Apr. 25, 2026, 11:23 AM EDT

Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin on Saturday defended his decision not to release a full autopsy of the party’s 2024 election losssaying it would “allow people to point fingers, place blame” instead of focusing on this year’s midterm elections.

Speaking to MS NOW’s “The Weekend,” Martin argued that “re-litigating” the 2024 presidential election would distract Democrats from their goal of winning the midterms in November and the 2028 presidential race.

He said Democrats are planning for what they expect to be an “unprecedented assault on our elections” from President Donald Trump, who has already signaled his intention to have federal officials “take over” the elections.

The party’s focus, Martin said, should be on protecting free and fair elections and defeating Republicans and Trump, rather than “engaging in a back and forth” over where it went wrong in 2024.

After then-Vice President Kamala Harris lost to Trump, the DNC ordered a review of where the party fell short. But 10 months later, Martin said the committee would not release the full 2024 autopsya decision that has prompted still-grieving Democrats — including potential 2028 candidates — to prescribe their own solutions to winning over voters.

Martin has repeatedly said that releasing the full report would distract Democrats from taking on Trump. But a growing number of DNC members, Democratic leaders and elected officials are urging him make those findings public, NBC News reported last week.

Martin said Saturday that he wants to keep the party’s focus on “the top lines” and that a 200-page report “allows people to sort of engage in navel-gazing.” He said it would not be helpful for people to harp on “what ifs” over the last election when “none of us have a time machine.”

“I’m not here to protect anyone, right? What I’m here to do is win elections,” he said, adding, “What we’re focusing on right now is the future, not the past.”

Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.

Apr. 25, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Breaking with decades of tradition, the White House Correspondents’ Association will not feature a comedian at its annual gala this Saturday night. Instead, “the world’s most celebrated mentalist,” Oz Pearlmanwill entertain the throngs of journos, politicos, corporate overlords and Beltway influencers at the Washington, D.C. Hilton.

Among those luminaries will be President Donald J. Trump who, in his capacity as president, has previously boycotted the event. This time around he’ll deliver an address. The president seems to be feeling confident about his performance, as evidenced by this social media post:

In honor of our Nation’s 250th Birthday, and the fact that these ‘Correspondents’ now admit that I am truly one of the Greatest Presidents in the History of our Country, the G.O.A.T., according to many, it will be my Honor to accept their invitation, and work to make it the GREATEST, HOTTEST, and MOST SPECTACULAR DINNER, OF ANY KIND, EVER!

According to his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, he’s even been working with joke writers to prepare for the occasion.

All of which raises three interrelated questions. First, as the New York Times wonderedwhat could possibly go wrong? Second, will Trump dump on the countless media figures in attendance whom he has already disparaged, threatened, and even sued? And third, why is it that Trump can crack jokes about everything from the pope to unloading sludge on No Kings protestors, but won’t stand for a little comedic ribbing himself?

As for the mentalist, maybe he’ll ask the WHCA’s members to think of a number — like the number of cowardly decisions they’ve made in Trump’s second term. The non-profit, which describes its mission as helping “to facilitate robust coverage of the presidency,” has already sacked a comedian; last year the WHCA disinvited Amber Ruffin. Many felt the association was caving to pressure from MAGA world.

Ruffin certainly thought so. In 2025, she claimed that her dismissal was due to  “talking s—” about Trump. “I think it’s a good thing that I lost the gig,” she added, “because I was going to show up there and act all the way out.”

The same strategy of appeasement appears to be in play this year, which would account for the unusual choice  of a mentalist as host. The press organization, presumably under pressure from the same White House it’s supposed to cover, has thus gone beyond merely cancelling a comedian — no, this feels like a move to cancel comedy itself at its signature event.

There are a number of important things that happen during the event, including bestowing awards and scholarships to members of the media. And I don’t mean to blow my nose in the First-Amendment-inscribed pocket handkerchiefs that some attendees plan to wear to protest the administration’s anti-free speech policies, but I will say this: If you remove comedy from the WHCA Dinner, that leaves the high-profile entertainment up to a lot of HR-non-compliant afterparties and a mushroom cloud of Trump’s Victory 45-47 cologne.

My point is that the country needs Ruffin’s “acting all the way out.” America needs comedians to poke the powerful right in their grimacing faces. A liberal democracy that permits that sort of subversion makes itself stronger.

Since 1983, the WHCA dinner has deputized assorted clowns to preside over this quirky but vital ritual (only in 1999, 2003 and 2019 did an entertainer other than a comedian perform at the event).

Most WHCA comic headliners have executed their patriotic duties with verve and venom. Liberal or left-leaning stand-ups have lit up Republicans. Stephen Colbert in 2006 reminded America that George W. Bush “stands for things,” but also, “on things like aircraft carriers and rubble, and recently flooded city squares.” In 2017, Hasan Minhaj joked he did “not see” (which he pronounced as “Nazi”) Steve Bannon. A year later, Michelle Wolf referred to an absent Trump as “the one p—- you’re not allowed to grab.”

But liberal or left-leaning comedians are comedians first. As such, they’ve rarely missed an opportunity to dunk on Democrats as well. In 2013, Conan O’Brien taunted Barack Obama that he only won the presidency because Mitt Romney was his opponent. In 2016, Larry Wilmore made everyone in the room extremely uncomfortable by directing a racial slur at the nation’s first Black commander in chief. Roy Wood Jr. in 2023 reflected upon how odd it was that 80-year-old Joe Biden was begging for four more years of work.

I can think of one way to rebut the charge that WHCA is canceling comedy: Invite a humorist with RedState street cred to entertain at next year’s “nerd prom.” The right-wing comedy sector is booming. Many conservatives are devoted fans of stand-up and they have no shortage of skilled humorists to follow. Instead of a manosphere-adjacent mentalist like Pearlman, the WHCA should have platformed a manosphere-adjacent stand-up like Shane Gillis, Tony HinchcliffeAdam Carolla or countless other seasoned acts that could have easily played the gig.

All of these more conservative comedians, I surmise, are also comedians first. Had the WHCA invited them, Trump and his crew would have invariably been rinsed and roasted, patriotically. No one would have claimed that “liberal bias” motivated the barbs — have you ever listened to Hinchcliffe? Had WHCA simply done that, a weird and sloppy democratic tradition would have persevered. Life would go on, as it always does.

So would Trump’s wars, deportations, voter suppression schemes, corruption, lies and so forth. But the jokes would linger like funny prayers to ironic gods, permitting us to at least collectively recognize how absurd our predicament has become.

Jacques Berlinerblau is a professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University.

Apr. 25, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

ByJoseph Zeballos-Roig

President Donald Trump considers China the country’s biggest rival. But he also seems to view it as a model where the state calls the shots on who gets ahead in business.

Since returning to office, Trump has taken a more direct stake in American businesses than his predecessors — especially the Republican ones — turning the federal goverrnment into a major shareholder. While it’s still nowhere near China’s state-directed market economyit’s still closer to it than the U.S. has typically been.

America’s investment portfolio currently spans 16 companies with $21 billion invested so far, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The roster includes smaller stakes in Intel Corp. — the single-largest federal commitment— and rare-earth mineral companies such as MP Materials among others.

Now he’s poised to use the Iran war to exert more power in the economy.

The Trump administration is galloping ahead with a pair of bailouts for Spirit Airlines and the United Arab Emirates, a Persian Gulf nation and a close U.S. ally. Both are grappling with the fallout of the war, which has rippled through the global economy and spiked fuel prices.

Spirit was already in bad shape before war broke out in the Middle East. The budget carrier cycled through two bankruptcies in two years and has long had a dismal reputation among travelers. A University of Chicago professor once infamously comparedtraveling on the airline to a case of chickenpox since “everyone has endured Spirit once.”

Nevertheless, it is in line to receive a $500 million loanfrom the U.S. government to avoid liquidation or even an outright sale — turning Spirit into America’s first state-owned airline.

“We’re thinking about helping them out, meaning bailing them out, or buying it,” Trump told reporters Thursday evening. “I think we just buy it.”

Next up is the UAE. Iranian missiles bombarded the oil-rich nation, crippling its ability to sell and export oil through the critical Strait of Hormuz. Though the UAE has ample financial reserves, it is still bleeding dollars. Now the administration is engineering a currency swap linethat functions similarly to credit. It is the exact same lifeline that was extended to Argentinalate last year, and may wellbe granted to Asian nations in the future.

In both cases, Trump is using reprecussions from the war to justify more government involvement in the economy.

There is precedent for this. During World War I, the federal government took control of the nation’s railroadsthough they were returned to private ownership after the war’s end. In World War II, the feds ordered auto companies to stop building private cars and focus on planes and tanks, strictly rationingthe remaining civilian automobiles. And during the Korean War, President Harry Truman attempted to seize control of U.S. steel mills, only to be blockedby the Supreme Court.

Republicans have long argued that this kind of state meddling — which former House Speaker Paul Ryan referred to as “picking winners and losers” — risks being corrupted by personal influence. They had a field day when the solar power company Solyndra went bankrupt after receiving a federal loan guarantee from the Obama administration, calling it “crony capitalism” because some people invovled with the company had been campaign contributors.

Crony capitalism is typically definedas a system in which private firms leverage influence in government to secure privileged favors and gain advantage, instead of competing in open markets for success. The term was first usedin the 1980s to illustrate the two-decade dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos over the Philippines. Marcos minted oligarchs who dominated the Philippine economy with insider deals and relied on him to preserve their splendor. His rule ended with the economy in free fall.

Closer to home, the U.S. sugar industry has long beenheld upas a blatant exampleof crony capitalism. Domestic sugarmakers have been federally backed through a blend of import tariffs, purchasing quotas and price guarantees for more than four decades. The Trump administration has only reinforced the status quo: It tossed them three lifelines over the past year by restrictingsugar imports, boosting price guarantees and issuing temporary one-time payments for sugar producers.

Big Sugar is the dominant political donor among crop producers and an influential constituency. Republicans in particular learned never to cross them. “Don’t f— with sugar,” former Republican House Speaker John Boehner wrote in his 2021 memoir.

Now with Trump knocking down wall after wall separating business and government, that critique appears prescient.

Take the UAE, first among equals in the Persian Gulf. Early last year, Dubai pledged $1.4 trillionin direct U.S. investments over 10 years. The UAE is heavily intertwined with the Trump family, who cultivated extensive business tiesin the country. An Emirati-backed investment firm also has a sizable stakein World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture directed by Trump’s sons. Now the war’s fallout has stirred fearsin the Trump administration that the UAE’s enormous investment pledges are in jeopardy.

Over the past 15 months, Trump has laid the groundwork for a command economy, giving him plenty of opportunities to direct government money to friends and family if he chooses. Now, a war of choice against Iran sets the stage for him to take it even farther.