Former President Trump‘s reentry into public life at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Sunday exacerbates challenges for political leaders in both parties, as well as the media.

Washington has been a relatively Trump-free zone for the first 40 days of President Biden‘s administration, particularly with Trump banned from Twitter, the megaphone that allowed him to gin up news cycle after news cycle. 

The speech to a faithful crowd in Orlando, Fla., won’t bring a return to the last four years, but it did establish that Trump remains the overwhelming leader of the Republican Party and that Republicans in Congress contending with the Biden administration will have to constantly be looking over their shoulder.

It also showed he can still command some media attention, though only Fox News carried his CPAC speech live among the major cable networks.

“It’s still Trump’s party,” said Dan Eberhart, a GOP fundraiser who has been critical of Trump’s post-election rhetoric.

“Whether it remains so is going to be played out live on TV for the next two years because the media is obsessed with the question,” he added.

Trump is expected to form a super PAC and be involved in party primaries. His speech essentially represented a threat to all the Republican lawmakers who voted to impeach him.

Trump’s victory in the CPAC straw poll notwithstanding, it’s unclear whether he will run for president again in 2024. But it is clear he wants the GOP to know it’s a possibility.

Trump’s remarks at CPAC resembled his old campaign rallies and included grievances, misleading statements and attacks on his critics, all delivered to a boisterous crowd.

He renewed his false claims that he won the 2020 presidential election, saying at one point he could run for a “third” term in 2024.

Such claims led to the Jan. 6 mob of Trump supporters that ransacked the Capitol, an event that led to five deaths, including a Capitol Police officer, and the former president’s second impeachment. 

The divides over the ugly episode in U.S. history continue to eat at the Republican Party, even as it quickly and generally asserts itself under the former president. 

The attack has led to new fears about the role misinformation is playing in American life and directly led social media networks to eject Trump, something he and other Republicans are now roundly criticizing.

Clinton Watts, a distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said that Trump’s lack of presence on social media platforms makes it much harder for false claims about his election loss and other conspiracies to take hold.

“They can’t be hammered into people’s heads because you’re just not seeing him enough and they’re not spreading fast enough,” Watts said. “The conspiracy audience doesn’t know where to go to see the conspiracy and even if they go there, he’s not saying anything.”

That said, CPAC featured a number of speakers who made false claims that the election was stolen from Trump, underscoring how such theories will continue to resurface.

The Biden White House has generally sought to ignore Trump, something that could be challenging if he seeks more attention and tries to make news.

“A central part of the challenge that Biden is going to face is that he needs to position himself at the center of national deliberations about lawmaking,” said William Howell, a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. “But he needs to capture the narrative and set its terms.”

The Biden White House, by and large, has refused to engage on questions about Trump.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki declined to engage with a question about Trump’s claim that Biden had “sold out” to teachers unions during a briefing on Monday afternoon.

“I think we are going to spend more of our time focused on communicating about our agenda for the American people than responding to criticism from the former president,” Psaki said.

Trump appears poised to remain a shadow in Washington, especially when it comes to the Republican Party. Though one third of those polled said they preferred that Trump not run again for the White House, he still won the straw poll handily.

At the convention, a golden statue of Trump was wheeled around the convention hall, and the event’s agenda reflected many of the former president’s priorities with a focus on election integrity, “cancel culture” and alleged anti-conservative bias in technology companies and the press.

“The CPAC crowd is fully on board the Trump train now. The results of the 2020 elections are not up for discussion — Trump won, and the election was stolen from him,” Eberhart said, noting that narrative made it more difficult for prospective 2024 candidates like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to find an opening.

Trump discussed plans for a potential super PAC during a meeting with several political allies at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., on Thursday. Corey Lewandowski is expected to play a leading role in the endeavor, and several other former Trump campaign aides, White House officials and other allies are expected to be involved.

The super PAC would work in conjunction with Trump’s already-formed leadership PAC, Save America, which has been raking in millions of dollars since it launched last year. Through the political action committee, Trump has made endorsements for GOP candidates like former aide, Max Miller who is running against one of the Republicans who voted in favor of Trump’s impeachment earlier this year, Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez.

While Trump ruled out forming a new political party during his speech on Sunday, Republicans say that his attacks on other GOP lawmakers are counterproductive and take energy away from more effective criticism of the Democrats’ agenda.

“If he left and started his own party, the Republican Party would lose. If he runs again it’s going to be challenging for him to win a national election based on the events that unfolded after Nov. 3,” veteran Republican strategist Colin Reed said. “It’s one less lingering issue out there, but as long as he’s taking pot shots at his perceived Republican enemies, that’s where the focus is going to be here in D.C.”

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In 2013, Jose Luis Vaello-Madero moved back to Puerto Rico. He had lived and worked in New York since 1985. His wife had already moved back to the island for medical reasons; now he would join her there to help take care of her. By then, he had developed health problems as well. And so, like millions of other Americans, he sought and received benefits under the Supplemental Security Income program that his taxes had helped fund over the years.

If Vaello-Madero had moved to a remote cabin in Alaska or bought a houseboat in Florida, he would have been able to continue collecting SSI without a problem. But Congress had only authorized the SSI program in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the Northern Mariana Islands.

When the Social Security Administration learned three years later that Vaello-Madero was still receiving payments inside Puerto Rico, they stopped disbursing them. Then the agency sued him to recover the $28,081 he had already received.

Now the Supreme Court will decide if he—and the commonwealth in which he now lives—were unjustly denied access to the program by Congress. The justices agreed on Monday to hear the case at the urging of the Justice Department.

If it rules in favor of Vaello-Madero, it could open up multiple nationwide benefits programs to the island’s three million residents, who are U.S. citizens. If the court sides with the Justice Department, however the court could also take the opportunity to further entrench the colonial-era rulings that keep Puerto Ricans in what the commonwealth described to the court as a “second-class citizenship not supported in the Constitution.”

The case, United States v. Vaello-Madero, first made its way to a federal district court in Puerto Rico, where the judge sided with Vaello-Madero. Congress, Judge Gustavo Gelpí wrote in his 2019 ruling, “cannot demean and brand said United States citizen while in Puerto Rico with a stigma of inferior citizenship to that of his brethren nationwide.”

The Justice Department appealed the decision to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. A three-judge panel quibbled with Gelpí’s reasoning, but ultimately ruled that Congress had violated the equal-protection guarantees of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause by excluding U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico.

“While we respect the legislature’s authority to make even unwise decisions to purportedly protect the fiscal integrity of SSI and the federal government itself, the Fifth Amendment does not permit the arbitrary treatment of individuals who would otherwise qualify for SSI but for their residency in Puerto Rico,” Judge Juan Torruella wrote for the panel in 2020. “Even under rational basis review, the cost of including Puerto Rico’s elderly, disabled, and blind in SSI cannot by itself justify their exclusion.”

In its briefs for the Supreme Court, the Justice Department cited two precedents to support its position. First, in the 1978 case Califano v. Torres, the Supreme Court rejected a SSI claim by a Puerto Rico resident who had argued the denial violated his right to travel.

Then, in the 1980 case Harris v. Rosario, the court overturned a lower-court ruling that held Puerto Rico’s exclusion from the predecessor program to TANF did not violate the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Taken together, the two rulings strongly suggest that Congress could exclude U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico from the SSI program without violating the Constitution.

Vaello-Madero pointed out that those two decisions came without full arguments or briefings, and therefore hold less precedential weight. But he also attacked the deeper line of cases that led to them. “The legal foundation upon which Califano and Harris are built is not good law,” his lawyers told the court.

“Those cases attributed Congress’s power to discriminate against Puerto Rico to the island’s territorial status under the Insular Cases—a much-criticized line of cases that are long overdue to be overruled.” The Insular Cases, in a nutshell, are a series of rulings where the Supreme Court held the Constitution does not fully apply to territories acquired by the United States during the Spanish-American War.

In those rulings, the Supreme Court distinguished Puerto Rico from other then-territories like Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma by saying the latter were on the path to eventual statehood, while territories like Puerto Rico and Guam were not. Racism played an unambiguous factor in the distinction.

In Dawnes v. Bidwell, the first of the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court described Puerto Rico and other newfound colonial possessions as “inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought” where “the administration of government and justice, according to Anglo-Saxon principles, may for a time be impossible.”

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Royal Caribbean, giants of the cruise industry, have begun offering cruises for fully vaccinated passengers. Here’s a look at the decision they’ve taken, as well as a look at other companies offering similar opportunities.

Cruise For Vaccinated Passengers – Information for Travelers

Royal Caribbean announced that they were going to offer a cruise for fully-vaccinated passengers in May, which would make them the first cruise line to offer such an opportunity. According to the cruise line, both crew and passengers above the age of 16 are required to have received a full course of the Covid-19 vaccine in order to be able to take part in the cruise. The cruise is only available for Israeli

The cruise is scheduled to depart from Israel, and will be on Royal Caribbean’s newest ship, Odyssey of the Seas. The options on offer are three-night to seven-night round trip voyages, departing from Haifa and visiting the Greek Isles and Cyprus. Odyssey of the Sea was originally intended to sail in Rome, before making its way over to Florida, but the uncertainty of the situation in Europe is behind the change of plans.

Whilst having previously signaled their intent to vaccinate some crew members, alongside other cruise lines like Costa Cruises and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, the decision to fully vaccinate their crew is a newer development by the company. At present, there is no timeline for when this is due to take place.

Why Israel?

Israel currently is leading the races towards complete inoculation of its citizens, with around 4.6 million of its 9 million citizens having received at least one dose of the vaccine – giving the country the fastest per capita pace of vaccinations. More than a third of Israelis have received both doses.

In a statement, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Royal Caribbean’s decision to use Israel as the port of departure “a significant expression of confidence in our policy,” and “an important economic, touristic moment for the State of Israel”. A spokesperson for Royal Caribbean added “with the vaccine rollout in Israel going so well, we felt it was wonderful opportunity to work with Israel and offer sailings for the market.”

For the thousands who have had cruises cancelled in the US and elsewhere around the world, the decision provides hope and potential solutions to what has been a tricky period for customers and businesses alike.

Vaccinations In Other Travel Industry Areas

Cruise lines aren’t the only sector of the travel industry to consider vaccinations in order to continue operations. Several airlines have also committed to vaccinating their crew, in order to keep them safe and give passengers peace of mind. In February, Etihad Airways announced that they were the first airline to have 100% vaccinated crew on board, whilst Singapore Airlines joined them in this feat not long after. The question of vaccine passports for travelers is still a controversial one, yet the IATA’s Travel Pass is expected to be ready in a matter of weeks.

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