Snow and ice are expected to coat the South less than a week after rare snowfall peppered spots of Florida and Georgia. The United States’ South is expected to be hit by a major weather system over the coming weekend, with icy weather anticipated to begin Friday and last through Sunday. Snow and ice are expected as far south as Houston, Texas, and as far east as Virginia Beach. Rain is likely to blanket much of the Deep South. Projected amounts of precipitation are unreliable at this point as current models vary and are likely to change in the coming days, according to the Nashville Severe Weather blog. But the models generally show wintery conditions covering a large part of the south from Friday to Sunday, potentially wreaking havoc on any weekend travel plans. “It is still early, but models are suggesting that multiple cities in the South could see at least some winter weather. They could get everything: rain, snow, ice or a combination of them all,” The Weather Channel reports. Freezing weather may extend in some regions as well, so any snow that does land is likely to stick around and compound any effects from the storm itself. Wintery weather across the South is expected to ramp up significantly on Friday, with snow falling in parts of north Texas up into the Great Plains region. By Friday night, the area of potential snowfall is likely to stretch from Colorado to Virginia and North Carolina. Into the weekend, the system is expected to tilt slowly down into the Gulf Coast of Texas and up into the Northeast, with much of the South staying under the system. Wintery conditions on Saturday night could stretch from Houston up to New York City. The storm system that will potentially blanket the South comes less than a week after wintery weather hit Georgia and parts of northern Florida – a rare event for the area. A separate system hit the Northeast at the same time, snarling traffic and causing significant air travel delays, according to NBC News. The twin storm systems placed roughly 55 million people under winter weather alerts. Air traffic in the United States face delays with roughly 7,700 flights within, into, or out of the United States delayed, and more than 500 canceled, according to FlightAware.com. In Michigan, snow and ice-covered roads contributed to a 100-car pile up.

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump has made good on many of his campaign promises since taking office for the second time a year ago. Standing in the Capitol Rotunda on January 20, 2025 — the inauguration having been moved indoors due to frigid temperatures in our nation’s capital — Trump took the Oath of Office, then addressed an expectant nation, outlining his goals and priorities for this second and final term in the White House. The 45th and 47th president pledged that “from this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world.” Trump planned to restore American greatness by securing the southern border “to repel the disastrous invasion of our country,”; by making “our children safe, healthy, and disease-free” and safe from radical gender ideology; and by “defeating America’s enemies” to promote peace. It was an ambitious agenda, but one Trump and his administration say they’ve met. “President Trump accomplished more in one year than many presidents did in eight,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Daily Wire. “Under President Trump’s leadership,” Leavitt said, “America is safer, stronger, and more prosperous than ever before, and the best is yet to come.” Perhaps most notable has been Trump’s handling of the border crisis. The president completely shut down the border, which had become dangerously porous under President Joe Biden. After four years of record illegal immigration, Customs and Border Protection touted record-low number of encounters most months last year. November was the seventh straight month of zero releases into the United States. In the first 10 months of Trump 2.0, CBP said, there were less apprehensions than one month under Biden, and nationwide apprehensions averaged under 10,000 a month. “These numbers reflect the tireless efforts of our agents and officers who are delivering results that redefine border security,” CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott promised in December. We’re not slowing down. We’re setting the pace for the future.” Additionally, the president’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers have detained more than 66,800 illegal immigrations this year, with huge numbers of detentions in Texas, Arizona, California, and Louisiana, despite protesting, unrest, and even rioting over the apprehensions in some cities. (Photo by Aristide for The Washington Post via Getty Images) Fixing the illegal immigration problem is just one of several ways Trump has upended Biden’s legacy. By rescinding executive orders, pardons, and policies, Trump has significantly minimized his predecessor’s impact — and reducing Biden’s legacy, as Axios reported this weekend, to a mere “footnote.” This includes purging Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and policies from government agencies and academic institutions, one of the “radical political theories and social experiments” he lambasted in his second inaugural address. The president also targeted fraud resulting from illegal immigration and the Biden administration’s failure to properly vet refugees in the aftermath of the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. While the Biden administration revered climate change and warned that it presented a threat to the entire world, Trump has given the topic little discussion, instead focusing on things like the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. After elevating leading MAHA figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the Department of Health and Human Services, Trump made waves with announcements about infant vaccinations, dietary guidelines, and nutrition. In his second inaugural address, Trump only spoke of health when he spoke of children. To that end, Trump signed an executive order almost immediately protecting children from irreversible gender transition procedures, calling them a “stain on our Nation’s history.” The president’s order states that the United States will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the attempted gender transition of a child, promising that it will “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.” Since the signing of that order, transgender programs all across the United States have shut down or ceased offering dangerous hormones to children: in New York, NYU Langone Health, in Colorado, Denver Health, in Virginia, both VCU Health and the Children’s Hospital of Richmond, in Washington, D.C., Children’s National Hospital, to name just a few. The Department of Health and Human Services has also taken further steps to penalize hospitals involved in these procedures, and the White House has told The Daily Wire that it would “certainly” back legislation protecting children in this way. Trump also pledged last year to fix an education system that “teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves — in many cases, to hate our country despite the love that we try so desperately to provide to them.” So far this term, as Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon work to dismantle the Education Department, the president has prioritized patriotic curricula. He also created a joint task force between the Department of Education and Justice Department to aggressively investigate schools that have discriminated against women by allowing men in women’s sports or spaces. SCOOP: Tomorrow, Donald Trump will sign an executive order on keeping men out of women’s sports, @realDailyWire has learned. — Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) February 4, 2025 That task force is one of several ways Trump is enforcing a February executive order banning men from women’s sports, a historic moment in the fight to protect the integrity of women’s spaces from gender activists and ideologues. Trump signed that legislation surrounded by female athletes, including women like Riley Gaines who spoke out against men competing in their sports. The executive orders Trump signed in his first few months largely set the stage for the year to come. In his inaugural address, Trump pledged to sign a day-one executive order “designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.” His second-term war on narcoterrorists escalated in recent months, culminating with a daring midnight raid on Venezuelan Dictator Nicolas Maduro, capturing the authoritarian and bringing him back to the United States to face trial. That raid, which is widely considered to have been carried out flawlessly, stunned the world. And as he explained the president’s actions to the press, Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized that the raid shows that Trump, unlike many world leaders, absolutely means what he says. Following that raid, Trump dubbed his foreign policy “The Donroe Doctrine.” Through strategic military action and negotiations, Trump aims to achieve what he said would be his “proudest legacy…that of a peacemaker and unifier.” The president has told the press many times that he has ended almost 10 wars, referring to conflicts between Israel and Gaza, Israel and Iran, Pakistan and India, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Thailand and Cambodia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Serbia and Kosovo. He has also been heavily involved in helping Russia and Ukraine negotiate an end to their ongoing war, hosting both leaders in the United States. With the president’s blessing, Pete Hegseth is aggressively straightening out the War Department, freshly re-named to emphasize the deadly seriousness of the administration when it comes to protecting the United States and American interests. The Pentagon is cracking down on loosened standards, woke ideology, and more. None of which is to say that the foreign focus of Trump’s second term distracted from domestic policy. In just one year, the president secured almost $10 trillion in both private and foreign investments for the United States, including $600 billion in investments from Saudi Arabia, a $350 billion tech deal with the United Kingdom, and more. “In recent years, our nation has suffered greatly,” Trump told the nation a year ago. “But we are going to bring it back and make it great again, greater than ever before.” “We will stand bravely, we will live proudly, we will dream boldly, and nothing will stand in our way because we are Americans,” Trump concluded. “The future is ours, and our golden age has just begun.”

There has been a clamor among some on the American Right for the United States to pull out of NATO, given Europe’s reflexively adversarial response to Trump’s Greenland saber-rattling. Whether we should remain in an alliance formed in a very different world back in 1949 is a question President Trump first raised during his initial term. The question actually has more merit than one might think at first blush. One must ask what exactly NATO’s raison d’être was to begin with. It is difficult, eighty years on, to recall just how much of a mess Europe was at the time. Much of the continent had been razed by the most lethal of its many internecine conflicts. Europe was no longer at war, but it was not exactly at peace either. Stalin — a dictator with as much, if not more, innocent blood on his hands than Hitler — had advanced his Red Army all the way through Poland, then-Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and half of Germany. That Soviet presence was massive: nearly ten million infantry backed by tens of thousands of tanks and aircraft. By 1945, the Red Army had become a military colossus that had just annihilated the most professional army in the world. Given this looming threat just over the horizon, by 1949 Western Europe needed to band together to offer a deterrent to Stalin’s hegemony. And given the circumstances, the only military body capable of giving this new North Atlantic Treaty Organization its muscle was, of course, the U.S. Armed Forces. While Western Europe was rebuilt under the auspices of the Marshall Plan, American troops, armor, and aircraft kept the Soviets at bay. This mission was performed successfully all the way to 1991, when the Soviet Union — the very threat NATO was created to contain — abruptly collapsed. That was 35 years ago. And yet NATO did not ride off into the sunset with its mission accomplished. Instead, it continued to expand, adding 16 new nations — each creeping closer and closer to an increasingly alarmed Russia (a country that suffered roughly 25 million dead repelling the last Western invaders from its soil). But why the steady eastward expansion? Some NATO supporters argue that Putin’s resurgence and his aggression in Ukraine are answer enough. But Ukraine and Russia share a convoluted history. Ukraine has long been contested land, where its story and Russia’s overlap in a region that has seen over seven hundred conflicts since the fall of Rome. This is not the first time war has raged from Crimea to the Donbas. Nor will it be the last. There is no reason for a non-Ukrainian to die fighting for that territory. In fact, the only credible reason to continue our involvement in NATO is if Putin’s Russia poses the same danger as Stalin’s USSR once did. But today’s Russian military is not the Red Army of 1945 in which anywhere from 30 to 35% of its personnel were non-Russians (including 20% Ukrainians). And today Russia is demographically dying. Between 1990 and now—owing to the breakup of the Soviet Union, low birth rates, emigration, and early mortality often linked to alcoholism—Russia’s population has shrunk by roughly three to five million; that is a around a 2 to 4% decline. Over that same period, the U.S. population grew by more than 95 million, or roughly 38%. Even without the United States, the EU today has roughly four times Russia’s population. History shows that in modern war, population is often the best predictor of who prevails in a protracted struggle. Russia’s economy is both small and oil-dependent. It has been called the world’s largest gas station for a reason. Anywhere from 20 to 30% of its economy depends on crude oil sales, depending on the year and market conditions — making it extremely vulnerable to sanctions or blockades. As it stands, Russia’s entire economy is smaller than that of three American states. Speaking of economies, since NATO’s establishment, the GDP of EU nations has grown from barely $2.5 trillion to as high as $23 trillion today, an increase of more than 800%. This prompts the obvious question: if these nations have grown so rich, why do they still need us as if they were clearing rubble out of Cologne? In other words, whether one agrees with leaving NATO or not, Trump’s re-evaluation of an alliance nearing the end of its eighth decade is not grounded in anti-EU whimsy, but in a classic cost-benefit analysis of its service to American interests. Polls show that while only about 15% of Americans favor leaving NATO, as many as 30% of European residents believe the United States should reduce or end its role in Europe’s defense. This is ironic. If the same Europeans who love to hold up their model social-welfare systems — especially their “free” health care — understood how much of those systems are underwritten by the American taxpayer, they might take a less belligerent view toward one of their primary health care providers. Andreas Rentz/Getty Images What do I mean by this? Take a look at the wealthiest EU nation — and the one with the most violent history with Russia — Germany. Germany currently spends roughly 2% of its €5 trillion GDP on defense, or about €100 billion annually. At the same time, it spends roughly ten to 12% of GDP on health care — around €500 billion per year. Estimates suggest that if American soldiers and airmen withdrew and Germany were left to fend for itself, Berlin would need to raise defense spending to as much as 4% of GDP. That means an additional €90–100 billion every year. That money has to come from somewhere. And since health care is the largest pool of discretionary spending (unless Berlin plans on raiding pensions), that is where it would most likely be found. A full American withdrawal would require cutting Germany’s health care system by at least 20%. The consequences would be catastrophic. Growth spending would slow, wait times would balloon into rationing, co-pays and supplemental costs would rise, hospital consolidations would reduce access to emergency and specialized care, benefits would shrink, staffing shortages would worsen, and zero-cost access would disappear. Setting aside health outcomes, the social upheaval in a country accustomed to expansive care at minimal personal cost would be acute — and politically devastating for any party responsible. And Germany is only one nation. If the entire EU had to raise defense spending to 4% to fill the void left by an American departure, it would require roughly €340 billion more per year — again, about 20% of total EU health care spending. Even partial offsets would place ten to 20% pressure on health budgets — unless already sky-high taxes rose further. Suddenly, the EU’s vaunted “free” health care system would be anything but. Put more bluntly, NATO is not merely a security alliance — it is a massive American taxpayer-funded subsidy for Europe’s welfare state. That is the dirty little secret no one in Brussels wants to discuss. Every time a German walks into a “free” clinic or a Frenchman is wheeled into an operating room, roughly one euro in five is effectively paid by you and me. NATO — at least for its original Western democracies — needs the United States not to defend borders it could fund itself, but to prop up welfare systems already straining under their own weight. There is a famous story in business lore about accounting wunderkind Harry Sonneborn, who told McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc that the real value of his restaurants was not the thin margins on hamburgers, but the land beneath them. “You’re not in the hamburger business,” he said. “You’re in the real estate business.” In the same way, American contributions to NATO are not primarily about Europe’s defense. They allow European capital to be freed from defense spending — a burden borne by American taxpayers — and redirected toward social welfare. So when your taxes go to NATO, an alliance originally created to defend Europeans from other Europeans, you are not in the continental defense business. You are in the health care business. Just not for yourself. You are providing it for wealthy Germans, French, Brits, and Scandinavians who understand exactly how fragile their welfare systems are — and how quickly they would collapse if America walked away. After all, it is easy to pay for both guns and butter when someone else largely pays for the guns. It is quite another thing to foot the bill for both. More the suckers us. * * * Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, The Daily Wire, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three books. You can also follow him on Substack and X. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Erika Kirk’s latest court filing seeks to stop defense delays in the assassination trial of her late husband Charlie Kirk — a case in which the defendant, Tyler Robinson, has yet to enter a plea. Erika’s attorney, Jeffrey Neiman, filed a court document asking the judge overseeing the trial to enforce Erika’s right to a speedy trial, arguing that there have been “undue delays” in the progress of the case. “The Utah Code affords victims of a crime ‘the right to a speedy disposition of the charges free from unwarranted delay caused by or at the behest of the defendant,'” Neiman wrote in the filing, according to Fox News. “This Court is tasked with the critically important function of ensuring the Defendant has a fair trial, but this Court must also do so while balancing Mrs. Kirk’s right to a speedy trial and therefore this Notice invokes Mrs. Kirk’s rights under applicable Utah Code,” the filing continued. Neiman noted that Charlie Kirk, a prominent conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder, “believed in the importance of the United States Constitution,” and while the Constitution “guarantees criminal defendants many rights, it does not guarantee them the right to cause undue delay in the criminal justice process.” Robinson’s defense team claims the Utah County Attorney’s Office has a conflict of interest in the case due to a Utah County prosecutor’s daughter being present at Utah Valley University when the assassination took place. They are currently working to get the office booted from the case. The prosecution says the family member saw nothing direct and a conflict of interest has not been established. They’ve also accused the defense of stall tactics. At Robinson’s last court appearance, Judge Tony Graf said there wasn’t sufficient evidence yet to warrant the expulsion of the office, but has notably allowed Robinson’s team to begin examining witnesses in relation to the supposed conflict of interest. Robinson has been charged with murdering Kirk, a 31-year-old husband and father of two, on September 10 at Utah Valley University. At the time he was shot, Kirk was taking questions from people in the crowd who disagreed with him on politics. The state has made clear that they intend to seek the death penalty if Robinson is convicted. Related: Tyler Robinson Had Another Day In Court. Here’s The Latest In The Charlie Kirk Assassination Trial.

After a group of leftist activists and ex-CNN host Don Lemon disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Sunday, on Monday Lemon hosted Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison on a podcast, where Ellison insisted that the activists had a right to disrupt the service. The Daily Wire reported: Dozens of protesters crowded into Cities Church in St. Paul on Sunday as part of a “clandestine operation” to “disrupt business as usual,” activist leader Nekima Levy-Armstrong told Lemon, who embedded with the protest group. The protest lasted roughly 30 minutes and effectively ended the church service as it drove congregants out. Lemon asked Ellison about the church invasion, prompting this response: The protest is fundamental to American society; this country started in a protest. It’s freedom of expression; people have a right to lift up their voices and make their peace. None of us are immune from the voice of the public. Quite honestly, I think that you got the First Amendment, freedom of religion and the freedom of First Amendment and freedom of expression. I think it’s just something you gotta live with in a society like this. Ellison ignored the 1994 FACE Act, which made it to prevent people from exercising religious freedom at places of worship. It states: “Whoever by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure intimidate, or interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship” could be prosecuted under the law. “This administration is real tender about things when it comes to their own interest,” Ellison claimed. “But they don’t care about the same things when the things don’t lie in their favor. So they’re getting tender about a church service now.” “They’re arresting people in clinics, schools, churches, anywhere they choose to do it,” he alleged. “They don’t really care about sacred and sensitive places unless it works in their favor.” Ellison somehow segued to President Trump’s criticism of Jimmy Kimmel for his remarks about the death of Charlie Kirk, then threw in this completely unrelated remark about Trump: “The mad king won’t let you say jokes about him.” Tim Pearce contributed to this article.