💬 The Rubin Recap: The Sunday return to normalcy

No room for Nancy anymore

One of the true joys of the coming midterm elections is that for the first time in decades, Nancy Pelosi won’t be seeking re-election. Last November, Pelosi announced she’d retire at the end of her term. The announcement came almost one year to the day Donald Trump won the 2024 election, sending him back to the White House for a second term. Pelosi, it seems, saw the writing on the wall in Trump’s America and especially in Trump’s D.C.

One thing that Trump doesn’t get enough credit for is shaking up Washington D.C. to the point that career politicians become uncomfortable and decide to pack it in. Pelosi, in her nearly four decades in the House of Representatives, became the poster child for the career politician. Mitch McConnell is another career politician. Trump, because of his unique career, is the antithesis of the career politician. And America’s founders never intended for members of Congress to make careers of serving in the House or Senate. That wasn’t a norm they envisioned.

Is it true that we’re losing some decent Republicans in 2026, too? It sure is — but it’s worth losing a few of them if the bigger prize is someone as dastardly as Pelosi going away. She has been anything but a normal member of Congress, and not for the reasons the mainstream media will tell you.

Her conduct alone in high-profile moments as Speaker of the House made her abnormal. Remember when she mockingly applauded Trump during his State of the Union address in 2019? Classy.

A year later she outdid herself when she tore up her copy of Trump’s State of the Union speech seconds after he finished delivering the address.

That abnormal behavior was celebrated and lionized by the mainstream media. Also, not normal. Do I even need to bring up her unprecedented stock-trading record? Some estimates put her net worth at north of $300 million after entering Congress barely a millionaire. I wish that was a joke.

The reason I bring this up now is because Pelosi was behaving abnormally again, and most in the media, even on the right, completely missed it. During an interview on MS Now, Pelosi brazenly spread misinformation about Republicans plotting to tamper with the 2026 midterms. “They may try to creep into the technology and create a false count,” Pelosi ridiculously said.

What’s so rich about her remarks — ya know, beyond them being baseless and inflammatory — is that they’re really a projection of her own behaviors in recent years. Maybe you remember, just three weeks before the 2024 election, she went on a podcast and boasted that Trump would never be president again because of her actions.

"Elections are decisions. You decide to win," a pompous Pelosi declared. "I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States." The audio is shocking — listen here if you haven’t heard it.

No one in the mainstream media so much as blinked when she made that remark. Had Trump said something like that, you can bet another “racketeering” investigation would’ve been manufactured.

You, friend, are a normal person. And you probably welcome, like I do, Trump’s America — and Trump’s version of Washington D.C. — incentivizing abnormal politicians like Pelosi to recede back into the shadows.

Dr. Arthur Brooks on pinpointing the best predictor of whether someone will suffer from depression

Since 2008, depression, anxiety, loneliness, addiction, and self harm have all soared among young people. They literally have doubled, or worse, in some cases. Harvard professor Dr. Arthur Brooks says such a sharp rise in these problems over such a short period doesn’t even really make sense. But after years of research, he says it can all be traced back to one problem, which he says is the best predictor of whether someone will suffer from depression and anxiety. And you might be thinking it’s the phone. Brooks says it’s actually something else and the phone and social media become symptoms of the problem. Very interesting conversation on mental health, parenting and family values, teen rebellion — and much more.