Happy Thursday! A bakery owner in New Hampshire took to the courts after a local zoning board ordered him to take down a painting of giant pastries adorning his business. The owner has insisted the mural is art, while the zoning officer deemed it an advertisement.
This might not be the stuff of landmark Supreme Court cases, but let it be known that if the Advisory Opinions crew decides to do some on-the-ground reporting on this, we like eclairs.
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- Hamas returned the bodies of four murdered hostages to Israel on Thursday as part of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal. The group was said to include Oded Lifshitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir. The children’s father, Yarden Bibas, was kidnapped separately and released alive earlier this month. After being handed over by the Red Cross, the bodies were transferred to a forensic institute for final identification. A group of six living hostages is scheduled to be released on Saturday.
- President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy traded barbs Wednesday as the U.S. negotiates with Russia on an end to the war in Ukraine. Trump described Zelensky as a “dictator without elections,” while the Ukrainian leader accused Trump of amplifying Russian disinformation. The exchange followed the start of high-level talks between U.S. and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia aimed at ending Russia’s war with Ukraine, though Zelensky said his country had been excluded from the meetings. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, praised the “very friendly” atmosphere of the negotiations and the American officials in attendance. “On the American side, there were completely different people who were open to the negotiation process without any bias, without any condemnation of what was done in the past,” he said.
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to draw up plans to slash the defense spending by $50 billion—roughly 8 percent of the military’s budget—in the next five years, multiple outlets reported Wednesday. The order, which Hegseth detailed in a Tuesday memo first obtained by the Washington Post, included exemptions for U.S.-Mexico border security, nuclear weapons modernization, and missile defense—a priority of the Trump administration as it seeks to develop an “Iron Dome” air defense system to cover the United States. The proposal for the cuts comes as Republican lawmakers say they want to boost military spending.
- The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday left in place a lower court’s hold on the implementation of President Trump’s executive order to restrict birthright citizenship. The ruling—which followed a request by the Department of Justice to stop the lower court’s block from taking effect—marked the first time an appellate court has weighed in on the administration’s effort to end birthright citizenship for children born to parents in the U.S. illegally or temporarily. The case now looks poised to make its way to the Supreme Court, as opponents of the order argue it runs afoul of the 14th Amendment.
- Trump issued an executive order on Wednesday aimed at stopping federal funds from reaching recipients who are in the United States illegally. The directive, part of the administration’s immigration crackdown, calls on federal agencies and departments to “identify all federally funded programs” providing benefits to illegal immigrants and “take corrective action.” It’s not immediately clear which programs will be affected by the order, as illegal immigrants are currently ineligible for most welfare payments.
- The Senate voted 52-46 on Wednesday to confirm Kelly Loeffler as head of the Small Business Administration, with Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada joining Republicans in support of her bid. Loeffler—a businesswoman and Trump loyalist—briefly represented Georgia in the Senate after being appointed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in 2020 to fill a vacant seat, but lost her reelection campaign to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock after a runoff in January 2021. She will now be tasked with overseeing the agency that provides “counseling, capital, and contracting expertise” to small businesses.
Get Informed, Independent Gun Politics Reporting From The Reload!
To Mars or the Moon, That Is the Question
As headlines focus on the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul federal agencies, one change has flown under the radar. The lunar rock from the Apollo missions—displayed in the Oval Office since 2021—has quietly been sent back to NASA.
The move may be remembered as a fitting symbol of the administration’s approach to American spaceflight, as Trump’s allies push him to forgo the moon to focus on Mars. But doing so would risk upending a costly lunar exploration program launched by Trump himself and giving China an edge as it seeks to put its own astronauts on the moon.
Trump launched the Artemis program in 2018 with the goal of putting humans back on the moon by 2024. Although the deadline has come and gone, the key motivator behind the initiative remains: competition with China. “A big driver for Artemis, in addition to just science and exploration, was … China’s intention to put Chinese astronauts on the moon,” Clayton Swope, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told TMD. “You have a moon race 2.0, effectively.”
The stakes of the new space race ...
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Worth Your Time
- For all of its media attention, what has Elon Musk’s DOGE actually accomplished over the last month? Not nearly as much as it claims, Jane C. Timm reported for NBC News. “A series of announcements by DOGE as well as claims by Musk and President Donald Trump about the agency’s efforts have crumbled under scrutiny even as they’re broadly repeated by conservative pundits, sympathetic media and the White House. Two of the most notable claims — around Social Security fraud and $8 billion savings found in a Department of Homeland Security contract — have been debunked. Meanwhile, Trump’s agenda is set to add to the federal government’s deficit well in excess of what DOGE is cutting. ‘It’s amateur hour in their federal government,’ said Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who ran the Social Security Administration under President Joe Biden,” Timm wrote. “DOGE’s cuts, as illustrated through the ‘receipts’ posted online Monday, run the gamut across the U.S. government, albeit they appear to hew particularly to Trump’s politics — particularly opposition to diversity initiatives and media outlets. The more than 1,000 listed cuts represent a fraction of the $55 billion in savings DOGE says it has achieved in about a month of work, according to its website. The list includes a hodgepodge of canceled media subscriptions, contracts and leases, and quite a few noticeable errors.”
- In a feature for History Today, Vaughn Scribner told the story of a key combatant in the American Revolutionary War: nature. “Although their enemies were ostensibly the American rebels, over the following eight years many of the foreign troops would come to see their military foes as just one of the New World’s many hostile forces. The American environment – its physical terrain, flora, fauna, weather, climate, and diseases – proved hugely detrimental to their physical and mental health,” he wrote. “In the accounts of the European soldiers who endured the Revolutionary War, America’s vast swamplands recur as a particular source of misery. In October 1779 Lieutenant John Enys found the hardships of marching through New York’s ‘Great Swamp’ ‘impossible to conceive’. While Enys considered the swamps of New York ‘disagreeable’ and ‘uncertain’, he was relatively lucky: his comrades stationed in the war’s southern theatre (comprising Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Florida) encountered far larger, more dangerous swamps, where the natural dangers were exacerbated by the presence of rebel foes who knew how to use the environs for their own benefit. The American soldier Francis Marion became known as the ‘Swamp Fox’ due to his ability to wage guerrilla warfare against the British forces during their invasion of the Carolinas in 1780 and 1781.”
Presented Without Comment
Politico: Trump Blindsides Staff, Congress With Conflicting Medicaid Messages
On Wednesday, the White House appeared to add a new wrinkle by indicating Trump may also be open to altering elements of Medicare — the popular health care program for older Americans he’s repeatedly promised to preserve.
“The Trump administration is committed to protecting Medicare and Medicaid while slashing the waste, fraud, and abuse within those programs — reforms that will increase efficiency and improve care for beneficiaries,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in an initial statement to POLITICO.
But after this article was published, Desai sent an updated statement that omitted the mention of Medicare, instead saying only that the administration sought to protect Medicaid “while slashing the waste, fraud and abuse within the program.”
Also Presented Without Comment
BBC: Trump Calls Zelensky ‘Dictator’ as Rift Between Two Leaders Deepens
Also Also Presented Without Comment
New York Times: ‘Long Live the King’: Trump Likens Himself to Royalty on Truth Social
In the Zeitgeist
The third season of HBO’s White Lotus premiered over the weekend to somewhat mixed reviews. Resorts on the Thai island of Ko Samui are already bracing for the “White Lotus effect,” wherein tourists flood the dark comedy’s scenic locales with each new season. We can’t help but wonder if fans actually watch until the end before booking their flights.
Toeing the Company Line
- In the newsletters: Scott Lincicome unpacked the many problems with the Trump administration’s plan for “reciprocal tariffs,” Nick Catoggio argued that Donald Trump is making the U.S. one of the bad guys in the Russia-Ukraine war, and Jonah Goldberg reflected on the Trump team’s contradictory foreign policy thus far.
- On the podcasts: On Advisory Opinions, Sarah Isgur and David French talk to commentator David Lat about the Department of Justice dropping its case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Filling the host’s chair on The Remnant, Sarah talks with author Caroline Criado-Perez about her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.
- On the site: Steve Hayes—yes, that Steve Hayes—reports on the ways in which DOGE is really just bait and switch when it comes to cutting federal spending, and Charles Hilu writes about the tough position the Trump administration's tough-on-Ukraine stance is putting GOP senators in.
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