Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla. made a new push Friday on bipartisan legislation that would make daylight saving permanent. 

S. 582, also coined the Sunshine Protection Act, would make daylight saving permanent and add an hour to the day. The Senate unanimously passed the legislation in March 2022, but it has been stalled since. 

The bill would allow Arizona and Hawaii, which do not observe daylight saving time, to remain on standard time, as well as American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

‘The antiquated biannual ritual of toggling between times isn’t just an inconvenience—it also has very real impacts on our economy, our energy consumption, and our health,’ Markey said in a statement released. ‘We know the sun will come out tomorrow, so let’s make that sun stay out an hour later by making Daylight Saving Time permanent and passing the Sunshine Protection Act. You can bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun … and smiles.’

‘We’re ‘springing forward’ but should have never ‘fallen back.’ My Sunshine Protection Act would end this stupid practice of changing our clocks back and forth,’ Rubio also said in the announcement. 

Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott also called to ‘lock the clock,’ calling upon Congress to move forward with the legislation. 

‘Floridians are sick of changing their clocks because we all want more sunshine,’ Scott said in a statement released. ‘It’s time for Congress to act and I’m proud to be leading the bipartisan Sunshine Protection Act with Senator Rubio to get this done. When I was Governor of Florida, I signed this bill into law on the state level. Now it’s Washington’s turn and we should finish the job by passing this good bill today.’

Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., introduced similar legislation in the House of Representatives in March 2023. H.R. 1279, also called the Sunshine Protection Act, seeks to make daylight saving permanent as well. 

President Joe Biden has not yet taken a stance on the issue, while former President Donald Trump tweeted back in 2019 he was ‘O.K.’ with making daylight saving permanent. 

‘Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is O.K. with me!’ Trump wrote on Twitter at the time, now known as X. 

Approximately 30 states have introduced legislation to permanently end the changing of clocks twice a year since 2015, according to Reuters. Some states have also only proposed to make the change so long as neighboring states do the same, per the outlet. 

Daylight saving time has been in place in nearly all the United States since the 1960s after initially being tried in 1918.

Year-round daylight saving was used during World War II and adopted once again in 1973 in an effort to reduce fuel use.

Daylight saving starts on Sunday, March 10. 

Reuters contributed to this report. 

Since the Hamas terror massacre of Israeli Jews Oct. 7, the U.S. has been hit with record levels of antisemitic incidents. While authorities are getting to grips with how to effectively deal with it, Western democracies are also dealing with an explosion of antisemitism not witnessed since the Holocaust. 

Across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom has been rocked by unprecedented antisemitism.  

‘In the 68 days inclusive between the Hamas terror attack on Israel (Oct. 7) and Wednesday, Dec. 13, CST recorded at least 2,093 antisemitic incidents across the U.K.,’ according to the Community Security Trust (CST), the organization responsible for the security of British Jews.

‘This is the highest ever total reported to CST across a sixty-eight-day period. CST has been recording antisemitic incidents since 1984.’

‘I think people are feeling tense and nervous, particularly with marches taking place every Saturday,’ Jake Wallis Simons, editor-in-chief of the London-based Jewish Chronicle, told Fox News Digital from England.

Mass pro-Palestinian marches have blanketed the heart of London. 

‘The marches had a lot of antisemitism and criminality in them, and there are placards supporting Hamas,’ Wallis Simons said.

Former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman decried the mass protests as ‘hate marches’ and wanted to ban the mass antisemitic spectacles. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, fired the outspoken Braverman after her calls for the need to rein in public Jew hatred. Braverman accused the police of double standards at pro-Palestinian marches in an unauthorized newspaper article, according to Reuters. 

‘Jewish children are being told to hide their school blazers, Jewish students are terrified on campus, synagogues are guarded, kosher shops are being attacked, business owners are being threatened’

The demonstrations in the U.K. have been largely populated by leftists and British Muslims. 

‘The police are not cracking down on antisemitism,’ said Wallis Simons. He noted that the police are claiming that ‘if they enforce the law, it will lead to disorder.’  He stressed the absurdity of the police reasoning because ‘that allows space for antisemitic hate to go on. There have been some arrests.’

He termed a late February march outside parliament, where the antisemitic slogan ‘from the river to the sea,’ was projected on Big Ben, a ‘real expression of mob power and intimidated politicians.’

The full slogan, ‘From the river to sea, Palestine will be free,’ is widely interpreted to mean the abolition of the Jewish state and its replacement with a Palestinian nation.

Antisemitism Exposed

Just last week The Board of Deputies of British Jews wrote on X about the election of pro-Hamas and firebrand socialist politician George Galloway to Parliament.

‘George Galloway is a demagogue and conspiracy theorist, who has brought the politics of division and hate to every place he has ever stood for Parliament. His election is a dark day for the Jewish community in this country, and for British politics in general.’ 

‘This is for Gaza,’ Galloway said of his special election victory.

‘Jewish children are being told to hide their school blazers, Jewish students are terrified on campus, synagogues are guarded, kosher shops are being attacked, business owners are being threatened,’ a spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism in the United Kingdom told Fox News Digital.

‘The effect is that, as our polling shows, a majority of Jewish people in this country are afraid to show their Jewishness in public, and we are aware of some Jews who have left the country altogether. This is not the tolerant Britain that we cherish It is a Britain succumbing to a racist mob.’

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The spokesperson for the Campaign Against Antisemitism added, ‘At the epicenter of this societal disaster are the weekly anti-Israel marches, which feature antisemitic signage, genocidal rhetoric and intimidation. They have made London a no-go zone for Jews. Brave officers are outnumbered and cannot properly police these marches, which therefore continue to infect our public discourse. Our country is at a tipping point. The situation for Jews in Britain is desperate.’

The Hamas terrorist movement’s lethal antisemitic ideology has entered into many walks of life in advanced democratic countries across the world.

‘Hamas is losing on the battlefield, but its narrative was successfully exported from those tunnels [in the Gaza Strip] to Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, the U.S. and Canada, to name just a few. The scope and nature of Jew hatred has reached epic levels,’ Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the LA-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, told Fox News Digital.

‘The largest mass murder of Jews after the war [World War II and the Holocaust] leads to the largest worldwide antisemitic campaign,’ author and journalist Henryk M. Broder, a leading German expert on antisemitism, said in a recent interview. ‘That can’t be explained with logic.’ 

While the United Kingdom is widely viewed as one of the ground zeroes of the mushrooming antisemitic movement, America’s northern neighbor, Canada, has been engulfed by probably the worst outbreak of antisemitism in its country’s history.

‘There have been multiple instances of Jewish day schools in Montreal being hit with gunfire, public calls for the killing of Israelis, vandalized homes and synagogues, antisemitic graffiti, large-scale antisemitic disruptions on our university campuses and appalling instances of antisemitic activities outside the country’s most well-known Jewish-founded hospital, among countless other things,’ Casey Babb told Fox News Digital.

Babb teaches courses on terrorism and international security at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs in Ottawa.

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‘Statistically, hate crimes in Canada have increased north of 132%, with the vast majority of those crimes targeting the Jewish community,’ Babb added. ‘Indeed, this may be the most antisemitic time in our country’s history. I’d go as far as suggesting Canada, for a variety of reasons, has become one of the most hostile nations in the West for Jews.’

Just last week, hundreds of anti-Israel protesters surrounded the Montreal Holocaust Museum and blocked access to a group of Israeli army reservists who were slated to speak. The antisemitic mob reportedly chanted ‘Death to Israel, death to the Jews.’

Germany is another European ground zero of the post-Oct. 7 antisemitic movement. Last month, the country’s premier film festival, Berlinale, turned into an anti-Israel hate festival, according to Israel’s government and a number of German newspapers.

The filmmakers termed the Mideast’s only democracy, Israel, an ‘apartheid’ state and accused Jerusalem of carrying out a genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas’ mass murder, systematic rape of Israelis and taking of over 130 hostages still held by terror groups in Gaza were nonissues for the packed film audience that cheered the delegitimization of the Jewish state in the capital city, Berlin, that planned the Holocaust. 

Reports noted that Germany’s federal culture minister, Green Party politician Claudia Roth, and Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wegner, from the Christian Democratic Union Party, were caught on camera applauding the anti-Israel agitation. 

‘You see the unleashing into the mainstream of not just antisemitism, but the Hamas narrative, which turns reality on its head,’ Cooper said. 

The Hamas Covenant calls for the genocide of the Jews. According to Article 7 of the Covenant, ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’

Israel and experts on Jew hatred argue the genocide charge should be attributed to Hamas. Israel has launched surgical-style urban warfare to root out Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, who previously served as his country’s envoy to the U.N., wrote on X about the Berlinale, ‘Under the guise of freedom of expression and art, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric is celebrated. You don’t need seven professors to state the obvious: this is blatant anti-Semitic discourse.’

‘We have seen the biggest antisemitic wave in Denmark since 1943’

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Critics say the problem of state-sponsored antisemitism has repeatedly played out in Germany, where the Berlinale receives generous state funding.

In January, the German taxpayer-funded University of Tübingen hosted a speaker, Michael Blume, who two German courts ruled can be called antisemitic. Blume is the civil servant in charge of fighting antisemitsm in the state of Baden-Württemberg. He blamed Israel’s government for the Hamas massacre and said Israel is ostensibly preventing the fight against antisemitism because the Jewish state opposes ‘renewable energies.’ 

Blume didn’t respond to press queries. 

Antisemitism has also engulfed Denmark. 

‘We have seen the biggest antisemitic wave in Denmark since 1943,’ when Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany, Henri Goldstein, head of the 1,800-strong Jewish Community, said in late February. 

In Norway, Oslo Chief Rabbi Joav Melchior echoed the comments of experts and leaders of Jewish communities across the globe that the levels of antisemitism have not been seen since the Holocaust. 

‘It manifests in statements made against Israel, Zionists and Jews — comments that were not made in the past and would not have been accepted in public discourse without a very strong reaction,’ he told the Israeli news outlet Ynet.

France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish community of 440,000, saw a soaring increase of Jew hatred, with 1,676 antisemitic acts in 2023, compared to 436 in 2022. 

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Jerusalem has long viewed Norwegian governments as strongholds of anti-Israeli policies. Ynet noted that at the Cairo Summit for Peace two weeks after Hamas kidnapped over 240 hostages, including Americans, the Scandinavian country’s foreign minister, Espen Barth Eide, was ‘the only Western foreign minister who condemned Israel without calling for the release of hostages held in Gaza.’

The French media reported in late January that a report from the Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) said, ‘We are witnessing a rejuvenation of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic acts. Schools are no longer a sanctuary of the Republic.’ 

France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish community of 440,000, saw a soaring increase of Jew hatred, with 1,676 antisemitic acts in 2023, compared to 436 in 2022. The Council of Jewish Institutions in France said 25% of the antisemitic acts were ‘calls to murder’ Jews and a third glorified Hamas’ ideology of jihad.

‘The explosion of antisemitism globally points to a failure of leadership in higher education, the media of record and in government policy, especially in democratic countries,’ said Charles Asher Small, director of the Institute for the U.S.-based Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP). 

‘For the past several decades, the threat posed by anti-American and anti-democratic social movements has not been addressed, and we keep kicking the can down the road.’

Meanwhile, Rabbi Cooper warned, ‘If not met with a strong, definitive response from those in power, you will see it [antisemitism] spreading to elementary schools.’

Traditionally, Ireland has been classified as one of the most hostile European countries toward the Jewish state, according to Israeli diplomats. Irish discrimination against Jews appeared on the basketball court in February when the Irish women’s basketball team refused to shake hands with Israeli opponents because of the war in Gaza. The Israeli team defeated Ireland 87-57. 

Spain, with a tiny Jewish population of 45,000 out of a total population of over 48 million, has also been embroiled in rising antisemitism. In October, The Jewish Chronicle reported a synagogue in Barcelona canceled events. 

‘We’re scared, particularly for our sons and daughters,’ a Jewish resident of Barcelona told El Periodico. ‘Antisemitism is in the air.’

Maxo Benalal, secretary general of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain, said soaring Spanish antisemitism was ‘truly terrifying.’

The Pentagon found no evidence of aliens, alien technology or secret government-run reverse engineering programs.

‘The aggregate findings of all USG investigations to date have not found even one case of UAP representing off-world technology,’ according to the report, which was released Friday, and ‘authentic sensitive national security programs’ were ‘mistaken’ with UFO programs.

‘AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) has no evidence for the USG reverse-engineering narrative provided by interviewees and has been able to disprove the majority of the interviewees’ claims,’ the report says, although ‘some claims are still under evaluation.’

Jeremy Corbell, an investigative journalist and pivotal figure in the fight for UFO transparency, told Fox News Digital in an exclusive statement, ‘If the U.S. won’t fess up, other nations will.’

‘The reason AARO was formed in the first place was because of the mishandling of the UFO problem by our government agencies in the past,’ Corbell said. ‘It was instated to address the UFO reality, the cover-up, as a defense against the dangerous and real possibility of strategic surprise. 

‘The historical review is an attempt to rewrite history and obscure the basic fundamental facts about the UFO phenomenon.’

The purpose of the 63-page report ‘is not to prove or disprove any particular belief set, but rather to use a rigorous analytic and scientific approach to investigate past USG-sponsored UAP investigation efforts’ and claims the government and private contractors are hiding alien technology and biological material. 

A ‘vast majority’ of reported UFOs, or UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), are ‘the result of misidentification,’ according to the report. 

The Pentagon acknowledged an Intelligence Community Control Access program was expanded in 2021 ‘without sufficient justification’ to protect UAP reverse-engineering.

But the program never recovered an extraterrestrial craft and was disestablished ‘due to its lack of merit,’ the report says. 

Canada to release own report: ‘Quite fascinating … so stay tuned’

As the debate rages in the U.S., Canadian officials addressed the UAP phenomemon earlier this week.

Mona Nemer, the country’s top scientific advisor, told lawmakers they’re close to finishing their report, which should be released late summer or early fall. 

‘I think our report is going to be quite fascinating on the historic front, so stay tuned,’ Nemer told the Canadian Parliament’s science and research committee on Tuesday. 

Nemer said they’ve been in contact with their counterparts in the U.S. and France, and ‘enthusiasm for the responses have been uneven.’

‘The historical review is an attempt to rewrite history and obscure the basic fundamental facts about the UFO phenomenon.’

— Investigative journalist Jeremy Corbell

‘Sometimes the information is more complete or, you know, more cryptic than we’d like it to be,’ Nemer said, ‘which is why in some cases I will be engaging directly with the deputy ministers to make sure that we have the information that we need.’

Highlights of Pentagon report

Other conclusions put forth in the report include the public’s general mistrust of the government and ‘perceived bureaucratic barriers,’ intense secrecy related to military programs and growing interest in UFOs. 

To put the rapidly growing interest in UFOs into perspective – a once-considered taboo subject that destroyed careers, like Bob Lazar’s after he was essentially forced to hide in exile, had its own Super Bowl commercial. 

Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said there was no evidence that any information was ‘illegally or inappropriately’ withheld from Congress.

‘What we found was that claims of hidden programs are largely the result of circular reporting by a small group repeating what they heard from others and that many people have sincerely misinterpreted real events for mistaken sensitive U.S. programs as UAP or being extra-terrestrial exploitation,’ he said.

In a statement released with the report, the DoD said the conclusions are based on ‘verifiable evidence.’

‘All investigative efforts, at all levels of classification, concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification,’ the statement says.

Reactions to the UFO report

The report didn’t sit well with many whistleblowers and elected officials, as they sounded off on social media or during interviews. 

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn, who’s been one of the most outspoken members on the UFO subject, wrote on X, ‘So the people doing the cover up of #ufo #uap say they find no cover up. Classic self fulfilled prophesy.’

Burchett warned in a previous interview that humanity ‘can’t handle’ the technology he’s seen in videos. 

‘If they’re out there, they’re out there, and if they have this kind of technology, then they could turn us into a charcoal briquette,’ Burchett said on the ‘Event Horizon’ podcast. 

‘And if they can travel light years or at the speeds that we’ve seen, and physics as we know it, fly underwater, don’t show a heat trail, things like that, then we are vastly out of our league.’

Lue Elizondo, the former director of the Pentagon’s advanced aerospace threat identification program, told The Good Trouble Show that it’s ‘inconceivable that the Pentagon continues to go down this road of obfuscation and denial.’

‘Our adversaries have already stated for the record they have their own UAP programs. Is this not important to the Pentagon?’ Elizondo said. ‘This report is not only inaccurate, but also misleading in many of its assertions.

‘Furthermore, this is yet another example of a long list of missteps by the Pentagon in recent history. It’s a sad day for democracy when the American public is being fed misinformation under the guise of truthfulness and transparency.’

Fox News Digital’s Louis Casiano contributed to this report. 

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has not ruled out a chance to serve under former President Donald Trump for a second time should he become the Republican presidential nominee and come out victorious in November.

Pompeo served as Trump’s director of the CIA and secretary of state during his first term. 

On Friday, he was asked about serving under Trump for a second time during a Friday appearance on ‘Your World with Neil Cavuto.’

‘I don’t often comment on jobs I’ve not been offered,’ he said. ‘If I get a chance to serve and think that I can make a difference, I’m almost I’m almost certainly going to say yes to that opportunity to try and deliver on behalf of the American people,’ he told Cavuto. 

Cavuto noted that Trump in the past has demanded strict loyalty from those working under him. 

‘I’m confident President Trump will be looking for people who will faithfully execute what it is he asked them to do,’ Pompeo replied. ‘I think as a president, you should always want that from everyone.’

‘I must say, as secretary of state, I certainly wanted my team to do what I was asking them to do, and was enormously frustrated when I found that I couldn’t get them to do that,’ he added.

Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters when he came into office have turned against him in recent years. Former Vice President Mike Pence drew Trump’s ire when he refused to abide by Trump’s wishes that he reject the certification of some electoral votes during a joint session of Congress held on Jan. 6, 2021.

Last year, he briefly mounted an unsuccessful campaign against Trump to win the Republican presidential nomination. 

Former national security adviser John Bolton called Trump ‘unfit’ to be president in a new memoir. In a January interview with ABC News’ ‘Good Morning America,’ he described what he thinks a second Trump term would look like.

‘I think if you look at what Trump did in his first term — which I try and describe in the original book — you can extrapolate from that what a second term will be like, and basically it will be the same except worse,’ Bolton told George Stephanopoulos.

Trump has not made any mention of potential running mates or cabinet nominations for his second White House bid. 

President Biden’s presidential re-election campaign on Friday launched a $30 million ad buy following his State of the Union address Thursday night, as the president heads out on a battleground state tour. 

The ad spending is more than Biden’s campaign spent in all of last year, his deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty said. 

Flaherty said in a statement on social media that Biden had the best fundraising hours of this cycle after his State of the Union, claiming it set a record for fundraising for an incumbent Democrat without giving numbers. 

‘The dumbest thing you can do is underestimate Joe Biden,’ Flaherty wrote on his X account. 

Republicans have slammed Biden’s aggressive speech as ‘divisive,’ ‘partisan’ and an ‘utter disgrace.’ 

‘I thought it was the most divisive State of the Union from the most out-of-touch president in American history,’ Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., told Fox News. ‘I thought it was bizarre.’ 

The president visited Pennsylvania on Friday, and also plans swings through Georgia, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Michigan over the next week as he prepares to face-off against former President Trump. 

Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to Arizona and Nevada. 

‘We firmly believe that this race is going to be won on the ground across key states that afford multiple pathways to 270, and everything we are doing this month to kick off the general election is grounded in that premise,’ said Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said, according to Reuters. 

Fox News Digital has reached out to the Biden campaign for comment. 

Reuters contributed to this report. 

It was clear from President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address that his staff was going for a come-from-behind victory in the style of President Harry Truman.

This was the message of the left-wing media after the speech last night.

Unfortunately, neither Biden’s staff nor the elite media have apparently studied Truman. They have no idea what he did in 1948 to win re-election against all odds.

The Biden team knows what was brutally reinforced in a recent New York Times poll. Their candidate is behind. His policies are not working, and his cognitive problems are worsening.

At a minimum, this State of the Union unified the professional Democrats and made it virtually impossible to launch a dump Biden movement. However, this came with a cost for Biden. 

In 1948, the country had voted four times in a row to put Democrats in the White House (all four were for Franklin Delano Roosevelt). The transition from a wartime boom to a peacetime economy had been difficult. Truman’s commitment to civil rights alienated a large part of the South. His commitment to stopping Soviet expansion had also alienated the most liberal wing of his party.

Gov. Strom Thurmond was mounting an independent segregationist campaign. Former Vice President Henry Wallace was running as a progressive dedicated to creating a more socialist America and appeasing Russian dictator Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. President Truman looked doomed to defeat.

In fact, by September, Truman was sufficiently behind the Republican nominee, Tom Dewey of New York. Gallup announced it was no longer going to poll, because the presidential race was over.

But Truman had been counted out before. During his 1940 re-election campaign to represent Missouri in the U.S. Senate, the Kansas City and St. Louis Democratic Party machines decided to defeat him. He was a reformer they could not control. Truman had virtually no money but took one driver and crisscrossed Missouri. He pounded away at the machines and made the election a choice between a courageous independent senator and the party bosses of Missouri’s two biggest cities. Against all odds and expectations, Truman won.

So, Truman knew how to run an intense, aggressive underdog campaign – and he did.

Biden imitated this aspect of the Truman mystique in his 2024 State of the Union – and it worked in achieving two goals. 

First, it demonstrated Biden could still give a major, energetic, hour-long speech. (This was reinforced by the way in which he gradually left the House Chamber while energetically chatting with supporters).

Second, the steady chants of ‘four more years’ and the standing ovations likely neutralized the Democrats who have been considering whether Biden could be talked into retiring or replaced at the convention. At a minimum, this State of the Union unified the professional Democrats and made it virtually impossible to launch a dump Biden movement.

However, this came with a cost for Biden. 

The bitterly partisan nature of the speech also reinforced Republican and independent support for President Donald Trump – and enthusiasm for defeating Biden.

There are four big differences between 1948 and 2024.

First, Truman simply had the job of reassembling enough of the Roosevelt coalition to win a narrow victory. There is no comparably large reservoir of votes from which Biden can draw.

Second, President Trump is no Dewey. Trump will carry an aggressive, enthusiastic, and intense campaign that seeks to reinforce Americans’ disappointment with Biden and move us back on track for a better future.

Third, the problems of the country are far more divisive and hostile than they were in 1948. The reaction on the left to Biden using the term ‘illegal’ to describe the man accused of killing Laken Riley gives you a sense of how hard it is going to be for Biden to cope his own political ecosystem.

Finally, the State of the Union was the wrong place for this bitterly partisan speech. It should be a time for the president of the United States to address all Americans – not for the Democratic Party nominee to address his partisan supporters. Hearing the elite media tout the Truman analogy, I went back and read Truman’s 1948 State of the Union.

Biden began his speech with three consecutive attacks on President Trump and Republicans – on Ukraine, Jan. 6, and abortion.

Compare that bitter partisanship, which alienated every Republican listening, with Truman’s opening:

‘We are here today to consider the state of the Union.

‘On this occasion, above all others, the Congress and the President should concentrate their attention, not upon party but upon the country; not upon things which divide us but upon those which bind us together – the enduring principles of our American system, and our common aspirations for the future welfare and security of the people of the United States.

‘The United States has become great because we, as a people, have been able to work together for great objectives even while differing about details.’

Despite what the elite media says, Joe Biden is no Harry Truman.

House Republican lawmakers confronted a small group of leftist protesters on Thursday after the activists attempted to interrupt their press conference urging President Biden to keep Cuba’s terror designation in place.

Four Cuban-American lawmakers – Reps. Maria Salazar, R-Fla., Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., and Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla. – were just minutes into their press conference outside the U.S. Capitol when two members of the group Code Pink and one other person abruptly stepped in front.

The protesters were holding signs that said, ‘Take Cuba off Terror List’ and refused to move from the area in front of the lawmakers’ display when asked.

‘I wish the average Cuban could have the same privilege that you’re having right now,’ Salazar told the activists. One shot back, ‘Well, thank you for giving us the privilege.’

Salazar continued, ‘You know, I love this, because if we traveled to Cuba now, and you and I go … you will not be able to come close this close to the Capitol and speak your mind and have a dialogue like we could be having right now, because they will either put you in jail or put you back on a plane back to Miami.’

‘Isn’t it beautiful over there?’ the protester replied.

Code Pink is an antiwar group that has staged several demonstrations in and around the U.S. Capitol complex in the wake of Israel’s war in Gaza. 

Malliotakis, whose mother is a Cuban refugee, pointed out that Cuba has close ties to Iran, which backs groups like Hamas.

‘Instead of standing here protesting our press conference, you should be at the southern border, or maybe standing at the other side of the ocean where we’re seeing Cubans fleeing in makeshift rafts,’ she said. ‘And maybe you can learn about what’s actually happening in communist Cuba, because you’re using a privilege that we only have here in the United States and the Cuban people do not have.’

‘You will be jailed, you will be beaten, you will be killed, if you do what you’re doing right here, protesting in freedom, if you do it in Cuba. . . . It’s ironic that we stand here with signs supporting a communist regime that does all those things.’

At one point, another protester holding a Spanish-language sign got close to lawmakers, prompting police officers to attempt to intervene. The House Republicans stopped her from being taken away and instead asked her to move to a space that didn’t raise security concerns.

The demonstrators did not move for the duration of the press conference.

At least one of them appeared to be Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, who has been seen in the halls of Congress in recent weeks participating in various protests, including a Gaza ceasefire demonstration with progressive activist and actress Susan Sarandon.

Malliotakis called her a ‘professional agitator.’

Benjamin confirmed her attendance at the event and said in a statement to Fox News Digital: ‘Politicians like these have been pushing the same tired position for over 70 years, and the only result has been impoverishment of the Cuban people. If they really cared a whit about Cuban families, they would call for measures to ease shortages, including lifting sanctions and taking Cuba off the terror list.’

Cuba was designated as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1982 ‘because of its long history of providing advice, safe haven, communications, training, and financial support to guerrilla groups and individual terrorists,’ according to the U.S. State Department.

President Biden on Friday said his decision on whether to debate President Trump ahead of Election Day is dependent on his opponent’s ‘behavior.’ 

Biden was asked on Friday, the day after his State of the Union address, if he would debate Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. 

‘Depends on his behavior,’ Biden said. 

Biden’s comments come after Trump challenged him earlier in the week to a debate ‘anytime, anywhere, anyplace.’ 

Trump, the 2024 GOP frontrunner and presumptive nominee, posted his offer on his Truth Social on Wednesday afternoon — just hours after former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, his last-standing Republican opponent, suspended her campaign. 

‘It is important, for the Good of our Country, that Joe Biden and I Debate Issues that are so vital to America, and the American People,’ Trump posted Wednesday. ‘Therefore, I am calling for Debates, ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, ANYPLACE! The Debates can be run by the Corrupt DNC, or their Subsidiary, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD).’ 

The Biden campaign fired back shortly after Trump’s invitation on Wednesday. 

‘I know Donald Trump’s thirsty for attention and struggling to expand his appeal beyond the MAGA base — and that’s a conversation we’ll have at the appropriate time in this cycle,’ Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler told Fox News Digital. ‘But if he’s so desperate to see President Biden in prime time, he doesn’t have to wait!’ 

Tyler invited Trump to watch the State of the Union on Thursday night. 

Trump gave a live play-by-play during Biden’s address, reacting throughout. 

Biden invoked Trump nearly a dozen times in his State of the Union address, but never by name. He repeatedly referred to him as ‘my predecessor.’ 

Trump told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview after the address that Biden ‘suffers from a terminal case of Trump derangement syndrome,’ and said the president was ‘angry’ and ‘mentally disturbed’ throughout his speech. 

‘He did a terrible job,’ Trump said.