• Team Trump’s Obama faux pas: Someone on Team Trump posted a video on Donald Trump’s official Truth Social account that contained a brief AI-generated portrayal of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The clip was immediately condemned as racist by both Democrat and Republican lawmakers. South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott said he was “praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” The main video in question detailed a voting-machine report on the 2020 election. Near the end, a two-second clip of the Obamas as apes suddenly appears, then the content returns to the original topic. Trump insisted that he did not see the whole video: “I didn’t see it. I looked at the first part. … I guess somebody didn’t, and they posted and we took it down.”

• Benghazi conspirator extradited: Nearly 14 years after a terrorist attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya left four Americans dead, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, one of the conspirators has been apprehended. Zubayr Al-Bakoush’s arrest was announced by FBI Director Kash Patel and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro on Friday. Al-Bakoush will stand trial in Washington, DC, and says he has “complete trust in the court and jury.” Attorney General Pam Bondi said that this apprehension demonstrates the long arm of the U.S. justice system: “It might not happen overnight, but it will happen. You can run, but you cannot hide.” Al-Bakoush faces counts of terrorism, murder, and arson. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.

• More WaPo upheaval: It seems Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who announced major changes to the paper in 2025, was not satisfied with the pace of change. Last week, 300 WaPo employees, almost a third of its total staff, were cut. The cuts eliminated the sports and international reporting departments entirely, with some aspects being folded into other departments. CEO Will Lewis was notably absent from coverage of the cuts last week, apparently because he too was being offboarded. Lewis announced his resignation on Saturday. Lewis was brought on two years ago, and at his first all-staff meeting in 2024, he announced that WaPo’s annual losses had reached $100 million. Perhaps he hoped to turn those numbers around, but if so, he ran out of time. The paper’s chief financial officer, Jeff D'Onofrio, will serve as the acting CEO for the time being.

• Virginia’s 10-1 Dem map: Virginia Democrats, who have been pushing a gerrymandered redistricting map for the commonwealth in response to redistricting in several Republican-led states, released their map last week. The new map effectively turns the state’s current 11 congressional districts, which currently favor Democrats 6-5, into a 10-1 Democrat advantage. Virginia Senate President Pro Tempore L. Louise Lucas ridiculously asserted that the new map fulfills “a promise to level the playing field.” Far from ensuring a level playing field in Virginia, a state with roughly a 50% split between Republican and Democrat voters, this action is an effort to turn it into a single-party state. Thankfully, a Virginia judge has blocked the Democrats’ efforts to realize their gerrymandering dream.

• Trump admin gets immigration win in Fifth Circuit: The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Friday that the Trump administration is correct to regard illegal immigrants as “applicants for admission” even if they crossed the border years before. As a result, the Trump administration may continue with mandatory detention for apprehended illegals. The 2-1 decision came from Reagan-appointed Judge Edith Jones and Trump-appointed Judge Kyle Duncan. Biden-appointed Judge Dana Douglas argued that her colleagues were twisting the law by suggesting “that ‘seeking admission’ is like being an ‘applicant for admission.’” Douglas further argued that the majority decision is based on a conviction that “Congress must have wanted these noncitizens detained.” This issue is likely to be escalated to the Supreme Court.

• Massie calls for Lutnick’s resignation over Epstein revelations: More revelations from the recently released Epstein documents have generated a call from Rep. Thomas Massie for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s resignation. Massie took issue with Lutnick’s claim that he had cut off all contact with Jeffrey Epstein back in 2005, years before the financier was convicted as a sex offender. However, the documents indicate that Lutnick continued to have correspondence with Epstein through 2018. A spokesman for the Commerce Department responded, “Secretary Lutnick had limited interactions with Mr. Epstein in the presence of his wife and has never been accused of wrongdoing.” Meanwhile, Massie argued, “Howard Lutnick clearly went to the Island if we believe what’s in these files. He was in business with Jeffrey Epstein, and this was many years after Jeffrey Epstein was convicted for sexual crimes.”

• Mamdani’s warmth of collectivism: It turns out that being a nepo-baby communist activist raised in a compound in Uganda does not properly equip someone to run The Big Apple. In January, a record 80,000 calls to 311 reporting heat and hot water outages were made. Some residents report going nine or more days without hot water. Others say the heat regularly goes out in the middle of the night, leaving residents no choice but to bundle up and wait out the freezing temperatures. Mayor Zohran Mamdani can’t take all the blame, although residents do say he has failed to act. Since October 1, 2025, some 215,045 heat complaints have been made, far outstripping the 187,775 in the previous year. Former Mayor Eric Adams argued in 2023 that a flood of immigrants had already overwhelmed his city, saying, “We are past our breaking point.”

• Global warming stops global warming: A recently released report out of the University of California, Irvine, has found that climate change is breaking down nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, faster than was previously believed. Using satellite observations, the scientists found that N₂O “is decreasing at a rate of 1.4 percent per decade,” a marked decline. These researchers have determined that climate change itself is what’s behind the significant drop in human-produced N₂O emissions. They noted that this new revelation must now be factored into climate projections. As one expert noted, this “highlights a gap in current Earth system models.” It appears that the science on climate change is far from settled.

• Trump ends Obama’s commercial fishing restriction off New England coast: President Trump strengthened the U.S. fishing industry by signing an executive order on Friday to reopen a large protected area of the Atlantic to commercial fishing. Barack Obama established the 5,000-square-mile Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off the coast of Cape Cod to protect undersea corals and ecosystems. These heavy federal regulations burdened the fishing industry and are something commercial fishing groups have long sought to reverse. Bob Vanasse, executive director of Washington, DC-based Saving Seafood, commented, “By reopening the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts to commercial fishing, fairness, transparency, and science-based governance has been restored to the affected fisheries.” Of course, environmental groups vow to challenge the EO in court. Trump called the monument an “unfair penalty on commercial fishermen,” adding that “appropriately managed commercial fishing” would not endanger what the monument sought to protect.

Headlines

• TPUSA’s “All-American” alternative halftime show draws millions of viewers (NY Post)

• DOT crackdown pulls hundreds of English-illiterate truckers off roads (Fox News)

• Luigi Mangione’s state trial set for June in surprise ruling (NewsNation)

• Russian military intelligence official shot in Moscow (Fox News)

The Executive News Summary is compiled daily by Jordan Candler, Thomas Gallatin, Sterling Henry, and Sophie Starkova. For the archive, click here.