Grenell, long known for his hyper-aggressive confrontations with journalists and political rivals on Twitter and then X, served as US ambassador to Germany and then acting director of national intelligence during Trump's first term. He was appointed despite no prior arts experience. Grenell was a central player in Trump's push to dramatically overhaul the Kennedy Center following the president's return to office.
On this week's episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with his reflections on the recent shootings in Minneapolis. He argues that these killings, alongside ICE's warrantless home raids and mistaken detentions, and the reports of deaths in custody, are not isolated abuses but signs of a rapidly deepening crisis in American democracy, one in which basic rights and due process are applied unevenly and increasingly contested.
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CNN anchor and senior White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins and California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) called out numerous gaffes and falsehoods from President Donald Trump's jaw-dropping address to the 2026 Davos World Economic Forum. Newsom was in the audience when Trump delivered a lengthy and rambling speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday. The president spoke for well over an hour, dropping a familiar mixture of falsehoods, exaggerations, attacks on allies and enemies alike, and wild asides.
The president shared the 62-second video on Thursday, just before midnight, which pushes a conspiracy about manipulated vote-counting machines but concludes by cutting to an AI clip that shows the faces of the Obamas superimposed on apes' bodies for roughly a second, accompanied by the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight. The video carries a watermark linked to a pro-Trump account on X with tens of thousands of followers.
What we must call out as a blatantly racist reposting on his so-called Truth Social (which is never true and certainly not social) posting, the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, uploaded an AI generated video depicting both former President Barack Obama and former First Woman Michelle Obama as very hairy dark brown monkeys donning wide smiles while standing in a tropical jungle.