Republican Who Claimed “We’re All Going to Die” Won’t Run Again

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst reportedly told confidantes that she would not seek reelection in the 2026 midterms.

Multiple sources told CBS News that Ernst plans to announce her decision next Thursday.

The Iowa Republican’s apparent decision comes just a few months after a horrifying gaffe at a town hall.

When constituents expressed concerns that people would die as a result of President Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill, she responded by saying, “Well, we all are going to die.” And as voters reeled from her callous comment about millions of Americans being booted from their Medicaid coverage, Ernst doubled down.

The senator’s comments seriously tainted her political reputation, sparking widespread speculation that she would not run again. But Ernst sent mixed signals, refusing to say whether or not she would seek another term.

In June, she brought on Bryan Kraber to manage her 2026 reelection campaign, signaling her intent to turn her sinking ship around. But she also delayed her annual “Roast and Ride” fundraiser until October. Typically, Ernst—who has been in office since 2015—holds the event in June.

A few Iowa Democrats have already waded into the race, including State Senator Zach Wahls, Des Moines School Board chairwoman Jackie Norris, and State Representatives J.D. Scholten and Josh Turek. Turek even used Ernst’s infamous existential blunder in an ad announcing his candidacy for her Senate seat.

As recently as last week, Ernst claimed she wasn’t concerned about Democratic challengers in her state. “Bring it on, folks. Because I tell you, at the end of the day, Iowa is going to be red,” she said.

One source told CBS News that Ernst feels that she achieved her goal of serving two terms, and now intends to head for the private sector.

This story has been updated.

Judge Zia M. Faruqui has handed yet another legal defeat to Trump-appointed D.C. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, calling her attempt to jail a local attorney and West Point graduate “one of the weakest requests for detention” he’d ever seen, according to WUSA9.

Anthony Bryant, who served a tour in Afghanistan, was arrested early Monday morning on charges of assaulting, resisting or impeding police, threatening a federal official and threatening to kidnap or injure a person.

Pirro’s office alleged that Bryant approached National Guardsmen who were patrolling 14th Street on Sunday night and allegedly yelled “These are our streets!” and “I’ll kill you.” Pirro also claims that Byrant “threw his shoulder” into one of the Guardsmen’s shoulders. The police found a legally registered handgun on Bryant when they arrested him.

Bryant was released after his initial arrest, but then arrested again and placed in jail on Wednesday on the order of Judge G. Michael Harvey. On Thursday, Judge Faruqui stepped in.

“This is perhaps one of the weakest requests for detention I have seen and something that, prior to two weeks ago, would have been unthinkable in this courthouse,” Faruqui said, adding that the government has a “as close to zero” chance of demonstrating Bryant was a real threat.

Bryant’s attorneys also alleged that the police report failed to mention that Guardsmen yelled slurs at Bryant, who is Black. There is no video of the alleged scene because National Guardsmen conveniently don’t wear body cameras. This made the prosecution’s claims virtually impossible to prove.

“To charge people for what seems to be lesser conduct and then say they’re so dangerous they have to be locked up,” Faruqui said. “It puts prosecutors in an impossible position.”

Bryant was released by Faruqui, ordered to hand over his firearms, and advised to avoid tense situations. Faruqui also noted that Harvey and Pirro’s urge to throw Bryant in jail for such a minor infraction was contradictory to the Justice Department’s release of hundreds of January 6 rioters who’d been jailed on charges much more serious than Bryant’s.

This all comes as Pirro’s office failed to convince three different grand juries that a D.C. woman deserved a felony charge for allegedly placing herself between ICE agents and someone they were detaining. They also failed to charge the Subway Sandwich Thrower with a felony.

House Speaker Mike Johnson flailed Friday when reporters called attention to his state’s distressing murder rate.

While appearing on Fox News, Johnson was confronted with a clip of California Governor Gavin Newsom name-dropping the Louisiana Republican, while mocking President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Democratic-led cities.

“If he is to invest in crime suppression, I hope the president of the United States will look at the facts. Just consider Speaker Johnson’s state, and district,” Newsom said during a press conference on Thursday. “Just look at the murder rate, which is nearly four times higher than California, in Louisiana.”

Louisiana’s homicide rate in 2023 was 19.3 per 100,000 people, approximately 300 percent higher than California’s homicide rate of 5.1 per 100,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control.*

Johnson didn’t even try to account for the dismal crime stats.

“Again, Gavin Newsom will do anything for attention, he can name drop me all that he wants, he needs to go and govern his state and not be engaging in all of this,” Johnson said.

“Look, we have crime in cities all across America and we’re against that everywhere and we need to bring policies to bear,” Johnson said. “My hometown of Shreveport has done a great job of reducing crime gradually, but we’ve got to address it everywhere it rears its ugly head.”

While Johnson isn’t stupid enough to get on board with Trump’s tactic of simply pretending Republican-led cities don’t have bad crime rates, he seems content to completely ignore the situation in his own district.

In fact, Shreveport, which is part of Johnson’s district, landed at 25 on Newsweek’s recent list of the 30 U.S. cities (with at least 100,000 residents) that had the highest number of violent crimes against people. Newsom has claimed that Shreveport’s murder rate is six times higher than the rate in San Fransisco, a city regularly criticized by Trump and other Republicans.

No city in California made the list.

The rest of Louisiana isn’t in the clear, either. In 2024, Baton Rouge had a murder rate of 36 people per 100,000, and New Orleans had a murder rate of 31 per 100,000. Baton Rouge’s murder rate is twice the rate in Washington, D.C., where the president has deployed thousands of National Guard troops, some of which were sent by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry.

Newsom responded to Johnson’s Fox News appearance Friday by copying Trump’s social media cadence. “Mike ‘Little Man’ Johnson can’t even answer a basic question: why is Louisiana’s homicide rate nearly 4X HIGHER than California’s????? LOUISIANA IS A FAILED STATE!” he wrote in a post on X.

* This post originally misidentified how much higher the Louisiana homicide rate was compared to California.

Donald Trump has tapped Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill, a market fundamentalist Silicon Valley investor and long-time associate of billionaire Peter Thiel, as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control.

Taking the place of Susan Monarez, whose firing has raised alarm over the dangerous incompetence of the health department under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., O’Neill will bring to the role no medical or scientific background.

But he does have a history of feverish advocacy of deregulation and libertarianism, as the progressive group Public Citizen highlighted when he was nominated for his current role at Trump’s health department.

In a 2014 speech, for instance, O’Neill—then managing director of Thiel’s Mithril Capital—proposed allowing drugs onto the market without first determining whether they even work. “Let people start using them, at their own risk,” he said. “Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.”

He revealed in the same speech that, while working for George W. Bush’s health department, he opposed the Food and Drug Administration regulating firms that use algorithms in lab tests, such as biotech company 23andMe.

He’s also a proponent of legalizing the organ trade. “There are plenty of healthy spare kidneys walking around, unused,” as he put it during a 2009 talk—where he also argued in favor of generally leaving health care to the whims of the market. “Because there’s not a free market in health care, people are suffering very significant health consequences that in a free market they would not suffer,” he claimed.

The 2009 remarks were delivered at a seasteading conference. For those who don’t keep up with plutocrats’ vanity projects, seasteading is the idea of establishing autonomous, floating communities at sea. Until last year, O’Neill served on the board of a Thiel-backed seasteading venture, which was founded by anarcho-capitalist Patri Friedman—of whom O’Neill is a self-described disciple—who outlined his goal as follows, according to SFGate:

“I envision tens of millions of people in an Apple or a Google country,” where the high-tech giants would govern and residents would have no vote. “If people are allowed to opt in or out, you can have a successful dictatorship.”

O’Neill also appears to share, with many of his Silicon Valley peers, a fixation on anti-aging.

President Donald Trump is once again stomping all over Congress’s power of the purse.

The president invoked a rare “pocket rescission” to claw back roughly $5 billion from the U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the New York Post.

Trump wrote to Congress Thursday night requesting $4.9 billion in funding toward international aid efforts, including $3.2 billion in development assistance from USAID, the essential aid organization Trump bypassed Congress to dismantle.

Congress has 45 days to decide whether or not to approve Trump’s request, but the White House Office of Management and Budget says it can just freeze the funds until the fiscal year ends on September 30, ensuring the funds’ cancellation.

All of this comes as Congress stares down the barrel of an October 1 deadline to avert a total government shutdown.

“Congress can choose to vote to rescind or continue the funds—it doesn’t matter,” an official from the White House budget office said in a statement, per Politico. “This approach is rare but not unprecedented.”

While OMB, run by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, is all for a pocket rescission, the Government Accountability Office holds that such a move is illegal.

General Counsel Mark Paoletta said that when Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter made similar requests, “GAO noted the lapse without objection.” He claimed that GAO had only recently changed its tune because of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Trump also wants to scrap funding allocated to the State Department, including $521 million in contributions to international organizations and $393 million for peacekeeping activities. The president would take back another $445 million separately allocated for peacekeeping, and $322 million from a joint USAID-State Department Democracy Fund.