In the aftermath of the bruising midterm elections, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took a moment on Friday to remind voters why they had elected President Donald Trump two years earlier. Rubio, began with a light-hearted crack about the multiple jobs he holds within the Trump administration — currently serving as National Security Adviser in addition to his duties at the State Department — and attributed at least a portion of the damage wrought in Tuesday’s elections to President Trump’s willingness to make tough decisions, even when they might not give him any political advantage. “I see firsthand that this is a man who wakes up every morning with one thing as a priority: you,” Rubio said. “Our country and its future. The most important thing a president can do for a country is to keep it safe, and there are people around the world that want to destroy it. They want to destroy our country, they want to destroy our way of life.” “[Trump] was elected to do the hard things — the hard things. It would have been very easy to do what multiple presidents before him have done, which is to ignore the Iran thing, leave it for the next guy,” Rubio continued. “Put it aside and don’t worry about it — that would have been the easiest thing to do, honestly, to just basically say leave it alone, who cares, that’s going to be someone’s problem in the future. But this president didn’t do that.” “He confronted it because what Iran wants to do is not just destroy our country and to destroy our way of life, and threaten our children — we cannot live in a world in which the most radical terroristic regime on the planet possesses a weapon of mass destruction. And we’ve had president after president ignore it and allow it to linger, but this president wasn’t allowed — wasn’t elected to ignore it,” the former Florida senator concluded. “And he wasn’t elected to allow threats to linger. And he did it for you. Not for him, not for anybody else — he did it for you and for our country, and for that we, our children, and children not yet born owe a sense, a deep sense of gratitude. And I know he’ll continue to do it and that’s why I’m so honored to be his Secretary of State. And that’s why I know he’s so honored that all of you are here today.” Democrats swept the midterm elections on Tuesday, retaking control of both the House and the Senate and flipping a number of traditionally Republican seats in the process. Many of the Democrats who won big in those elections campaigned on putting an end to the war in Iran and fixing kitchen-table issues to make life more affordable for Americans — but in the days since, they have suggested that they are more interested in investigating and prosecuting anyone who has ever been in President Trump’s orbit.

The British version of the popular dating reality show “Married at First Sight” has been canceled after some of the participants accused other participants of rape and threats of acid attacks. Channel 4 announced this week that the show will not return after its tenth year of production. The allegations first surfaced in a BBC Panorama investigation, “The Dark Side of Married at First Sight,” which aired in May and in which the women said the show failed to protect them.  Two of the show’s participants allege that they were raped, and one said her on-screen husband also threatened her with an acid attack. Both women chose to remain anonymous. A third woman, identified as Shona Manderson, accused her on-screen husband of performing a non-consensual sexual act, as BBC reported. The accused men all denied the allegations. The outlet noted that one of the men was arrested on suspicion of rape back in June. Channel 4 commissioned an external review of contributor welfare in April, after Panorama brought the allegations to the network, and later pulled all previous seasons from its streaming platforms. Channel 4 chief executive Priya Dogra said in a statement that the review, which examined more than 31,000 documents and 20 hours of footage, found that the show’s welfare protocols complied with Ofcom’s broadcasting code.  However, she said fully adopting the review’s recommendations would fundamentally change the format, and she decided to end the show. “This review did not have the authority to adjudicate on the very serious allegations made by three women… but I would like to repeat that I am very sorry for the distress those women have clearly felt,” Dogra said. “Married at First Sight” is a reality television social experiment where complete strangers agree to marry each other the very first time they meet at the altar, hoping to find true and lasting love. The weddings are not legally valid, but the couples act like spouses after their faux weddings and go on a honeymoon and move in together. “Married at First Sight UK” first aired in July 2015, one year after the U.S. version debuted.

This is a republished monologue with permission from the creator. You can hear the original and the complete show, “REPUBLICAN MELTDOWN! The Brutal Truth Behind Trump’s Midterm Disaster,” here. *** This isn’t the moment to look for comfortable answers to an election blowout. This is the time to say, “All right, what is really going on? What’s really turning people off?” Challenge yourself and hope to meet the moment because that will lead to a better Republican Party, a conservative movement willing to address the issues. And that’s what I really wanted to do. Make sure I don’t go to my defaults in this moment. Look at liberal Vox; they asked me, to the effect of, “How do you know if your priors are wrong? I said, “Listen, everyone does this. Everyone says they don’t like to be challenged on their ideology.” Look at the amendments over not allowing biological men in female spaces and female sports, which passed unanimously across the country in blue states like Colorado and Washington, and passed overwhelmingly. Could you find 100 members of this current Democratic Congress, 50% or 52% who would sign onto a bill saying that? Could you find 50 members who would say there are actually only two biological sexes? The answer is no. The electoral class is almost always more extreme than the general public; remember that. They fear the political class and its judgment. They will ignore very obvious things most Americans believe. So the only way we’re going to be able to do that, to challenge ourselves to find better answers, is to examine the data. First, the generic ballot looks like it’s a D +13 electorate. That means that the Democrats won the overall popular vote in the House of Representatives by a 13-point margin, which is near historic. It’s Watergate levels — very high. We don’t know the exact number yet because, of course, California will be counting votes until the next election. They’ll finally finalize the vote, and then we’ll go to another election. But in 2024, the generic ballot was R+2. So it’s about a 15-point swing — 15 points overall. That’s what the New York Times is estimating, and they were very right in their polling. Looking at the polling, the two groups that swung hardest against Republicans were young people, who moved 33 points toward Democrats, followed by Latinos, who moved 29 points toward Democrats. Now, those aren’t mutually exclusive groups. There are a lot of young people who are Latinos. So when one moves, the other one moves with it because they’re kind of the same group in a lot of cases. Two things about that: Latinos who are younger swung more to the left than Latinos who are older. Likewise, Latinos who make $50,000 a year or less also swung further to the left than Latinos who made higher amounts of income — $100,000 or $200,000. That’s both a persuasion part of that element of why they swung. It’s also a turnout part of that. There are two different things to dissect from that. Democrats persuaded more Latinos on policy, but they also persuaded more Democrat Latinos to turn out, which affects how aggressive that swing towards Democrat Latinos was. Florida is a great state to examine because it has a lot of data, a large Latino population, and, unlike Texas, it registers people by party. This is going to be, by the way, the thing that I do for the rest of my life: encourage states to register people by party because it makes examining data much easier. And unlike other states that do register by party, like Arizona and New York, which also have large Latino populations, Florida actually counts all their votes on election night. Can you imagine a world where, in New York, which is still counting votes, and Arizona, which is still counting votes, we could all count our votes on election night? It would be nice. In the early vote — Florida is a state where a majority of people, over 80% of the population, vote early — Latino Democrats outvoted Latino Republicans in every age category except Latino senior citizens. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, Latino Democrats outvoted Latino Republicans by a margin of three to one. Latino Republican voter totals among the R groups were anemic. It was so small, in fact, among the youngest population that Latino independents outvoted them, and independents always vote less often than Republicans or Democrats. If you register with a party, you feel like you have more skin in the game. Latino independents actually voted at a higher proportion than Latino Republicans among 18- to 24-year-olds. Latino Democrats between the ages of 18 and 34: 32% of all registered voters in that group – of all Latino Democrats between 18 and 34 in the state of Florida – voted early. Only 14% of Latino Republicans in Florida voted early in that same age category. Now I can assure you, I know some of you were saying, “Ryan, it’s because they voted on Election Day.” I can assure you they did not. I can assure you that that gap did not close by Election Day, not even close to it. Maybe it got a little tighter, maybe it was two to one, but two to one is still pretty bad. And what happened in Florida regarding this likely happened all over the country. I was saying for weeks that the sheer number of first-time Latino voters in Texas who came to the polls, and the number of Latinos who had voted in just one previous Democratic primary, were in excess; it was very high. So in fact, the Latino difference in other Republican states like Texas was probably three to one or four to one, not two to one, or two and a half to one like it was in Florida. It was probably much, much higher. One thing that protected Florida from turning blue was that the Cuban votes stayed Republican, and Latinos in Florida actually had a lower voter turnout than Latinos in Texas. So those two things actually really helped protect Florida from turning blue. So yes, these were swings that, in fact, because those who did show up among minorities tended to be more Democrats, that’s part of the swing. So put that into a caveat. Democrats got their voters out, Republicans didn’t, and that’s part of the 20, 30 point swing toward Democrats nationwide. Let’s talk about the persuasion argument. This is where Republicans need to challenge themselves. We could probably think about why we didn’t get our voters out. There’s a million answers for that after spending a billion dollars. Giancarlo Sopo put together a wonderful series of tweets examining the Latino vote, especially the Florida-based Latino vote. Their main priority — and this is true in a lot of excess polling, even polling by Atlas Intel — said immigration was number one, but they split the economic argument into different categories, so that’s why economics was not number one, but it would’ve been number one if it’d all been in one category. Their main priority, Sopo writes, is that tariffs were the main thing, and tariffs/high prices like inflation were the number one driver. And then the second thing was immigration. Now the tariffs make complete sense because if you look at white working-class counties, counties with virtually no Latino population to begin with, they also experienced huge swings. West Virginia had a tremendous swing to the left. Appalachia as a whole, tremendous swings to the left. According to NBC News, Latinos spend a higher percentage of their budget on essential items like food and energy than the average American. And which products, because of the Iran War, have the biggest spike in costs? Gas, energy, food. So it makes perfect sense why they would be more heavily impacted by the war than, let’s say, a WASPy Connecticut woman with a million dollars in the bank. A report from Moody’s found that the Iran War cost the American household an extra $2,000 this year because of higher prices on those two items, energy and food. And if you’re already reeling from years of high inflation under Joe Biden’s presidency, you feel like you still haven’t caught up. You’re still not caught up after the pandemic. It’s been half a decade, and you think, “I can’t get to where I was in 2019, and then this happens, and now I feel really, really far behind.” Now, I can’t overstate how much the war in Iran impacted the president’s approval on these issues. According to progressive data analyst David Shor, President Trump’s approval rating on gas prices was about 50% before the war, but by Election Day it had halved to 28%. His approval rating on the cost of living was near 40%. It was close to 30% by Election Day. Trump’s approval on the economy was 19 points worse during this midterm than the 2018 midterm. So yes, a big part of the Latino flip was the economy, specifically ramifications from the cost of living because of the war. I obviously also think the narrative around tariffs — the tariffs that increased prices so much also fed into that. And the Republican response with that One Big Beautiful Bill was very, very small, saying, “Hey, if you work in restaurants or as a nurse or do overtime or whatever, you’ve got all this money back, and you kept tax cuts. The Democrats voted to increase your taxes by $10,000.” They didn’t do a good job amplifying that. They didn’t do that at all. And what they were feeling in the real-time increases was because of these policies. That’s the economic part of it. The other part is immigration, and this is tough for me. I’m an immigration hawk. I’m not shy about it at all, but I need to challenge myself because we have these election results, and I need to challenge my priors and get uncomfortable. It wasn’t a secret that Trump campaigned on mass deportations and Latinos overwhelmingly embraced him in the 2024 election. It’s not a secret. Many of you are probably wondering, “Hey, Latino voters, you wanted to end the chaos of the border. You voted for the guy who campaigned on mass deportation. Why are you upset now?” And what I want to understand, what I’m trying to understand and what I understand that I think many Democrats don’t, is an unspoken value in America, an unspoken value in our political system: the idea of fairness. Fairness is a concept we very much believe in, and that includes immigration. And we understand that, I think, as Republicans, we understand open-border activist Democrats heard the argument of fairness. Latinos see people coming across the border, many of whom are not Latino, and they’re demanding free stuff, and they’re getting free stuff from the government and all of these protections. And they’re saying, “This is not fair. I work hard. I pay taxes. I don’t get things from the government. My family waited in line. They’re not getting kickbacks. Why are you getting this and I’m not getting it? I pay taxes. You’re abusing the system. This isn’t fair.” We won the Latino vote in part because of the fairness argument. This is a fair thing. You should have to wait in line. You should have to respect our laws, and if you are a criminal, you should be deported. That is a fairness argument that overwhelmingly people understood, especially Latinos, and that is part of the reason they moved so heavily Republican in 2024. They did not care about anything else. But the administration, especially under the guidance of Stephen Miller and the mismanagement of Kristi Noem, focused too heavily on numbers for numbers’ sake. They said we need to deport as many people as possible and felt the pressure from conservative influencers to get mass deportations done as fast as possible, no matter what. You got to deport 10 million people. Any way you can get them, get them. And mass deportations did happen. I know a lot of people who black pill constantly who try to feed you negative stories, saying, “There were no mass deportations; we’re not getting them.” All you need to do is look at the current CDC birth data and see how many fewer foreign-born women in this country are having children. Because if they’re not here, they can’t have children here. The number of births to women born in China in America is down 6% in 2026 from 2025. Afghans are down 5%. Mexicans are down 10%. Guatemalans are down 10%. Hondurans are down 11%. El Salvadorians down 7%. Haitians are down 14%. Somalians are down 12%. These people aren’t here because a lot of them are leaving, and they’re not being replaced because Trump changed immigration guidelines. So we’re getting what we want. We should celebrate it, and we should not black pill about it, but we should also look at how we are doing mass deportations a little bit indiscriminately, where people are getting arrested trying to get their papers in order out of court or seeing their son off at the military. It’s very easy to see how somebody could be like, oh, this person overstayed their visa, which is a crime – they should have to pay some kind of consequence for that. I’m not saying they shouldn’t, but they go to the courthouse to get that fixed, and they’re being handcuffed and dragged off, and it looks overly aggressive. I understand how an average person says this is not fair. And then we lose the same fairness argument we won around immigration, especially when it comes to somebody who never committed a crime. If you’re a child molester, I don’t care what they do. Honestly, they shoot you. If you’ve raped a five-year-old and you’re trying to evade deportation, I honestly don’t care if they shoot you. I’m not talking about those people. I think we’re all in agreement. I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about people who seemed to be getting an unfair shake from the system. And I think it’s wrong that the administration was not counting self-deportations as a factor in the mass deportation. We were not talking about the millions who were just leaving because Trump was finally enforcing the laws, period. And maybe part of that was the scare tactic of just being arrested anywhere, but they might’ve had those wins even if they didn’t do it as aggressively as they currently did. Now, I am for an aggressive immigration policy where we protect the border, and we deport illegals, but there’s got to be a softer way to do it. I think maybe going after employers who are sometimes very wealthy; they’re not all just small restaurant owners. A lot of them are wealthy agricultural companies, even bakers. I don’t know if it’s true, but there’s a famous story of the bake shop in Illinois where a black worker called ICE on the fact that half of the employees were Latino and they were illegal immigrants. And a black worker basically got hired for every job that was then open — replacing that illegal immigrant — and got a wage increase. Those are good stories. We should have gone after employers who did mass illegal alien hiring, not necessarily the aggressive arresting on the street and chasing down people when they were dropping their kids off at school. The problem is that the few times it was really aggressive fueled rumors about how aggressive ICE would be. And I don’t know how aggressively they actually were, but it’s a problem that there were enough stories where the belief was that ICE was systematically arresting people who were really basically doing nothing wrong, and everyone was in fear. And I think that explains a dramatic swing among Latinos when it comes to this issue. Not that all of a sudden they all become open border activists, not that all of a sudden they become anti-deporting anybody; it’s just that it was overly aggressive and it looked unfair. So, Latinos are seeing a swing towards Democrats in part because Latino Democrats outvoted Latino Republicans, especially young Latino Democrats, by very large margins. In Florida, it was about two to one. I think in Texas it was probably three to one or four to one —a big part of it. That helped flip a lot of places with Senate seats. The visualization of mass deportations being too aggressive and being unfair to people trying to work within the system to become legal or do it legally who otherwise have not committed crimes created an idea that this was not a fair way to do immigration policy. And the Iran War made the group that was most susceptible to wild price swings and inflation dislike the economics. That’s why I believe Latino votes swung so heavily. *** Ryan James Girdusky is an author, podcaster, political consultant, and writer whose work has been featured in multiple publications including the Washington Examiner, The American Conservative Magazine, The Week, Human Events, and The Daily Caller. He is the host of “It’s A Numbers Game with Ryan Girdusky” podcast. Follow him on X: @RyanGirdusky

Texas just elected its most vocally religious politician in recent memory. James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian who built his campaign around Scripture, became the first Democrat the state has sent to the U.S. Senate since 1988. Days later, Texas Monthly declared that “The Christian Nationalist Agenda Is Dead.” The irony is thick. When liberals bring God into politics on behalf of their preferred social programs, the media welcome it as moral courage. When conservatives invoke the same faith to support pro-life, small-government, and pro-family policies, critics brand it Christian nationalism. Americans can disagree about what Scripture means and how it applies to public policy. Christians on the Right and the Left get it wrong, and they will keep getting it wrong. That’s a debate worth having. But applying the “Christian nationalist” label only to one side is a double standard, not an innocent analysis that just happened to land that way.  It’s unrealistic to expect anyone to make ethical choices apart from his or her deepest beliefs. For people of faith, that’s where the moral framework comes from. Even those who claim no religion live by a set of convictions, whether or not they can trace from whence those convictions came. We all bring our worldviews into the voting booth, and every voter — not just the ones whose conclusions meet with secular, public approval — should have the freedom to do so. That double standard has rarely been more glaring. Talarico was one of 13 seminary-trained Democrats elected on Tuesday, alongside Kansas megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton, who won a seat in the U.S. Senate.  Liberal Christian author Jen Hatmaker, a prominent critic of Christian nationalism, posted on Wednesday that she’d forgotten “what hope feels like” until the results came in, praising the newly elected for speaking the language of the Beatitudes, Isaiah 58, and 1 Corinthians 13.  I disagree with some of the theology these new officeholders have articulated, such as Talarico’s suggestion that all religions lead to God or Hamilton’s view that abortion can be acceptable. But that’s beside the point I’m making. They have every right to carry their faith into public office how they choose — and so does everyone else. With so many who identify as “religious Left” in the Senate now, one might expect the usual critics of religion in politics to be out in full force. But chances are that we will see no CNN documentaries, concerned magazine essays, or fresh warnings about the separation of church and state.  Last year, Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) quoted Matthew 25 on the House floor to oppose portions of a bill that would have cut some Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program provisions. No one accused him of trying to build a theocracy by invoking his faith to change legislation.  Democrats regularly cite Matthew 7:12 — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — and Matthew 25:35 — “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” — to make the case for their immigration and economic policies.  Last summer, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) quoted Old Testament prophet Amos to condemn proposed cuts to Medicaid and food assistance.  I’m fine with them doing this, even if I disagree with their interpretation. So why aren’t they OK with it when Republicans do it? Compare those examples with many involving House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). When he said on air in 2023 that anyone curious about his views should “go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it,” the response was outrage. Jen Psaki went on MSNBC to label him a Christian fundamentalist. MSNBC’s Sarah Posner called him the most unabashedly Christian nationalist speaker in history. Politico, Time, and Newsweek all ran headlines tying him to Christian nationalism. When conservatives defend positions on borders, life, marriage, and taxes from Scripture, media compare us to theocrats. When liberals do the same on immigration and economics, media hold their actions up as the “right” kind of Christianity.  Critics will say this misses the point. Christian nationalism, they argue, isn’t about Christians who vote their faith; it’s about wanting the government to impose Christianity itself. For example, the push to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms — a real debate.  I agree that specific church-state proposals deserve criticism and comprehensive discussion, but that’s not how critics use the Christian nationalism label in practice. Media branded Johnson a Christian nationalist the moment he said the Bible shaped his worldview, not in response to any particular church-state policy.  And let’s be real: Christian Democrats aren’t actually content to keep their beliefs personal. They too want to see their worldviews pushed into law; that is the entire point of voting for the politicians they did. They want federal law on taxes, immigration, and abortion shaped by their reading of Scripture. That is exactly what Johnson wants. The only difference is the conclusions and who agrees with them.  The tired talking point that “you can’t legislate morality” is simply false. Every law on the books is a judgment about right and wrong. It’s illegal to murder, steal, or cheat on your taxes because those things are wrong, and lawmakers decided to make it official. The question was never whether faith and morality shape our laws, because they always will. The question is whether every citizen’s convictions get equal standing when they do. As American citizens, we all have the right and the responsibility to live, vote, and govern according to what we believe is best, whether we’re liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans. And yes, sometimes one’s version of Christianity seems to fit a little too neatly into one party’s platform. That’s true on both sides. As voters, we can scrutinize it, raise it with our leaders, and point out inconsistencies. What we cannot fairly do is tell one side that bringing their faith to politics is “Christian nationalism” and tell the other it’s simply love and kindness. *** Ericka Andersen is the author of “Freely Sober: Rethinking Alcohol Through the Lens of Faith.” This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Shutting down USAID was the biggest shake-up for American diplomacy in a generation. An agency founded in 1961 was folded into the State Department within months. It was overdue. USAID spent $1.5 million to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in Serbian workplaces and funded EcoHealth Alliance, a group tied to the Wuhan lab. Its own acting administrator placed 56 senior officials on leave for actions “designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders.” An agency that stopped answering to the elected government had stopped answering to the American people. Plenty of Africans agreed. We have spent a combined two decades working with foreign countries across the Arabian Gulf and Africa, and the complaint African ministers most often raised was never that America gave too little. It was that America arrived with workshops while China arrived with cranes. Ghana built a national strategy around the phrase “Ghana Beyond Aid.” Africa’s leaders have been asking for partners, not patrons, for years. Dissolving USAID was the easy part. Secretary of State Rubio and President Trump have built “trade, not aid” into how Washington operates, starting in Africa. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), America’s development bank, now has a $205 billion ceiling, more than triple its old limit, and expanded power to take equity stakes. The Washington Accords between Congo and Rwanda tie a peace framework to clean, traceable supply chains for cobalt, copper, and coltan with American access built in. The guns in eastern Congo have not gone quiet, but for the first time both capitals have an American economic reason to make peace stick. Many conservatives recoil at sending money overseas. That is a healthy instinct. The President’s Africa team applies one test that should satisfy it: every dealing, hard or soft power, must benefit the American people. Start with critical minerals. They are in your phone, your car, and our fighter jets. China controls roughly 70% of global processing capacity and has used that chokehold as leverage over American industry. Africa holds nearly 30% of the world’s reserves. Whoever builds the mines, railways and refineries there sets the terms for everyone else. Our Gulf partners — the Emiratis, Saudis, and Qataris — are among the continent’s largest investors. Having worked alongside them, we have found they would rather build with Americans than without us. Trade, not aid, gives them an American partner worth building with. Next, customers. By 2050, more than one in four people on Earth will be African, a young and growing consumer base that wants what America makes. America First means exporting, not just importing. Every market we open is a new order for an American factory and a new paycheck for an American worker. Every project we fund creates high-paying work for American engineers, geologists, project managers, and operators. The same discipline runs through what remains of foreign assistance. The America First Global Health Strategy moves lifesaving programs into bilateral compacts that ask governments to co-invest, take ownership, and partner with American businesses. That builds partners instead of dependents, and it gives American industry a real stake. Finally, the math. This is investing, and it pays. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the agency DFC replaced in 2020, returned a net profit to the Treasury for 40 straight years. DFC had net income of $241 million in FY2024 and $341 million in FY2023. None of this works without good stewards. The president’s Africa team at the National Security Council, the State Department, and DFC know the difference between a deal that looks good in a press release and one that pays off for Americans. They are the reason this model will not become another USAID. America First does not mean America alone. The old model sent billions abroad and hoped for gratitude. The new one sends American capital and expertise abroad and brings home minerals, markets, jobs, and returns, alongside African partners who would rather trade with us than owe Beijing. Trade, not aid, is strength at home. *** Ambassador Michael Patrick Murphy, KM is Director of Africa and the Middle East at Nestpoint Associates. A U.S. Army veteran and graduate of The Citadel, he has spent two decades working with countries and businesses across the Gulf and Africa. In late 2022, he was appointed to be Permanent Representative of the Sovereign Order of Malta to the African Union Commission. Alex Olson is Deputy Director of Government Affairs at Nestpoint Associates. As the firm’s principal government affairs representative, Alex leads advocacy for trade and critical minerals issues, anchoring Nestpoint’s footprint across Africa.