Voters remembered Laken Riley, Trumps new cabinet approach and other commentary

Conservative: Voters Remembered Laken RileyLaken Riley’s “murder was a direct result of Biden’s border policy,” thunders the Washington Examiner’s Byron York.“Biden and top administration officials had pretty much ignored the case” until the the State of the Union Address, when he still “mangled Riley’s name — he called her ‘Lincoln’ — and then angered his own progressive Democratic supporters when he ad-libbed that Riley had been killed by ‘an illegal.’ ” Donald Trump “mentioned Riley’s name often in his campaign appearances,” promising “a border crackdown, and everybody knew he would do it because, in his first term, he enormously reduced the number of illegal crossers.” Now her killer’s trial has shown “both the appalling consequences of an open border and why the issue was important for so many millions of voters.”From the right: Trump’s New Cabinet ApproachPresident-elect Donald Trump’s plan for his Cabinet is “far more consistent, and potentially transformative,” than many realize, argues Ben Domenech at The Spectator: He’s picking “communicators, not administrators” whose skills “are less about the unsexy business of corralling bureaucrats” and more “about being experienced advocates to a public audience on behalf of Trump’s agenda.” He can pair them “with solid deputies expected to do the tough behind the scenes work of upending the administrative state.” That is: “Leave policy making to the nerds” and “pick the people with the capability to make the best case for” those policies.Republican: Unleash the Wrecking BallWith progressives in retreat, a second Trump administration can “take a wrecking ball to the Washington establishment” as well as make “deep cuts to federal spending and an overhaul of the bloated bureaucracy,” cheers USA Today’s Nicole Russell.

That wrecking ball will be “Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk an...