Two Guys Without Shirts

Good afternoon. This is the Final NOTUS newsletter for February 17, 2026. You can get it in your inbox every day by signing up here — it’s free!

The Latest

Donald Trump blamed the ‘radical left’ for the sewage spill in the Potomac, saying Govs. Wes Moore and Abigail Spanberger and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser must fix the problem “IMMEDIATELY,” or he’ll bring in “true Patriots” to do it for them.

• The head of D.C.’s Department of Energy and Environment said that he’d eat fish plucked from the Potomac, the E. coli concerns notwithstanding. The department quickly walked back his remarks.

CBS denied it told Stephen Colbert he couldn’t air an interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. “The show was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule,” the company said. The Talarico interview now has over 2.6 million views on YouTube — gaining likely many, many more eyeballs than it would have otherwise.

The U.S. and Iran have agreed on ‘a set of guiding principles’ for further discussions, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Iranian state television after the two sides met for three hours in Geneva today.

Trump said Japan will invest in three ‘tremendous’ projects in the United States: an oil-and-gas facility in Texas, a power-generation project in Ohio and a critical minerals facility in Georgia.

• “The scale of these projects are so large, and could not be done without one very special word, TARIFFS,” the president said in a Truth Social post.

The Hill

The House and the Senate are on recess, but Senate Democrats have sent the White House a new counterproposal on reforming immigration enforcement and ending the DHS shutdown.

House Democrats said Randy Fine should be censured for saying that he would choose dogs over Muslims.

The Administration

A federal judge said ICE can’t re-detain Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia because there’s no “good reason” to believe it has a plan to successfully deport him anytime soon.

The Department of the Interior is appealing a court order requiring it to restore slavery exhibits it removed from the President’s House in Philadelphia.

• A federal judge called Interior’s actions Orwellian. Interior called the judge’s ruling “unnecessary judicial intervention,” insisting that “updated interpretive materials providing a fuller account of the history of slavery” were going to be installed anyway.

Kristi Noem’s spokesperson is leaving DHS. As Politico notes, Tricia McLaughlin has aggressively defended the administration’s approach to immigration enforcement.

Pete Hegseth ordered the firing of a top Pentagon spokesman. The New York Times says Hegseth blamed Col. Dave Butler “for news articles late last year that compared him unfavorably to Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll.”

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