President Donald Trump offered some advice — from his own experience — to former MTV reality TV star Spencer Pratt in the wake of his loss in the Los Angeles mayoral primary election. Trump mentioned Pratt while speaking to the Faith & Freedom Coalition on Friday, jabbing at California’s long, drawn-out ballot-counting process, which he and numerous others argue opens the doors wide for anyone with the desire to commit election fraud. WATCH: “It’s happening in California, where the ballots still aren’t in,” Trump began. “They’re still not — can you believe it? You know what’s happened? They’re cheating. The kid won. Or he was certainly in the top two. I don’t know him, I never met him. Spencer Pratt.” The president then advised Pratt to keep pushing back, adding, “And he went away quietly. We didn’t go away quietly. He shouldn’t go away quietly; he should protest, because it was, in my very strong opinion, a rigged election. That kid should be in the runoffs.” Trump went on to describe how Pratt — solidly in second place when the polls closed on Election Day — had seen his lead chipped away and then eventually obliterated as mail-in ballots overwhelmingly favored Democratic Socialist City Councilwoman Nithya Raman. “The woman who edged him out after like a long time,” Trump referenced Raman with a chuckle. “Days. Days and days. And then you’d hear reports: ‘Spencer Pratt is not doing so well’ even though he was strongly in the lead.” Despite his loss, Pratt has promised to continue his efforts to expose the failures in the city’s leadership — beginning with incumbent Democrat Mayor Karen Bass, whom Pratt and many others blame for the disastrous response to the deadly Palisades Fire. He has also promised to continue his efforts to help clean up Los Angeles. While Trump did not officially endorse Pratt, he spoke positively about him when asked — and Pratt, who is a registered Republican, made it clear from the beginning that his campaign was interested in results over partisanship.

Gregg Phillips, the third-highest ranking FEMA official, has reportedly been forced from the agency due to wild past claims of teleporting to a Waffle House. Phillips was the leader of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, appointed in December by the White House. He held one of the most “consequential roles” in the agency. However, Phillips has raised eyebrows in the past with outlandish claims, such as one stating he’d “teleported” to a Waffle House. The Department of Homeland Security said on Thursday that Phillips was leaving the agency, citing “personal reasons,” according to CNN. However, sources told CNN that Phillips did not leave of his own accord. Instead, they said he’d been forced out because his image had created a lot of embarrassment and exhausted the new DHS leadership. Phillips made the claims about teleportation in January of 2025 on a conservative podcast called “Onward,” informing the host that “teleporting is no fun,” according to the New York Times. There were multiple incidents when Phillips said he physically teleported to a Waffle House 50 miles from his previous location.  The New York Times investigated the claims, asking roughly two dozen Waffle House employees at three different locations about the alleged incident. None of them remembered anything like that happening. Phillips later clarified on social media that he had been “heavily medicated” when the episode took place due to his cancer treatment, and argued the experiences mirrored biblical examples of supernatural transportation. In a post on Truth Social, Phillips said that he’d turned to alternative routes after conventional cancer treatments failed him, and the incident in question had occurred during the first week of this new treatment.  “I was in the opening days of intensive treatment, heavily medicated, not thinking about future headlines,” Phillips said. “That context was nowhere in the reporting.” Phillips also pointed out that he did not use the word “teleportation.” Instead, it was “used by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe something with no easy name.”

This piece is part of MI x DW, a collaboration that brings Daily Wire readers exclusive commentary and research from the Manhattan Institute’s world-class team of scholars.  *** I first learned of Ro Khanna in 2017. I was in college, and Khanna had just been elected to Congress. I initially took note of him due to the eerie resemblance between his life and mine. In addition to sharing a cultural background and first name, a rarity on its own, we both grew up outside Philadelphia, graduated as high school valedictorians, studied economics, and, as it would later turn out, attended the same law school. I never subscribed to narratives about “seeing people who look like you,” but I’d be lying if I said I felt no excitement at seeing someone whose story tracked mine reach such heights. Since then, Khanna has become a leading voice in the Democratic Party and arguably the most visible Indian American elected official. But his ascent has depended, in part, on his embrace of an ideology that cannot make sense of his own life. Examining that embrace reveals not only a politician’s contradictions but also the fraught position of Indian Americans who align themselves with the contemporary Left. Click here for more Manhattan Institute content. Reflecting on his life, Khanna has consistently sounded notes of optimism about the promise of America. “I remember Little League coaches who believed in me,” he has said. “I remember the local paper, the Bucks County Courier Times, that published my letters to the editor in a community that was 95 percent white. I grew up believing I could do anything in this country.” He has fondly recalled his family celebrating Christmas and his street celebrating Diwali “because the neighbors were curious.” He has recounted lessons from his parents that would warm a conservative’s heart: “My parents rarely talked about my rights. They talked a lot about my responsibilities,” he said in 2024. “They said, ‘You were born in America. You won the lottery. Go make good grades.’” And perhaps most strikingly, when asked about his experience growing up Indian American, he replied, “It was remarkably easy. . . . I’m not saying race isn’t an issue for other people. For me, it really was not a big issue.” Listening to Khanna’s recollections, one can hear the outlines of a story about America as a country where people can transcend differences of race and religion and flourish through hard work and personal responsibility. Yet Khanna’s politics often seem strangely detached from his biography. If his life tells a story of integration, his rhetoric traffics in the language of permanent racial consciousness. For example, Khanna frequently expresses alarm about the white-black racial wealth gap, which he claims is “ten-to-one” and “increasing.” After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, he rushed to defend affirmative action, explaining, “The reality is race matters. Race is consequential to people’s lives.” And more recently, Khanna criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which raised the legal threshold for race-conscious redistricting, saying that those who deny that racism still exists “have blinders on.” Khanna’s statements are striking, not simply because they are misguided but because they are incoherent and vacuous in ways that his own life lays bare. Khanna oscillates between two extremes, seemingly feeling no need to reconcile them. When he reminisces on his past, America is a colorblind society, teeming with opportunity for people of all backgrounds. When he turns to the issues of the day, America is a racist prison, forever holding racial minorities down. To avoid stumbling on the tension between these positions, Khanna deals in generalities capacious enough to accommodate both. For example, when he says “race matters” in defense of affirmative action, he appears to make a banal claim that  Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which raised the legal threshold for race-conscious redistricting most voters in both parties would accept while smuggling in a more controversial view: that race constitutes a significant barrier to opportunity in America. My own views on race lie between Khanna’s narratives. Given the way race shapes social ties, the notion that “race matters” seems indisputable. I myself have experienced feelings of isolation and alienation due to my race, and I believe race can meaningfully shape a person’s experiences and perspective. But it does not follow that race remains a pervasive barrier to opportunity, beyond what it may signal about one’s socioeconomic background. On the contrary, it is precisely in the spheres of opportunity that race should matter the least, insofar as they are governed by meritocratic norms that supersede personal affinities. If I could speak with Khanna, I’d ask what he makes of Raj Chetty’s findings that “the black-white income gap is due almost entirely to differences in rates of intergenerational mobility rather than transitory or historical factors” and that “neighborhood differences explain relatively little of the black-white intergenerational gap.” I’d ask what he makes of the research showing that “once social security wealth is accounted for, the racial wealth gap has narrowed over the last 30 years” and, as of 2019, stood below two-to-one. I’d ask why, if he believes “race is consequential to people’s lives” but opposes quotas, he disagrees with the decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which allows universities to consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life.” And I’d ask why, given evidence that South Asian Americans face an even steeper penalty in college admissions than other Asian Americans, he doesn’t devote even a fraction of the time that he spends advocating preferences for other racial groups to highlighting discrimination against his own. Khanna is the most salient example of the way Indian Americans must strain themselves to fit in with the Left today. Indian Americans occupy a peculiar position in America’s racial landscape. They possess nearly every quality that progressives associate with racial disadvantage: brown skin, immigrant origins, ethnic names, a foreign religion, and they constitute a minuscule share of the population. Yet, by virtually every measure—whether family stability, household income, or upward mobility—they enjoy extraordinary success. They confound left-wing narratives about race but, due to their small numbers, are poorly positioned to challenge them. Falling outside the white majority, excluded from the coalition of diversity, and lacking a larger constituency, Indian Americans often face a choice: they can pursue a life of assimilation and advancement within establishment institutions by accommodating themselves to the sensibilities of liberal elites, or they can preserve their own sensibilities at the expense of their success and sense of belonging. Given the price of the second option, many Indian Americans feel compelled to choose the first, accepting the self-abnegation it demands. They learn to mute those aspects of their identity that sit uneasily with progressive orthodoxy: their accounts of upward mobility, the values their parents instilled in them, the discrimination they suffer at the hands of affirmative action. They nod along dutifully during discussions of systemic racism that their own success undermines. They internalize the shibboleths of their milieu, making clinical assertions about “black and brown people” without betraying any hesitation at the way the phrase describes them chromatically yet excludes them politically. Over time, they become estranged from themselves, conversant in a language that can articulate everyone’s stories but their own. The notion that aligning with progressivism requires self-abnegation from Indian Americans is not merely my interpretation. Khanna himself has counseled this approach. Recounting conversations with Asian American constituents opposed to affirmative action, Khanna has explained, “What I say to people in my district is, many people in the Asian American community wouldn’t have been in America if it weren’t for the Civil Rights Movement . . . so we owe an enormous debt to the Civil Rights Movement.” In other words, Khanna knows that progressive racial ideology imposes costs on Indian Americans and that no defense can be offered for this phenomenon. But rather than challenge it, he resorts to a non sequitur: Indian Americans, he implies, should feel such gratitude toward the Civil Rights Movement that they accept the violation of their own civil rights. They should regard themselves not as full and equal members of the political community, entitled to the same rights as everyone else, but as outsiders living here on sufferance, expected to keep their heads down and subordinate their rights to the interests of others. As Khanna eyes a 2028 presidential bid, his party appears united around a two-pronged strategy of foregrounding material concerns and elevating anti-incumbent sentiment. That approach may well succeed in the short term. But if Democrats want to build a durable working-class coalition, they will likely have to moderate their posture on race. (A recent paper finds that Democratic presidential candidates could gain more support by moderating on affirmative action than on any other issue.) The last Democrat to attempt this maneuver was Barack Obama, whose biography afforded him the latitude to voice conservative-sounding views on race (notwithstanding his post-presidency shift). Khanna’s biography gives him the perspective to craft an Obama-esque message but not the latitude to do so. Unlike Obama, Khanna doesn’t enjoy a reservoir of credibility with any sizable constituency that he can draw on to stray from left-wing dogma; instead, he must establish his credibility by parroting that dogma. In the end, the compromises that allow Indian Americans to find a home in the Democratic Party leave them ill-equipped to reform it. *** This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. The original can be found here. Rohit Goyal is a Law School Associate at the Manhattan Institute and a student at Yale Law School.

The midterm political season is gearing up, and since Republicans are busy negotiating with Iran, and Democrats are busy flirting with socialism, you may be asking yourself: What are all the intelligent people doing? And really, I have no idea. I think you might be in the wrong country. As we enter the pre-midterm summer, the Trump administration is trying to bolster its popularity by making a peace deal with Iran.  So far, the administration has agreed to give Iran billions of dollars in fresh revenue, in return for which, Iran has offered to sell the administration a beautiful handmade rug for 50% off the price they were asking on the street.  Iran has also agreed to stop trying to acquire nuclear weapons in exchange for nuclear weapons. And they’ve promised to open the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 10 A.M. and 11:30 A.M. so they can get in there to cater lunch for the guys who are laying the mines. Democrats, meanwhile, are using Marxism as a path to popularity after recent polls showed that 66% of Democratic voters are ready to experiment with socialism.  The polls also showed that 72% of Democrats want to experiment with sticking a pencil in their eye to see if they can draw pictures on the inside of their skulls.  And 81% want to experiment to find out what would happen if they set their farts on fire after coating their asses with gasoline. In New York, Democratic primaries have elevated socialist candidates like Brad Lander. Lander has promised to develop American politics in solidarity with Cuba, because he thinks it would be so cool if Americans drove those hep cars from the 1950’s until they ran out of gas, after which they could set dumpsters on fire so they’d have somewhere to barbecue their housepets. Socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier also won her primary. Chevalier has shown her commitment to providing people with affordable housing by supporting the mass murder of Jews.  Chevalier says killing Jews will make housing more affordable because she hates Jews so much they just somehow make her rent seem higher. Chevalier has also promised to eliminate police and prisons, after which she recommends everyone stay safely indoors, unless they’re Jews. Socialist Claire Valdez won her primary, too, and gave a dynamic victory speech. Valdez promised the enthusiastic crowd free healthcare, and the crowd shouted hooray. She promised to provide free public transportation, and the crowd shouted hooray.  She promised free higher education, and the crowd shouted, “Where are we and what’s going on?” After which, the crowd was led gently back to the hospital, where they continued cheering for goods and services that don’t cost anything and for the ghost of Napoleon Bonaparte, who lives in the broom closet. All of these candidates gained support after they received the endorsement of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.  Mamdani has become increasingly popular with New Yorkers through his strategy of talking about socialism while actually promoting a jihadism that seeks to slaughter half of America and enslave the rest.  As one New Yorker put it, “I love Mamdani because he wants to kill me, my family, and everything I value, and his charming smile makes me feel good about myself and the blood-soaked evil that will end my way of life.”  Although, as of right now, midterm election prospects look grim for Republicans, Democrats are nominating candidates whose policies are absolutely guaranteed to turn our country into a smoking hellscape.  The GOP is encouraged by this because the smoking hellscape agenda only has the support of 53% of Democrats. However, 27% of Republicans say a smoking hellscape might be cool if there were winged demons in it like that crazy nun in “The Conjuring 2.” Now, many of you may be asking yourselves, “How did America turn into a country full of such stupid people, and when does the next episode of ‘F-Boy Island’ air on HBO?” But remember, while politicians may be acting badly, there are many brilliant Americans working on important scientific advances, like artificial intelligence so powerful it will slaughter half of America and enslave the rest.  So cheer up — while you still can.

I’m on day nine of no air conditioning in my Washington, D.C. apartment. The building decided to upgrade the HVAC systems in the dead of June. In one of the swampiest cities in America. I feel like a European. And I hate it. The silver lining (if you can call slow-roasting inside your own home a silver lining) is that I now have some sympathy for the people forced to endure this reality year in and year out. Not because of broken buildings or bad timing, but because their governments decided that sweating to death is a form of environmental virtue. They are wrong. Catastrophically and lethally wrong. Europe’s anti-AC policies are doing almost nothing to stop climate change. They are, however, killing people. According to the WHO, Europe averages more than 175,000 heat-related deaths every single year. In 2024 alone, a peer-reviewed study published in Nature Medicine put the summer death toll at nearly 63,000, compared to roughly 2,400 in the United States that same year. So Europe, with a population just 40% larger than ours, is losing tens of thousands of people to heat every summer, while we lose thousands. The difference isn’t climate, it’s ideology. The EU’s Green Deal and its accompanying “degrowth” ideology — the belief that every kilowatt of energy consumed is a sin against the planet — have spent decades actively discouraging AC installation, mandating carbon-neutral buildings, and pushing “passive cooling solutions” like fans and open windows. The result is not a greener planet, but a deadlier one. The European heat death toll is twelve times America’s gun homicide rate. Liberals will go on and on about “genocides” in their favorite third-world countries, yet never say a peep about the grim-heater knocking on thousands of their neighbors’ doors every single summer. No marches. No hashtags. No candlelight vigils. Just grandma dying because a bureaucrat decided a thermostat was too carbon-heavy. And right now, it’s happening again. France is currently in the grip of a historic June heatwave. Fifty-four of its 96 departments are under red alert as of this week. Schools are closed, trains are canceled – the whole catastrophe is being compared to the 2003 heat wave that killed an estimated 15,000 people. Already, 40 people have drowned in rivers and lakes, jumping in to escape the heat. Only about 20% of French homes have air conditioning. According to Le Parisien, one 67-year-old woman is enduring 90-degree temperatures inside her home, so dizzy she can barely stand. Her survival strategy: three to four cold showers a day and hosing down her house with a garden hose. The garden hose. Meanwhile, the French ecological transition agency advises that even the elderly shouldn’t set their AC below 79 degrees Fahrenheit. For everyone else — the pregnant, the chronically ill, the merely human — the French public health agency has assembled a truly heroic list of tips: “Wear a hat.” “Bend your legs regularly.” Eat “water-rich foods like cold soups.” Avoid using “your oven, computer, hairdryer.” “Dim the lights.” They might as well hand out paper-free pamphlets on how to write a will and what to wear at your own funeral. Dying because European governments won’t permit a box that sucks heat out of your living room. Welcome to the third world, Europe. The climate scolds’ math doesn’t even work. Cooling accounts for roughly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. If every European turned on an air conditioner tomorrow, models project it might add 0.05 degrees Celsius to global temperatures by 2050. That’s not saving the planet. That’s a rounding error. Meanwhile, the bodies keep piling up from actual heat exhaustion. Studies show proper air conditioning slashes the risk of dying on brutally hot days by 75%. The U.S. figured this out decades ago and now has near-universal AC with a tiny fraction of Europe’s heat-death toll despite plenty of nasty summers. In fact, cold-related deaths across the globe still substantially outnumber heat-related deaths. Over time, moderate warming could actually reduce net temperature-attributable mortality in many regions by cutting cold deaths faster than it raises heat deaths. So the entire premise that keeping Europeans sweltering indoors is some heroic act of planetary sacrifice falls apart on its own terms. They’re not preventing deaths. They’re just redistributing them. Get Europe some air conditioning. Cut the heat deaths. And maybe even reduce cold deaths down the road. Bingo. Because grand-mère isn’t dying from climate change. She’s dying because some bureaucrat in Paris decided sweltering until she’s six feet under was virtuous. And I’m dying because my building decided June was a great time to upgrade the HVAC. But at least I know it’s coming back. For far too many Europeans, it was never there at all.