On This Day: May 4, 1776 — Rhode Island became the first American colony to formally renounce allegiance to the British Crown — two full months before the Declaration of Independence — passing its Act of Renunciation in Providence and setting the tone for the bold separation that would follow. Rhode Island, the smallest colony, was also the most stubbornly independent: it had refused to send delegates to the Stamp Act Congress, defied royal governors with particular ferocity, and would later become the last state to ratify the Constitution, holding out until threatened with trade sanctions.
The Rhode Islanders who voted for renunciation that day did not know that their step would be followed by the other twelve colonies. They acted on principle, without a guarantee that anyone else would follow. That is what courage in a republic looks like — not waiting to see which way the wind blows before you move.
This week: two Republican committee chairmen break with their own president over troop withdrawals that could hand Putin a victory. Two soldiers are missing in Morocco. Spirit Airlines is gone, and a TikToker wants the people to own the replacement. And the midterm betting markets keep moving in one direction.
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🪖 GOP Armed Services Chiefs Break With Trump Over Germany Troop Pullout: “Wrong Signal to Putin”
The Republican chairs of both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees — Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama — issued a rare joint rebuke of President Trump Saturday, warning that his decision to withdraw 5,000 US troops from Germany “risks undermining deterrence and sending the wrong signal to Vladimir Putin,” as Trump then escalated by telling reporters the drawdown would go “a lot further than 5,000” and hinting he might pull forces from Spain and Italy too, according to NBC News and Time.
NATO has formally requested urgent clarification on the drawdown timeline. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called the rift a “disastrous trend,” saying the greatest threat to the transatlantic alliance “are not its external enemies, but the ongoing disintegration of our alliance.” Germany still hosts 30,000 US troops even after the withdrawal, and Berlin’s Defense Minister called the move “expected” — but Wicker and Rogers argued the Army’s Long-Range Fires Battalion deployment was also quietly cancelled at the same time without notice to Congress, a fact the Pentagon’s statement omitted entirely, Newsweek reported.
The Founders who wrote the Constitution gave Congress — not the president alone — authority over war and military deployments precisely because they feared the consequences of a single executive making unilateral decisions about America’s military posture. When the chairs of both armed services committees, from the president’s own party, say a decision “runs counter to the intent of the law that Congress passed overwhelmingly,” that is not just a policy disagreement. It is a constitutional alarm.
🇲🇦 Two US Soldiers Missing in Morocco During Africa’s Largest Military Exercise
Two US Army service members were reported missing Saturday evening near the Cap Draa Training Area outside Tan Tan in southwestern Morocco — a remote Atlantic cliffside — while participating in African Lion 2026, the largest annual joint military exercise on the African continent, with a defense official telling Stars and Stripes the pair are believed to have fallen into the ocean during an off-duty hiking accident, as US, Moroccan, and multinational search-and-rescue teams deployed ground, air, and maritime assets in an ongoing operation, according to Stars and Stripes and AFRICOM.
The incident is not believed to be terrorism-related. African Lion 2026 involves more than 5,600 personnel from over 40 nations, running April 20 through May 8 across Morocco, Ghana, Senegal, and Tunisia — designed to strengthen collective security capabilities and interoperability with African and allied partners. No names or unit information have been released pending the outcome of the search, Al Jazeera reported.
In a week of large strategic debates about troop withdrawals and military posture, it is worth pausing to remember that behind every policy decision about where to deploy American forces are actual human beings — young men and women who went to Morocco to train alongside allies and make the world safer. Two of them are missing tonight. Their families are waiting. Our prayers are with them.
✈️ Spirit Airlines Is Dead — And a TikToker Has Raised $26M in Pledges to Buy It Back “For the People”
Spirit Airlines ceased all operations at 3:00 AM on Saturday, May 2, ending 34 years of service and stranding 44 million annual passengers without a budget carrier — the final collapse coming after a failed $500 million federal bailout request, two bankruptcies, a blocked JetBlue acquisition, and years of furloughs, pay cuts, and merger chaos — as by Saturday evening, voice actor and aviation YouTuber Hunter Peterson had launched Spirit 2.0 at letsbuyspirit.com, raising over $26 million in non-binding pledges from 36,000+ people at a $45 minimum before the site crashed under the traffic, according to Business Insider/Yahoo News.
Peterson’s pitch — modeled on the Green Bay Packers’ community ownership structure, with one member one vote regardless of investment size — went viral with 2.8 million TikTok views and spawned the trending search term “letsbuyspirit.com,” while aviation analysts note that the non-binding pledges total a fraction of the estimated $1.7 billion needed and that Peterson himself is a voice actor with no aviation or business background who built the website “in like an hour,” View from the Wing reported.
The Founders who wrote the commerce clauses of the Constitution understood that free markets, not government bailouts or viral crowdfunding campaigns, are the mechanism by which failing enterprises are replaced by better ones. Spirit failed because its business model — ultra-low fares funded by ultra-high fees — stopped working. The market will produce a replacement. Whether it will be owned by the people, private equity, or a TikToker with a dream is a question the bankruptcy court will ultimately answer.
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📊 Betting Markets Snapshot
- 2028 Presidential Winner (Polymarket, $563M+ traded):
JD Vance 19% | Gavin Newsom 17% | Marco Rubio 11% | AOC 6% | Kamala Harris 5% | Jon Ossoff 4% (Polymarket) - 2026 House Control (Polymarket):
Democrats 85% | Republicans 16% (Polymarket) - 2026 Balance of Power (Polymarket):
Democrat Sweep 49% | R Senate / D House 36% | Republican Sweep 9% (Polymarket) - Senate Control (ElectionBettingOdds avg):
Democrats 51.9% | Republicans 48.1% — still essentially a coin flip (ElectionBettingOdds)
🦞 Maine Dems Ditch the Governor — Oyster Farmer Graham Platner Now Faces Susan Collins
Gov. Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign Thursday, citing a lack of financial resources after being outspent $4.8 million to $1.5 million by political newcomer Graham Platner — a Marine veteran of four combat tours who farms oysters on the Maine coast — ending the race that national Democrats had tried to steer toward their preferred candidate in a primary stunning enough that Schumer and DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand declined to even mention Platner’s name in their statement, according to NBC News and Time.
Platner now faces Republican Sen. Susan Collins in what Democrats consider a must-win in November — but Republicans are already on offense, with the RNC calling him “a Nazi sympathizing self-proclaimed communist with a record of hate-mongering and dishonesty” and a $2 million super PAC campaign highlighting his deleted Reddit posts and a tattoo of Nazi iconography he covered up last fall after claiming he didn’t know its significance when he got it drunkenly in Croatia in 2007, The Hill and Maine Public Radio reported.
Collins has survived wave elections before. She survived 2018. She survived 2020. But she has never faced an opponent who leads her in early head-to-head polling while simultaneously being the subject of $68 million in already-booked advertising — most of it Republican. This race will test whether Maine voters want generational change badly enough to overlook a candidate whose baggage Republicans are already spending heavily to define.
💰 Crypto and AI Super PACs Are Flooding the Midterms — And Voters Don’t Trust Either Industry
A new Politico/Public First poll finds that 45% of Americans say investing in cryptocurrency is not worth the risk and 44% say AI is developing too fast — yet crypto and AI industry groups are pumping tens of millions of dollars into 2026 midterm races, with the crypto-backed Fairshake PAC and the AI-aligned Leading the Future PAC spending heavily on candidates who favor lighter regulation, even as only 9% of voters have heard of Leading the Future and just 3% recognize Fairshake, according to Politico.
In hypothetical matchups, poll respondents were significantly less likely to support candidates backed by groups pushing looser AI regulations — and political observers told Politico that once voters connect the money to the industries behind it, the backlash could be “swift.” OpenAI and Anthropic both posted record lobbying expenditures in Q1 2026, while Fairshake spent over $40 million in 2024 helping defeat Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown — who is now running again, CoinTelegraph/Politico reported.
The Founders who worried about concentrated wealth corrupting republican government would have recognized this dynamic immediately: when industries with enormous financial stakes in regulatory outcomes funnel tens of millions of dollars into elections, the question is not whether they are buying influence — it is whether voters know who is paying for the ads they are watching. Transparency is the minimum the republic owes its citizens.
🗳️ Midterm Environment Keeps Darkening for GOP — Brookings: Dems Now Trusted More on Economy
A new Brookings Institution analysis finds that for the first time since 2010, Democrats are more trusted than Republicans to handle the economy — driven by Trump approval on inflation hitting just 30%, the overall economy at 37%, and healthcare at 29% — while only 41% approve of his handling of the Iran war and 61% of Americans overall say it was a mistake to start it, with Republicans now defending 23 of the 69 most competitive House seats going into November, according to Brookings Institution.
Six special elections since 2025 have shown an average pro-Democratic swing of 15 points — consistent with wave-level performance — while the Polymarket balance-of-power market now prices a full Democratic sweep at 49%, though analysts note that Republican-drawn gerrymanders following the Supreme Court’s VRA ruling in states like Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee provide a partial offset, and the Senate map still strongly favors the GOP with 23 Republican seats up versus 12 Democratic ones, Polymarket reported.
The Founders who designed the midterm election cycle did so deliberately: they wanted the House to face voters every two years precisely so the public could render a verdict on governing performance while memories were fresh. The verdict forming right now, six months out, is not a good one for the party in power. November 3 is closer than it looks.
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🔍 Allies, Adversaries, and the Price of Pulling Back
When George Washington wrote his Farewell Address in 1796, one of his great warnings was against “permanent alliances” — the kind that drag a republic into other nations’ quarrels against its own interest. It is a passage that has been quoted, misquoted, and weaponized by every strand of American foreign policy thinking for two centuries. Isolationists love it. Realists cite it. Internationalists argue it has been taken out of context.
What Washington actually said is more nuanced than any of those camps usually acknowledge. He did not say America should have no alliances. He said alliances should serve American interests, not supplant American judgment. “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations,” he wrote, “is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” But he also warned that a republic that abandons its credibility — that makes commitments it does not keep — eventually finds itself without allies when it needs them most.
That is the question now sitting in the middle of Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops from Germany, hint at more cuts in Spain and Italy, and make clear that Europe’s failure to support the Iran war has consequences. There is a version of this argument that is reasonable: Europe has been under-investing in its own defense for decades, expecting American taxpayers to foot the bill. Germany in particular has been a frustrating ally — slow to build up its military, quick to lecture Washington on foreign policy. Trump has been making this argument since 2017, and it is not wrong.
But there is a difference between leverage and abandonment. Threatening to reduce troops to push Germany to spend more is leverage. Announcing the withdrawal while simultaneously hinting you might pull out of Spain and Italy and possibly NATO itself — with Russia still actively fighting a war in Ukraine — is something closer to abandonment. And the men whose job it is to know the difference — the Republican chairs of both Armed Services Committees — are saying publicly that this particular move crossed the line.
Roger Wicker and Mike Rogers are not doves. They are not Biden-era multilateralists who reflexively defend every alliance obligation. They are conservative defense hawks who have spent careers thinking seriously about deterrence. When they say a decision “risks undermining deterrence and sending the wrong signal to Vladimir Putin,” they are not being alarmist. They are doing their job.
This matters for the midterms too. The betting markets pricing a Democratic sweep at 49% are not just a function of inflation and healthcare. The Iran war is at 41% approval. The Germany troop decision is drawing rare cross-party criticism. A president who has governed on the premise that his instincts are better than his advisers’ consensus is now being told by his own party’s defense leadership that his instincts on this one are wrong.
The Founders who built this republic’s foreign policy architecture understood that the credibility of American commitments is itself a strategic asset — one that takes generations to build and can be lost in a single decision. As Proverbs 11:14 says: “Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.” The abundance of counselors — Wicker, Rogers, NATO, European allies — are all saying the same thing. Whether anyone is listening is a different question.
Meanwhile, two American soldiers are missing in Morocco. They were there to train with allies — to do the unglamorous, daily work of building the relationships and capabilities that make deterrence real. Whatever happens with the strategic debates in Washington, the mission those soldiers were on was the right one. Isaiah 41:10: “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
“The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.”
— George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796
The Capture of Fort Ticonderoga
Question: On May 4, 1776, Rhode Island became the first colony to renounce allegiance to the British Crown. Rhode Island was also the last state to ratify the Constitution in 1790 — only doing so under threat of trade sanctions. What was Rhode Island’s primary objection to the Constitution that caused it to hold out for so long?
A. It gave too much power to large states at the expense of small ones
B. It lacked a Bill of Rights protecting individual liberties
C. It allowed the federal government to assume state war debts
D. It did not immediately abolish the slave trade