Former Donald Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, now a cohost on Fox News Channel’sThe Five, says those who hate Trump need someone to love them. “You need a hug or a husband or a hobby or a dog,” she said on the show’s Tuesday broadcast.
That apparently includes lesbian comedian Rosie O’Donnell, who has been married twice to women. In the episode, Conway and her colleagues lambasted O’Donnell for her anti-Trump statements, such as those in a recent TikTok video in which O’Donnell called for Trump to be removed from office via the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment, among other things, provides for the removal of a president who cannot perform the duties of the office.
Kellyanne Conway: She moved to Ireland, but she never moved on | Fox News Video www.foxnews.com
“We gotta do it soon, before the November elections,” O’Donnell said. “Because you know he’s going to do anything he can to start a war and then declare no elections because of that war. He needs to be stopped.”
To Conway and her cohosts, that’s a sign of “Trump derangement syndrome,” an illogical hatred of the president. They claimed — falsely — that he has had a very successful first year in office in his second term.
O’Donnell “moved to Ireland but never moved on,” Conway said. She also blasted O’Donnell for terming Trump a “nameless blob of negative energy,” saying it was a case of “a slob calling someone a blob.”
Conway herself may need someone to love her. She is divorced from George Conway, a lawyer and former Republican who has become a sharp critic of Trump. Conway has filed paperwork to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in the Democratic primary in New York’s 12th Congressional District, although he hasn't made an official announcement. If he does, he'd be one of numerous candidates seeking to succeed longtime U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, a Dem who is retiring.
Mamdani announced Tuesday at a press conference that he has appointed Lillian Bonsignore, a 56-year-old out lesbian and decorated first responder, to lead the FDNY once he is inaugurated on January 1. In response to the news, the billionaire and Tesla CEO took to social media over the weekend to attack Bonsignore, fallaciously claiming that "people will die because of this."
“Proven experience matters when lives are at stake,” Musk wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, which he owns.
Musk's implication that Bonsignore is inexperienced is completely false, as Mamdani was quick to point out. He wrote in post directly replying to Musk, “Experience does matter, which is why I appointed the person who spent more than 30 years at EMS. You know, the workforce that addresses at least 70% of all calls coming into FDNY?”
Bonsignore joined the FDNY in 1991 as an emergency medical technician, serving 31 years before her retirement in 2022. She was named chief of the FDNY’s Emergency Medical Services division in 2019, becoming the first woman to head the division and first uniformed woman to be a four-star chief in the department. Her tenure included working as a first responder in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and leading the EMS division during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bonsignore's appointment makes her the second woman and first out gay person to serve as FDNY chief. It also marks the first time women have led both the city's fire and police departments, as Jessica Tisch is expected to stay in her post as police commissioner when Mamdani takes office.
“Bonsignore’s calm, decisive leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic — when EMS professionals were more vital than ever — is exactly the kind of leadership our city needs in moments of uncertainty,” Mamdani said in a statement to City & State New Yorkbefore the announcement.
Meanwhile, Musk's experience includes heading the failed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which shut down within just ten months after failing to meet its goals. The department was responsible for firing about 300,000 federal workers, including 2,000 staff members of USAID in the complete dissolution of the U.S. humanitarian department. Data models by Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols estimate that as of June, over 640,000 people globally have died due to losing USAID support, at least two-thirds of them children.
If you thought Project 2025 was bad, wait, there’s more: It’s continuing into 2026.
The Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank that created Project 2025, has posted its priorities for 2026, and while it’s not calling this Project 2026, that’s basically what it is.
It’s officially a list of the foundation’s priorities for 2025-2026, under the title “Restoring America’s Promise.” It was published in February but has recently received new attention due to social media posts dubbing it Project 2026.
“Project 2025 was an effort of more than 100 organizations convened by Heritage to prepare for the next conservative administration,” a Heritage spokesperson told Newsweek.“That administration is now in office, so all policy and personnel decisions are up to the president and his team. … There is no Project 2026 and will not be, regardless of what leftist lunatics make up on BlueSky.”
“Restoring America’s Promise” is fairly brief, especially as compared to Project 2025, which took up 900 pages. It has nine sections, including “Counter the CCP” — the Chinese Communist Party — “Unleash American Energy,” “Eliminate Regulation, Inflation, and Spending,” and “Root Out the Deep State,” “deep state” being the extreme right’s term for career federal workers who are supposedly undermining conservative plans.
The sections most relevant to LGBTQ+ people are “Put Family First” and “Expand Education Freedom.” “Every child conceived deserves to be born to a married mother and father who will love, guide, and protect them throughout their lives,” the former says. “But family breakdown and rampant abortion tears at the soul of our country and saps it of strength and moral authority. Radical ideologies that deny social and biological truths about sexual embodiment, marriage, and unborn life poison our courts, our culture, and our laws.”
The section on education begins, “The education system is failing our children — from the scourge of woke ideas like critical race theory and radical gender ideology to the lack of academic excellence and transparency.” It goes on to promote school choice — which is usually subsidies for parents who want to send their children to private schools — and issue a call to “reclaim institutions of higher education from the radical Left.”
Also, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts promoted what he calls “Heritage 2.0” at Turning Point USA’s America Fest last Friday. He said it will consist of these policy priorities: “The American Family,” “The Dignity of Work and the Future of Free Enterprise,” “National Security,” and “The American Heritage and Citizenship,” according to The Daily Signal, a conservative outlet. He further praised “the great successes of the Trump-Vance administration.” Donald Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025 during his presidential campaign, but his administration has implemented many Project 2025 ideas.
However, the Heritage Foundation may be falling apart.
Roberts used the term “Heritage 2.0” in a recent email to staff as well after the recent departure of several key Heritage employees and board members, conservative publication National Reviewreports. National Review headlined its story “The Heritage Foundation Implodes.”
At least a dozen employees left or were fired, Reuters reports. This included almost the entire legal and economic departments, according to National Review.
The sticking point for some was Roberts’s support of podcaster and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Carlson hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his show in October, and they expressed “mutual opposition to U.S. support of Israel, a view at odds with that of many conservatives,” Reuters notes. Carlson has said his position is not anti-Semitic. Fuentes, however, has said that “organized Jewry” is undermining white culture, and he has said he admires Adolf Hitler.
Roberts then posted a video saying a “venomous coalition” was attacking Carlson. He later apologized for using that term, which some Jewish people consider anti-Semitic. He also told Heritage staffers he did not support Fuentes but hoped to “convert” some of his acolytes, according to Reuters.
Robert P. George, a prominent legal scholar, left the board after demanding a retraction of Roberts’s video, which was not forthcoming, Politicoreports. Josh Blackman, a staff member who contributed to Project 2025, said in his resignation letter that he left because the video “aligned the Heritage Foundation with the rising tide of antisemitism on the right.”
“A Heritage Foundation that was once synonymous with free markets, the rule of law, and a strong national defense has, to a large extent, abandoned or downgraded those things in pursuit of newer, populist ideological fashions in an apparent finger-in-the-wind attempt to stay in the good graces of the power brokers of the new right,” according to National Review.
Many who’ve left have gone to Advancing American Freedom, founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. National Review calls Advancing American Freedom an “organization that is unbendingly committed to markets, constitutionalism, traditional values, and peace through strength — and has no truck with antisemitism.” However, a glance at its website shows it is just as anti-LGBTQ+ as other right-wing groups, opposing what it calls "gender indoctrination" and more.
Journalists Peter Alexander (left), Scott Pelley and Rachel Maddow at the 2025 Walter Cronkite Awards in Washington, D.C.
Tina Dela Rosa Photography
On Friday afternoon at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the 2025 Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in Political Journalism unfolded less like a media victory lap than a reckoning. The journalists honored — Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, Scott Pelley, Peter Alexander, John Dickerson, Julio Vaqueiro, and a range of local and investigative reporters — gathered amid an unspoken understanding: The work being celebrated is also the work now under the greatest strain.
Presented biennially by USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center, the Cronkite Awards recognize political journalism on television and digital platforms that meet the highest standards of rigor and independence. This year, speakers returned repeatedly to the same idea: that journalism is no longer warning about a future democratic crisis. It is documenting one already underway.
MS NOW anchor Rachel Maddow (right) with her longtime partner, Susan Mikula, at the 2025 Walter Cronkite Awards in Washington, D.C., on December 12, 2025.
Tina Dela Rosa Photography
Maddow received one of the afternoon’s top honors for MS NOW’s (formerly MSNBC) The Rachel Maddow Show episode “Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once,” a broadcast that captured more than 1,400 “Hands Off” protests that erupted nationwide on April 7, during the opening months of President Donald Trump’s second term. The episode stitched together footage from cities, suburbs, and rural towns, presenting the demonstrations not as isolated expressions of dissent but as a national political response taking shape in real time. Maddow attended the ceremony accompanied by her longtime partner, Susan Mikula.
In an exclusive interview with The Advocate at the ceremony, Maddow said she remains convinced that the most important political story in the country is not centered in D.C. “Our fate is not going to be determined by what happens in Washington and by what the administration wants to do,” she said. “What’s going to determine what happens to us is the reaction — how the country deals with it and the sort of institutional response.”
Rachel Maddow speaks at the 2025 Walter Cronkite Awards in Washington, D.C.
Tina Dela Rosa Photography
That framework, democracy measured by public resistance rather than executive intent, now runs through much of Maddow’s work across television and podcasting. Earlier this month, she launched Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order, a six-part podcast series examining the U.S. government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the suppressed evidence that revealed it was unnecessary and rooted in racial hatred.
Maddow described the project to The Advocate as an effort to resist comforting myths about history. “I’m trying to not just make us remember what we did there,” she said, “but trying to make us get real about how we think of that as a very black-and-white moral wrong.” The danger, she explained, is assuming that injustice only happens when villains are obvious, and resistance is easy. “These decisions are hard in the moment,” she said.
Rachel Maddow listens to speakers at the 2025 Walter Cronkite Awards in Washington, D.C.
Tina Dela Rosa Photography
Burn Order traces how an executive order authorized the roundup of innocent Japanese Americans, how internal dissent was ignored or buried, and how a bombshell document, ordered destroyed, eventually exposed the truth. Maddow said she wanted the podcast to function as what she called a “moral mirror,” forcing listeners to confront how ordinary institutions and individuals can capitulate even when they know something is wrong.
Maddow also spoke at length about the podcast’s distinctive score, which she said plays a structural role in the narrative. “In this one in particular, I just feel like it’s so integrated with the vibe of what’s going on in the storytelling,” she said. The score, she explained, is entirely original and was composed by a young student composer the team recruited for the project. When producers asked for adjustments — more tension, a sense of urgency — the composer turned around new material within hours, including music with a literal ticking clock embedded in it. “It’s amazing,” Maddow said.
The themes Maddow explores in the podcast echo her analysis of the present. Americans, she said, are often encouraged to wait for a singular, unmistakable moment when authoritarianism arrives. “That moment is here. It’s happening,” she said. She pointed to the rise of masked, unidentified law enforcement agents patrolling neighborhoods and pulling people off the streets, and the instinctive backlash she has observed from people encountering it. “You don’t need to read a lot of academic books on fascism to know what that looks like.”
MS NOW's Rachel Maddow (left) with NBC News's Kirsten Welker and PBS Newshour's Amna Nawaz at the 2025 Walter Cronkite Awards in Washington, D.C.
Tina Dela Rosa Photography
Maddow’s meant to make a statement by attending the awards ceremony, she said. She said that she rarely attends awards events, not out of ideology, but out of temperament. “I’m kind of allergic to it,” she admitted, describing a longstanding personal aversion to the ritual of professional self-congratulation. This day, however, felt different.
The Cronkite Award, she said, was not really about her. It recognized coverage of mass protests, work that required building something close to an entirely new reporting apparatus, and she wanted the people who did that work to be seen. “I wanted to be here in part just to acknowledge how hard my staff on my show has worked to make that coverage happen,” Maddow told The Advocate.
Onstage, she used her acceptance remarks to highlight the invisible labor behind that coverage. She described her team’s painstaking process of verifying user-generated protest footage, systematically scanning local newspapers and TV broadcasts, and reaching out directly to newsrooms to ask whether any material had never made it to air. There is no standing national infrastructure to support decentralized civic action at scale, she said, and building one would require extraordinary effort.
The honor, she added, belonged to producers and associate producers who had reshaped their jobs to track political action outside Washington — often without precedent, and with little guarantee the skill set would ever be reusable. That reality, Maddow said, was precisely the problem. In a democracy, she argued, journalism is structurally built to monitor institutions, not movements — even when those movements may ultimately decide the country’s fate.
“There are lots of systems in place to cover the powerful,” Maddow said. “What we don’t have systems for is covering the people — especially when they are acting politically.”
That approach has also translated into audience momentum. According to an MS NOW spokesperson citing Nielsen data, The Rachel Maddow Show has beaten Fox News’s Hannity for five consecutive Mondays among viewers in the key demographic. In the most recent week, the program was up 25 percent in the demo, the spokesperson said.
60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley attends the 2025 Walter Cronkite Awards in Washington, D.C.
Tina Dela Rosa Photography
If Maddow’s award focused on public response, CBS’s Scott Pelley confronted institutional pressure head-on. Pelley accepted a Cronkite Award on behalf of 60 Minutes for “Rule of Law,” an investigation into executive orders targeting law firms deemed hostile to the president. The reporting aired amid corporate upheaval at Paramount, CBS’s parent company, which, following a merger with Skydance, appointed controversial queer conservative journalist Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of the venerated news division, prompting concerns about editorial independence.
60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley discusses the state of journalism after accepting his 2025 Walter Cronkite Award.
Tina Dela Rosa Photography
Pelley brought up those anxieties while offering reassurance. “Last season, all of our stories got on the air,” he said. “We got them all on the air with an absolute minimum of interference.” He also noted the loss of senior newsroom leaders and warned that fear itself has become a growing obstacle to accountability reporting.
NBC News chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander talks about not taking attacks from Donald Trump personally as a reporter at the 2025 Walter Cronkite Awards in Washington, D.C.
Tina Dela Rosa Photography
NBC News chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander was honored for “Holding the Powerful Accountable,” with judges praising his persistence in live questioning despite personal attacks from the president. In remarks that drew knowing laughter and sustained applause, Alexander reflected on the costs of that role, and why he believes it remains essential.
He rejected the idea that journalism’s job is to take sides. “I’m not an advocate for Republicans or for Democrats,” Alexander said. “I’m an advocate for the facts, even and especially when it isn’t easy.” He described being shouted down, insulted, and publicly dismissed during press briefings, moments that viewers often ask him about afterward. His answer, he said, is simple: “My job is the next question.” He added, "Those moments reflect on the other person, not on me."
The Daily Show's Jon Stewart sent a video message accepting his program's 2025 Walter Cronkite Award.
Tina Dela Rosa Photography
Alexander also shared a personal story about his grandmother, Faye, who lived to be 105 and closely followed his work. After one particularly heated exchange at the White House, a critic attacked him online. Faye responded with three words that Alexander said he has never forgotten: “Drop that, Helen.” The room laughed, but the point landed.
“Being a journalist does not mean being popular,” he said. “It means never giving up.”
Comedian and activist Jon Stewart received the inaugural Cronkite Award for comedic news and commentary for The Daily Show, recognizing satire’s role in translating investigative reporting into mass-audience accountability. In a video message, Stewart, who couldn’t attend because of his Broadway debut, joked about being placed anywhere near Walter Cronkite’s legacy, but organizers emphasized that his work rests on deep reporting and has helped reach audiences that traditional news outlets increasingly struggle to engage.
Kellyanne Conway: She moved to Ireland, but she never moved on | Fox News Video 
