The Department of Justice said Wednesday it may have more than a million more documents related to the late Jeffrey Epstein that it needs to review and that the process could take weeks to complete.

The DOJ said two of its components, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, had just handed over the missing tranche of files, days after the Epstein Files Transparency Act deadline had passed.

‘We have lawyers working around the clock to review and make the legally required redactions to protect victims, and we will release the documents as soon as possible,’ the DOJ wrote in a statement on social media.

The ‘mass volume of material’ could ‘take a few more weeks’ to review, the DOJ said.

‘The Department will continue to fully comply with federal law and President Trump’s direction to release the files,’ the department wrote.

The DOJ has been sharing on a public website since Friday tens of thousands of pages of files related to Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking cases as part of its obligation under the transparency bill. 

President Donald Trump signed the bill into law Nov. 19, giving the DOJ 30 days to review and release all unclassified material related to the cases.

The file rollout has stirred controversy as critics have blasted the DOJ for what they say are excessive redactions and the law’s lapsed deadline Friday. Initially, the DOJ said it would miss the deadline by a couple of weeks, but Wednesday’s announcement signals that might extend further into the new year than the administration had anticipated.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on ‘Meet the Press’ Sunday there was ‘well-settled law’ that supported the DOJ missing the bill’s deadline because of a need to meet other legal requirements, like redacting victim-identifying information.

The transparency bill required the DOJ to withhold information about victims and material that could jeopardize open investigations or litigation. Officials could also leave out information ‘in the interest of national defense or foreign policy,’ the bill said. 

The bill also explicitly directed the DOJ to keep visible any details that could be damaging to high-profile and politically connected people.

Nasry Asfura has won the 2025 Honduras presidential election, delivering victory for the right-of-center National Party of Honduras (PNH) and shifting the political landscape of Central America. 

The 40.3% to 39.5% result in favor of Asfura over Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla arrived after the vote-counting process had been delayed for days by technical glitches and claims by other candidates of vote-rigging. Rixi Moncada, the candidate of the ruling LIBRE party, came in a distant third.

The results of the race were so tight and the ballot processing system was so chaotic, that about 15% of the tally sheets, which accounted for hundreds of thousands of ballots, had to be counted by hand to determine the winner.

Two electoral council members and one deputy approved the results despite disputes over the razor-thin difference in the vote. A third council member, Marlon Ocha, was not in a video declaring the winner.

‘Honduras: I am ready to govern. I will not let you down,’ Asfura said on X after the results were confirmed.

The head of the Honduran Congress, though, rejected the results and described them as an ‘electoral coup.’

‘This is completely outside the law,’ Congress President Luis Redondo of the LIBRE party said on X. ‘It has no value.’

Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated Asfura on X, saying the U.S. ‘looks forward to working with his administration to advance prosperity and security in our hemisphere.’

Initially, preliminary results on Monday showed Asfura, 67, had won 41% of the ballot, inching him ahead of Nasralla, 72, who had around 39%.

On Tuesday, the website set up to share vote tallies with the public experienced technical problems and crashed, according to The Associated Press.

With the candidates only having 515 votes between them, a virtual tie and site crash saw President Trump share a post on Truth Social.

‘Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election,’ he wrote. ‘If they do, there will be hell to pay!’

By Thursday, Asfura had 40.05%, about 8,000 votes ahead of Nasralla, who had 39.75%, according to Reuters, with the latter then calling for an investigation.

‘I publicly denounce that today, at 3:24 a.m., the screen went dark and an algorithm, similar to the one used in 2013, changed the data,’ Nasralla wrote on social media, adding 1,081,000 votes for his party were transferred to Asfura, while 1,073,000 votes for Asfura’s National Party were attributed to him.

Asfura, nicknamed ‘Tito,’ is a former mayor of Tegucigalpa and had entered the race with a reputation for leadership and focus on infrastructure, public order and efficiency.

His win ended a polarized campaign season, with one of the defining moments of the contest being Asfura’s endorsement by Trump.

‘If he [Asfura] doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad,’ Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Nov. 28.

Before the start of voting Nov. 29, Trump also said he would pardon former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who once led the same party as Asfura. Hernandez is serving a 45-year sentence for helping drug traffickers.

In the end, the election saw the defeat of centrist former vice president of Honduras, Nasralla and left-wing Moncada, 60, who served under President Xiomara Castro. 

Moncada, a prominent lawyer, financier and former minister of national defense, focused on institutional reform and social equity.

Nasralla, a high-profile television personality turned politician, mobilized a base but fell short of converting his popularity into a winning coalition.  

He was focusing on cleaning up Honduran corruption. The Honduran presidential race was also impacted by accusations of fraud.

In addition to electing a new president, Hondurans voted for a new Congress and hundreds of local positions.

Reuters contributed to this report.

A group of 19 Democrat-led states and Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over a declaration that aims to restrict gender transition treatment for minors.

The lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; its secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; and its inspector general comes after the declaration issued last week described treatments such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and gender surgeries as unsafe and ineffective for children experiencing gender dysphoria.

The declaration also warned doctors they could be excluded from federal health programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, if they provide these treatments to minors.

The move seeks to build on President Donald Trump’s executive order in January calling on HHS to protect children from ‘chemical and surgical mutilation.’

‘We are taking six decisive actions guided by gold standard science and the week one executive order from President Trump to protect children from chemical and surgical mutilation,’ Kennedy said during a press conference last week.

HHS has also proposed new rules designed to further block gender transition treatment for minors, although the lawsuit does not address the rules, which have yet to be finalized.

The states’ lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Eugene, Oregon, argues that the declaration is inaccurate and unlawful and urges the court to prevent it from being enforced.

‘Secretary Kennedy cannot unilaterally change medical standards by posting a document online, and no one should lose access to medically necessary health care because their federal government tried to interfere in decisions that belong in doctors’ offices,’ New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led the lawsuit, said in a statement.

The lawsuit claims the declaration attempts to pressure providers into ending gender transition treatment for young people and circumvent legal requirements for policy changes. The complaint said federal law requires the public be given notice and an opportunity to comment before substantively amending health policy and that neither of these were done before the declaration was released.

The declaration based its conclusions on a peer-reviewed report that the department conducted earlier this year that called for more reliance on behavioral therapy rather than broad gender transition treatment for minors with gender dysphoria.

The report raised questions about standards for the treatment of transgender children issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and brought concerns that youths may be too young to give consent to life-changing treatments that could result in future infertility.

Major medical groups and physicians who treat transgender children have criticized the report as inaccurate.

HHS also announced last week two proposed federal rules — one to cut off federal Medicaid and Medicare funding from hospitals that offer gender transition treatment to children and another to block federal Medicaid money from being used for these procedures.

The proposals have not yet been made final and are not legally binding because they must go through a lengthy rulemaking process and public comment before they can be enforced.

Several major medical providers have already pulled back on gender transition treatment for youths since Trump returned to office, even those in Democrat-led states where the procedures are legal under state law.

Medicaid programs in just under half of states currently cover gender transition treatment. At least 27 states have adopted laws restricting or banning the treatment, and the Supreme Court’s decision this year upholding Tennessee’s ban likely means other state laws will remain in place.

Democrat attorneys general from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, Washington state and Washington, D.C., as well as Pennsylvania’s Democrat governor, joined James in the lawsuit.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A Christmas Eve jazz concert at the Kennedy Center was canceled just days after the White House announced that President Donald Trump’s name would be added to the iconic performing arts institution in Washington, D.C.

The show’s host, musician Chuck Redd, who has led the holiday ‘Jazz Jams’ at the Kennedy Center since 2006, said he called off his performance after Trump’s name was added to the facility.

‘When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,’ Redd told the Associated Press.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the Kennedy Center for comment. The Kennedy Center’s website lists the show as canceled.

The Kennedy Center’s board voted unanimously on Dec. 18 to rename the institution the ‘Trump-Kennedy Center,’ prompting swift backlash from members of the Kennedy family who said the decision undermined the legacy of President John F. Kennedy.

Maria Shriver, Kennedy’s niece, criticized the decision, calling it ‘beyond comprehension.’

Last week, workers added Trump’s name to the outside of the center, and the website’s header was changed to ‘The Trump Kennedy Center.’

Another Kennedy niece, Kerry Kennedy, vowed to remove Trump’s name from the building after he leaves office.

President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill in 1964 that designated the center as a living memorial to Kennedy following his assassination in 1963. The law prohibits the board of trustees from making the center into a memorial to anyone else or from putting another person’s name on the building’s exterior, the AP reported.

Trump was elected chairman of the Kennedy Center board in February, after removing 18 trustees appointed by former President Joe Biden.

Since Trump returned to office on Jan. 20, several artists have canceled performances at the Kennedy Center, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, who called off a production of ‘Hamilton.’

Redd has toured worldwide and performed with numerous musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, according to his website bio.

Fox News Digital has reached out to Redd for comment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

North Korea showed off its apparent progress in the development of a nuclear-powered submarine. State media released photos of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and his daughter, a potential heir, as they inspected what appears to be a largely completed hull.

The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea’s official state media, said Kim and his daughter visited the shipyard to examine the construction of what it describes as an 8,700-ton-class nuclear-propelled submarine, The Associated Press reported. Pyongyang has signaled that it plans to arm the submarine with nuclear weapons, the AP noted. Kim has said the development of the submarine is a crucial step toward the modernization and nuclear armament of his country’s navy.

The Christmas Day release of the photos marks the first time North Korean state media has shown an update on the nuclear-powered submarine since March. Earlier images mostly showed the lower sections of the vessel, the AP noted. The KCNA did not say when the photos released on Thursday were taken.

Moon Keun-sik, a submarine expert at Seoul’s Hanyang University, told the AP that the photos of a largely completed hull indicate that many of the core components are already in place, as submarines are typically built from the inside out. However, it was not immediately clear exactly how much progress Pyongyang had made.

‘Showing the entire vessel now seems to indicate that most of the equipment has already been installed and it is just about ready to be launched into the water,’ Moon, who also served as a submarine officer in the South Korean navy, told the AP. Moon added that North Korea’s submarine could be ready for testing at sea within months.

While at the shipyard, Kim condemned South Korea’s efforts to develop its own nuclear-powered submarine as an ‘offensive act,’ despite the fact that President Donald Trump has backed Seoul’s push toward the technology. Kim said South Korea’s efforts violate North Korea’s security and maritime sovereignty, according to the AP.

In October, during his tour of Asia aimed at securing investments, Trump said that the U.S. would share technology with South Korea that would allow it to build a nuclear-powered submarine. The president posted on Truth Social that the vessel would be built in Philadelphia.

‘South Korea will be building its nuclear-powered submarine in the Philadelphia shipyards, right here in the good ol’ U.S.A. Shipbuilding in our country will soon be making a BIG COMEBACK,’ the president wrote.

The White House underscored the point when it released a fact sheet in November which directly referenced Washington and Seoul’s efforts to ‘further our maritime and nuclear partnership.’

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The Department of Justice warned Tuesday that some documents in the latest batch of files it published related to Jeffrey Epstein included false and unverified information about President Donald Trump.

The DOJ wrote in a statement that the material included ‘untrue and sensationalist claims’ about the president that the FBI received ahead of the 2020 election.

‘To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already,’ the DOJ wrote on social media, adding that it published the documents because of its ‘commitment to the law and transparency.’

The documents included an email sent by an unnamed federal prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York on Jan. 7, 2020, saying Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet at least eight times in the 1990s. Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell accompanied Trump on some of the flights, and two of the flights included passengers who were ‘possible witnesses in a Maxwell case,’ the prosecutor wrote.

The U.S. attorney’s office ‘didn’t want any of this to be a surprise down the road,’ the prosecutor wrote. 

The documents also indicated a number of tips that were provided to the FBI about Trump’s alleged involvement with Epstein in the early 2000s. Trump has said he ended his friendship with Epstein before Epstein faced charges. It is unclear what was done with the information provided in the documents, or whether any of it was corroborated or used in the prosecutions of Epstein and Maxwell.

The DOJ has been sharing on a public website since Friday tens of thousands of pages of files related to Epstein’s and Maxwell’s sex-trafficking cases. Maxwell was found guilty in 2021 of trafficking minors, while Epstein died in 2019 in prison by suicide, authorities say.

Among the files was also a letter Epstein appeared to have written to former physician Larry Nassar, a convicted child molester, that was postmarked three days after Epstein died and referenced Trump.

‘Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls,’ the letter read. The document’s authenticity is unknown. Accompanying it was an FBI request to conduct a handwriting analysis of it.

The latest trove of documents came as part of the DOJ’s response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a law passed last month that imposed a 30-day deadline on the department to release all unclassified material related to the cases.

The last batch of documents included several photos of former President Bill Clinton, who was pictured in a pool and hot tub. A woman whose face was redacted was featured in the latter. A Clinton spokesperson responded by demanding the DOJ release all the files and that refusal to do so would confirm the DOJ was ‘not about transparency, but about insinuation.’ The spokesperson noted that Clinton’s name has ‘repeatedly’ been cleared by prosecutors.

The transparency bill allowed the DOJ to withhold information about potential victims and material that could jeopardize open investigations or litigation. Officials could also leave out information ‘in the interest of national defense or foreign policy,’ the bill said. But the bill explicitly directed the DOJ not to redact any details that could be damaging to high-profile and politically connected people.

The file rollout has stirred controversy as critics have aired grievances about over-redactions and the law’s lapsed deadline. Trump signed the bill into law on Nov. 19, meaning the statutory deadline for all the files to be released was Dec. 19. The DOJ has said more files are forthcoming by the new year.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on ‘Meet the Press’ on Sunday there was ‘well-settled law’ that supported the DOJ missing the bill’s deadline because of a need to meet other legal requirements, like redacting victim-identifying information.

Bill Mears contributed to this report.

The House Small Business Committee sent a letter this week to the Small Business Administration demanding answers on federal pandemic relief funds that flowed from the Biden administration to entities in Minnesota possibly connected to the massive unfolding fraud scandal.

In a letter sent Monday to SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler, the committee said it is conducting oversight into reports of fraud and concealment involving the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program, both of which were created to help small businesses survive the COVID-19 pandemic.

The letter cited public reporting and federal prosecutions tying Minnesota-based nonprofits and individuals to massive fraud schemes that drained hundreds of millions of dollars from federal programs under Democratic Gov. Tim Walz’s watch.

The letter also points out that the Minnesota nonprofit Feeding Our Future was at the center of what the Justice Department has called the largest pandemic relief fraud scheme charged in U.S. history, with 78 individuals charged as of late November in a case involving roughly $250 million in fraudulent claims as part of an overall system of fraud that prosecutors said last week could total up to $9 billion or more.

‘The SBA’s COVID lending programs were created to keep small businesses afloat during an unprecedented crisis, not to subsidize fraud,’ Small Business Committee Chairman Roger Williams, R-Texas, told Fox News Digital in a statement. 

‘Under the Biden-Harris administration, weak oversight and reckless decision-making allowed bad actors to exploit these programs and steal hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars. The Feeding Our Future case highlights the severity of these failures, and the Committee on Small Business is determined to hold those responsible accountable.’

The committee’s letter requests detailed records on PPP and EIDL loans issued to dozens of individuals and businesses tied to Minnesota-based fraud investigations, including loan amounts, disbursement dates, forgiveness decisions and internal SBA communications.

Lawmakers are also seeking all documents and communications between the SBA and Walz’s office or Minnesota state agencies during the Biden-Harris administration, arguing such records are necessary to determine whether warning signs were ignored or oversight failed.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Loeffler says she is looking forward to working with Congress to get to the bottom of the situation. 

‘Earlier this month, SBA determined that numerous Somali nonprofits indicted as part of the $1 billion pandemic fraud scandal in Minnesota received PPP and EIDL Loans totaling at least $2.5 million, including Feeding Our Future,’ Loeffler said. 

‘SBA has since broadened its investigation to uncover pandemic-era fraud across the entire state of Minnesota and looks forward to working in partnership with Congressional leaders to uncover the full depth of the abuse and deliver accountability on behalf of American taxpayers.’

The letter asks for the documents to be provided by Jan. 12, 2026.

On Tuesday, Fox News Digital first reported that Loeffler sent a letter to Walz alerting him that her agency will ‘halt’ more than $5.5 million in annual support to resource partners in the state ‘until further notice.’

Obamacare subsidies that have dominated the conversation on Capitol Hill are set to expire after Congress failed to act, but a cohort of bipartisan senators are quietly working to find a solution for when lawmakers return next year.

It has engulfed Congress since September and played a starring role in the longest-ever government shutdown. And both Republicans and Democrats tried, and failed, to pass their partisan plans to either extend or replace the Biden-era enhanced tax credits.

They are guaranteed to expire, and millions of Americans who use the subsidies are set to experience hikes to their out-of-pocket costs for healthcare that can vary widely depending on the state.

Still, some in Congress haven’t given up on the issue.

Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, held bipartisan confabs last week as lawmakers readied to leave Washington, D.C., to hash out a framework for an Obamacare fix that could meet the desires of both sides of the aisle.

There are several political landmines that the group will have to overcome, like Democrats’ demands for a relatively clean, multiyear extension of the subsidies and Republicans’ desires to add income caps and anti-fraud measures.

‘We have some momentum to enact a bipartisan bill that includes reforms,’ Collins said. ‘As you know, Senator Moreno and I convened an ideologically diverse group of both Democratic and Republican senators who met for nearly two hours on Monday night, and we’re now working on drafting a specific bill to incorporate those conversations that will include reforms as well as the two-year extension.’

The plan has yet to see the light of day, but Collins and Moreno both already have a public proposal, as do several other lawmakers in the upper chamber.

Their original plan, released earlier this month, would extend the subsidies by two years, put an income cap onto the subsidies for households making up to $200,000 and eliminate zero-cost premiums as a fraud preventive measure by requiring a $25 minimum monthly payment.

That initial offering could give a glimpse into the final product, but there are still hurdles to getting a bill on the floor that could pass.

Namely, Senate Republicans are largely against any kind of extension to the subsidies without major reforms and a built-in off-ramp to wean off the credits, which they say are rife with fraud and funnel money directly to insurance companies rather than patients.

There’s also another wrinkle in the House, where Democrats and a handful of Republicans rebelled to force a vote on their own extension to the subsidies. That bill is expected to get a vote next month.

Lawmakers see it as changing the dynamic of negotiations in the Senate, but whether it ever makes it to a vote in the upper chamber is an open question.

‘Well, we’ll see,’ Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said. ‘We’ll obviously cross that bridge when we come to it.’

Some Republicans in the upper chamber see the momentum building in the House as a pressure point on them that could further drive the conversation around the subsidies and, more broadly, healthcare.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said, ‘It will apply pressure on us, which isn’t a bad thing.’

‘I’m ready to start talking about healthcare at any time,’ Kennedy said. ‘I just don’t, I mean, I’m a pragmatist. I live in the real world, and I just don’t see a lot of appetite to make reforms. I just don’t — I see the vast majority of my Democratic colleagues just want an extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies.’

And Senate Democrats welcome the development, given that the House’s plan mirrors their own, three-year extension of the subsidies, which already failed in the upper chamber earlier this month.

‘Well, it seems to me the basic proposition is, is it progress or not? And I think it is, because what we have felt all along is the only timely tool is the tax credits,’ Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said.

As President Donald Trump rolls out his TrumpRx proposal to cut prescription drug prices, economists are raising questions about what happens when prices are capped and whether short-term savings for consumers come at the expense of future medical breakthroughs.

On Friday, Trump announced deals with nine pharmaceutical companies to lower prices on certain medications for Americans, along with $150 billion in promised new investments in domestic manufacturing and pharmaceutical research.

The announcement builds on the administration’s Trump Rx initiative, a government-run portal designed to steer consumers toward lower-cost prescription drugs offered directly by manufacturers. The program is central to Trump’s effort to tie U.S. drug prices to those paid in other wealthy countries, a policy known as ‘most favored nation’ pricing.

But economists caution that price-lowering agreements don’t eliminate costs and often shift them elsewhere, particularly into reduced drug development, delayed innovation, or higher prices in other parts of the market.

Michael Baker, director of healthcare policy at the American Action Forum, said government price setting shifts costs rather than eliminating them.

‘At the most basic level, government price setting only limits what patients pay for a drug — usually reflected in an out-of-pocket or co-insurance payment,’ Baker said. ‘This does nothing to address the overall cost of the drug, which someone still has to pay, nor does it lower the cost associated with development.’

As a result, Baker said, patients ultimately bear those costs through tighter coverage rules, fewer treatment options or reduced future innovation.

‘Patients will experience far less of the crown jewel of the U.S. healthcare system that they are currently accustomed to receiving,’ he added.

Economists say the effects of permanent price caps would also be felt upstream, in research and development.

‘We know for sure that if drug prices are capped permanently below the levels the firm would have set, that will lead to lower incentives for R&D to discover new drugs and bring them to market,’ explained Mark V. Pauly, professor of healthcare management at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Pauly added that the impact is expected to be negative, but its scale — including how many drugs might never be developed and their potential value — remains highly uncertain.

‘I do not know the answer, but I know for sure no one else does either,’ he added.

Others argue the administration’s approach avoids the most damaging forms of price control.

Ed Haislmaier, an expert in healthcare policy and markets at The Heritage Foundation, said recent agreements appear to involve companies trading lower prices for benefits such as expanded market access or relief from other costs, including tariffs.

‘In such cases, companies are likely calculating that revenue losses from lower prices will be offset by revenue gains from more sales,’ Haislmaier told Fox News Digital.

‘The kind of government price controls that are most damaging to innovation are ones that limit the initial price a company can charge for a new product. That is the situation in some countries, but fortunately not yet the in the United States,’ he added.

Ryan Long, Paragon’s director of congressional relations and a senior research fellow, suggested that pricing pressure abroad could force foreign governments to shoulder a greater share of drug development costs.

Long said this strategy would lead ‘to lower prices for American consumers without sacrificing U.S. leadership in biopharmaceutical innovation that leads to new treatments and cures.’

Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest is very much like a circus, and I mean that in the best possible way. A circus can travel anywhere, put up its tents and put on a show.

The scale of last weekend’s event in Phoenix was nothing short of monumental, with 31,000 in attendance. That isn’t so far off of the estimated 50,000 souls who went to the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

To put it bluntly, TPUSA, along with other organizations, are capable of producing a much-needed midterm convention and a city like Phoenix, which hosted the conservative confab admirably, is exactly where it should be held.

As I’ve written in this column before, a midterm GOP conventionmidterm GOP convention, though a tad unconventional as a concept, is exactly what Republicans need to put Trump and his policy wins front and center before the electorate.

John and Lucy, a couple in their 40s who I met at the event, told me it was their first AmFest.

‘The energy is amazing,’ Lucy said. ‘I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect this.’

John concurred, saying, ‘This is like a rock concert, fireworks and loud music, I think it gets everyone pumped up.’

The atmosphere at AmFest was a whizzing and whirring technicolor explosion of light and sound, all resounding toward the goal of forwarding the conservative movement.

There is little doubt that 10 minutes at a pulsating and intense live event like Amfest – or a Trump rally – is worth 10 days of on-screen ads. It hits attendees in each of their five senses, and 50,000 may not sound like much, but that’s a veritable army to send back home in an off-year election.

One eager young conservative I met, Matt, who is studying finance in grad school and sports what might now be called the TPUSA mustache, told me, ‘I’d totally go to a midterm convention. Hell, I’d just go for the parties.’

That may sound a bit shallow to some, but it also sounds like exactly the kind of positive energy that a winning political movement needs.

When it comes to the question of where to hold a midterm convention, Phoenix can teach would-be convention planners a lot about the key question of location, location, location.

In places like New York City or Chicago, AmFest would have brought out hundreds of protesters, including many of the dangerous Antifa variety. Even vastly smaller events like a recent Mom’s For Liberty conference in Philadelphia attracted angry mobs.

In Phoenix, I never saw more than a dozen or so, and they were far more silly than menacing.

It’s worth noting that the local news channels did choose to focus almost as much attention on this bedraggled band of apparently unemployed naysayers as they did the tens of thousands inside the event.

Funny that.

But around the clean and very pretty downtown of soft light and perfect temperatures, one felt little to no resentment or pushback at the sudden flood of red MAGA hats and sparkly Trump outerwear. Everything was cool.

I asked one of my Uber drivers, a longtime Phoenix resident, why he thought the city was so welcoming in this way.

‘Nobody is uptight about politics. Everyone has weird ideas, we have weird politicians,’ he told me, laughing at his own joke for moment before adding, ‘It’s always been like this.’

Phoenix is not the only prime location for a midterm convention. Oklahoma City is another, as is Nashville. These are thriving places with better than average governance that truly do highlight the accomplishments of the Trump administration.

JD VanceJD Vance told the crowd at AmFest, ‘Why do we penalize corporations that ship American jobs overseas? Because we believe in the inherent dignity of human work and every person who works a good job in this country.’

The best place to sell that very popular message is in the smaller American cities where the jobs are being created, not one of the great metropolises still clinging to the dream that one day everyone can just work for the government.

As of now, the GOP has somewhere just north of seven months to put together a midterm convention, but the good news is that it is also flush with campaign cash. And the conservative movement has organizations like TPUSA that are capable of coming together to pull it off.

If Republicans want to hold onto Congress and give Trump a runway for his final two years, then their first priority for the coming fall should be to bring the circus back to town.