In a move that reflected the party’s divisions, Democrats offered a range of responses to President Donald Trump’s Feb. 24 State of the Union address.
Some skipped Trump’s speech or attended alternate events. Others spoke out in opposition to Trump’s words.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger delivered the party’s official response, emphasizing the burden of rising costs on American families and safety concerns about federal immigration enforcement.
Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, was escorted from the chambers after holding up a large sign that said, “Black people aren’t apes,” referencing a video Trump recently posted on Truth Social depicting President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as apes. Green was similarly removed during Trump’s 2025 address to Congress after protesting the president’s speech.
At another point, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., shouted at Trump, accusing him of killing Americans, referring to the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens in her state, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal immigration agents.
Several other lawmakers wore pins that read “release the files” in reference to documents related to the late sex-offender Jeffery Epstein.
Many Democrats attended events organized by liberal groups elsewhere in Washington, D.C.
The advocacy group MoveOn and left-leaning media outlet MeidasTouch planned a rally they dubbed the “People’s State of the Union.” Gathered on the National Mall, attendees spoke about immigration policy and the Epstein files. Several senators and U.S. representatives spoke.
Pro-democracy, anti-Trump advocacy group Defiance.org hosted another event, with speakers including lawmakers and mayors whose cities have been targets of Trump’s immigration crackdowns. The event was dubbed the “State of the Swamp,” and many guests sported frog-themed hats and headbands — a reference to the peaceful protest movement known as the Portland Frog Brigade, members of whom were in attendance.
We fact-checked some of the Democrats’ Feb. 24 remarks.
Spanberger: Trump’s policies “have forced American families to pay more than $1,700 each in tariff costs.”
Estimates vary, but research supports this number.
Spanberger’s office pointed to research from the Democrats on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, which estimated that the average U.S. household has paid about $1,745 in tariff costs from February 2025 to January.
One group’s figure was higher than Spanberger’s: In August, the National Taxpayers’ Union estimated that tariffs added $2,048 to U.S. households’ tax burden.
Spanberger: “Rural health clinics in Virginia and across the country are already closing their doors” because of Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
This is accurate.
On Sept. 4, 2025, two months after Trump signed the bill into law, Virginia health care company Augusta Medical Group announced it was closing three rural clinics. The company said its consolidation was part of its “ongoing response to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the resulting realities for healthcare delivery.”
Trump’s tax and spending law is expected to reduce federal Medicaid spending in rural areas by at least $137 billion by 2034, according to an analysis by KFF, a health policy research organization. The Congressional Budget Office predicts the law will raise the number of uninsured patients by 10 million by 2034.
Rural health facilities disproportionately rely on Medicaid reimbursement to stay afloat. In 2023, 40.6% of children and 18.3% of adults under age 65 from rural areas and small towns were enrolled in Medicaid.
Trump’s tax and spending law includes the Rural Health Transformation Program, a one-time $50 billion investment in rural health funding. But the new funding source will not offset what rural health facilities lose from the Medicaid cuts.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy: “Millions of Americans are losing their health care.”
Early data supports Murphy’s figure, which he cited while speaking at the “People’s State of the Union” rally.
On Jan. 1, enhanced tax credits that helped reduce health care costs for most people purchasing insurance through Affordable Care Act marketplaces expired. KFF estimated that premium costs would more than double in 2026 for Affordable Care Act enrollees. Anecdotal reportsshow some people have dropped their insurance, citing rising costs.
Healthanalysts and the Congressional Budget Office reported that the subsidies’ expiration would cause rising costs that would trigger millions of Americans to forgo health insurance coverage. Early Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data signals that about 1.5 million people may have dropped their insurance in 2026.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A team of researchers has uncovered what they say is the first reported use of artificial intelligence to direct a hacking campaign in a largely automated fashion.
The AI company Anthropic said this week that it disrupted a cyber operation that its researchers linked to the Chinese government. The operation involved the use of an artificial intelligence system to direct the hacking campaigns, which researchers called a disturbing development that could greatly expand the reach of AI-equipped hackers.
While concerns about the use of AI to drive cyber operations are not new, what is concerning about the new operation is the degree to which AI was able to automate some of the work, the researchers said.
“While we predicted these capabilities would continue to evolve, what has stood out to us is how quickly they have done so at scale,” they wrote in their report.
The operation targeted tech companies, financial institutions, chemical companies and government agencies. The researchers wrote that the hackers attacked “roughly thirty global targets and succeeded in a small number of cases.” Anthropic detected the operation in September and took steps to shut it down and notify the affected parties.
Anthropic noted that while AI systems are increasingly being used in a variety of settings for work and leisure, they can also be weaponized by hacking groups working for foreign adversaries. The San Francisco-based company, maker of the generative AI chatbot Claude, is one of many tech developers pitching AI “agents” that go beyond a chatbot’s capability to access computer tools and take actions on a person’s behalf.
“Agents are valuable for everyday work and productivity — but in the wrong hands, they can substantially increase the viability of large-scale cyberattacks,” the researchers concluded. “These attacks are likely to only grow in their effectiveness.”
A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately return a message seeking comment on the report.
Microsoft warned earlier this year that foreign adversaries were increasingly embracing AI to make their cyber campaigns more efficient and less labor-intensive. The head of OpenAI’s safety panel, which has the authority to halt the ChatGPT maker’s AI development, recently told The Associated Press he’s watching out for new AI systems that give malicious hackers “much higher capabilities.”
Anthropic said the hackers were able to manipulate Claude, using “jailbreaking” techniques that involve tricking an AI system to bypass its guardrails against harmful behavior, in this case by claiming they were employees of a legitimate cybersecurity firm.
“This points to a big challenge with AI models, and it’s not limited to Claude, which is that the models have to be able to distinguish between what’s actually going on with the ethics of a situation and the kinds of role-play scenarios that hackers and others may want to cook up,” said John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at Citizen Lab.
The use of AI to automate or direct cyberattacks will also appeal to smaller hacking groups and lone wolf hackers, who could use AI to expand the scale of their attacks, according to Adam Arellano, field CTO at Harness, a tech company that uses AI to help customers automate software development.
“The speed and automation provided by the AI is what is a bit scary,” Arellano said. “Instead of a human with well-honed skills attempting to hack into hardened systems, the AI is speeding those processes and more consistently getting past obstacles.”
AI programs will also play an increasingly important role in defending against these kinds of attacks, Arellano said, demonstrating how AI and the automation it allows will benefit both sides.
Reaction to Anthropic’s disclosure was mixed, with some seeing it as a marketing ploy for Anthropic’s approach to defending cybersecurity and others who welcomed its wake-up call.
“This is going to destroy us – sooner than we think – if we don’t make AI regulation a national priority tomorrow,” wrote U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, on social media.
That led to criticism from Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, an advocate of the Facebook parent company’s open-source AI systems that, unlike Anthropic’s, make their key components publicly accessible in a way that some AI safety advocates deem too risky.
“You’re being played by people who want regulatory capture,” LeCun wrote in a reply to Murphy. “They are scaring everyone with dubious studies so that open source models are regulated out of existence.”
The government shutdown is entering a fourth week as Democrats and Republicans blame each other for holding the country “hostage.” Caught in the middle, federal workers, government services, and the economy are all feeling the impact. Previous shutdowns have seen reduced overall economic growth, disproportionately affecting certain industries. National parks and museums remain closed, flight delays are mounting, and backlogs for new small business loans and flood insurance renewals are growing.Republicans continue to accuse Democrats of blocking paychecks by refusing to reopen the government, while Democrats argue that Republicans are unwilling to negotiate over the core issue of health care funding. “Congressional Democrats seem to want to keep the government shut down even though it would mean that a lot of you would not get your paycheck,” Vice President JD Vance said in remarks to an audience of Marines celebrating the 250th anniversary Saturday.Democrats pushed back in “No Kings” protests across the country.”They’re the ones acting like children refusing to negotiate with Democrats in the Senate who they know have to vote for a budget in order for it to become law,” Sen. Chris Murphy said in an interview Saturday.The shutdown has had a sizable impact as uncertainty weighs on the federal workforce. Under the Trump administration’s direction, federal agencies have been planning not just furloughs but also permanent layoffs. However, a federal judge has temporarily blocked the firings, deeming them potentially illegal.Public perception of who is to blame has been roughly evenly split. A new Associated Press poll finds that a majority, about 6 in 10 Americans, blame President Donald Trump and Republicans for the shutdown. An even larger majority, three-quarters of Americans, believe both sides deserve at least a “moderate” share of the blame, suggesting that no one has truly escaped responsibility for the shutdown.Watch the latest coverage on the federal government shutdown:
WASHINGTON —
The government shutdown is entering a fourth week as Democrats and Republicans blame each other for holding the country “hostage.” Caught in the middle, federal workers, government services, and the economy are all feeling the impact.
Previous shutdowns have seen reduced overall economic growth, disproportionately affecting certain industries.
National parks and museums remain closed, flight delays are mounting, and backlogs for new small business loans and flood insurance renewals are growing.
Republicans continue to accuse Democrats of blocking paychecks by refusing to reopen the government, while Democrats argue that Republicans are unwilling to negotiate over the core issue of health care funding.
“Congressional Democrats seem to want to keep the government shut down even though it would mean that a lot of you would not get your paycheck,” Vice President JD Vance said in remarks to an audience of Marines celebrating the 250th anniversary Saturday.
Democrats pushed back in “No Kings” protests across the country.
“They’re the ones acting like children refusing to negotiate with Democrats in the Senate who they know have to vote for a budget in order for it to become law,” Sen. Chris Murphy said in an interview Saturday.
The shutdown has had a sizable impact as uncertainty weighs on the federal workforce. Under the Trump administration’s direction, federal agencies have been planning not just furloughs but also permanent layoffs. However, a federal judge has temporarily blocked the firings, deeming them potentially illegal.
Public perception of who is to blame has been roughly evenly split. A new Associated Press poll finds that a majority, about 6 in 10 Americans, blame President Donald Trump and Republicans for the shutdown. An even larger majority, three-quarters of Americans, believe both sides deserve at least a “moderate” share of the blame, suggesting that no one has truly escaped responsibility for the shutdown.
Watch the latest coverage on the federal government shutdown:
Sen. Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that as Republicans have accused Democrats of refusing to come to the table on the shutdown, “Republicans are boycotting negotiations” with the House on recess. “The only way you can solve a shutdown is to have two parties that are in Washington negotiating,” he said.
WASHINGTON (AP) — ABC’s “This Week” — Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.; Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, R-Ark.
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NBC’s “Meet the Press” — Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Raphael Warnock, D-Ga.; Gov. Doug Burgum, R-N.D.
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CBS’ “Face the Nation” — Nikki Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Gov. Roy Cooper, D-N.C.; Reps. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, and Jim Himes, D-Conn.
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CNN’s “State of the Union” — Sens. John Fetterman, D-Pa., and Tom Cotton, R-Ark.; Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
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“Fox News Sunday” — Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Chris Murphy, D-Conn.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) pulled the curtain back on his own party during a new interview in which he said “undocumented Americans” are the people Democrats “care about most.”
Murphy apparently stumbled upon a new term for illegal immigrants when discussing the matter with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. They are not undocumented, they are illegal, and they most certainly are not Americans by any definition.
Hayes began the discussion by asking Murphy for his thoughts on the $118 billion Senate foreign aid bill that was rejected by Republicans.
“This time around, the negotiation didn’t have a path to citizenship. It was entirely on their [Republicans’] terms in order to get Ukraine funding, right?” Hayes asked.
Murphy called so-called negotiations on immigration and border security “a failed play.”
“You are right that that has been the Democratic strategy for 30 years, maybe, and it has failed to deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country,” he responded.
🚨 Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy admits Democrats’ “strategy” on immigration “has failed to deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country,” so they’re adjusting it pic.twitter.com/IPXCh0WQi2
Democrat Admits That llegal Aliens Are Who We Care About Most
By “undocumented Americans,” Senator Murphy is referring to the millions of illegal immigrants that President Joe Biden has resettled in communities across the country.
Democrats are telling you exactly where their priorities lie, and it’s not with the American people.
Need more proof besides seeing videos of the invasion at the border on a nearly daily basis? The White House announced that ICE will reduce deportations and the capacity to detain illegals if the $118 billion foreign aid bill is not passed.
They are literally threatening the lives and jobs of the American people, holding them hostage, if they don’t get their Ukraine funding. Their priorities lie with Ukraine and every illegal alien that pours across the southern border. America last.
Is Biden the President or a mobster?
Attempting to shake down Republicans for a bad immigration bill won’t secure our southern border.
President Biden dismantled border security as soon as he took office. He and the Democrats have adamantly opposed virtually every enforcement mechanism already available, like detention and deportation.
And Biden has all the authority he needs to reverse his executive actions, enforce existing U.S. law, and end the border crisis right now. He certainly doesn’t require a bill that provides a fraction of the funding for the border to fix the problem he started.
When Biden and Harris took office, they *immediately* set out to decimate our border security.
Here are 64 actions they’ve taken to undermine border enforcement and encourage illegal immigration:
1️⃣ Terminated the National Emergency With Respect To The Southern Border…
What The Hell Is An ‘Undocumented American’, Chris Murphy?
So pleased was Senator Murphy with his newly made-up term that he repeated the clarion call to “rescue” the “undocumented Americans” later in his interview.
“I am of the belief that this was a moment where you had to show some big bipartisan momentum and progress on the border, or you would never ever have the ability to try to rescue the undocumented Americans that desperately need help,” he told Hayes.
Notice that there is no concern for the American people who desperately need help. No cries from Democrats that the American people are the ones they “care about most.”
And there is certainly no bill being debated in the Senate or the House that would rescue documented Americans or legal immigrants.
Senator Chris Murphycame out Sunday in support of conditioning U.S. aid to Israel, calling the death toll in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli Defence Forces “unacceptable” and “unsustainable.”
The Connecticut Democrat, who sits on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, confirmed that attaching strings to the House-approved $14.3 billion aid package to Israel is in the mix when Congress returns from Thanksgiving recess on Monday.
“I guess I’m not sure what would be controversial about simply saying that aid we give any country has to be used in compliance with international law,” Sullivan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And, yes, of course, I do think that Israel needs to be more careful in the way that it is conducting these operations.”
Murphy added that he thinks there is “both a moral cost to this many civilians, innocent civilians, children often, losing their life, but I think there’s a strategic cost” to Israel’s operations in Gaza, “Ultimately, Hamas will get stronger, not weaker, in the long run, if all of this civilian death allows them to recruit more effectively and ably inside Gaza,” Murphy argued.
The wartime death toll in Gaza has risen to over 14,000 Palestinians—including roughly 10,000 women and children—according to data from the Gaza health ministry. The pace of killing, The New York Timesreported on Saturday, has few precedents in any conflict this century.
Murphy’s interview underscores a growing division over the war in Gaza within the Democratic Party. Citing an unnamed House and Senate Democrat, Politico reported earlier this month that Democrats in both chambers are discussing whether and how to condition aid to Israel. According to the report, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders hosted a lunch on November 13 for Senate Democrats about the unfolding Israel-Hamas war, where the possibility of conditioning aid was raised. In response to the report, several pro-Israel Democrats in the House came out explicitly against placing any restrictions on aid.
Just over a week after the reported meeting, Sanders penned an op-ed in The New York Times last Thursday calling for an end to what he described as the United States’ “blank check approach” to Israel. “The United States must make clear that while we are friends of Israel, there are conditions to that friendship and that we cannot be complicit in actions that violate international law and our own sense of decency,” Sanders wrote.
Sanders called for an end to the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, an end to settler violence and settlement expansion in the West Bank, and an Israeli commitment to “broad peace talks for a two-state solution in the wake of the war.”
Murphy was asked Sunday whether he agreed with Sanders. “Well, I stand by what I said,” he replied. “I do believe that the level of civilian harm inside Gaza has been unacceptable and is unsustainable.”
President Joe Biden acknowledged growing calls for conditioning aid on Friday, telling reporters that the proposal was “a worthwhile thought” but that “if I started off with that, we’d never have gotten to where we are today. We have to take this a piece at a time.” In a Sunday interview with NBC, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivandidn’t rule out the question of conditioning aid, but said Biden was “going to continue to focus on what is going to generate results.”
Much of the ennui was surely brought on by the pandemic, but things have been trending this way for a while: Back in 2000, Robert D. Putnam warned in Bowling Alone of a sharp decline in civic and community involvement, that the bonds that once held us together seemed to be breaking. It seems to Murphy that those ties—the ones he’d watched hold a tragedy-scarred Newtown together after Sandy Hook—are now in danger of being ripped apart completely. The problem runs deeper than infrastructure or climate change or even gun safety: Americans are “worn out,” “overwhelmed,” and their leadership feels “mechanical,” he told me. “The project of trying to address this unspooling of America that’s happened is really enormous,” Murphy said. “And I think that that’s caused a lot of leaders to just not try.”
Murphy grew up in Wethersfield, Connecticut—the same town where his parents met in high school. His father’s family, he said, went back generations and was well-off. But his mother lived in public housing in nearby New Britain and moved to town when she was in elementary school. “My mother always reminded me that her life was very different than my life,” Murphy told me. “That was very formative for me—the understanding of just how lucky I was.”
His good fortune, as he saw it, came with a civic obligation—a “responsibility to serve”—and politics seemed a natural way to fulfill it. “I think I was just kind of an organizer out of the womb,” he said.
But he struggled upon arriving at Williams College in Massachusetts for undergrad: He was “overwhelmed from the start” academically, he told me, and lost his race for freshman representative to the college council. I “got skunked,” he recalled. “I was definitely on my back feet, sort of wondering whether I was good enough to continue to pursue the things I wanted to pursue, which was a life in public service.”
Then he read What It Takes, the late Richard Ben Cramer’s classic on the inner lives of 1988 presidential aspirants, which Murphy describes as “the most important book” he’s ever read: “That book just knocked me off my feet,” he said. “I was once again hooked by this idea that there was a nobleness to public service.” (Murphy now gifts the book to each of his Senate interns every year: “I think that I, today, probably contribute 50 percent of the proceeds to Richard Ben Cramer’s estate,” Murphy joked. “I buy, like, 60 copies of What It Takes every year.)
Murphy was elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives at 25, the state Senate at 29, and the United States Congress at 33. But while Murphy was a talented politician, he was not particularly ideological or especially well-known when he mounted a run for the Senate seat Joe Lieberman was vacating in 2012. “He was really a backbencher in Congress,” said Gary Rose, a professor of political science at Sacred Heart University who wrote a book on the 2012 Senate race, in which Murphy defeated former WWE CEO Linda McMahon. “He was not considered a major force.”
Sandy Hook changed that. “My life took a hard about-face,” Murphy wrote in his 2020 book, The Violence Inside Us. “I now had my calling…my mission in life.” He would spend the next decade in the Senate fighting the formidable gun lobby and helping build a movement that is starting to prove equally formidable.
“He was an extraordinary quarterback,” Senator Cory Booker, one of his closest friends in the Senate, told me. “He was just a Joe Montana–type tactician working the ball down the field and did something a lot of people can’t speak to as a senator, which is putting points on the board.” Or maybe he was more like a hockey player, with a “real ability to see around corners and see ahead for where the puck is going, not where it is right now,” as Senator Richard Blumenthal, his fellow Nutmegger, described him. Or perhaps more of a point guard? “He’s been amazing to watch,” says Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, an admirer of Murphy’s who told me his own gun safety activism—which included an impassioned pregame speech after Uvalde—has been inspired by the Connecticut senator. “I think the hope is that we are going to tip the scales as a country, where we can actually get a group of like-minded government officials to make some real change.”
At least Europe no longer has to endure that hackneyed Henry Kissinger quip about whom to call if you want “to call Europe.”
No one’s calling anyway.
Of the myriad geostrategic illusions that have been destroyed in recent days, the most sobering realization for anyone residing on the Continent should be this: No one cares what Europe thinks. Across an array of global flashpoints, from Nagorno-Karabakh to Kosovo to Israel, Europe has been relegated to the role of a well-meaning NGO, whose humanitarian contributions are welcomed, but is otherwise ignored.
The 27-member bloc has always struggled to articulate a coherent foreign policy, given the diverse national interests at play. Even so, it still mattered, mainly due to the size of its market. The EU’s global influence is waning, however, amid the secular decline of its economy and its inability to project military might at a time of growing global instability.
Instead of the “geopolitical” powerhouse Commission President Ursula von der Leyen promised when she took office in 2019, the EU has devolved into a pan-Europeanminnow, offering a degree of bemusement to the real players at the top table, while mostly just embarrassing itself amid its cacophony of contradictions.
If that sounds harsh, consider the past 72 hours: In the wake of Hamas’ massacre of hundreds of Israeli civilians over the weekend, European Enlargement Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi announced on Monday that the bloc would “immediately” suspend €691 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority. A few hours later, Slovenian Commissioner Janez Lenarčič contradicted his Hungarian colleague, insisting the aid “will continue as long as needed.”
The Commission’s press operation followed up with a statement that the EU would conduct an “urgent review” of some aid programs to ensure that funds not be funneled into terrorism, implying such safeguards were not already in place.
As far as the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell was concerned, the outcome of any review of assistance for the Palestinians was a foregone conclusion: “We will have to support more, not less,” he said on Tuesday.
To sum up: Over the course of just 24 hours, the Commission went from announcing it would suspend all aid to the Palestinians to signaling it would increase the flow of funds.
The EU’s response to the events on the ground in Israel was no less confused. Even as Israel was still counting the bodies from the most horrific massacre in the Jewish state’s history, Borrell, a longtime critic of the country who has effectively been declared persona non grata there, resorted to bothsidesing.
Borrell, a Spanish socialist, condemned Hamas’ “barbaric and terrorist attack,” while also chiding Israel for its blockade of Gaza and highlighting the “suffering” of the Palestinians who voted Hamas into power.
The Spaniard’s approach stood in sharp contrast to that of von der Leyen, who unequivocally condemned the attacks (albeit in a series of tweets) and had the Israeli flag projected onto the façade of her office.
Borrell organized an emergency meeting of EU foreign ministers in Oman to discuss the situation in Israel, but Israel’s foreign minister declined to participate, even remotely | AFP via Getty Images
Those moves immediately drew protest from other corners of the EU, however, with Clare Daly, a firebrand leftist MEP from Ireland, questioning von der Leyen’s legitimacy and telling her to “shut up.”
By mid-week, ascertaining Europe’s position on the crisis was like throwing darts — blindfolded.
Bloody hands
Compare that with the messaging from Washington.
“In this moment, we must be crystal clear,” U.S. President Joe Biden said in a special White House address Tuesday. “We stand with Israel. We stand with Israel. And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond to this attack.”
Biden noted that he’d called France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom to discuss the crisis. Notably not on the list: any of the EU’s “leaders.”
On Tuesday, Borrell organized an emergency meeting of EU foreign ministers in Oman, where they were already gathering, to discuss the situation in Israel. Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, declined to participate, even remotely.
That’s not too surprising, considering Europe’s record on Iran, which has supported Hamas for decades and whose leadership celebrated the weekend attacks. Though Iran denies direct involvement, many analysts say Hamas’ carefully planned assault would not have been possible without training and logistical support from Tehran.
“Hamas would not exist if not for Iran’s support,” U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, said on Wednesday. “And so it is a bit of splitting hairs as to whether they were intimately involved in the planning of these attacks, or simply funded Hamas for decades to give them the ability to plan these attacks. There’s no doubt that Iran has blood on its hands.”
Despite persistent signs of Tehran’s malevolent activities across the region, including the detention of a European diplomat vacationing in Iran, Borrell has repeatedly sought to engage with the country’s hard-line regime in the hope of reigniting the so-called nuclear deal with global powers that then-U.S. President Donald Trump exited in 2018.
Last year, Borrell even traveled to Iran in a bid to restart talks, despite the loud objections of Israel’s then-foreign minister, Yair Lapid.
If nothing else, Borrell is consistent.
“Iran wants to wipe out Israel? Nothing new about that,” he told POLITICO in 2019 when he was still Spanish foreign minister. “You have to live with it.”
European Council President Charles Michel mounted an ambitious diplomatic effort earlier this year amid a resurgence in tensions | Jorge Guererro/AFP via Getty Images
Now Europe has to live with the consequences of that misguided policy and its loss of credibility in Israel, the region’s only democracy.
The Charles Michel Show
Another glaring example of Europe’s geopolitical impotence is Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed, predominantly Armenian, region in Azerbaijan.
The long-simmering conflict there was all but forgotten by most of the world, but not by European Council President Charles Michel, who mounted an ambitious diplomatic effort earlier this year amid a resurgence in tensions.
In July, Michel hosted leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan in Brussels, the sixth such meeting. He described the discussions as “frank, honest and substantive.” He even invited the leaders to a special summit in October for a “pentalateral meeting” with Germany and France in Granada.
It wasn’t meant to be. By then, Azerbaijan had seized the region, sending more than 100,000 refugees fleeing to Armenia. Europe, in dire need of natural gas from Azerbaijan, was powerless to do anything but watch.
Earlier this month, Michel blamed Russia, traditionally Armenia’s protector in the region, for the fiasco.
“It is clear for everyone to see that Russia has betrayed the Armenian people,” Michel told Euronews.
A similar pattern has played out in Kosovo, where the Europeans have been trying for years to broker a lasting peace between its Albanian and Serbian populations. The main sticking point there is the status of the northern part of Kosovo, bordering Serbia, where Serbs comprise a majority of the roughly 40,000 residents.
Borrell even appointed a “Special Representative for the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue and other Western Balkan Regional Issues.”
The incumbent in the post, Miroslav Lajčák, Slovakia’s former foreign minister, hasn’t had much luck. Though Lajčák was awarded the grandiose title more than three years ago, the parties are, if anything, further apart today than ever.
The EU has spent untold millions trying to stabilize the region, funding civil society organizations, schools and even a police force.
When tensions threatened to devolve into all-out combat following an incursion into northern Kosovo by Serbian militiamen last month, however, the EU was forced to resort to its tried-and-true crisis resolution mechanism: Uncle Sam.
”We get criticized for too little leadership in Europe and then for too much,” U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke said in 1998, after Washington dragged its reluctant European allies into an effort to halt the “ethnic cleansing” campaign unleashed by Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milošević in Kosovo.
”The fact is the Europeans are not going to have a common security policy for the foreseeable future,” Holbrooke added. “We have done our best to keep them involved. But you can imagine how far I would have got with Mr. Milošević if I’d said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. President, I’ll be back in 24 hours after I’ve talked to the Europeans.”’
Risky business
One needn’t look further than Ukraine for proof that his point is no less valid today. Though the EU has done what it can, providing tens of billions in financial, humanitarian and military aid, it’s not nearly enough to help Ukraine keep the Russians at bay. If it weren’t for American support, Russian troops would be stationed all along the EU’s eastern flank, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Ukraine’s plight highlights the divide between Europe’s geostrategic aspirations and reality. Even though Europe didn’t anticipate Russia’s full-scale invasion, it had been talking for years about the need to improve its defense capabilities.
“We must fight for our future ourselves, as Europeans, for our destiny,” then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared in 2017.
And then nothing happened.
The reality is that it will always be easier to lean on Washington than to achieve European consensus around foreign policy and military capabilities.
That’s why Europe’s discussions about security sound more like fantasy football than Risk.
After Biden decided to send a U.S. aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean in response to the Hamas attack this week, Thierry Breton, France’s EU commissioner, said Europe needed to think about building its own aircraft carrier. Even in Brussels, the comment generated little more than comic relief.
Despite all the rhetoric about the necessity for Europe to play a more global role, not even the leaders of the EU’s biggest members, France and Germany, seem to be serious about it.
As Biden hunkered down in the White House Situation Room to discuss the crisis in Israel, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were busy conferring in Hamburg.
After agreeing to redouble their efforts to cut red tape in the EU, they took a harbor cruise with their partners.
The leaders celebrated their successful deliberations on a local wharf with beer and Fischbrötchen, a Hamburg fish sandwich. The sun even came out.
In a reasonable society, accidentally ringing the wrong doorbell, pulling into the wrong driveway, or getting into the wrong car would not result in being shot. However, in America—which is not a reasonable society, but rather one in which a large segment of the population cares about the supposed right to bear arms more than it cares about human beings—it’s happened three times since last Thursday.
On Tuesday, two cheerleaders were shot outside of Austin, Texas, after one of them reportedly got into the wrong car. According to KTRK, Heather Roth got out of a teammate’s car and opened the door to what she thought was her own car. Seeing a man sitting in the passenger seat, and apparently still thinking it was her car, she panicked, she said, and returned to her friend’s vehicle. Realizing her error and seeing the man approaching, Roth rolled down the window to apologize to him, she said—at which point he pulled out a gun and started shooting. “He just started shooting at all of us,” Roth said at a vigil, according to KTRK. The athlete reportedly “suffered a graze wound and was treated at the scene,” while fellow cheerleader Payton Washington “was struck twice in the leg and back and was flown to the hospital in critical condition.” (In an affidavit, a witness said they saw the shooter fire on the car multiple times before fleeing the scene; police have reportedly arrested Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr. and charged him with deadly conduct.)
The shooting followed the killing of Kaylin Gillis, who was shot in upstate New York on Saturday by a 65-year-old after her friend accidentally pulled into the wrong driveway. The group was reportedly turning around—and never even got out of the car—when Kevin Monahan allegedly fired at least two shots at the vehicle. Monahan was charged with murder on Monday.
Gillis’s murder came just two days after the shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, who was allegedly shot twice by Andrew Lester on Thursday after ringing the wrong doorbell while trying to pick up his younger brothers in Kansas City, Missouri. Yarl, who is Black, had accidentally gone to Northeast 115th Street instead of Northeast 115th Terrace, which is just one block away. According to prosecutor Zachary Thompson, Yarl did not “cross the threshold” into the home—nor was there any indication that “words were exchanged”—yet Lester allegedly shot him, in the forehead and right arm, through a glass door. Lester was not charged until Monday; he faces charges of assault in the first degree and armed criminal action. After a warrant was issued for his arrest, he surrendered on Tuesday. That same day, Yarl’s classmates staged a walkout on his behalf:
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Speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday, Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, a longtime advocate for stricter gun laws, said America is turning into “a killing field” where “even simple wrong turns are becoming potentially deadly,” which would sound dramatic if not for the fact that it’s 100% true.
This week on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” former President Trump awaits formal charges in New York, plus we talk to Sen. Chris Murphy on Washington’s impasse on gun control.
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NEWTOWN, Conn. — They would have been 16 or 17 this year. High school juniors.
The children killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012 should have spent this year thinking about college, taking their SATs and getting their driver’s licenses. Maybe attending their first prom.
Instead, the families of the 20 students and six educators slain in the mass shooting will mark a decade without them Wednesday.
December is a difficult month for many in Newtown, the Connecticut suburb where holiday season joy is tempered by heartbreak around the anniversary of the nation’s worst grade school shooting.
For former Sandy Hook students who survived the massacre, guilt and anxiety can intensify. For the parents, it can mean renewed grief, even as they continue to fight on their lost children’s behalf.
In February, Sandy Hook families reached a $73 million settlement with the gunmaker Remington, which made the shooter’s rifle. Juries in Connecticut and Texas ordered the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay $1.4 billion for promoting lies that the massacre was a hoax.
In mid-November, a memorial to the 26 victims opened near the new elementary school built to replace the one torn down after the shooting.
Ten years on, some victims’ relatives and survivors aren’t without hope for a brighter future.
ACTIVISM IN TRAGEDY’S AFTERMATH
After the massacre, Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden were among many victims’ relatives who turned to activism. They helped form Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit group that works to prevent suicides and mass shootings.
Hockley, who lost her 6-year-old son, Dylan, and Barden, who lost his 7-year-old son, Daniel, both find it difficult to believe their children have been gone for a decade.
“For me, Dylan is still this 6-year-old boy, forever frozen in time,” Hockley said. “This journey that we’ve been on the last 10 years, it doesn’t feel like a decade and it doesn’t feel like 10 years since I last held my son, either.”
A decade hasn’t diminished the disbelief Barden and his wife feel over Daniel’s death.
“Jackie and I still have moments where we just kind of look at each other, still wrapping our heads around the fact that our little 7-year-old boy was shot to death in his first grade classroom,” he said.
“I can’t help but wonder what he’d be like now at 17,” he said, repeating the number 17. “I just think he would be still a more mature version of the beautiful, sweet, compassionate, thoughtful, intelligent little boy that he was at 7. And it breaks my heart to think of the wonderful impact he would have had in these last 10 years and what he would have still yet to come, and it’s all been taken away from him.”
Sandy Hook Promise’s programs have been taught in more than 23,000 schools to over 18 million children and adults. Key components include education about the warning signs of potential school violence or self-harm and an anonymous tip system to report a classmate at risk for hurting others or themselves.
Hockley and Barden say they believe the educational programs and reporting system have prevented many suicides and stopped some school shootings.
“It’s a tremendous satisfaction and it’s a serious responsibility,” Barden said of the group’s work. “And it’s a gift in a way that we have built something that allows us this mechanism with which to honor our children by saving other children and by protecting other families from having to endure this pain.”
GROWING UP A SURVIVOR
Ashley Hubner was in her second grade classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary when the shooting happened. She and her classmates ran to the cubby area to hide. The school intercom system clicked on. Everyone could hear gunshots, screaming and crying.
When police arrived, she and her classmates didn’t want to open the door. They thought bad guys could be impersonating officers. They screamed “No!” The officers had to convince them they were actually police.
Ashley, now a 17-year-old senior at Newtown High School, developed post-traumatic stress disorder and has struggled with anxiety and depression, like other students who were there that day. Ashley said she always gets more emotional and irritable around the shooting anniversary.
“Even though it’s been 10 years, like this is still a problem that a lot of us still have to handle in our everyday lives and it still affects us greatly,” she said.
Adding to the grief is the fact that mass shootings keep happening, she said.
“We’ve had 10 years to change things and we’ve changed so little, and that’s just disgusting to me,” she said.
Ashley said there wasn’t much talk among her classmates yet about the anniversary.
“I feel like everyone just tries to pretend like everything is normal and then when it gets to that day, I’m sure people will reach out and I’ll reach out to people.”
Ashley wasn’t sure how she might mark the day. All town schools will be closed for staff development. She said she may make her first trip to the new memorial.
She said she has been happy with her senior year at Newtown High, calling it one of the best school years she’s had. She is looking forward to going to college.
“I’m really, really excited to leave,” she said. “Just like to get new experiences, grow up and move on with this chapter of my life, you know?”
LIGHT CONQUERING DARKNESS
St. Rose of Lima Church has been a gathering point for the Newtown community since the day of the shooting, when hundreds of people packed the Roman Catholic church and stood outside for a vigil. It has held a special Mass every Dec. 14 since.
Monsignor Robert Weiss still struggles with his own trauma. The church led the funerals for eight slain children. He hasn’t slept well ever since and becomes emotional easily. During Mass, he always keeps watch on the entrances, worried about a violent intruder.
“It’s a very difficult time for me having buried eight of those children,” he said of the anniversary. “It just brings back so many memories of true sadness.”
The anniversary Masses are hopeful, Weiss said, with a theme that light conquers darkness.
“The darkness of evil is not going to conquer good and we as a community have to work together to be sure that happens,” Weiss said. “We want to celebrate and remember the children and the families, and how it’s turned this tragedy into so many positive things to assist other people.”
2022 ‘TIPPING POINT’ IN GUN SAFETY
After Sandy Hook, there was frustration among many gun violence prevention advocates that nothing was being done to stop such massacres. The failure of a gun control bill in the months after Sandy Hook was another hard loss.
But U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said the shooting gave new energy to the movement, with numerous groups forming to demand action.
“In the 10 years leading up to Sandy Hook, the gun lobby controlled Washington. Anything they wanted they got,” said Murphy.
“After Sandy Hook happened, we started building what I would describe as the modern anti-gun violence movement,” he said. “During the next 10 years, there was essentially gridlock. The gun lobby no longer got what they wanted, but unfortunately in Washington we weren’t getting what we wanted either.”
After mass shootings last spring killed 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major federal gun control law in decades. The law expands background checks for younger gun buyers, boosts school mental health programs and promotes “red flag” laws to temporarily confiscate guns from people deemed dangerous.
“I think this summer marked the tipping point, where finally the gun safety movement has more power than the gun lobby,” Murphy said.
“It’s going to be a hard December for those families, but I hope they know what a difference that they have made in the memory of their children in these 10 years.”
