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Trump Wins Another Fake Award—but He Actually Deserves This One
New Republic • Feb 13, 2026

Trump Wins Another Fake Award—but He Actually Deserves This One

Last month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright convened the National Coal Council for the first time since the organization was disbanded under President Biden. He extolled the administration’s work forcing aging coal plants to stay open, and hinted at further handouts to come. Now we’re starting to get a sense of what those handouts might look like. This week, the Trump administration announced that it would, as promised last summer, revoke the so-called “endangerment finding”—a key scientific finding from 2009 on which almost all federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is based. It will also order the Defense Department to purchase electricity from coal-fired power plants, and the industry will get a 33-month extension on cleaning up coal-ash dumps containing mercury, arsenic, and other toxins (all of which are expected to seep into groundwater in the meantime). Administration officials speaking to The Wall Street Journal ahead of the Wednesday announcement additionally said the administration would “award funding to five coal plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina and Kentucky to recommission and upgrade the facilities” and that “Trump will be awarded the inaugural ‘Undisputed Champion of Coal’ award by the Washington Coal Club.” Trump famously covets fake awards that stroke his ego, but it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t deserve this one.The revocation of the endangerment finding, which determined that greenhouse gases harm public health, is the biggest news. But propping up coal is societally consequential in its own right, and few think it’s a good idea. It’s economically unsustainable, and aside from warming the planet, coal combustion has been linked to respiratory problems, heart problems, cancer, cognitive impairment and decline, and death. In 2023, a study from George Mason University found that exposure to fine particulate pollution from coal combustion was associated with more than twice the mortality rates linked to fine particulate pollution from other sources. In fact, pretty much everything that the Trump administration has proposed doing this week polls poorly—and not just with Democrats.In 2023, Data for Progress found that 65 percent of all likely voters supported proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulations restricting coal- and gas-fired plant pollution—and half of Republicans did too. More recent polling conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the GMU Center for Climate Change Communication found that 66 percent of all registered voters, including a majority of moderate Republicans (57 percent), favor transitioning the economy to 100 percent clean energy by 2050. Shockingly, even 26 percent of conservative Republicans support this. And 74 percent of registered voters want to see carbon dioxide regulated “as a pollutant”—including 76 percent of moderate Republicans and 45 percent of conservative Republicans. This is the data you should keep in mind when reading New York Times reporters Lisa Friedman and Maxeline Joselow’s meticulous story about the small, behind-the-scenes team that has been working for years to overturn the endangerment finding. While “conservative groups and businesses immediately fought to dismantle” the finding in 2009, they write, most corporations had given up by 2017 “as they lost legal challenges and public concern about global warming began to grow.” Officials in the first Trump administration actually rejected calls to revoke the finding, even during their wild dash to undo as many environmental regulations as possible on their way out the door in January 2021.But a few key people—specifically Trump allies Russell Vought and Jeffrey Clark, as well as “lesser-known conservative attorneys” Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill—refused to give up, and during the Biden administration they began drafting “a comprehensive strategy for reversing the finding on ‘Day 1’ of the next Republican administration,” working “in secret ‘to prevent media and other conflicted sources from shaming participants and undercutting the work before it is done.’” Businesses weren’t pressing for it anymore, most mainstream Republicans weren’t pressing for it anymore, and, to hear Joselow and Friedman recount the opinion of one former Trump transition adviser, “the years of work of conservative activists might have gone nowhere if a different Republican had won the presidency.”Or, to put it another way, almost no one wanted this. Instead, both the polling data and the Times report show that a handful of extremely dedicated ideologues—not even fossil-fuel executives—toiled in secret and found, in Trump, a useful random-number generator who was willing to turn their incredibly unpopular position into policy. Cue the rejoicing from coal companies and the like, who weren’t even aware something this politically implausible was an option.On the one hand, the fact that no one wants these handouts for coal means that the potential for backlash—as with almost everything else this administration seems to be pursuing—is significant. On the other hand, not all of this damage will be easy to undo.Stat of the Week6.4 degrees FahrenheitThat’s how much February temperatures have risen since the last time Cortina, Italy, hosted the Winter Olympic Games, in 1956. Unsurprisingly, climate change is creating challenges for this year’s games.What I’m ReadingWhy this country declared an ocean current collapse a national security riskThis detailed report on what the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean’s current system could mean for Iceland was published Tuesday, six days after reporter Chico Harlan was told he was being laid off after 17 years at the Post, as part of layoffs that cut almost half of staff at the storied newspaper.Sometime over the next 100 years, human-driven warming could disrupt a vital ocean current that carries heat northward from the tropics. After this breach, most of the world would keep getting hotter—but northern Europe would cool substantially, with Iceland at the center of a deep freeze. Climate modeling shows Icelandic winter extremes plunging to an unprecedented minus-50 degrees Fahrenheit. Sea ice could surround the country for the first time since it was settled by Vikings. “At that point, Iceland would be one giant glacier,” said Hildigunnur Thorsteinsson, the director general of the Icelandic Meteorological Office.… In October, the government classified the AMOC collapse as a national security risk. It amounts to a reckoning with national survival, as the country begins to absorb the idea that climate change won’t necessarily unfold linearly or predictably, and could bring changes beyond the scope of what a nation can cope with.Read Chico Harlan’s full report at The Washington Post.This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Is Fan Fiction
New Republic • Feb 13, 2026

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Is Fan Fiction

In an interview last month with Fandango, writer-director Emerald Fennell explains why the title on the Wuthering Heights poster is in quotations. “I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. It’s not possible,” she says. “There’s a version that I remembered reading that isn’t quite real. And there’s a version that I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so it is Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t.” The movie, marketed as “a film by Emerald Fennell,” might be more aptly called “Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights,” so sharply does the auteur’s vision diverge from that of the book’s author, Emily Brontë.Fennell’s “This is my Wuthering Heights” defense proves the justification for the gleeful rewriting—some might say butchering—of the 1847 novel. The primary couple is the same: Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw (Margot Robbie), the haughty daughter of a landowner, and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), the brooding orphan who is raised alongside her like a brother. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” Cathy opines before marrying local aristocrat Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), dooming everyone and herself in the process. What this film proceeds to excise could fill a book—a book called Wuthering Heights.For one, like numerous previous adaptations, Fennell’s version leaves out the second half of the story, in which the next generation of Earnshaws and Heathcliffs (let’s call it Wuthering Heights: The New Class) breaks the cycle of generational trauma in which romantic love and abuse are indistinguishable. Characters are collapsed, erased, granted tidy backstories, while the most Gothic elements, such as the implication that Heathcliff is Catherine’s half-brother, fall away. (Meanwhile, the choice to cast a white actor as the “dark-skinned,” racially indeterminate Heathcliff drew sharp criticism from corners of the internet, suggesting that posh, Oxford-educated Fennell is more interested in bourgeois provocation than critiquing Britain’s race and class hierarchies, then or now.)Oddly enough, Emerald Fennell’s prior features—mean and stylish, equal parts revenge play and music video—seem more moved by the spirit of Emily Brontë than this one. In Promising Young Woman, a med school dropout (Carey Mulligan) feigns drunkenness to expose the predatory behavior of so-called “nice guys,” while conducting a campaign against the men who raped her childhood best friend. And in Saltburn, a middle-class striver (Barry Keoghan) insinuates himself into an uber-rich family through lies and sex acts, only to pick off these fatted sitting ducks one by one. Her films demand that viewers spend time with irredeemable individuals and endure, even laugh at or luxuriate in, their awful behavior. Meanwhile, this Wuthering Heights has not one but multiple redemption arcs. Characters offer and accept forgiveness. What, truly what, am I watching?But what this new “adaptation” offers in lieu of fidelity is promiscuous pastiche. Equal parts Guillermo del Toro and V.C. Andrews, Wuthering Heights is saturated in every sense of the word, misty but vivid, a loud, horned-up melodrama that is weird and basic at the same time. It’s got real “Get in loser, we’re going to the moors” energy, as Fennell and Robbie attempt to appeal to a generation ready to fall in love with a less challenging, more sentimental imagining of an old classic. Turning Brontë’s tale into “this generation’s Titanic” requires more than the smoothing of Cathy’s and Heathcliff’s edges, though that is the film’s most startling intervention. Brontë’s Cathy is quick to cuff a servant or scream her face off at everyone around her; her Heathcliff is a literal dog murderer. None of this comes through in Robbie’s or Elordi’s renderings, who play like Buttercup and Westley in The Princess Bride. The sight of a miserable Catherine, weighed down by a diamond choker, set against a millennial pink backdrop, cries out for a Billie Eilish track. Indeed, what was Cathy made for, if not to love Heathcliff? (LuckyChap Entertainment, Robbie’s production company, is responsible for Barbie and all of Fennell’s directorial turns.) Barbie is just one of many films that weigh heavily on Wuthering Heights, competing to overtake the actual source entirely.Barbie is just one of many films that weigh heavily on Wuthering Heights, competing to overtake the actual source entirely. For the British Film Institute, Fennell curated a list of her influences for her movie, providing a cheat sheet for cinephiles and an explication of her stylistic flair. She pulls prodigiously from the look of 1970s cinema and its inheritors: the old Far From the Madding Crowd, the new Beguiled, and several works from explicit art-house filmmaker Catherine Breillat, as well 1974’s controversial Third Reich–set The Night Porter. But there are more motifs or images that go unmentioned. The sooty, burned-out shell of Wuthering Heights, littered with piles of sea-foam bottles, could almost be a Tim Burton set, while the image of an ailing Catherine, bleeding and covered in leeches, belongs in an Italian giallo film. Is Fennell entitled to treat the Western canon as her own personal playground? Why not call the movie Windy Peaks and quit filching Brontë’s luster? Because this particular Wuthering Heights is foremost a work of fan fiction, and proudly so. Catherine’s feverish scribbling of alternate names on the window—“Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Linton, Catherine Heathcliff”—is the act of a lovesick adolescent doodling in her Trapper Keeper; this film “will complete the Twilight-to-Fifty-Shades Smutty Fanfic Loop,” a critic from Thought Catalog vows.To that end, in an early scene, Catherine experiences her sexual awakening when she spies two servants humping roughly in the stable. (It should go without saying this sequence is a Fennell addition.) Heathcliff catches Catherine spying and puts his hand over her mouth to silence her panting; covers her eyes to shield her from their saucy use of a whip and muzzle. (This formative erotic experience is one Cathy makes her husband reenact with her in bed.) As the film lays it out, here is a story about desire, yes, but also about desiring to desire as the fan fiction writer does, exploring the freedom and pleasure that comes with free play using premade materials.All roads, in other words, lead back to Barbie.The final product, all said, is a visually rich, transportive, if simplistic, story of love denied. It’s something of a missed opportunity for Fennell—if anyone had the nerve to put Brontë’s ugliest inclinations on-screen, it was her. But, through the character of Isabella (played by Saltburn’s Alison Oliver), she has found a clever device for dumbing down the original. As a love letter to fanfic and female fantasy, Oliver is the audience’s guide and Fennell’s twisted surrogate. For those who hoped for a darker, weirder movie, Oliver’s Weird Barbie figure provides bizarro comic relief and a point of view that no earnest ’90s romance could dream of accommodating.When we first meet Isabella Linton, Cathy’s future sister-in-law, she is giving her brother a detailed play-by-play of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. A frizzy-haired brunette with wire-framed glasses and a whispery voice, Isabella is a bookish young woman, one of the most unforgivable archetypes in classic literature. This silly exchange, which immediately precedes the Lintons meeting Catherine, serves several purposes. Isabella’s mistrust of the Nurse figure in Shakespeare put us on guard with the film’s own nurse figure, Nelly (Hong Chau), and her passionate recounting of the play only underscores how much this Wuthering Heights is about bad timing, not bad people. (Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is, unsurprisingly, another one of Fennell’s self-proclaimed touchstones.)But last, and perhaps more importantly, this scene reveals Isabella to be the film’s ideal viewer—and the one most in need of reprogramming. When her rambling ceases, or at least slows down, her brother politely responds, “What a thorough précis, Isabella!” There is nothing duller, surely, than a humorless recapper, but for the purposes of this film, it is equally unforgivable to be so attentive to a text’s particularities. Isabella must be punished, and, boy, will she enjoy it.When Edgar and Catherine wed, Isabella welcomes her new sister-in-law as a life-size doll, braiding her hair and taking locks of her hair to make a Cathy figure for her dollhouse (dreamhouse, even?). Isabella’s infatuation with Catherine ends when Heathcliff, who ran off in the wake of Cathy and Edgar’s wedding, returns looking, well, like Jacob Elordi. In the novel, Isabella surrenders to Heathcliff’s bored seduction, one designed entirely to drive Cathy mad, but lives to regret marrying this sadistic monster. It is within Isabella’s mousy, lustful, literary gaze that this new Wuthering Heights finds a point of view, the unexpected romance trapped inside its bodice-ripper rebrand. But Alison Oliver’s Isabella loves her imprisonment. Her pleading letters home are a ploy, composed alongside Heathcliff and with his help, to torment Catherine; she loves to be degraded, wearing the literal and figurative dog collar with kinky pride. “He would devour you,” Catherine warns Isabella, with no small amount of jealousy and spite. But such a sentiment is a vestige from the novel. It is Heathcliff who becomes Isabella’s puppet, even as the dom/sub aesthetic might make the dynamic appear otherwise. Heathcliff may be the story’s hero, but Isabella is the one who can write.It is within Isabella’s mousy, lustful, literary gaze that this new Wuthering Heights finds a point of view, the unexpected romance trapped inside its bodice-ripper rebrand. This is, perhaps, where Fennell falters most gravely—not by scrapping the old or instituting the new but, instead, by not recognizing what she has.

Trump Is a Weak and Failing President—Finally, Dems Are Acting Like It
New Republic • Feb 13, 2026

Trump Is a Weak and Failing President—Finally, Dems Are Acting Like It

Donald Trump’s losses are mounting. His border czar just announced a large drawdown of federal agents in Minnesota after protests turned public opinion. Job creation during Trump’s first year was worse than previously known. The country is losing manufacturing jobs. Trump is a weak and failing president—and there are now signs that Democrats are acting like it. But couldn’t they do more to seize the moment? Yes! The New Republic has a special issue online right now that’s full of pieces laying out the way forward. Today’s guest is TNR editor Michael Tomasky, author of the lead piece explaining how Democrats can become more aggressive and effective. We discuss the true nature of Trump’s weakness, why Democrats face a crossroads rivaling the New Deal and Civil Rights eras, and how that offers them uncommon challenges and opportunities. We also discuss Emily Cooke’s writeup of our poll of rank-and-file Democrats, as well as pieces by Alex Shephard, Perry Bacon, and your faithful podcast host. Listen to this episode here.

On Fascists, Mean Girls and Screechy Pedophile Allies
Common Dreams • Feb 13, 2026

On Fascists, Mean Girls and Screechy Pedophile Allies

In what one sage deemed "amateur-hour, clown-fucker, reality-show dictatorship shit," this week's House hearings on ICE abuses, Epstein cover-ups and other GOP atrocities showcased a parade of rancid, lying, stonewalling MAGA lickspittles and deplorables - loudest among them sneering "bad acid trip come to life" Pam Bondi - facing off against a for-once united cohort of smart, angry, truth-telling Democrats with righteous history on their side and, finally, no fucks left to give. We are here for it.Deep in his delusional bubble, the mad child-king ostensibly in charge of these evil cretins told Fox News Wednesday that Americans are living in "the greatest period of anything we’ve ever seen." Maybe he meant how he's been bravely standing up for a bridge he thinks Canada ripped us off for while forgetting he praised it when it was built, and paid for, by Canada. Or maybe it's 'cause in exchange for idiotically spending our money trying to prop up dirty, pricey, inefficient coal - "the 19th century called and it wants its fuel source back" - and glitching out en route, the "simplest mark of all time" got another shiny participation trophy as the “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal." "Lookit his happy face!" the Internet chortled. "The big special boy is so big and so special!" Also, "Marvel is running out of Superheroes" and "This is the saddest thing I've ever seen."Possibly sadder is MAGA Reps. Andy Ogles and Mark Alford still melting down about Bad Bunny's "pure smut" half-time show wherein "children were forced to endure explicit displays of gay sexual acts" that are "illegal to be displayed on public airways" which is why he wants a Congressional inquiry into said "unspeakable depravities," though they might be confusing them with Epstein's, which they've notably ignored. Also sad is another bigly fail by US Attorney Jeanine Boxwine to get a grand jury indictment for fake crimes, in this case against Dem Sens. Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin and four Reps, all veterans, for their video reading the law out loud to remind military they have the right not to obey illegal orders. The kicker: Her attempt was so ludicrous that reportedly zero grand jurors thought she hit the famously low ham-sandwich bar for probable cause.In this week's House hearings, it was clear Dem lawmakers, like the rest of us, had reached the famed point in 1954's McCarthy hearings when an appalled Joseph Welch, at the limit of his tolerance for McCarthy's lies and cruelty, exclaimed, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" That fierce moral outrage, and the strength and clarity needed to vent it, has been evident in besieged Minnesota for weeks - In grand jurors' refusal to indict so-called "rioters,” in protesters' profane, hilarious anthem pillorying ICE Barbie, in neighbors seething at the masked, armed rabble that just caused a multi-vehicle crash in St.Paul, the latest in endless ICE crimes and transgressions. "Oh my God, you guys are so....evil. I can feel it, " railed one resident. "Jesus. Fucking incels, racists, murderers, thugs. What are you doing?!"So it was that, in Tuesday's House Homeland Security Committee hearing, when acting ICE director Todd Lyons whined in his opening statement that "to say the men and women of ICE are Gestapo (is) wrong" and hurts their alleged feelings, Rep. Dan Goldman wasn't having it. "People are simply making valid observations about your tactics, which are un-American and outright fascist," he said. Goldman cited their racial profiling, asking people for their papers, use of excessive force and other forms of intimidation, likening them to Nazi/ Soviet regimes and shutting down Lyons' protestations as "unnecessary speaking." "I have a simple suggestion," Goldman said calmly. "If you don’t want to be called a fascist regime or a secret police, then stop acting like one." Tell it to power-mad, I-want-my-blankey ICE Barbie, reportedly fascisting it up big time over her goons. Jesus. Other Dems minced no words. Rep. LaMonica McIver: "Mr. Lyons, do you consider yourself a religious man?" "Yes, Ma'am." "Well, how do you think Judgment Day will work for you with so much blood on your hands?" "I'm not gonna entertain that question." "Oh, ok, of course not. Do you think you’re going to hell, Mr. Lyons?" "I’m not gonna entertain that question." When the Chair chides her about "standards of decorum," she blithely notes, "Well, you guys are always talking about religion, so it's OK for me to just ask a question, right? Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate you." (Comment: "We need more Black women in Congress.") She goes on, "How many government agencies, Mr. Lyons, are you aware of that routinely kill American citizens and still get funding?” "Ma'am, I'm not gonna entertain that." "Of course you're not. This is exactly why we should not be funding this agency...The people are watching you."And so it went. Quoting Lyons' earlier testimony he "wanted to see a deportation process like Amazon Prime, but with human beings," Eric Swalwell asked, "How many times has Amazon Prime shot a mom 3 times in the face?" "None," said Lyons, lamely noting he meant it "needs to be more efficient" and he'd added, "we deal with humans so we can't be like them." Swalwell, coolly, "Speaking of humans, how many times has Amazon Prime shot a nurse 10 times in the back?” Online, commenters clarified, "Obviously, Amazon Prime doesn't shoot you in the face. You have to pay for Amazon Prime Plus to get that level of service," though, "you'll still get ads unless you step up to Premium, and you'll have to pay for the ammo." From another, "Is this the first time Amazon has been used as the good guy in a comparison? Fuck him up."Rep.Delia Ramirez ripped Lyons: "My mother, a Guatemalan immigrant and (finger in air) an American taught me I have a responsibility to look evil in the eye and you have used your power to perpetrate great evil, and it's time you answer to this committee for the lawlessness you have empowered." She named Good, Pretti, Marimar Martinez - "Do something bitch" - and myriad other crimes: 100 court orders violated, dozens of tear-gas attacks despite a court order, banned chokeholds, warrantless arrests, 3,800 children in detention, roving patrols, plate switching, observer intimidation. On ICE demands to "respect the mission": "I have as much respect for you as I do for the last white men who put on masks to terrorize communities of color... the inheritors of the Klanhood and the slave patrol. Their activities were immoral and criminal, and so are yours."Wednesday, A.G. Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee in a rabid attempt to make them forget her months of covering up the Epstein files, missing deadlines, redacting perps, releasing survivors' names and otherwise ignoring them by "shouting, lying and being a cold bitch." Over five hours, in "an astonishingly contemptuous performance," she failed to answer a single question. Acting out "a sociopathic tween," she shrieked, veered, lied, argued, sniped, stonewalled, deflected, rolled her eyes and mean-girled through a book of scripted smears at Dems daring to seek accountability: "Insolent, Shouty Brat Brings Burn Book To Congress." She was "a nasty piece of work," a "demented skank," a "Nazi redneck bleach blond Barbie," a "historic villain" who once vowed to "put human trafficking monsters (behind) bars" and will now be shunned "in every room she ever walks into for the rest of her life," to die "as a disbarred lawyer and a national disgrace...Her cheese has slid off her cracker."She was snippy queen of the frantic non-sequiturs, with "an unmistakable stench of desperation" in her tantrums. When Jerry Nadler asked how many Epstein perps she's indicted - zero, duh - she raved, "You all should be apologizing. You sit here and you attack the President, and I am not going to have it." Then she wildly pivoted - what child rape? - yelling, "The Dow is over 50,000, the S&P at almost 7,000, the NASDAQ is smashing records, Americans’ 401(k)s are booming. That’s what we should be talking about." WTF. When Zoe Lofgren asked her about redacting traffickers' names, she sneered, "I find it interesting she keeps going after President Trump, the greatest president in American history. She didn't say how much money she took from Reid Hoffman, did she?" Asked about Ludnick's ties to Epstein, she bickered, "what is ties?", scowled "shame on you," scoffed, "I'm stunned you want to keep talking."Jamie Raskin, the Committee's Ranking Member, repeatedly called bullshit: "You can filibuster all you want, but not on our time. The way it works is, we ask you a question, you answer it. I warned you at the outset of this hearing." Bondi exploded. "You don't TELL ME anything,” she shrieked. “You’re a washed-up, loser lawyer." Then, mad-Lady-Macbeth-like, she muttered, "You’re not even a lawyer." (Raskin, a graduate of Harvard Law School and former editor of Harvard Law Review, is a longtime professor of Constitutional law at American University, and has written several books.) Unflappable, Raskin coolly accused her of running an Epstein cover-up of "staggering incompetence." "You've turned the people's Department of Justice into Trump’s instrument of revenge,” he charged. “Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza, and you deliver every time."Bondi blocked questions from Becca Balint with smears against Merrick Garland - Balint: "Weak sauce" - then with charges of anti-Semitism. Balint, whose grandparents were killed in the Holocaust: "You want to go there?! Really?!" Ted Lieu asked if Trump attended parties with underage girls; Bondi rolled her eyes. "This is so ridiculous," she said. "They are trying to deflect from all the great things Donald Trump has done. There is no evidence he has committed a crime. Everyone knows that." Lieu: "I believe you just lied under oath, which is a crime." Bondi, screaming, "Don't you ever accuse me of committing a crime!" Jared Moskowitz noted Trump's name appears over a million times in the Epstein files, "more than God's name in the book about God." Grinning, he mused about her Burn Book zingers: "I'm curious. Just flip to Moskowitz. Because we’re in the Olympics, I’m going to give it a grade. Give me your best one. Whaddya got?"With almost a dozen Epstein survivors sitting behind Bondi in the hearing room, Pramila Jayapal asked them to stand and raise their hands if they'd tried and failed to meet with DOJ officials. They all did. She asked Bondi to turn around and apologize; Bondi stood her ground: "I'm not going to get in the gutter with this woman and her theatrics." Noting an earlier claim that any victim who wants to talk to the DOJ has done so, Dan Goldman took up her quest. He asked how many had met with the DOJ: None. How many had reached out asking to: All. Of those who reached out, how many were ignored: All. And despite "their shameful, despicable efforts to intimidate," how many are still willing to talk to them? All. Bondi, still sitting, still hating, still steadfastly unperturbed, breezily flips her fake blond hair back, gazing into space.Jasmine Crockett declined to "ask any questions of this witness because (she) has no intention of answering them." She turned to Ballint. "Right or wrong? Raping children." Ballint: "Wrong." "Killing random citizens." "Wrong." Etc. Crockett: "OK, thank you. I never woulda got that from our witness, who is somehow a lawyer but doesn't understand how it works with witnesses. I'm not sure what law school you went to (Stetson)... but you don’t seem very good at your job...Americans are looking for answers (not) protecting pedophiles and creeps. You will be remembered as one of the worst Attorney Generals in history." Bondi cuts in to rave about immigrants convicted of crimes in Texas. Crocket cuts her off: "CONVICTED! So what we talkin’ about? Convict some of these perpetrators who raped these women sitting behind you that you won’t even acknowledge are here!” She stalks out. Bondi is still babbling about Hakeem Jeffries and some money.Observers were aghast at the wretched Bondi spectacle. Online, one older woman conceded "I'm sure this will get taken down" but spoke her mind for all of us: "Bondi is an absolute cunt, and needs to rot in prison for the rest of her life. What an evil evil woman. My God." Trump loved it: Bondi was "fantastic." John Pavlovitz, pastor and father, looked on at her "masterclass in gaslighting," and wondered, "How does someone become Pam Bondi?" He muses about "the meandering road to losing one's soul...so completely bereft of empathy, so seemingly unencumbered by other people’s suffering, and so strident in the face of simple accountability." As someone's daughter, he writes, "I'm sure there’s a story you have to tell yourself to keep the self-loathing at bay and let you sleep at night...I hope whatever you got for your soul was worth it to you. It sure as hell isn’t for the rest of us." See on Instagram "

LIVE: Epstein Fallout | US War on Cuba | ICE Mega-Prisons
1:25:46
BreakThrough News Video • Feb 13, 2026

LIVE: Epstein Fallout | US War on Cuba | ICE Mega-Prisons

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