President Donald Trump on Sunday wished all Americans an Easter filled with "peace and joy," then unleashed on his detractors in politics and the courts who he said are blocking his agenda and putting the country at risk.

In America, while a rising number of women are dying because doctors refuse to treat their miscarriages or are arrested for having them, where millions of women may lose hard-won voting rights while others are eradicated from public life and historical record because of their gender, six rich women did what rich people do best in perilous times: blissfully abscond to the safety of their own private estates or islands or yachts — or, in this case, spaceship — and flaunt their wealth to the masses.

Americans are feeling increasingly stressed about politics amid assassination attempts, a late-breaking candidate change, debate drama, and legal battles. In APA’s 2024 Stress in America survey, 77% of U.S. adults said the future of our nation was a significant source of stress in their lives (Stress in America 2024, APA).

The United States Constitution offers Americans “a way to address common problems across lines of difference,” said Yuval Levin, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

“It gives us different mechanisms and institutions for dealing with each other when we disagree, and therefore for turning difference and disagreement into something constructive,” added Levin, a former George W. Bush administration official.

The federal agency that sent out an email over the weekend asking workers what they accomplished last week can't fire those workers for not responding, claims an amended lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of federal employees.

Why it matters: It's the latest potential legal stumbling block for DOGE and Elon Musk's slash-and-burn workforce strategy.

For many years, the conventional wisdom was that only highly biased, less educated media consumers would put partisanship over truth – in other words, they would believe news that confirmed their worldview, regardless of whether it was true. Then, studies done in the past few years showed that media consumers of all backgrounds put truth above partisanship, with a 2021 review paper claiming that the veracity of the news was more than four times more impactful than whether it confirmed a participant’s political beliefs.

Venezuela’s foreign minister on Monday accused opponents of President Nicolás Maduro as being linked to damages at the country’s diplomatic facilities in five nations.

Foreign Minister Yvan Gil in a statement said the vandalism was coordinated by grassroots groups known as “comanditos” — meaning small commandos — but he did not offer any evidence to back up the accusation, which comes three days after Maduro was sworn in to a third six-year term, despite credible evidence of his election defeat.

As we close out 2024, something important is unfolding in America that hasn’t happened in many years: We’re more united in our outlook about our country’s institutions. There is rising and perhaps unexpected alignment between Americans of different walks of life, from left to right. Granted, this alignment may at first glance seem like a problem, for what unites us, increasingly, is what we distrust.

Merriam-Webster’s decision to name “polarization” as 2024’s ‘word of the year’ certainly feels spot on. Of course Americans are divided into “two sharply distinct opposites,” right? and of course our beliefs are at “opposing extremes.”

After the November election, a rowdy debate erupted in online spaces over whether it's acceptable to cut off family and friends because of how they voted. Supporters of Kamala Harris expressed a range of views, from a reluctance to burn bridges to a "screw 'em all" mentality. "It's okay to shame someone for doing something shameful," feminist writer Jessica Valenti argued on Instagram. Shunning those who voted for Donald Trump, she added, was "a reasonable response by those of us who are disgusted, anxious, and afraid."