Jim Antle, the magazine’s executive editor, brings to life the pages of the Washington Examiner’s magazine in the show Inside Scoop. Each episode features exclusive insight from the article authors and expert analysis.
This week, Antle gives his take on President Donald Trump’s messaging to voters and how it will only get Trump and the Republican Party so far. The political risk is the message may not land the way the White House intends. Antle gives the example of when former President Joe Biden tried to use “Bidenomics” branding to his advantage and tried to convince voters the inflation they were feeling was transitory.
“Voters didn’t believe him, and they thought he was out of touch as a result,” Antle said. “President Trump risks a similar fate, having voters think that he’s out of touch with the state of the economy.”
Antle believes Trump’s tactic of blowing off the high prices by saying the country is doing great economically is not sitting well with the public.
“Voters know what their own personal cost of living is like,” Antle said. “It’s very difficult for any messaging or any campaign ad to really change their perceptions of that.”
Next in the show, Antle sits down with deputy commentary editor Sean Durns to discuss Oct. 7 three years later and Israel’s long quest for defensible borders.
“Israel is still living with the ramifications of Oct. 7 every day,” Durns said. “I think that the Oct. 7, both the massacre and the wars that have followed, have remade the Middle East in a fashion that we haven’t seen since 1967 in the Six-Day War.”
The attack has had a lasting impact on broader strategic questions facing Israel, including security along its borders and the changing regional balance of power.
“Israel right now has scored a series of military successes against Hamas, against Hezbollah, and against Iran itself,” Durns said. “Right now, Israel is, I think, unquestionably the military superpower in the Middle East.”
Lastly in the show, Zachary Faria writes how the share of young Americans who identify as having various nontraditional sexualities or “gender identities” is declining.
“An absolute shock for LGBT activists who did not understand that those increases were being driven by social contagion,” Faria said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s youth risk survey of high schoolers has recorded a drop in “LGB” identification (lesbian, gay, and bisexual) among ninth through 12th graders. That drop is driven by a sizable decline in the share of high school girls who identify as bisexual, including a decline from a peak of 26% in 2021 to 13% in 2025 among female high school freshmen.
This comes as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual campus survey of undergraduates shows students are feeling less depressed and anxious. A report from the Centre for Heterodox Social Science found evidence that improved mental health has reduced bisexual, transgender, and queer identifications among students aged 14-25.
UNIVERSITIES ARE STUDYING THEIR PROBLEMS, BUT CAN THEY FIX THEM?
“The social contagion was obvious to anyone paying attention, though the LGBT movement fought any insinuation that there wasn’t some natural LGBT awakening among nearly half of the youth population,” Faria said. “The progressive movement’s takeover of the culture in 2020, amplified by TikTok, has waned as the years have passed, leading to an unsurprising decline in the number of young people seeking acceptance as supposed members of the movement.”
Tune in each week at washingtonexaminer.com and across all of our social media platforms to go behind the headlines in the Washington Examiner’s magazine show, Inside Scoop.