The Daily Populous Tuesday February 17th, 2026 night edition
Authored by thebulwark.com and submitted by BulwarkOnline

Barack Obama kicked off a minor social media frenzy last week when he told the liberal podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen that aliens are real. “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” he said, adding that they’re certainly not “being kept” in “Area 51.”

On Sunday, Obama tried to clean his comments up: “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he wrote on Instagram. But “I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!” If you ask us, sounds someone’s alien handlers got to him. Happy Monday.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio holds a press conference with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Budapest, Hungary, at the prime minister’s office. (Photo by Balint Szentgallay / NurPhoto via Getty Images.)

Trump Shits on Europe. Rubio Applies Perfume.

At least one top Trump administration official isn’t anxious to see the U.S.-led international order crumble overnight, and on Saturday he got his chance to say so. Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the stage at the Munich Security Conference in an attempt to strike a reassuring tone toward America’s European allies.

“We want Europe to be strong. We believe that Europe must survive,” Rubio said. “Because the two great wars of the last century serve for us as history’s constant reminder that ultimately our destiny is, and will always be, intertwined with yours.”

Rubio wasn’t without his critiques of Europe. But unlike Vice President JD Vance, whose hectoring there’s-a-new-sheriff-in-town speech at the same conference last year scandalized European allies, Rubio couched his critiques as a shared challenge for Europe and America both to overcome. Europe, he said, had at times lost its way in the same manner and for the same reasons that America had: because of a shared “dangerous delusion” that the world had entered “the end of history,” in which the lure of open markets and prosperity would inevitably charm the world’s despotic regimes into embracing liberal democracy.

“We made these mistakes together, and now together we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward to rebuild,” Rubio said. “This is why we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel. This is why President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe. The reason why, my friends, is because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours.”

Whatever else he is, Rubio remains a talented politician; the whole thing was artfully done. In the world in which he operates—a world in which his boss, the president, opens up about three new lines of antagonism against U.S. allies a week—this was about the most promising rhetorical line available to him: America hits because America cares.

Europe, however, doesn’t appear to be buying it. Nowhere was this clearer than in a remarkable speech delivered the same day by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who opened his remarks with a riff on the theme of the conference: “Under destruction.”

“It probably means that the international order based on rights and rules is currently being destroyed,” Merz said. “But I’m afraid we have to put it in even harsher terms. This order, as flawed as it has been even in its heyday, no longer exists.” Europe, he said, had “just returned from a vacation from world history.”

The era of America as the sole world superpower, in which smaller democracies could bob along comfortably in her wake, is over. “If there had been a unipolar moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a unipolar moment in history, it has long passed,” Merz said. “The United States’ claim to leadership has been challenged and possibly lost.”

“We, the Europeans, too, are preparing for this new era,” Merz said. “And we reach different conclusions than, for example, the administration in Washington. Our prime task as Europeans, and, of course, as Germans too, is to accept this new reality today. It does not mean that we accept it as an inevitable fate. We are not at the mercy of the world.”

This isn’t idle talk. Politico Europe reported last week that negotiations are underway among Europe, Canada, Mexico, and a bloc of Indo-Pacific nations to form a new trade bloc, a move explicitly designed to tie the member countries closer together in an economic world now defined by Donald Trump’s harsh tariffs. It’s exactly the sort of middle-power solidarity in response to a world increasingly dominated by two hostile great powers, the United States and China, that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney argued for last month at the World Economic Forum.

Selfishly, as an American, I wish Europe would allow itself to be wooed by Rubio’s you-catch-more-flies-with-honey approach. A future in which America’s erstwhile allies are as willing to freeze us out as we have lately been to freeze them out is one in which America is perpetually lonelier, grimmer, poorer, and less safe. You can bet that Rubio knows this too. You can hope, at least, that it keeps him up at night.

But all the sweet talk in the world can’t change the fundamental truth. It isn’t just that everyone knows Rubio is only authorized to speak up to a point, and that ultimately it’s Trump who will call the relevant shots. In case there was any doubt, Rubio left Munich and immediately met with two of Europe’s most noxious right-wing populists, Hungary’s Victor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico. As Dalibor Rohac notes on the homepage today, what Rubio offered wasn’t a return to normal transatlantic relations but “Trumpism with a human face.”

Europe has finally learned the lesson that Trump is no aberration or blip, that America is the kind of place that ultimately cannot be trusted to elect reliable stewards for the free world, and that they’re all just going to have to plan accordingly.

Maybe Rubio deludes himself into thinking that he can put it all back together, if only he can find his way into the Oval Office in 2029. It’s plain by now that our allies aren’t waiting around for him.

America’s alliances aren’t just ratified by governments. They’re also built by cultural, economic, and ideological links among people. Share your ideas of what we can do now to rebuild our alliances from the bottom up. Leave a comment

Well, technically, according to federal law, the holiday we’re celebrating today is still officially Washington’s Birthday. But thanks to the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968, it’s now observed on the third Monday in February, rather than on February 22. Partly because the holiday got unmoored from Washington’s actual birthday, partly because there was a general desire to include Lincoln (whose birthday was celebrated by many Northern states but not nationally) in the celebration, and partly because advertisers started to use the term “President’s Day”, we seem to now have a new name for this holiday.

Which is, I’ve come to think, okay. It’s true that, along with many other conservatives, I used to decry the substitution of Presidents’ Day for Washington’s birthday (and Lincoln’s) as a sad example of modern democratic leveling run amok. After all, we’ve had forty-five chief executives. Only a few have been great. Some have been good. Some have been pretty bad. A few have been very bad. When Madison anticipated in Federalist No. 10 that “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm” of our republic, he was right.

So was I correct that “Presidents’ Day” is an unfortunate innovation? In a way, yes. But in a way, no. As Lincoln said, “This is a world of compensations.” One compensation for the universalism of Presidents’ Day is that it lowers our expectations. It reminds us that we shouldn’t look up too much to whomever our president is.

And I’m encouraged that, in fact, we don’t. In a recent poll, YouGov asked Americans to rate twenty well-known presidents. It’s striking, I think, that only 11 of them received positive net favorability ratings from the American public. We the people know that our presidents have been a mixed bag.

This is a sign of civic health. Hard-headed realism and worldly skepticism are desirable qualities in citizens of a democratic republic. If we resist credulous idolization of our presidents, that’s a good thing. And if an all-purpose designation like “Presidents’ Day” can help us to temper our hopes for the occupants of that office, that can be useful. Not all holidays have to be edifying.

Abraham Lincoln was our greatest president. But perhaps history is quietly teaching us a sober lesson in the fact that his time in office was bracketed by two of our worst presidents: James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson.

Could history now favor us with the reverse, so to speak? Could our very worst president be followed by a very good president?

Who knows? But I do know that it’s our responsibility as citizens to make sure the republic survives the tenure of our current president. We could even try to help the nation come out of this experience stronger in some ways. There are, after all, lessons to be learned from awful presidencies as well as from admirable ones.

Let’s hope we’re putting some of those lessons into effect on Presidents’ Day 2029.

THE ‘BROOM HANDLE’ STORY FALLS APART: Last month, after ICE officers in Minneapolis shot a Venezuelan immigrant they were trying to arrest in the leg, the DHS propaganda machine surged into action. “What we saw last night . . . was an attempted murder of federal law enforcement,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement. “Our officer was ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat him with snow shovels and the handles of brooms. Fearing for his life, the officer fired a defensive shot.”

Now that story is disintegrating. Federal prosecutors moved last week to drop with prejudice the charges against the migrants Noem had accused of attacking her officer, writing in a filing that “newly discovered evidence” is “materially inconsistent” with the allegations officers made against them. And on Friday, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons announced that the officers in question appear to have fabricated the excuse: “A joint review by ICE and the Department of Justice of video evidence has revealed that sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements,” Lyons said. “Both officers have been immediately placed on administrative leave pending the completion of a thorough internal investigation.”

NO LAW SCHOOL FOR YOU: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth keeps opening up new theaters in his war on woke. Military officers who are currently in the process of enrolling for graduate education got an abrupt and unwelcome update last week: The Defense Department is planning to cancel all tuition assistance to a host of schools deemed too leftish—or, in Hegseth’s phrasing, that “diminish critical thinking”—with dozens of top schools listed as “moderate or high risk” for being banned. CNN reports:

A source familiar with Hegseth’s guidance told CNN that the implication is that “graduate programs for highest performing officers and non-commissioned officers are almost certainly at risk.” This source and a military official added that it has created extensive uncertainty within the services about how to proceed with applying for advanced civil schooling, including top law programs, medical programs, and nuclear engineering programs. . . . The guidance was first mentioned publicly in a video Hegseth posted on social media last week, in which he bashed Harvard and other American universities that have “pervasive institutional bias” saying they “no longer live up to their founding principles, as bastions of free speech, open inquiry, and committed to the American values that make our country great.”

It’s astonishing all on its own that Hegseth thinks the armed forces will be better off without lawyers trained at many of the nation’s top law schools, like Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Duke, and Georgetown—to say nothing of engineers trained at MIT. And then there’s the compounding factor that these announcements are being made in mid-February—extremely late, in other words, in the school-applications game.

Over the weekend, emails purportedly from the Judge Advocate Recruiting Office to this year’s crop of JAG candidates began circulating on X: “The Department of Defense will no longer pay for candidates to attend these moderate or high risk schools,” the email reads. “You will have to apply and be accepted to a law school that is not in the moderate or high risk category, and is not listed below. This needs to be done immediately, particularly as we know that some application deadlines have passed, and that you also have a very short turn to try and submit (or re-submit) applications to other schools.”

AND NOW, A PSA FROM SONNY: Last year, friend of The Bulwark Jake VanKersen came on my podcast, The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, to talk about getting his micro-budgeted movie made and, more importantly, seen by folks. That’s the tricky part: Shooting a movie is easier than ever, but getting eyeballs on it? Still pretty tough! Lots of competition out there.

Anyway, Jake’s movie, I Agree With You, is playing at his hometown theater in Michigan in two weeks. Which means you can see it! On February 27 and 28 and March 1, his film will be showing at the Cinema Carousel—where he worked as a kid and where his mom worked when she was a kid—in Muskegon. It’s a fun movie: super-indie, just a two-hander featuring a couple in a relationship-defining fight. If you’re a Bulwarker in the area, I’m sure Jake would love to see you there!

Bill’s seen things you people wouldn’t believe:

SwaggyMcSwagsabunch on February 16th, 2026 at 17:27 UTC »

Off topic, the vastness of the universe argument for aliens being real is always funny to me because the same vastness case can be made to argue that the statistical likelihood of the conditions necessary for life happening not once but twice is near zero.

On topic, article calls Rubio a talented politician and then the next paragraph states that Europe isn’t buying Rubio’s rhetoric. Doesn’t sound talented to me.

BulwarkOnline on February 16th, 2026 at 16:38 UTC »

Europe has finally learned the lesson that Trump is no aberration or blip, that America is the kind of place that ultimately cannot be trusted to elect reliable stewards for the free world, and that they’re all just going to have to plan accordingly.

Maybe Rubio deludes himself into thinking that he can put it all back together, if only he can find his way into the Oval Office in 2029. It’s plain by now that our allies aren’t waiting around for him.