AoSHQ The Morning Report
May 20, 2025
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Abraham Lincoln spoke those words in 1858, not as a metaphor, but as a warning.In Other News
The country was tearing along seams of ideology and morality. Lincoln saw it. He feared America could not endure as both a slave state and a free one. He was right.
But even then, Lincoln hoped the Union would stand. He didn’t root for secession or sabotage. He didn’t pray for Southern crops to fail or cities to burn to make his case. He confronted the moment of agony and clarity, defending a flawed system while preparing to save it from itself.
That’s what leadership once looked like.
Now, fast-forward 165 years. We are once again a house divided, this time not by geography but by worldview. One half of the political spectrum clings to a fading legacy and an aging standard-bearer. The other half fans the flames of decline, cheering for economic downturns, legal chaos, or worse, if it means stopping Donald Trump.
That’s not leadership. It’s nihilism with a press pass.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on May 5 to halt federal funding for a type of biomedical research in China and Iran, aiming to prevent the development of another pandemic like COVID-19.In Other News
Trump and some federal agencies have long theorized that the pandemic began at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which the Chinese deny.
“It can leak out innocently, stupidly and incompetently, and half destroy the world," Trump told reporters at the White House.
His executive order targeted the elimination of what is called gain-of-function, which studies how viruses become more powerful*. The United States funded that sort of research at the Wuhan lab, in the city where the initial outbreak was reported.