The Week: Mr. Rubio Goes to Munich | February 20, 2026

◼ In a speech at this year’s Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made an overdue attempt to calm the waters after months of acrimony between the U.S. and its European allies. He may have succeeded. Rubio had to toe the Trump administration’s line on Europe while offering the Europeans something of an olive branch. He managed this by balancing the substance, much of which could have been drawn up in the Oval Office, with a tone markedly more emollient than anything that Europeans have heard from the White House for quite some time. If it has the desired effect, the speech will pave the way for a more constructive discussion of how Europe can assume greater responsibility for its own defense. Such an outcome would allow the U.S. to dedicate more resources to dealing with growing threats elsewhere, particularly China. This would be a pragmatic division of resources—not the American abandonment of Europe that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are likely hoping for.

◼ Two ambitious Democrats attended the Munich Security Conference to showcase their frivolity. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) flubbed a predictable question about Taiwan and criticized the arrest of Nicolás Maduro on the grounds that America had committed “acts of war just because the nation is below the equator,” which Venezuela is not. It got worse: She said that “completely unconditional” American aid to Israel “enabled a genocide in Gaza.” California Governor Gavin Newsom turned his attention to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents: “I want to remember all those images of masked men, the secret police, something familiar in Germany.” Newsom explicitly and AOC by implication compared American domestic and foreign policy to the greatest crimes of the past century, in the country where those crimes were committed. Germans can get arrested for loose references to the Nazi period, but Americans, thanks to our First Amendment, are free to commit drive-by history.

◼ Canada experienced one of its worst mass shootings in years on Valentine’s Day when 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar shot and killed eight people, including his own mother and eleven-year-old half brother. Van Rootselaar was described as “deranged” and “obsessed with mass shootings and death videos.” He also identified as a woman, wore female clothing, and had begun the process of transitioning to his preferred gender. Within 48 hours of that attack, Robert Dorgan, a.k.a. Roberta Esposito, took a gun into a high school hockey match in Rhode Island and opened fire on his estranged family, killing his ex-wife and one of his three children before turning the gun on himself. Dorgan, too, identified as transgender, but went halfway with it—coupling his masculine physique and stubble-flecked face with a pair of fake breasts. His family warned that Dorgan was imbalanced, as his transgressive and antisocial appearance suggested. But no one intervened in time to prevent the worst. These two atrocities are part of a disturbing trend in which trans-identifying individuals or those adjacent to transgender activism commit murderous violence: a trend to which the same people who have brought us all manner of transgender madness are now furiously insisting we close our eyes.

◼ A major Massachusetts health-care system and a Manhattan hospital have both ended their “gender-affirming care” programs for patients under 18 years of age. Baystate Health and NYU Langone Health cited mounting federal pressure and the risk of losing Medicare and Medicaid funding under new policies from the Department of Health and Human Services. Both systems have shuttered their medical programs while continuing to offer counseling and referrals for gender-dysphoric patients under 18. Other hospital networks have taken similar steps and for similar reasons. Currently, 27 states have either banned or restricted “gender-affirming care” for youth patients. Science and reason are, however belatedly, winning victories over ideology and fad.

◼ Late-night host Stephen Colbert alleged that CBS had prevented him from broadcasting an interview with James Talarico, a Democrat running for Senate in Texas, out of fear that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would deem it a violation of the “equal-time rule.” This rule—authorized by Congress in 1934, when a few networks dominated the media—requires that television and radio broadcasters provide an equal opportunity to be heard to all candidates for public office. Talk shows had long been held exempt from the rule as news interview programs, but updated guidance by the FCC last month made clear that was no longer the case. Colbert and Talarico are making the most of this story, and embellishing it. CBS says it never told Colbert not to run the interview, and Talarico has been raising money off claims that President Donald Trump is censoring him. The rule requires only that other candidates get comparable broadcast opportunities. If Democrats now dislike the rule—a new position for them, but a defensible one—they should introduce legislation to eliminate it.

Automatic protections for teens

Learn more.

◼ Republicans are pushing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which appears to have majority support in the Senate. Its goal is popular and necessary: ensuring that only U.S. citizens vote in federal elections by requiring specific forms of proof of citizenship to register to vote. But it is already a federal crime as well as a deportable offense for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, or to represent themselves as citizens when registering. Violations happen, and a proof-of-citizenship requirement would make them easier to detect and catch, but the incidence is low—think dozens, not thousands. The Constitution wisely places primary responsibility for running elections in the states rather than in Washington; federal rules are only a backstop. The 1993 “motor voter” National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) required states to register voters merely upon proof of residency, such as a utility bill. The Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that the NVRA prevents states from imposing their own proof-of-citizenship requirements; Congress could fix that. Congress could also enforce the REAL ID Act of 2005, with which five states still don’t comply. But calls for Republicans to end the Senate filibuster in order to pass the SAVE Act would cause great mischief in exchange for very modest ends. Senate Republicans should not sell their patrimony for this mess of pottage.

◼ New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised to dramatically expand the city’s welfare system and pay for it by taxing the rich. Now, in proposing his first municipal budget, he is struggling to come up with the funds to cover current services. New York’s spending on public employees and social programs requires a record budget of $127 billion. Florida’s state government, which serves nearly three times as many people, boasts a budget of just $117.4 billion. New York’s expenditures are so gargantuan that the city, already one of the highest-tax jurisdictions in the nation, is facing a $5.5 billion deficit—and that’s after the state government agreed to chip in $1.5 billion. Because he is required by law to run a balanced budget, Mamdani has resorted to raiding his constituents’ couch cushions. His preferred method of confiscation is a punitive wealth tax on the highest-income New Yorkers. That proposal, however, requires the assent of Albany, and state lawmakers are wary of hiking taxes in an election year. So the mayor has threatened to raise property taxes by 9.5 percent across the board unless he gets his way, smacking homeowners and landlords of all incomes. It took even less time than usual for this socialist to run out of other people’s money.

Automatic protections for teens

Learn more.

◼ Aluminum is now approximately 60 percent more expensive in America than in the rest of the world. This is the natural result of protectionist tariffs, which currently sit at 50 percent for aluminum. American aluminum producers love the policy, as it enables them to charge higher prices. Everyone else loses, including the many more companies in downstream industries that purchase and process aluminum to manufacture other goods. Workers, more of them in those industries than the aluminum business itself, pay the price in lost jobs and lower wages, and consumers ultimately bear the burden of subsidizing economic inefficiency. Trump might have belatedly gotten the message, as his administration is reportedly thinking of paring back the aluminum tariffs. He should do one better by rescinding them entirely.

◼ The decision by Britain’s Labour government to hand over the Chagos Archipelago to distant Mauritius, a country with increasingly friendly ties to China, made little sense legally and even less sense geopolitically. Diego Garcia, the largest of the Chagos Islands, hosts a major U.S. base. The U.K. proposed to lease back Diego Garcia from Mauritius and pay richly for the privilege. Thereafter, the base will be far more vulnerable and subject to some significant new rules on how it is used. Notwithstanding strong opposition in the U.K., the British government is proceeding to finalize the new arrangement with obsessive determination, in part because of postcolonial guilt. Many of the Chagossians themselves, shamefully dispossessed by London decades ago, are objecting to the handover. The State Department, failing to take the consequences seriously enough, endorsed the proposed deal this week, but Trump later urged the U.K. not to go ahead with it. He is right to signal his opposition.

◼ The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—the United States’ largest backer of the humanities—is deploying its $7.7 billion endowment to support progressive education initiatives. Recent grants include $500,000 to the University of Utah for research on “transgender and queer of color critique” and an $8 million project titled “Visualizing Abolition” at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As more and more students flock to Southeastern Conference schools like Alabama and Clemson, in part because of the more traditional educational experiences on offer, the Mellon Foundation’s activism only deepens the divide. The people who complained about the Kochs’ influence on campuses are of course almost all unconcerned.

◼ Robert Duvall’s first film role was a famously nonspeaking one: as Arthur “Boo” Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He carried himself on-screen with an energy far different from that of his younger peers such as Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Dustin Hoffman. Duvall’s career began to take off in the late ’60s with small but significant supporting roles in films such as True Grit and M*A*S*H, but it exploded when he was cast as Tom Hagen in The Godfather. He brought conviction and intensity to every role he played. The list of films he starred in—Apocalypse Now, Network, The Great Santini—is practically a cursus honorum of classic mid- to late-’70s cinema. His greatest role might have been on television, as Augustus McCrae in CBS’s adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. As McCrae said on his deathbed: “My God, it’s been quite the party.” Dead at 95. R.I.P.

◼ Jesse Jackson, born to a single mother in South Carolina, became a Baptist minister and a young follower of Martin Luther King Jr. Post-Sixties, he dabbled in Chicago politics, and he promoted black businesses nationally via a scheme that was a double shakedown—to profit from his harassment of white-owned companies, black businessmen had to pay him off. These activities were lost in the blaze of his first presidential campaign in 1984. Walter Mondale won the Democratic nomination, but Jackson won the applause contest. He could be eloquent, in the manner of the pulpit. He could also be demagogic and careless. He abandoned his opposition to abortion to make himself a leftmost candidate, and casually referred to New York City as “hymietown.” (He apologized after a furor.) In 1988, he ran for president again, but his performance thinned and stiffened. The first successful black presidential candidate was the Ivy League–educated, memoir-writing Barack Obama; the first successful amateur presidential candidate was Donald Trump. Jackson was a harbinger of identity politics, a practitioner of personality-driven populism, and—at his rare best—a ringing voice. Dead at 84. R.I.P.