Monday, February 9, 2026. Chump remains out of step with the country -- on the Super Bowl half-time show, on ICE, on the economy, on tariffs, on everything.
Lauren Waters (THE LIST) notes the sad alternative to the Super Bowl half-time show:
Back in December, Spotify Wrapped crowned Bad Bunny the most-streamed artist of 2025. So, for many, he seemed like the perfect pick for a halftime performer. Donald Trump, on the other hand, went on a bit of a rant about the choice, and (as usual) others followed suit. So, for those who couldn't bear to watch the 2026 Grammy winner for Album of the Year, they could instead turn their attention to homogenous performances from the similarly named Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett, plus, of course, the tragically dated Kid Rock.
Sure — this alternative halftime show didn't have the big production, crowds of performers, popularity, credibility, or celeb cameos of the actual halftime show, but it did have a fog machine! Who are we to argue with their creative decisions? After all, art is subjective. Apparently, in some folks' opinion, nothing says "Super Bowl Halftime Show" like a 55-year-old Kid Rock seemingly lip-syncing to a song from 1999 while wearing shorts and a fedora.
Let's face it: there was no version of Turning Point USA's "All-American Halftime Show" that wasn't going to have MAGA folks fawning all over social media, no matter how pathetic it actually was. Of course, the evening's performances inspired exactly that, yet it also earned plenty of criticism. "BREAKING: The TPUSA "All American Halftime Show" is complete a**," political commentator Dean Withers wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, with a crying emoji alongside a clip from the show.
"You can tell it's s*** cause they won't show that crowd at all lmfao," another person commented on the clip. One simply wrote, "Snooze fest USA," while another added, "Wow. Low energy and no artistry. Despite not knowing Spanish, I enjoyed Bad Bunny... I could see it was celebratory and more about unification rather than division."
Most of the country watched Bad Bunny's half-time show.
As a few million people opted to flip to Kid Rock’s halftime extravaganza on Turning Point USA’s YouTube channel, exponentially more well-adjusted Americans watched what proved to be an incredible halftime performance by Bad Bunny that will go down in Super Bowl history.
The show exceeded expectations in almost every way. The choreography? Superb. Vocals? Crisp. Guest stars? Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin! The set design? Amazing. And the messaging? That was what set the show apart.
Without even directly addressing the political flashpoints of the day, Bad Bunny sent a message by celebrating Latin American identity on the world’s biggest stage. The symbolism began from the moment Bad Bunny stepped on the field, with depictions of Latin culture around every corner he turned in his sugar cane-inspired set. The performance ended with a parade of flags featuring numerous Latin American countries and Bad Bunny shouting out nations as far south as Argentina and as far north as Canada.
The official NFL account sent a direct message after the performance: “The Only Thing More Powerful Than Hate is Love.”
133 million watched Bad Bunny's half-time performance.
Convicted Felon Donald Chump is yet again out of step with the country.
It's a regular position for him, being out of step with the rest of the country. Sam Stevenson (NEWSWEEK) knocks that point home:
A trio of new national polls released over the past week paint a worrying picture for President Donald Trump.
These polls underscore sustained headwinds on Trump’s overall job approval as voters weigh immigration enforcement issues and economic perceptions ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Responding to recent polling, White House spokesman Kush Desai told Newsweek: “The Trump administration remains laser-focused on continuing to cool inflation, accelerate economic growth, secure our border, and mass deport criminal illegal aliens.”
Each survey captures something slightly different: a softening in overall approval, a shift among independents, and signs that even pollsters that are traditionally favorable to the president are beginning to record new lows.
Taken together, they form a negative trend for a White House preparing for a bruising midterm environment.
Quinnipiac’s new national poll of registered voters found 37 percent approve and 56 percent disapprove of Trump’s job performance, compared with 40 percent who approve and 54 percent who disapprove in both mid-January and October, widening the net negative from 14 points in October and January to 19 points now.
The February 2026 reading marks Trump’s lowest net score in the Quinnipiac series this term.
A break has taken place. Chump has lost significant support and it's because the American people see with their own eyes. They see his ICE goons murdering US citizens. They see the prices at the grocery store not going down. They see through his lies. Lies that include his claims on tariffs. Trevor Jennewine (THE MOTLEY FOOL) notes Chump's lies:
President Trump has repeatedly argued that foreign exporters will pay his tariffs for the privilege of doing business in America. He went further last month in an editorial published by The Wall Street Journal, claiming foreign companies were "paying at least 80% of tariff costs." He even linked a study from the Harvard Business School to validate his claim.
What's the problem? The study Trump linked made no such claim. In fact, the researchers arrived at the opposite conclusion. The report states, "Our results suggest that U.S. consumers paid up to 43% of the tariff burden, with the rest absorbed by U.S. firms."
Those results roughly align with research from other institutions. Goldman Sachs economists report that U.S. companies and consumers collectively paid 84% of tariffs in October 2025. And they estimate consumers alone will bear 67% of the burden by July 2026.
Similarly, the Kiel Institute examined shipments totaling $4 trillion between January 2024 and November 2025, and the researchers concluded, "Foreign exporters absorb only about 4% of the tariff burden." The other 96% is passed along to U.S. importers and consumers.
Trump's tariffs are effectively a tax on consumption, which means they reduce buying power for consumers and raise input costs for businesses. That's a problem because consumer spending and business investments account for approximately 85% of GDP. By siphoning money away from consumers and businesses, tariffs threaten to slow economic growth.
His lies never end. That includes his lies for ICE. His gestapo needs to be dismantled. It cannot be reformed at this point. They have terrorized too many people. They have been allowed to get away with every broken law. They have bullied and shoved people. They've broken windows and broken into homes -- and broken homes without warrants. Last month, two Americans were killed by these goons: Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
Saturday, Ernesto Londono (NEW YORK TIMES) reported:
Hours after an immigration agent fatally shot Renee Good inside her S.U.V. on a Minneapolis street last month, a senior federal prosecutor in Minnesota sought a warrant to search the vehicle for evidence in what he expected would be a standard civil rights investigation into the agent’s use of force.
The prosecutor, Joseph H. Thompson, wrote in an email to colleagues that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that specializes in investigating police shootings, would team up with the F.B.I. to determine whether the shooting had been justified and lawful or had violated Ms. Good’s civil rights.
But later that week, as F.B.I. agents equipped with a signed warrant prepared to document blood spatter and bullet holes in Ms. Good’s S.U.V., they received orders to stop, according to several people with knowledge of the events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The orders, they said, came from senior officials, including Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, several of whom worried that pursuing a civil rights investigation — by using a warrant obtained on that basis — would contradict President Trump’s claim that Ms. Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer” who fired at her as she drove her vehicle.
Over the next few days, top Department of Justice officials presented alternative approaches. First, they suggested prosecutors ask a judge to sign a new search warrant for the vehicle, predicated on a criminal investigation into whether the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot Ms. Good, Jonathan Ross, had been assaulted by her. Later, they urged the prosecutors to instead investigate Ms. Good’s partner, who had been with Ms. Good on the morning of the shooting, confronting immigration agents in their Minneapolis neighborhood.
Several of the career federal prosecutors in Minnesota, including Mr. Thompson, balked at the new approach, which they viewed as legally dubious and incendiary in a state where anger over a federal immigration crackdown was already boiling over. Mr. Thompson and five others left the office in protest, setting off a broader wave of resignations that has left Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office severely understaffed and in crisis. Officials have not said whether they ultimately obtained a new warrant to search the vehicle.
From an office of about 25 criminal litigators, gone are the top prosecutors who had overseen a sprawling, yearslong investigation into fraud in Minnesota’s social services programs, which the White House months ago cited as a reason for the immigration crackdown in the state.
This is not an administration that earns praise. It's one to be condemned. And that's only made more clear in Mica Rosenberg's report for PRO-PUBLICA this morning:
Fourteen-year-old Ariana Velasquez had been held at the immigrant detention center in Dilley, Texas, with her mother for some 45 days when I managed to get inside to meet her. The staff brought everyone in the visiting room a boxed lunch from the cafeteria: a cup of yellowish stew and a hamburger patty in a plain bun. Ariana’s long black curls hung loosely around her face and she was wearing a government-issued gray sweatsuit. At first, she sat looking blankly down at the table. She poked at her food with a plastic fork and let her mother do most of the talking.
She perked up when I asked about home: Hicksville, New York. She and her mother had moved there from Honduras when she was 7. Her mother, Stephanie Valladares, had applied for asylum, married a neighbor from back home who was already living in the U.S., and had two more kids. Ariana took care of them after school. She was a freshman at Hicksville High, and being detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center meant that she was falling behind in her classes. She told me how much she missed her favorite sign language teacher, but most of all she missed her siblings.
I had previously met them in Hicksville: Gianna, a toddler who everyone calls Gigi, and Jacob, a kindergartener with wide brown eyes. I told Ariana that they missed her too. Jacob had shown me a security camera that their mom had installed in the kitchen so she could peek in on them from her job, sometimes saying “Hello” through the speaker. I told Ariana that Jacob tried talking to the camera, hoping his mom would answer.
Stephanie burst into tears. So did Ariana. After my visit, Ariana wrote me a letter.
“My younger siblings haven’t been able to see their mom in more than a month,” she wrote. “They are very young and you need both of your parents when you are growing up.” Then, referring to Dilley, she added, “Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression.”
Dilley, run by private prison firm CoreCivic, is located some 72 miles south of San Antonio and nearly 2,000 miles away from Ariana’s home. It is a sprawling collection of trailers and dormitories, almost the same color as the dusty landscape, surrounded by a tall fence. It first opened during the Obama administration to hold an influx of families crossing the border. Former President Joe Biden stopped holding families there in 2021, arguing America shouldn’t be in the business of detaining children.
But quickly after returning to office, President Donald Trump resumed family detentions as part of his mass deportation campaign. Federal courts and overwhelming public outrage had put an end to Trump’s first-term policy of separating children from parents when immigrant families were detained crossing the border. Trump officials said Dilley was a place where immigrant families would be detained together.
As the second Trump administration’s crackdown both slowed border crossings to record lows and ramped up a blitz of immigration arrests all across the country, the population inside Dilley shifted. The administration began sending parents and children who had been living in the country long enough to lay down roots and to build networks of relatives, friends and supporters willing to speak up against their detention.
If the administration believed that putting children in Dilley wouldn’t stir the same outcry as separating them from their parents, it was mistaken. The photo of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from Ecuador, who was detained with his father in Minneapolis while wearing a Spider-Man backpack and a blue bunny hat, went viral on social media and triggered widespread condemnation and a protest by the detainees.
Weeks before that, I had begun speaking to parents and children at Dilley, along with their relatives on the outside. I also spoke to people who worked inside the center or visited it regularly to give religious or legal services. I had asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for permission to visit but got a range of responses. One spokesperson denied my request, another said he doubted I could get formal approval and suggested I could try showing up there as a visitor. So I did.
Since early December, I’ve spoken, in person and via phone and video calls, to more than two dozen detainees, half of them kids detained at Dilley — all of whose parents gave me their’ consent. I asked parents whether their children would be open to writing to me about their experiences. More than three dozen kids responded; some just drew pictures, others wrote in perfect cursive. Some letters were full of age-appropriate misspellings.
Read the report in full.
Meanwhile Malcolm Ferguson (THE NEW REPUBLIC) reports on an incident I had not heard of until this morning:
The U.S. Marshals Service is defending a federal agent after a video of him violently kicking a small dog made waves on Friday morning.
The agent, part of the Memphis Safe Task Force that the Trump administration unleashed on the city last summer, can be seen in the video kicking the dog after it runs up barking at the agents’ K-9.
The dog is tiny, harmless, and really not doing anything to stop the agents from doing their jobs. Nevertheless, the U.S. Marshals played the victim.
“A woman at the apartment complex recorded the incident on her cell phone and posted the video to social media. While the appearance of the incident is unfortunate, the deputy marshal’s action was not done with malice,” they wrote in a statement. “It was a last-resort, split-second action taken by a law enforcement officer to control the environment and mitigate a dangerous situation. An uncontrolled, aggressive animal can hinder official duties and threaten safety.”
Just not Chump's morning. And he's still not able to pull away from his racist antics on Friday. Hafiz Rashid (THE NEW REPUBLIC) explains:
Republicans suddenly seemed shocked that President Trump is capable of racism after he posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes Thursday night.
On Friday morning, longest-serving Black Senator Tim Scott called the video “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House”—spurring other GOP senators and representatives to miraculously realize that Trump’s post was indeed racist.
Representative Mike Lawler, who represents a swing district in New York, called out the president shortly thereafter, saying on X, “The President’s post is wrong and incredibly offensive—whether intentional or a mistake—and should be deleted immediately with an apology offered.”
After Trump took down the video, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, whose Pennsylvania district voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, posted, “Racism and hatred have no place in our country—ever. They divide our people and weaken the foundations of our democracy.
“Whether intentional or careless, this post is a grave failure of judgment and is absolutely unacceptable from anyone—most especially from the President of the United States. A clear and unequivocal apology is owed,” Fitzpatrick added.
“ICE and CBP’s… disregard for child welfare undermines the government’s core child-protection obligations. Yet your agency does not appear to be taking any action to speak out against or investigate the impacts of the Trump Administration’s immigration agenda on children.”
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), along with Representative Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), led over 55 colleagues in pressing Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on children’s exposure to ICE’s escalating violence in American communities, which threatens to leave them with lasting physical and psychological trauma.
“ICE and CBP operations that treat children like collateral damage threaten their physical and mental health and wellbeing… This disregard for child welfare undermines the government’s core child-protection obligations,” wrote the lawmakers. “Yet your agency does not appear to be taking any action to speak out against or investigate the impacts of the Trump Administration’s immigration agenda on children.”
Under the Trump administration, children — both U.S. citizens and noncitizens — have been exposed to increasingly violent and intense immigration enforcement operations. After Donald Trump rescinded ICE’s sensitive locations policy on Day One, ICE has carried out raids at schools, day care centers — and even a child’s birthday party. ICE has also become more violent, employing military-style techniques in communities across the country. Even when children are not the direct target, their exposure to this violence can create lasting trauma.
“(ICE and CBP’s) practices have triggered national outrage and risk traumatizing children and depriving them of access to education and basic services, with lasting consequences for their behavioral, physical, academic, and emotional wellbeing,” wrote the lawmakers.
Five-year-old Minnesota resident Liam Ramos was detained for more than a week in a Texas facility after reportedly being used as “bait” to capture his father. Liam’s father said Liam was not eating well, was sleeping a lot, and was asking about his mother and classmates.
In Massachusetts, a man suffered an apparent seizure while ICE agents attempted to detain his wife as their toddler cried within arm’s reach. Witnesses allege agents pushed him, struck him, and pressed on his neck while the child remained trapped between the adults.
In Illinois, ICE agents forcibly detained a day care teacher in front of her students. In another incident, masked agents deployed tear gas near an elementary school in Chicago, sending children running and teachers scrambling for cover. In Texas, ICE agents stormed a five-year-old child’s birthday party, where state and federal officers conducted an operation that resulted in the apprehension of 47 people, including nine minors — one of whom was just three years old.
“Children’s exposure to traumatic ICE raids occurring in their communities across America can have lasting effects on their long-term health and development, including their behavioral and psychological wellbeing,” wrote the lawmakers.
ICE operations are also hurting children’s academic and social development. In districts where ICE raids have occurred, schools are reporting declining student attendance and performance; in some schools, nearly half of students have been absent following school-based ICE raids. Early childhood providers have reported attrition from day care, after-school programs, and other community programs that typically serve as spaces for positive socialization, mental health counseling, and other forms of support.
Immigration enforcement actions are also impacting children’s access to health care. Most health care workers report significant or moderate decreases in patient visits since January 2025; for the children who do continue to visit the doctor, they reportedly have declining physical and mental health. One doctor observed “abnormal weight gain trajectories” in children not getting exercise outdoors due to “fear of encountering ICE,” and another pediatrician reported that “minors (are) constantly crying during their well-child checks, expressing their fear for themselves and their families.”
“Given HHS’s responsibility for the health and wellbeing of children in the United States, we request any data your department has collected regarding the impact of immigration operations on children’s health and development,” wrote the lawmakers.
The lawmakers noted HHS’s various programs, offices, and agencies that research and provide for children’s physical and mental health and wellbeing, and requested that Secretary Kennedy share any information HHS has regarding the impact of ICE and CBP operations on children’s mental health and development.
Other signers include: Senators Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.); and Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Danny Davis (D-Ill.), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), Judy Chu (D-Calif.), Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), Al Green (D-Texas), Becca Balint (D-Vt.), Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.), Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.), Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.), Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), Emily Randall (D-Wash.), Shontel Brown (D-Ohio), Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii), André Carson (D-Ind.), Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), Summer Lee (D-Pa.), Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), Sean Casten (D-Ill.), Dina Titus (D-Nev.), Dwight Evans (D-Pa.), Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), Gil Cisneros (D-Calif.), Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.), Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), Valerie Foushee (D-N.C.), Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Lateefah Simon (D-Calif.), Julia Brownley (D-Calif.), Johnny Olszewski, Jr. (D-Md.), Kelly Morrison (D-Minn.), Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), George Latimer (D-N.Y.), Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), Angie Craig (D-Minn.), Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), Robin Kelly (D-Ill.), John Garamendi (D-Calif.), Chuy García (D-Ill.), James Walkinshaw (D-Va.), Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), and Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.).
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