase from the average spent over the long holiday weekend last year.   Millennials are projected to be the biggest spenders, with the International Council of Shopping Centers estimating the generation born between 1981 and 1996 will drop an average of $764 a person during the five-day shopping period.   So, what’s the disconnect? Why do the same Americans who feel the economy is flailing appear to feel good enough about their personal bank account to go out and drop several hundred dollars in just a few days? Nicole Huyer, a senior research associate in The Heritage Foundation’s Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, joins this week’s edition of “Problematic Women” to discuss.   Also on today’s show, we discuss spending differences between men and women. Plus, will New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani actually be able to implement his socialist wish list in the Big Apple? And if he can, what will that mean not only for New York City’s economy, but the economic health of the nation?   Catch the conversation on this week’s edition of “Problematic Women.”   The post Shoppers Aren’t Buying Trump Economy Panic Narrative appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The fate of the Donald Trump administration—and perhaps Republicans in Congress—is tethered to how Americans feel about the economy. And right now, it’s hard to find anyone who can say with confidence what the hell is going on. Thursday offered a fresh reminder of the chaos. As The Wall Street Journal noted, “Stocks surrendered gains and closed sharply lower after a whirlwind day of trading that began after Nvidia posted strong results. The Nasdaq composite led indexes lower after being up on the day more than 2%. It closed 2.2% lower. Nvidia gave up an even bigger gain and finished the day down 3.2%.” Why the reversal? Because investors suspect there is, in fact, an artificial intelligence bubble. It’s not an unreasonable fear. History shows that every transformative technology—from automobiles to the internet—inspires waves of speculation. The presence of a bubble doesn’t mean the technology isn’t revolutionary; it simply means that early hype tends to sweep up both the winners and the doomed. For every Henry Ford, there were dozens of forgotten carmakers. The same was true of the dot-com era: Pets.com vanished, but the internet went on to reorganize modern life. Artificial intelligence is inspiring the same mix of excitement and dread. Some companies may never produce the margins to justify today’s investment frenzy. OpenAI, though not publicly traded, sits at the center of countless partnerships with massive firms like Oracle and Nvidia. If it stumbles, the shock could reverberate across the market. The numbers fueling today’s optimism are staggering. As The New York Times reported, “It would not be a stretch to describe this period of hyperactive growth in the tech industry as a historic moment. Nvidia, which makes computer chips that are essential to building artificial intelligence, said on Wednesday that its quarterly profit had jumped to nearly $32 billion, up 65% from a year earlier and 245% from the year before that. Just three weeks ago, Nvidia became the first publicly traded company to be worth $5 trillion.” That’s more than Germany’s entire economy. But even this explosion of wealth comes with a caveat. Much of the demand for Nvidia’s chips doesn’t mean consumers want AI right now—it means companies are racing to build massive AI systems in the hope that demand will materialize later. To some insiders, it looks less like a revolution and more like a house of cards. This is the central question: At what point will AI’s promised productivity gains begin to match the scale of the investment poured into it? Until there’s clarity, markets will continue to swing wildly—and so will public confidence. Workers, meanwhile, face their own concerns. Even if AI succeeds, technological progress has always brought job dislocation. Old roles disappear, new industries emerge, and the economy ultimately becomes more productive. People enjoy better goods at lower costs and work fewer hours than their grandparents did. But the transition is rarely painless. Both truths can coexist: The United States may be on the cusp of a remarkable economic transformation, and the anxiety surrounding it may be entirely justified. For now, Americans are left watching markets fluctuate, industries reorganize, and fortunes rise and fall—all while wondering what exactly the future will bring. And no government policy can fully soothe that uncertainty. 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 What Is Going On With the Economy? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Winc have a fertile discussion on why blue states have a lower birth rate than red states. 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.  SAMI WINC: The last symptom that we want to talk about today, Victor, is fertility. And we know that the university and the rhetoric in the United States is— VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yes, and climate too. WINC:   Yeah, because of climate, we don’t want to have children.  HANSON: Didn’t [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] say that? WINC: AOC said that the world was going to end in like 10 years or something.” I don’t know what it was. Who listens to her?  HANSON: She said she wasn’t going to have kids and have more AOCs, and I thought, “Promises, promises.” [Editor’s Note: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez said it is a “legitimate question” to ask if it’s OK to have children due to the climate crisis. She did not rule out having children of her own.]  That’s a problem. I’m not just being in jest. If you look at fertility in the 20 so-called blue states, it is about one point. We average everybody about 1.73. Just in 1999, we were 2.1. I’m talking about people who were born in the United States, the fertility rate. It was about 1.71. But in blue states, it’s about 1.4. And in red states, about 2.1.  So what’s happening, all you people in Arizona, Florida, Wyoming, Utah, you’re having like two to three kids, and four million people a year are joining you. And you people in blue states, like where I am, we’re having about 1.4 kids and nobody’s coming here. Everybody’s leaving. Our congressional districts, we’re going to surrender unless we cheat like we’re trying to in California. And they’ve stopped Texas from trying to cheat for their conservatives. We’re going to lose all of our congressional districts, and our economies are going to be backward. But we’ve got to keep doing it. We’ve got to keep getting left, left, left, left. Climate, climate, climate.  So, fertility is a big problem and Europe is worse. It’s not averaging 1.7. It’s averaging about 1.4. In some countries like Italy and Germany, I think it’s almost 1.2. And why is that? I have got to be very careful how I say that, but traditionally, declining fertility is commiserate not just with health.  Childhood diseases killed most people. If you were in ancient Greece, a woman would have to be pregnant 10 times to deliver four births to have the three births be successful out of the four and to have two children survive puberty. Maybe 20 pregnancies later, but with the industrial revolution, modern sanitation, health care, that’s not true. But usually it’s the emancipation of women that makes the fertility go down because they want to get in on the good life with men and have a say in things and child rearing for affluent people, men and women, but particularly women, because it puts more of a—I don’t want to use the word burden—but more responsibility to physically have children and to nurse them. It’s a drag, they think. That’s what they’re told in college. If you went to college and you said, “Hi, I’m Suzy Smith. And I’m from Utah. And I just want to say in this class on American history that I’m here to do my patriotic part. I want to marry one of you guys in class. I want to get my B.A. in American Studies. And I plan on having three to four children and raise them up to be good old red-blooded patriotic Americans and law-abiding. And that’s my goal. And if I can do that, I made a wonderful contribution.” I’m not mocking that. That is a noble thing to say, and that person will be demonized and told, “Get out of here.” If you said, “Hello, I’m Samantha Joan. You know, I’m just here because of the patriarchy. It’s so oppressive. And after six or seven boyfriends this year, I was so upset at them. They were just losers, and you know that my women’s studies professors have suggested that because Donald Trump is going to try to take abortion away from us, I have to be very careful. And I’m considering transitioning, but I haven’t decided Firyet.” That’s the alternative. It’s kind of like the difference between Karine Jean-Pierre at the podium and Karoline Leavitt, you know what I mean? It’s Miss Sunshine bouncy happy and has already had one baby and probably will have two more.  WINC: And super smart and right on top of it and responsive to the press.  HANSON: Yeah. To get serious for change, I mean I’m serious, but I was too mocking. It is the barometer of a healthy society. When Rome had its greatest problems in the first century AD and the third century AD and you look at the Italian birth rate, it really plummeted. And you can see glimpses in the description of women in Plautus and Terence, but especially, as I said, in first century BC and AD literature that there’s not an emphasis on the Italian agrarian model of kids and family and all that anymore. It’s just not, and the same thing happened in Greece. And I think all of us just think, wow.  My grandmother was one of 11 children. My grandfather was one of three boys, my maternal. My paternal grandfather was one of four boys. I don’t know about my paternal grandmother, because she died before I was born, but I think she had four sisters.  My parents had three of us. One child was lost, my sister, at an early age. And then my aunt and that family had two. Then my other family, my parents had my mom who had four deliveries, three survived to adulthood. And then her sister had two and her other sister was crippled and couldn’t have children. So that’s the story. Each generation gets smaller children. And then we say, “Well, we’re going to have immigration. That’ll keep up for two.” It would be energizing if it was, as I said, diverse and legal and integrated and assimilated and skilled.  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: Why Blue States Aren’t Having Babies appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump announced Friday that he will no longer consider documents signed by President Joe Biden with an autopen valid, and threatened Biden with “perjury” charges if he said he was aware of autopen signings. “Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “The Autopen is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the President of the UnitedStates. The Radical Left Lunatics circling Biden around the beautiful Resolute Desk in the Oval Office took the Presidency away from him,” the president added. Biden has previously rejected Trump’s accusations of the autopen being used without his awareness. “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false,” he said in a June statement. Trump also wrote he was “cancelling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally.” “Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and, if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury,” the president added. Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, praised Trump’s move, saying in a statement that “the Biden Autopen Presidency is one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history.” “Americans witnessed President Biden’s decline with their own eyes, Biden’s inner circle sought to deceive the public, conceal his condition, and take unauthorized executive actions using the autopen—actions that are now invalid,” the Kentucky Republican added in a statement. In an October report, the House Oversight Committee examined whether Biden had appropriately used the autopen, drawing on interviews with former White House staffers. The report found that “Biden allegedly made some executive decisions verbally, and withoutdocumentation indicating that they came from the president himself or that he understoodthe decisions completely,” and that “[s]enior White House officials did not know who operated the autopen and its use was not sufficiently controlled or documented to prevent abuse.” “The Biden White House’s process of ascertaining the president’s approval for decisionsand use of the autopen was inconsistent, poorly documented, and vulnerable to abuse,” stated the report. The House Oversight Committee called on the Justice Department to further investigate “all of former President Biden’s executive actions, particularly clemency actions, to assess whether legal action must be taken to void any action that the former president did not, in fact, take himself.” President Trump just declared Biden’s autopen actions NULL and VOID. Our investigation EXPOSED what went down at the Biden White House while they were covering up his mental decline. WATCH AND SHARE FOR THE WORLD TO SEE ?? pic.twitter.com/AGCzVgVFFN— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) November 28, 2025 Rep. Robert Garcia, ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, denounced the report and said Republicans had conducted a “sham investigation” in an October statement. “Despite this sham investigation, every White House official testified President Biden fully executed his duties as President of the United States. The testimonies also make it clear the former President authorized every executive order, pardon, and use of the autopen,” said Garcia, D-Calif. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently announced she would resign in January, wrote in a X post, “If Autopen Pardons are repealed then prosecute [former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony] Fauci for crimes against humanity.” If Autopen Pardons are repealed then prosecute Fauci for crimes against humanity.— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene?? (@RepMTG) November 28, 2025 The Oversight Project, which first surfaced the Biden White House’s autopen usage in a March report, praised the president’s decision in a X post. Thank you President Trump for taking our historic Autopen investigation and findings seriously and ordering your Administration to take action. We will follow up with the relevant authorities to identify what fraudulent documents are still being treated with legal effect. pic.twitter.com/7SarJTfxEk— Oversight Project (@ItsYourGov) November 28, 2025 The post Trump: Documents Signed by Biden Autopen ‘Terminated’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If shooting fish in a barrel is unfair, exposing Democrat failures is like shooting fish after they have been fileted. It would be more sporting if Democrats made it tougher to detect their blunders. Instead, they are so desperate to “get Trump” that they don’t spend five minutes to see if their flimsy arguments can withstand five seconds of scrutiny. The so-called Seditious Six—two Democrat U.S. senators and four House members—released an instantly notorious video in which they urged American GIs to resist unlawful commands. “We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community,” the lawmakers said. “Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home,” they continued. “You must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.” None of these six spent five minutes to craft an answer to the most obvious question: Which of President Donald J. Trump’s orders is illegal? Margaret Brennan, host of CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” asked Congressman Jason Crow, D-Colorado, on Sunday, “Specifically what?” illegal commands have Trump made? “Send troops into polling stations,” Crow squawked. “Kill terrorists’ families. Arrest and execute members of Congress.” Wrong! Trump has issued no such orders. Fox News’ Martha MacCallum asked Crow on Nov. 19: “What specific order from the commander-in-chief, that we are asking our military to carry out, are you objecting to?” “Martha,” Crow replied, “Donald Trump has made a series of very disturbing comments and suggestions that would violate U.S. law and put our military in a terrible position.” Trump often thinks aloud. But musings are not mandates, and comments are not commands. “Do you believe President Trump has issued any illegal orders?” ABC’s “This Week” host Martha Raddatz asked Senator Elissa Slotkin, D-Michigan.  “To my knowledge, I am not aware of things that are illegal,” Slotkin conceded. Flailing miserably, Slotkin then blamed Hollywood: “If you look at popular culture—you watch, you know, ‘A Few Good Men’—like, we have plenty of examples since World War II, in Vietnam, where people were told to follow illegal orders and they did it, and they were prosecuted for it.” So, the menace is not Trump. It’s a 33-year-old Tom Cruise film. Since the Seditious Six cannot identify even one illegal national security order from Trump, they should find a new hobby. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, D – Texas, on Nov. 18 exhibited severe symptoms of Ready, Fire, Aim. “Folks who also took money from somebody named Jeffrey Epstein,” she listed for her House colleagues. “As I had my team dig in very quickly: Mitt Romney, the NRCC, Lee Zeldin, George Bush, WinRed, McCain-Palin, Rick Lazio.” Sounding cockier than ever, Crockett finally got those pesky Republicans! Not so fast, Jasmine. Zeldin quickly resembled the Road Runner as Crockett recalled Wile E. Coyote, seconds after the cigar exploded in her mouth. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Zeldin, a former Republican congressman, blasted her via X: “Yes Crockett, a physician named Dr. Jeffrey Epstein (who is a totally different person than the other Jeffrey Epstein) donated to a prior campaign of mine. NO FREAKIN RELATION YOU GENIUS!!!” Rather than admit error and apologize, Crockett charged forward. “I never said it was that Jeffrey Epstein,” she told CNN. “Unlike Republicans, I at least don’t go out and just tell lies.” She added with breathtaking chutzpah: “I wasn’t trying to mislead people.” You heard it here first: Jasmine Crockett is a tax-cheating, bank-robbing, bomb-making, top-secret member of Hamas. And she never makes her bed. Oh, I don’t mean the profane and reckless House member. I meant another Jasmine Crockett. I wasn’t trying to mislead people. Crockett could have avoided this fiasco if she had spent five minutes on the Federal Election Commission’s website and noticed that these donations to Zeldin were dated Feb. 7, April 24, and Aug. 31 in 2020. As luck would have it, the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein died on August 10, 2019. Dead men tell no tales. And they don’t write checks, either. During the 43-day Schumer Shutdown, Democrats soiled themselves by claiming that Trump’s most-desired goal was to build the new White House ballroom. House Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York moaned, “The Trump administration just declared that erecting a ballroom is the president’s main priority. Meanwhile, the cost of living is way too high and the Republican health care crisis threatens millions of Americans.” The House Democratic Caucus complained: “So, Trump’s MAIN priority is a $300 MILLION ballroom? Not lowering costs. Not saving health care. Not reopening the government. Got it.” A Democrat National Committee press release stated, “Leavitt Admits Trump’s ‘Main Priority’ Is Building His $300 Million Gold Ballroom.” Again, a five-minute review of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s Oct. 23 briefing would have found her answering a journalist’s question about whether Trump envisioned, beyond the ballroom, “any other renovations” at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.? Leavitt replied that Trump ponders “how to improve things here on the White House grounds.” But, for now, “the ballroom is really the president’s main priority.” PolitiFact ruled Jeffries’ remarks False, determined that he “twists Leavitt’s words” and incorrectly presented “Trump’s top priorities for renovating” as “Trump’s top priority among every policy.” At best, Democrats routinely blow off their homework. At worst, they recklessly disregard the truth and harbor actual malice toward Trump, Republican officials, and the 74 million Americans who elected them. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Five Minutes of Homework Would Spare Dems Days of Grief appeared first on The Daily Signal.