Opinion
What We Don’t Know About The Presidents We Elect

The Navy proudly draws its newest, most devastating fighter, the McDonnell F4H Phantom II past the applauding President of the United States John F. Kennedy as he reviews the Inaugural Parade, in Washington, DC, on January 20, 1961. / Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images.
Notes on the occasion of an inauguration
Like most Americans, I applaud the recent ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas that was approved today by the Israeli security cabinet, and I was glad to learn that the incoming Trump administration was directly involved in support of the Biden team in the most positive way: by telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that a deal had to be made.
I did not like much of the Biden administration’s foreign policy, and I worried a lot, as a journalist and a citizen, about what Donald Trump’s new team would do. But I learned long ago that you cannot tell a presidency by its cover.
In late 1967 I was a freelance journalist in Washington and totally hostile to the ongoing American war in South Vietnam. I was persuaded to join the then nascent staff of the only Democratic member of the Senate, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who was willing to take on President Lyndon B. Johnson, a fellow Democrat, then running for second term, who had escalated the war he inherited with mass bombing campaigns. I would be the press secretary and, while traveling with the candidate, draft daily policy statements and work on speeches.
McCarthy, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, was far from a shining star. But, as a devout Catholic, he saw the Vietnam War in moral terms and was troubled by the Pentagon’s decision to lower the minimal acceptable scores on the Army’s standard intelligence tests in an effort to enlist more young men from the ghettos and barrios of America, where educational opportunities were fewer, as they still are today. McCarthy publicly called such action “changing the color of the corpses.” He quickly became my man.
A few weeks into the job, I was traveling with McCarthy on a fundraising tour in California and found myself outside a Hollywood mansion where McCarthy was making a money pitch to the rich and famous. Such events were always boring, and I found myself hanging around outside the mansion with a few of the local and national reporters tagging along. One of those outside was Peter Lisagor, then the brilliant Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News. He had joined our antiwar campaign out of curiosity, I suspected, since the chances of forcing Johnson to change his aggressive Vietnam policy seemed to be nil amid relentless US bombings. As I later learned, Lisagor had been one of the few journalists invited to fly in 1966 on Air Force One with the president on one of his early trips to Vietnam. The flight was kept secret until Johnson arrived in Saigon.
Lisagor told me a story—most likely he meant to cheer me up, since we were polling at 5 percent at the time—about time he had spent in 1961 at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I do not recall whether he was on a reporting project there—he had been a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 1948—but there he was on inauguration day of 1961, while in Washington the glamorous John F. Kennedy was being sworn in as president by Chief Justice Earl Warren.
As Lisagor told it, he was watching the swearing in with a bunch of MIT students and faculty members at a cafeteria that had a TV, and just as Warren pronounced JFK president a young faculty member named Noam Chomsky stunned the small crowd by saying, of Kennedy and his Harvard ties: “And now the terror begins.”
Chomsky’s point, as would become clear in his later writings, was that Kennedy’s notion of American exceptionalism was not going to work in Vietnam. As it did not. And Lisagor’s point to me, as I came to understand it over the years, was that one cannot always tell which president will become a peacemaker and which will become a destroyer. Lisagor died, far too young at age 61, in 1976.
Joe Biden talked peace—and withdrew US forces from Afghanistan—but helped put Europe, and America, into a war against Russia in Ukraine and supported Benjamin Netanyahu’s war against Hamas and, ultimately, against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Donald Trump is always talking tough but one of his first major foreign moves after winning the presidency was to order his senior aides to work with Biden’s foreign policy people to perhaps end a war in Gaza and save untold thousands of lives. And I hear serious talks are underway to bring an end to the Ukraine War.
One never knows.
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Daily Caller
‘The One Place We Really Need To Change Policies’: One Of RFK Jr.’s Top Priorities

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Hailey Gomez
Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Thursday evening on Fox News that the “one place” he wants to see policies changed is within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Kennedy was confirmed as the new HHS secretary on Thursday, with the Senate’s final vote hitting 52-48. On “The Ingraham Angle,” Fox News’ Laura Ingraham said his critics will call his new plan a “nanny state.” She asked if he would ban food items like McDonald’s Big Mac.
“Oh, we’re not going to take [that away]. That’s what I’m saying. If you want to eat a Big Mac, you ought to,” Kennedy said. “But you ought to. But, you know, McDonald’s ought to be incentivized to use beef tallow when it’s cooking its Big Macs. So that they’re good for people rather than using seed oils or some other cooking oils that are actually going to probably make you sicker.”
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“So we want to do a number of things but not take away choice from people,” Kennedy added. “The one place that I would say that we need to really change policies is in the SNAP program and food stamps and in school lunches because there the federal government in many cases is paying for it. We shouldn’t be subsidizing people to eat poison.”
SNAP, a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) program, provides food benefits to low-income families. Within a 2021 USDA report, the study said that nearly nine out of 10 SNAP participants faced barriers in “providing their households with a healthy diet throughout the month.”
During his run for president, Kennedy called out his concerns for Americans’ health, as Centers for Disease Control data states that over 100 million adults in the U.S. suffer from obesity and over 22 million adults have severe obesity. After withdrawing from the race and endorsing then-candidate Donald Trump for president, the term “Make America Healthy Again,” also known as MAHA, was coined.
WATCH:
Kennedy told Ingraham he believes in “freedom of choice” and wants to bring “radical transparency” so Americans can understand the effects of what they’re consuming.
“If you want to eat Twinkies, you ought to be able to eat them, but you ought to know what’s in them,” Kennedy said. “So a lot of what I’m going to do is about radical transparency, about making people understand, allowing people to understand and empower them with understanding that if you eat that, it may seem cheap, but it’s going to cost you in the long run. You’re going to get diabetes.”
“There are certain additives. We have 10,000 additives in our food,” Kennedy said. “The Europeans have 400. Many of the additives that we have are just illegal in Europe. We need to move more and more toward the European standard.”
Kennedy has previously addressed his concerns about seed oils in American food, telling Fox News during an October 2024 interview that the “unhealthy ingredients” are in the country’s foods due to being “heavily subsidized” despite “very serious illnesses, including body-wide inflammation.”
Business
Trump Admin reports 75K federal workers have accepted buyout offer

Quick Hit:
The Trump administration confirmed that 75,000 federal employees have accepted its Deferred Resignation Program, a buyout offer allowing them to retain benefits and receive pay through September.
Key Details:
- The Trump administration announced that approximately 75,000 federal employees have accepted its buyout offer.
- The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) confirmed the number, which accounts for less than 5% of the federal workforce of 2.3 million.
- The program, which provides extended benefits and pay through September, excluded military personnel, national security, immigration, and postal workers.
Diving Deeper:
The White House confirmed Wednesday night that around 75,000 federal employees opted into the Trump administration’s Deferred Resignation Program, a buyout initiative designed to reduce government workforce numbers while providing extended benefits for those who voluntarily resign.
The program, administered by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), originally set a February 6 deadline but was temporarily paused due to legal challenges from federal employee unions. However, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the unions lacked the legal standing to block the initiative, allowing the buyout deadline to proceed.
“As of 7:00 PM tonight, the program is now closed,” OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover said in a statement. “There is no longer any doubt: the Deferred Resignation Program was both legal and a valuable option for federal employees. This program was carefully designed, thoroughly vetted, and provides generous benefits so federal workers can plan for their futures.”
While the 75,000 participants represent less than 5% of the federal workforce, the move aligns with the Trump administration’s broader efforts to streamline government operations and reduce bureaucratic redundancy. The program was not open to military personnel, national security workers, immigration officers, or postal employees.
Despite initial resistance from federal employee unions, the White House and OPM argue that the program provides financial security and flexibility for those choosing to leave their positions. With the legal battle now settled, the administration considers the initiative a success in its push for a leaner and more efficient federal government.
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