What Happened Today - 12 Feb 2026
What Happened Today – 12 Feb 2026
Fallout from Bondi Testimony
Governor’s Meeting - Nixed
Canadian Tarriff’s vote explained
10 day, 10 mile ban in El Paso Update
Homan gives update in Minneapolis
Shutdown…again?
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Fallout from Bondi Testimony
As this is still ongoing and full fact‑checking and analysis are still landing, this is what’s clear right now — and there is zero doubt people will be chewing on Bondi’s mess of a testimony all week. Late‑night shows absolutely feasted on her performance, stitching together clip after clip of her yelling, talking over members, dropping random brag lines about the stock market, and throwing out attacks that had nothing to do with what she was actually being asked. The visual that keeps coming up is brutal: Bondi refusing to turn around and acknowledge Epstein survivors sitting right behind her while she rants about how “low” Democrats are for calling her out, then closing with a line about the Dow being up like that’s supposed to mean anything to women who were abused as teenagers. Commentators from The View to cable news are calling her cold, defensive, and weirdly more focused on pleasing Trump than doing her actual job, and even some people who used to defend her are now saying, on air, that watching her act like this was “personally disgusting” and “like a high school Lady Macbeth.”
The fallout in real politics is just as ugly. Democrats are openly saying what everyone saw: she wouldn’t apologize to the survivors, she spun the botched redactions and exposure of victims’ names as a minor paperwork issue, and she kept pretending there’s “no cover‑up” even while members like Raskin, Massie, and Chuy García laid out, in detail, how DOJ under her sat on millions of pages, protected powerful names, and then had to be forced to un‑redact even one obviously incriminating email. You’ve got Democrats on the committee flat‑out calling for her to resign, saying she’s chosen fealty to Trump over the Constitution, and pointing out that even the MAGA base now thinks she’s part of an Epstein cover‑up, which is a wild place for a Trump attorney general to be. Ty Cobb is on Bloomberg saying she clearly doesn’t care about Epstein’s victims; survivors themselves are telling reporters they felt “dehumanized” watching her refuse to look at them and dodge responsibility for DOJ’s screw‑ups. Polling already showed Americans disapprove of how the administration handled the Epstein files by something like 3‑to‑1, and her combative, empathy‑free performance did nothing to change that.
On the MAGA side, the reaction is split and that’s its own problem for her. The hardcore die‑hards are clipping the moments where she calls Democrats “washed‑up losers,” sneers at “theatrics,” and complains about judges “blocking” Trump, and they’re trying to spin it as her owning the libs in a hostile room. But a different slice of the MAGA world is furious for the opposite reason: they think she is covering up for elites in the Epstein files, protecting the wrong people, and bungling the redactions so badly it made Trump and the whole project look shady as hell. When you’ve got Republicans like Thomas Massie calling her defense “incompetent” and GOP‑leaning voices saying “nobody supports you, not even MAGA,” that’s a serious red flag for her staying power. Regular Americans who don’t live on cable news just saw something simple and damning: a top law‑enforcement official, confronted with victims and basic questions about truth and accountability, chose to scream, deflect, and posture instead of owning what happened and fixing it. That’s the kind of performance that doesn’t just get mocked for a night on late‑night TV; it sticks to you, and it’s going to hang over everything Bondi and DOJ touch from here on out.
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Governor’s Meeting - Nixed
Trump managed to turn what’s usually a boring, bipartisan governors’ get‑together into yet another petty loyalty test, and it blew up in his face. He started out by telling the National Governors Association he only wanted Republican governors at the White House meeting tied to their D.C. conference, breaking a long tradition where governors from both parties sit down with the president to talk policy and then do the formal dinner thing. Once word got out that Democrats were being iced out, the NGA basically said, “We’re not playing that game,” pulled its support, and yanked the meeting off the official agenda rather than co‑host an event where only half their members were welcome.
Then came the walk‑back that wasn’t really a walk‑back. After pressure from the NGA and a public outcry, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, who chairs the association, told everyone Trump had agreed to invite all governors to a new breakfast meeting and made it sound like the misunderstanding was fixed. Within hours, Trump jumps on Truth Social and undercuts his own guy, saying actually no, two Democrats are still blacklisted: Colorado’s Jared Polis and Maryland’s Wes Moore. He singled out Moore over the Key Bridge rebuild in Baltimore and went after Polis for refusing to spring Tina Peters—the convicted election‑system‑tampering county clerk Trump’s been obsessively demanding clemency for—even though Peters is doing nine years on state charges for exactly the kind of voting‑machine stunt MAGA loves to pretend never happens. So his line was basically: “I’m being so generous and bipartisan I even invited Newsom and Pritzker, but these two guys are ‘not worthy’ of being there.”
That’s when the wheels came all the way off. Democratic governors responded by banding together and saying if Moore and Polis are out, we’re out—putting out a joint statement that they wouldn’t attend the White House meetings or dinner in solidarity, and calling the whole thing a blatant break with the bipartisan spirit these NGA events are supposed to have. You ended up with the NGA refusing to run the meeting, Democrats boycotting the dinner, and the whole “governors come to Washington to coordinate with the president” tradition basically torched because Trump wanted to punish the only Black governor in the country and the only openly gay governor for not kissing the ring on his pet issues. The result is exactly what you clocked: what should’ve been a routine, useful meeting for all 50 states turned into a partisan clown show so toxic it had to be scrapped, all so Trump could send a message that access to the White House depends on personal loyalty, not the fact that you were elected to run a state.
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Canadian Tarriff’s vote explained
Six Republicans crossing the line to help overturn Trump’s Canada tariffs is a big, flashing “you don’t own us” sign aimed straight at him and his little tariff crusade. The House vote was 219–211, with six GOP members siding with Democrats to end the “national emergency” Trump cooked up to slap tariffs on one of our closest allies, and it only happened because a smaller group of Republicans had already joined Dems the day before to blow up Mike Johnson’s scheme to block any tariff votes until the end of July. So what’s next is procedural but important: this resolution now heads to the Senate, where they’ve already shown some willingness to smack down Trump’s Canada tariffs, and if it passes there it still goes to Trump’s desk—where he is almost certainly going to veto it—but that’s not the end of the story, because the Supreme Court is also about to rule on how much authority he actually has to do this tariff‑by‑tweet thing in the first place.
Even if this never survives a veto, the message is loud and ugly for Trump: his threats aren’t working like they used to. He went on Truth Social in the middle of the vote and basically tried to put a horse head in every Republican’s political bed—saying any GOP member in the House or Senate who votes against tariffs will “seriously suffer the consequences come Election time, and that includes primaries.” Six of them looked at that and still said, “Yeah, these tariffs are just a tax on our own farmers, manufacturers, and consumers, and we’re done pretending otherwise.” This wasn’t just a policy disagreement; it was a crack in the fear wall. It says there are at least a few Republicans who are finally more worried about their voters paying higher prices and getting hammered by retaliation than they are about a rage‑post from Trump, and that Congress might, just might, be ready to start clawing back some of the power it handed him to declare “emergencies” and mess with the global economy whenever he feels like it.
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10 day, 10 mile ban in El Paso Update
That El Paso 10‑mile, 10‑day flight ban turned out to be one of those “slam the panic button, then scramble to explain it” moments. The FAA dropped a security NOTAM late at night that shut down all flights in a 10‑mile radius around the airport, ground to 18,000 feet, and said it would last until Feb. 20, effectively freezing a whole metro area’s airspace for ten days. Within about seven hours, after lawmakers, locals, and the press started screaming, they quietly reversed it and said there was “no threat to commercial aviation” and flights would resume as normal.
The official line now is that this was about cartel‑linked drones and/or Pentagon counter‑drone testing around El Paso and Fort Bliss—DOD and Transportation say there was a “cartel drone incursion” that was “neutralized,” while multiple reports say the deeper fight was over a planned laser test to shoot down drones and FAA’s fear that it wasn’t safe for civilian traffic. Bottom line: security people wanted a clean bubble in the sky, FAA massively overreached with that 10‑day blanket order, and once the political and public backlash hit, they backtracked and tried to reassure everyone that there was never a continuing threat.
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Homan gives update in Minneapolis
Homan popped up this morning to do cleanup on Minneapolis and try to spin the end of that brutal ICE surge as some kind of victory lap, not the political retreat it obviously is. He announced that “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota is wrapping up, saying he recommended to Trump that the surge end and that Trump agreed, and he bragged that a “significant drawdown” of federal agents is already underway—about 700 officers leaving, with roughly 2,000 still staying in the state for now. His whole line is that the operation “made Minneapolis safer,” that Minnesota is now “less of a refuge for criminals,” and that the reason they can pull back is because local jails and law enforcement are suddenly cooperating more with immigration detainers, letting ICE grab people as they’re released instead of doing big, visible street operations.
What he’s downplaying, of course, is the actual blood cost of what they did up there. This “surge” brought in thousands of agents, mass raids, and ended with two U.S. citizens—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—shot and killed by federal officers in Minneapolis, plus videos of ICE and federal partners brutalizing people that sparked huge protests and hearings in D.C. In his update, Homan spent a lot of time defending agents, talking about “unlawful agitators” and insisting there’s been a “marked decrease” in threats and protests since he took over, as if angry communities were the problem, not the conduct of his officers. Governor Tim Walz and local officials are being polite on camera—saying communication improved once Homan arrived—but Walz has also made it clear he thinks what really changed is the politics: after the shootings and national backlash, the White House’s appetite for this kind of occupation evaporated, and now they’re trying to “save face” by pretending it’s all about better cooperation instead of the fact that this operation became a political and moral disaster they needed to get out of fast.
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Shutdown…again?
The “looming shutdown” right now is really a DHS shutdown cliff, and it’s all about ICE, immigration enforcement, and whether Congress is going to keep writing blank checks for the kind of brutality we’ve been watching in places like Minneapolis. Funding for the Department of Homeland Security runs out in days, because when they did the last budget patch, they funded most of the government through September but only extended DHS money for a couple of weeks to force this exact fight. Democrats—especially in the Senate—are saying they’re done with one more “kick the can” bill that keeps ICE, Border Patrol, and these federal task forces operating with no new guardrails after people have been killed and abused, and they want real statutory limits on raids, detention, and use of force baked into the DHS bill.
On the other side, Trump and his people are basically daring them to let DHS shut down, with Republicans openly saying, “We’re not kneecapping ICE,” and pushing for either a short four‑week extension or a clean full‑year DHS bill with no meaningful reforms. The twist is that even if DHS funding lapses, Trump already stashed a pile of money for ICE and Border Patrol in his earlier “big, beautiful” spending bill, and lawmakers in both parties admit he can move enough of that around to keep a lot of immigration enforcement running anyway. So a shutdown here would look less like ICE suddenly going dark and more like:
• TSA, Coast Guard, FEMA, and a chunk of DHS’s civilian workforce working without pay or getting furloughed.
• Training paused, maintenance delayed, some Coast Guard inspections and marine safety work stopped, with knock‑on effects for ports, shipping, and costs.
In terms of how long this could drag on, the honest answer is: it can go as long as both sides think the pain helps them more than it hurts. DHS has been through this before; essential functions keep going, non‑essential stuff stops, and everyone waits for one side to blink. Democrats feel like public opinion has finally turned against Trump’s hardest‑line immigration tactics after Minneapolis and the Minnesota surge, so they’re calculating that if there is a shutdown, voters will blame him for refusing even basic constraints on ICE. Trump and Senate Republicans are betting they can ride it out and pin the chaos on Democrats for “choosing migrants over security.” So we’re stuck in that classic D.C. standoff: real people’s paychecks and safety on the line, while the fight is fundamentally about whether Congress is going to put any real legal leash on ICE and DHS or keep letting Trump run immigration policy like a personal war, shutdown threats and all.
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Just another day in America…is it great again?
Speak Truth! Keep speaking TRUTH!
Don’t Give up the Ship!
Go Cause Good Trouble, with Your Elbows Up!
These are facts that I researched and verified – AI helped put together some sentence structure, but the words and tone are mine. These are my views based upon facts, research and thoughtful consideration using logic. I own the copyright to any images used. I’m comfortable to stand alone to uphold truth. Feel free to check me, but do not attack me. I am only causing good trouble.