NYT’s Most Obnoxious Columnist Joins 60 Minutes in Pro-Trump Overhaul

CBS’s 60 Minutes is getting another Trump-styled makeover.

Conservative columnist Ross Douthat is leaving The New York Times to join the storied broadcast magazine in a new role, 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton announced Tuesday.

Douthat has served as one of the Times’ principal conservative voices for more than two decades, writing for the daily’s opinion section since 2009. His latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, was published in 2025.

Despite being an early skeptic of Donald Trump’s politics and popularity, Douthat has since downplayed the president’s authoritarian and fascist tendencies while attempting to rationalize Trump’s behavior.

He has also criticized Democrats for their “resistance” showcases, spurring condemnation from those on the left that Douthat has been incorporated into a sort of “anti-anti-Trump” persona among the American intelligentsia, apparently ready to castigate Trump’s critics even as he himself scrutinizes the president and his policies.

Douthat will join the show alongside author Sebastian Junger, CBS News correspondent Trevor Phillips, and filmmaker Gianna Toboni, according to Bilton.

Bari Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist herself, has changed seemingly everything at CBS News since she was tapped to run the fabled network late last year. Weiss was appointed despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcast, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had also never run a major news operation.

Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. In December, Weiss pulled the plug on now former correspondent Cecilia Vega’s 60 Minutes segment investigating the result of Trump’s mass deportation program, focusing on Venezuelan immigrants who were deported to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison.

The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, ranging from Vega to 60 Minutes’ veteran executive producer Bill Owens and the program’s de facto face Scott Pelley.

In March, Weiss attempted to install another questionable commentator in the show’s lineup—wellness influencer and Epstein pen pal Peter Attia—though his job offer was quickly revoked.

President Trump couldn’t stay awake at Lindsey Graham’s funeral Tuesday.

As several well-wishers eulogized the former senator at the Washington National Cathedral, Trump could barely hold his face up and keep his eyes open. It didn’t take long for him to start dozing off, occasionally blinking to try and hide his drowsiness.

At certain points, Trump even started tilting his head as he was falling asleep.

All of this took place shortly after Trump delivered his own eulogy, in which he went off-script and made fun of Graham a little, with all of his friends and family present, and reminded the audience about the time he publicly shared Graham’s cell phone number. All of that was probably much too tiring for the 80-year-old Trump, and he decided to take a little rest.

President Donald Trump has made a habit of insulting our northern neighbors, and it’s coming back to bite him.

Canadians are boycotting travel to the United States in record numbers, costing the U.S. economy upward of $3.3 billion, the Canadian government reports. Tourism is at an all-time low this July, dropping more than 30 percent in year-over-year declines for the first time since 9/11.

“Following the change in the U.S. administration in early 2025 and the implementation of America First policies, Canadian travel sentiment shifted abruptly,” the report states.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, the number of Canadians willing to describe the U.S. as a “reliable partner” has dropped from 83 percent in 2022 to only 35 percent today.

No mystery here: Since the start of Trump’s second term, he has levied massive tariffs on Canadian goods, threatened Canadian sovereignty, and repeatedly insulted the Canadian people. Just last week, Canada rescinded its invitations to U.S. officials for the grand opening of the Michigan–Ontario Gordie Howe Bridge, days after Trump imposed new 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian goods and blamed the country for wildfire smoke drifting across America’s northern border. Trump’s threats to turn Canada into the “51st state” and references to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as a “governor” only add insult to injury.

But actions have consequences. As Canadians sour on the prospect of visiting the U.S., the American people are losing tourist dollars to the tune of $3.3 billion.

“In response to these measures and threats to Canadian sovereignty, provinces, territories, and Canadians from coast to coast to coast have stood together, taking the necessary actions to support our economy and defend our workers, farmers, businesses, and families,” Prime Minister Carney wrote in a statement following the latest round of tariffs. “In all circumstances, Canada will work relentlessly and take any measures necessary to build our strength at home and to support Canadian workers, farmers, businesses, and families.”

If only President Trump could say the same.

A longtime Department of Homeland Security official has resigned, citing the Trump administration’s “brazen corruption” and the “war on immigrants.”

Over the weekend, Marc Rosenblum, who serves as executive director for the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, announced he would end his decade of service at the DHS, Wired reported Monday.

“I’m sad to suspend my career in public service and leave my amazing team,” Rosenblum wrote in a LinkedIn post. “But it will come as no surprise that I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration.

“Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change,” Rosenblum wrote.

Rosenblum spent years working to improve transparency at DHS, and spearheaded efforts to publish information on immigration arrests and deportations for the first time. But after the Trump administration launched its sweeping deportation efforts, DHS stopped publishing data on ICE detentions, Customs and Border Protection encounters, and deportations—gutting the department’s transparency and undermining accountability. Rosenblum told Wired that he and his co-workers had faced “a challenging and often hostile work environment.”

In his LinkedIn post, Rosenblum said he was taking a month off, but looking forward to taking up a new role that would “actually align with my values and those of most other Americans.”

The president couldn’t resist taking issue with his speechwriters again Tuesday—even as he was in the midst of delivering a eulogy for late South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.

Graham’s funeral drew TV personalities, top lawmakers, and foreign heads of state, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Yet Donald Trump didn’t hesitate to veer wildly off course from his pre-written remarks while recalling Graham’s life before the elite crowd, pushing back on one critical detail: Graham’s popularity.

“Virtually everyone—Republican or Democrat—liked Lindsey,” said Trump before jumping from his script. “Well, not everybody. But it sounds good. Not everybody. He was a tough cookie, OK? I have to be—I have to veer from this for a second.

“He was a tough cookie, Darline, but he was beautiful,” Trump added, addressing Graham’s younger sister and temporary legislative successor, Darline Graham Nordone.

Graham passed away on July 11 after what his office described as a “brief and sudden illness.” The next morning, a preliminary medical report found that Graham had died from a tear in his aorta due to the hardening of his arteries.

During his brief remarks before the mourning crowd, Trump acknowledged that he and Graham had become close friends during his time in politics, fondly recounting the time he publicized Graham’s cell phone number during a heated debate during the 2016 presidential election.

“He said, ‘I had that number for 20 years.’ His phone totally—I don’t know what he did with it. But it exploded. That was the beginning of friendship in a way,” Trump said. “But it was Lindsey who had the last laugh, because while I blew up his phone for one day, we became great friends and Lindsey did not stop calling me for the next 10 years.”

He also reminisced about Graham’s warmongering, sharing with the assembly that Graham “never saw a war he didn’t like.”

“He felt in his bones that our destiny is to win, and that his job was to do everything he could to ensure our enemies would lose,” Trump said.