While there won’t be bombs dropping, President Donald Trump’s upcoming visit to China will be no walk in the park. While trade remains a thorn in U.S.-Chinese relations, there is more underneath the surface. If Trump wants to advance America’s interests in Beijing, there are topics he needs to address. Human rights is one of those issues. Millions of people are suffering under the oppression of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Christians in particular are subject to arrests, torture, and indefinite detention without a trial or access to a lawyer. The case of Pastor Ezra Jin typifies the anti-Christian discrimination of the CCP. Arrested in October, along with dozens of church members, Pastor Jin has been imprisoned without charges since then. In addition, the CCP is harassing his lawyer, eliminating whatever chance Jin has of getting a fair trial. Thankfully, the public pressure campaign led by Jin’s daughter, Senate staffer Grace Jin Drexel, has brought Jin’s case to President Trump’s attention. Trump promised that he would bring up Pastor Jin’s case in his meeting with Xi Jinping. Another prominent case Trump will ask Xi about is Hong Kong businessman Jimmy Lai. Lai, a British passport holder, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his pro-democracy activism. A virtual death sentence for the nearly eighty-year-old Lai. Hong Kongers were promised a high degree of autonomy after the city’s handover to China. The central government in Beijing has spent the time since the handover gradually erasing freedom in Hong Kong. Instead of taking his British passport and fleeing the city, Lai stayed and fought for Hong Kong, leading to his arrest in 2020. Like with Pastor Jin, Trump said on multiple occasions that he would try to secure Lai’s freedom. Should he succeed, this would not only be a moral victory, but it would also establish the United States’ status as the defender of global liberty. It may feel like ancient history at this point, but we are just over a year into Trump’s Liberation Day trade war — the next topic sure to be discussed. China was targeted more than any other nation, with tariff rates exceeding 100% at one point. Despite the tariffs, China remains one of the U.S.’s largest trading partners. With the economy straining due to the war in Iran, Trump is feeling pressure to score an economic victory. Despite this, Trump should not sign a trade deal with China that does not benefit the U.S. For one thing, China has a history of failing to honor international agreements. Aside from the aforementioned Joint Declaration, China failed to fulfill commitments it made under the trade deal signed during the first Trump administration. With that in mind, Trump would be wise to take any promises from Beijing with a grain of salt. Trump needs to remember on his trip that China isn’t a prospective partner; they are a geopolitical threat. For starters, China continues threatening the source of 90% of the world’s advanced computer chips: Taiwan. If China conquers Taiwan, they gain a stranglehold on critical tech and leverage over a global economy dependent on advanced chips. China’s saber-rattling isn’t limited to Taiwan; they are also threatening neighbors like Japan and the Philippines. China illegitimately asserts sovereignty over territory that is well within the exclusive economic zones of its neighbors. To get around this, China is building islands to claim territory in the South China Sea as its own. Xi wants Trump to abandon America’s allies in Tokyo and Manila. Trump can’t let them. The danger from China isn’t limited to what goes on outside the U.S.; the threat is already within our borders. Counterintelligence operations focus heavily on Chinese operatives, with dozens of arrests being made against Chinese nationals for spying. Moreover, China is one of the largest purveyors of transnational repression (TNP), whereby China harasses or suppresses dissidents living abroad. To protect the freedom of its citizens, Trump made clear to Xi that this is unacceptable. These are weighty issues the Trump administration has to address. Any of these issues may be enough for China to balk at any trade negotiations. The president should not let this risk intimidate him. For one thing, they are too important to sacrifice for the sake of a trade deal. Second, the U.S. doesn’t need to sacrifice its values to appease China. Despite China’s growth, the United States remains the world’s largest economy and doesn’t need to sacrifice core interests to appease China. President Trump has a full plate with the war in Iran causing economic and political pain. His trip to Beijing may be a tempting opportunity to score a win on the foreign policy front. If the president wants his trip to be successful, he needs to keep human rights and national security in mind. *** Matt Cookson is an alumnus of the Young Voices Contributor Program and was a Middle East History and Policy Fellow with Young Voices. He also works in the supply chain for a U.S. Defense Contractor. His commentary has appeared in the Mises Institute, Real Clear Politics, the National Interest, Providence Magazine, China Source, and the Idaho Freedom Foundation. You can follow him on X @MattCookson95 and Substack @thewaythecookiecrumbles. 

The man accused of attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month pleaded not guilty Monday morning. Cole Tomas Allen faces federal charges of attempting to assassinate the president, assaulting a federal officer, and multiple gun charges. He entered his not guilty plea in federal court for the District of Columbia. He faces life in prison if convicted. Allen charged through a security checkpoint on April 25 at the Washington Hilton Hotel where Trump and other high-level federal officials were attending the dinner, according to prosecutors. He was armed with a shotgun, handgun, and knives and shot a Secret Service agent during the attack, prosecutors said.  Allen sent an email the night of the attack to family members saying that he was no longer willing to allow “a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” according to an FBI affidavit.  Allen sent the email to family members at approximately 8:40 p.m. on the night of the attack, appearing to acknowledge his actions, according to the affidavit.  “So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today,” the email read. “Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused. I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for ‘Most Wanted.”  The message also identified potential targets. “Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest,” the email stated. The case against Allen is being overseen by Judge Zia Faruqui, who has “devoted” his career to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Last week, he apologized to Allen after he was held in solitary confinement.  “I’m sorry,” Faruqui told Allen. “Whatever you’ve been through, I apologize for the prior week.” Jail officials placed Allen on a temporary suicide watch that required 24-hour-a-day placement in a padded, lighted cell without access to phone calls, books, religious material, or recreational time. Faruqui, who has overseen January 6 cases, said Allen was being housed in more extreme conditions and treated more severely than those defendants, who were held in a lower restriction part of the jail called the Central Treatment Facility. “The Jan. 6 defendants all were moved to the CTF,” Faruqui said. “Pardons may erase convictions but they do not erase history … He’s being treated differently than anyone I’ve ever observed.”

Democrats are considering a radical plan to forcibly replace the entire Virginia Supreme Court after Democrat-favorable congressional maps were struck down last week.  A proposal to force out the current court by lowering the mandatory retirement age for justices was considered Friday during a call with House Minority Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and top Virginia Democrats, the New York Times reported. The plan would force out all current justices and give the legislature, narrowly controlled by Democrats, the opportunity to pack it with more partisan justices.  A case would then be brought to challenge the creation of Virginia’s so-called independent redistricting commission. If that commission was struck down, Democrats could then draw new election maps to their favor. The proposal would involve lowering the retirement age from 75 to at least 54, the age of the youngest justice currently on the bench. That plan was openly supported by Democrat state Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, a participant in the call.  “Everyone has got to have a strong stomach right now; this is a complete disaster waiting to happen if people are timid,” he told the Times. “We have Republican states ignoring their constitutions and interrupting early voting and ignoring their Supreme Courts all together. We know based on that, Republicans would explore every single option possible to move this forward.” The map struck down as unconstitutional on Friday was expected to give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in Virginia’s House delegation come November, up from their current 6-5 edge. In a 4-3 decision, Virginia’s Supreme Court ruled that the state’s “violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void.”  Jeffries has suggested appealing to the Supreme Court, though it is unclear on what grounds the nation’s high court would weigh in on.  Voters in Virginia narrowly approved the new gerrymandered maps in April after Democrat-aligned groups spent over $64 million supporting redistricting.  Campaign filings show that Virginians for Fair Elections, the leading Democrat-aligned group backing the gerrymandered map, raised more than $64 million between January and April 2026. That total was more than double the amount raised by Republican-aligned groups opposing redistricting. Much of the money raised came from House Majority Forward, which contributed nearly $39 million, according to campaign filings. The group describes itself as a “progressive, non-profit organization committed to promoting economic growth and opportunity, social justice, environmental stewardship, and democracy in the United States of America.” The ruling by the court meant that Republicans appeared to have come out ahead in the nationwide redistricting battle, with states like Tennessee and Florida adopting new maps expected to make their congressional delegations redder.

The radical ideology of gender identity continues to hollow out the integrity of women’s athletics in the state of California, and tennis legend Martina Navratilova has seen enough. Over the weekend, high school preliminaries in Orange County became the latest theater of the absurd. AB Hernandez, a male competing as a senior for Jurupa Valley High School, dominated the girls’ field in the CIF Southern Section Division 3, seizing the triple jump title by several feet and clearing over 20 feet in the long jump — besting the nearest female competitor by more than a foot. Hernandez also tied for first in the high jump, repeating a pattern of dominance that has sparked fierce protests from athletes and parents alike, the Daily Mail reported. One year later. We’re still doing this. Weak adults who refuse to do the right thing. pic.twitter.com/SSOabYBMNq — XX-XY Athletics (@xx_xyathletics) May 10, 2026 While the “Save Girls Sports” organization and frustrated families gathered at Yorba Linda High School to decry the erasure of female biological reality, the most stinging rebuke came from Navratilova. The 18-time Grand Slam champion, a harsh critic of President Donald Trump, still took aim at the leading Democratic candidate for the 2028 presidential nomination, torching California Governor Gavin Newsom for his refusal to protect female athletes and labeling the state-sanctioned charade as “cheating.” “Newsom could overturn this in a second. No excuse,” Navratilova wrote, emphasizing that the governor has the executive authority to intervene but chooses instead to hide behind bureaucratic red tape. Responding to the news that Hernandez remains seeded at the top of upcoming tournaments, she added a caustic, “Thanks for nothing [Gavin Newsom].” Navratilova’s fury was echoed by fellow Olympic legends. Three-time gold medalist Nancy Hogshead blasted Newsom’s office for its “big fail” in legal and biological analysis. Hogshead noted that while Newsom’s camp pays lip service to “fairness, dignity, and respect,” it pointedly excludes biological girls from that standard. “Females aren’t weakened males; males and females are built from different molds,” Hogshead stated, dismantling the “woke” notion that gender identity can override the material reality of bone density and muscle mass. A spokesman for Newsom attacked the governor’s critics after it was announced that a “Save Girls Sports” protest would be held at the track meet. “The Governor has said discussions on this issue should be guided by fairness, dignity, and respect. He rejects the right wing’s cynical attempt to weaponize this debate as an excuse to vilify individual kids,” the spokesman stated. “The Governor’s position is simple: stand with all kids and stand up to bullies.” This prompted Sophia Lorey of Save Girls Sports to fire back: “Shame on Governor Newsom for calling the girls behind me bullies… These girls are not bullies for defending fairness.” While Newsom remains ensconced in his progressive ivory tower, the federal government is taking notice. The Department of Justice has already filed suit against California agencies for Title IX violations, and the Department of Education has expanded its investigation into 17 other institutions. For Navratilova and those who still believe in the “unique biology of females,” the message to Sacramento is clear: biological reality isn’t a “right-wing weapon” — it’s a fact, and ignoring it is nothing short of state-sponsored cheating.

This article is on Ohio’s response to “Medicaid Millions,” a Daily Wire series exposing billions of dollars in dubious “personal services” payments where people are paid to spend time with their own family. *** Ohio says it has safeguards in place to cut down on fraud and abuse of Medicaid home health care, but one of the biggest tools to verify care is actually taking place has been rendered useless. The Daily Wire’s investigation of the multi-billion dollar a year Medicaid industry in Ohio has raised concerns about abuse of a program in which people are paid to visit the homes of elderly poor people and provide “cooking,” “cleaning,” and other non-medical services that even include “companionship.” In response to those concerns, the Ohio Department of Medicaid said it is “aware of concerns involving home health care activity” in Columbus, and “has been actively investigating these matters since prior to the publication of The Daily Wire series.” It touted an “extensive set of safeguards” in place to ensure aides are actually going to homes. The key component is “mandatory electronic visit verification capturing date, time, and service location,” a feature that is required by federal law. But Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine’s administration inserted massive loopholes including making the verification optional. The 21st Century Cures Act, passed by Congress in 2016, mandated that states require electronic visit verification, or EVV, by January 2020 for the riskiest category of “personal services” – non-medical services like cooking and cleaning – and by January 2023 for in-home nursing. Yet for years, Ohio simply paid providers even if they didn’t submit any electronic evidence, according to a 2024 audit by Auditor of State Keith Faber. Faber’s audit, examining payments in 2022, found that 44% of personal services claims had no electronic verification. The situation was similar for home nursing. “This resulted in approximately $1.1 billion in claims not supported by an EVV visit,” the audit found. The audit said if the state has an electronic validation system, then using it should be a “condition of payment.” A spokeswoman for the Ohio Medicaid Department, Stephanie O’Grady, told The Daily Wire that this was done in March 2025. But shortly before EVV was made mandatory, it was neutered as a fraud prevention tool. The most important feature – GPS coordinates captured by an electronic device – was made optional and defaulted to “off.” “Effective July 1, 2024, GPS functionality within any EVV application or device may only be activated with the signed consent of the individual receiving services — valid for one year and revocable at any time,” O’Grady said. “The approach allows the person receiving care to make an informed decision related to privacy protections for individuals receiving home and community-based services.” O’Grady disclosed to The Daily Wire that GPS is turned off for nearly half of home visits, with reliable coordinates present in only 53% of electronic records. The patient was also supposed to sign their name to show that the patient and aide were actually together, but that, too, was removed in 2024, Faber’s audit flagged. Earlier this year, Ohio’s attorney general Dave Yost, whose office is tasked with policing Medicaid fraud, testified that the rollback of safeguards made his job difficult. “Until about a year ago [GPS] was required, now it’s optional,” he told legislators in March. “I do not know for the life of me why it went away, but I respectfully ask you to put in statute where no vendor, no bureaucrat can object to legitimate monitoring.” “While we had the GPS, you could see where the person was, they had to drive to the house of the person they were providing services for, you could see how long they were there. That record makes it much harder to do the fake billing where they say they went to five houses but really sat at home,” he said. Ohio state lawmaker Josh Williams, a Republican from Toledo, says there was no reason why the recipient of a government service would object, or be able to object, to the government verifying that the person being paid by the government to help him actually showed up. “It seems like the DeWine administration continues to protect the bad actors. And I’m frustrated as a legislator, I’m frustrated as a taxpayer. I’m frustrated because I don’t think we should be providing protection for these individuals,” he told The Daily Wire. “We’re not checking any of your personal information. We’re making sure that the person that is assigned to your case is actually going to your residence.” “You want to be a Medicaid provider in the state of Ohio for home health care aid, we should be able to track your location data during the times in which you’re asking for payment,” he added. He said that a common fraud scheme involves a patient and caregiver colluding to have the government pay for nonexistent work — in which case the patient could now simply refuse GPS verification of the caregiver’s presence. “You have family members going to provide services to an elderly individual, and on many occasions, they’re not even showing up, but they’re getting paid. That family member is not going to report their nephew or their cousin or their niece for not showing up. That’s part of a widespread, broad fraud that we’re seeing,” he said. Williams has introduced a bill to make GPS mandatory again. But even then, it appears that GPS data could easily be faked. Faber’s audit said that Ohio spent $146 million contracting with Sandata, a company that produces EVV devices and software, resulting in Ohio providers being able to use Sandata’s software for free. Nonetheless, the state allows home care providers to use their own software instead, potentially including software that simply transmits fake coordinates rather than ones coming straight from a mobile device’s sensors. The vulnerabilities don’t end there. Ohio also permits the electronic records to be manually adjusted. In 2022, “34 percent of all EVV entries were manually adjusted,” Faber’s audit found. Additionally, ten percent of aides are exempt from EVV because they live with the patient, often a family member, O’Grady said. Yost, who resigned as attorney general last week for a job in the private sector, said in his testimony that in addition to DeWine’s rules, Ohio laws also make it difficult to prove and punish Medicaid fraud. The attorney general’s Medicaid fraud unit isn’t authorized to use subpoenas to gather information, he said. If someone is actually investigated, charged, and convicted, their punishment will be light because Medicaid fraud is “capped as being less serious than other theft, as a third degree felony,” he said. Red state blues The Medicaid scandal in Ohio has exploded under an all-Republican leadership. In fact, the historical dollar amounts in this series, relying on data through 2024, likely understate the ongoing cost, because DeWine drastically increased the pay rate for home health providers in 2024. The increases took effect as “part of Governor Mike DeWine’s commitment to making sure every Ohioan receives quality care and that providers receive support to continue delivering the highest level of care for Ohio’s residents,” a press release said. “The rate increases are historic in nature, totaling approximately $3.4 billion per year,” including home health and other Medicaid spending. DeWine has been accused of being soft on fraud, particularly after a spokesman once called fraud in the state’s Somali hotspots “the cost of doing business.” Last week, Vivek Ramaswamy secured the Republican nomination to replace DeWine next year. Responding to The Daily Wire’s reporting, he said that states have “turned a blind eye to this level of rampant fraud” despite the fact that “in a modern era of AI, you have a toolkit that allows you to detect aberrant abnormalities.” That’s partly because of an incentive issue with how Medicaid is set up, he said. Medicaid is run by the states, but is largely paid for by the federal government. That means it’s up to states to stop waste and fraud, but they don’t always have a strong financial motivation to do so, because it would decrease federal dollars to the state. Ohio’s Medicaid program is set to be in the hole $33 billion over the next few years due to federal changes aimed at stopping states from gaming the numbers to offload even more of the burden to the feds. Vice President JD Vance, also from Ohio, said in response to The Daily Wire’s series: “I’m directing the task force to look into it and take immediate action to prosecute any fraudsters involved and stop all further payments as appropriate.” Ramaswamy noted that there is “uppercase F fraud, and also lowercase F fraud, which may be technically legal but doesn’t comport with anyone’s sense of who should get these dollars.” Those cases could necessitate changes in law or policy to stop the bleeding. Aggressive Medicaid “waiver” programs such as those the feds have allowed Minnesota and Ohio to run are particularly vulnerable to abuse, and have exploded in usage. Medicaid takes up nearly half of Ohio’s general revenue fund, and spending has doubled in recent years. Yet even as the red flags are hard to ignore — the percentage of people claiming to be autistic is exploding the dubious levels, for example — there has been aggressive, almost blatant pushback against using common and affordable technology to provide basic safeguards. Nationally, a group called “Stop EVV” launched a “media toolkit” showing pictures of disabled people holding signs with messages like, “I’M THE EMPLOYER. IT IS MY RIGHT TO SCHEDULE, SUPERVISE & SIGN MY EMPLOYEE’S TIMESHEET.” The site pictured a bald eagle and American flag and called stopping GPS tracking a “civil rights” issue. Ohio’s Department of Medicaid says that “all allegations of fraud are investigated,” and further that many of the companies identified by The Daily Wire “are subject to ongoing investigation” by the state. It said it is unable to comment on those investigations. But Faber, the auditor — who is running for attorney general — has been warning of abuse that mirrors The Daily Wire’s findings. He recently told the legislature that 38% of Ohio home health spending was in Franklin County, and that of that, 41% – or more than 15% of all home health care spending in the state — is spent in a four mile radius. Faber’s audit found that in 2022, there were 2,479 home health companies in Ohio, which were paid $1.8 billion. That means 10% of all home health companies in the state are located in the seven buildings owned by one landlord in Columbus’s Somali neighborhood, which was highlighted in our second installment. The data analyzed by the Daily Wire, finding a quarter billion dollars to companies in seven buildings, covered from 2018 to 2024. It understates the total because data for smaller companies is not available for privacy reasons. Parker Thayer, an investigator for the Capital Research Center, contributed reporting.