Elon Musk blames 'snake' White House aide for rift with Trump
The media saw it as the man in charge of vetting White House employees not being looked into himself, while Musk saw it in a different way, writing on X Wednesday night: 'He's a snake.' Musk's post remains up which is notable given the Tesla CEO has apologized for going 'too far' in his wild statements regarding Donald Trump during their falling out.
When DailyMail.com reached out to the White House, they defended Gor's (pictured) credentials and a White House official noted that he helped Musk get many of his preferred DOGE employees installed in Washington. 'Mr. Gor is fully compliant with all applicable ethical and legal obligations. His security clearance is active, any insinuation he doesn't maintain a clearance is false.' said White House Counsel David Warrington. Nonetheless, several prominent officials defended Gor's work in the second Trump administration.
JD Vance added: 'Sergio has led the effort to ensure committed, principled America First advocates staff the President's government. He's done a great job, and will continue to do so. Sergio is a vital member of the team and he has helped President Trump put together an Administration that is second to none,' White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said. 'As a long-time advisor, there is nobody more capable of ensuring the government is staffed with people who are aligned with the mission to make America great again and work towards implementing the President's agenda.'
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called The New York Post's original story 'sad' and 'baseless gossip' and called Gor a 'trusted advisor to President Trump.' Trump's surprise decision to change Musk's preferred pick to lead NASA may have done more to fuel the historic blowup between the two men than previously known. The president canceled his nomination of Jared Isaacman as NASA's administrator after Musk officially left the White House on Friday.
Isaacman, a billionaire, pilot and astronaut, was close with Musk and even flew to space with Musk's Dragon program on Operation Polaris Dawn in 2024 . But he had a history of donating funds to Democrats, including recent Democratic candidates who ran against GOP senators Tim Sheehy of Montana and Bernie Moreno of Ohio in 2024. Despite his donations, Isaacman was approved by the Senate committee in April and was expected to get confirmed this week in the Senate.
But Trump's advisor Gor reportedly delivered Trump a list of Isaacman's donations to Democrats. Gor did not appreciate Musk's involvement in personnel matters, the report noted, as they had a tense relationship. 'This was Sergio's out-the-door '[expletive] you' to Musk,' one White House official said. Trump and Musk spoke about Issacson's record prior to their press conference last Friday.
Despite their conversation, Trump pulled Issacson's nomination on Saturday. 'After a thorough review of prior associations, I am hereby withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman to head NASA,' Trump wrote on his Truth Social site.
Musk responded to the news with disappointment 'It is rare to find someone so competent and good-hearted,' Musk wrote of Isaacman on X. The president mused Thursday that Musk's personal attacks might have been trigged by his decision. 'I know that disturbed him He wanted and rightfully recommended somebody that I guess he knew very well. I'm sure he respected him, to run NASA. But I didn't think it was appropriate. He happened to be a Democrat, like totally Democrat,' Trump said, adding that the administration had the right to nominate a Republican to the position.
As the person in charge at the White House personnel office, Gor is a powerful aide that is rarely crossed as he influences who is allowed to work in the administration. Gor, a long-time loyal Deputy Chief of staff to Sen. Rand Paul, left in 2019 to serve as Chief of Staff to Trump Victory Finance Committee.
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The Guardian
33 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The Rev William Barber's ‘moral movement' confronts Trump's America. Can it work?
On 2 June, at St Mark's Episcopal church in Washington DC, people packed the sanctuary – elders in denim jackets, seminarians in collars, organizers clutching clipboards. Some had come in from North Carolina; others walked from their homes just a few blocks away. The seats were full, so the crowd lined the aisles and leaned against the red-brick walls beneath stained-glass windows that cast streaks of light across the floor. It was the first Moral Monday of the summer – a tradition of weekly, nonviolent protest that began in North Carolina in 2013 and now serves as the beating heart of the Rev William Barber's national movement to end poverty and systemic injustice. 'I am not afraid,' the congregation sang. They clapped in rhythm. They swayed in place. Their voices, layered and lived in, reverberated through the rafters: 'I would die for liberation, because I know why I was made.' It was part worship, part invocation, part warning. They folded into the center of the sanctuary as they sang covenants of nonviolence – pledges to neither resist arrest nor retaliate, to remain disciplined and dignified in the face of confrontation. One organizer stepped forward and asked them to consider the gravity of what they were saying. 'In every cell of your body,' he said, 'do you believe that?' Barber, the co-chair of the revived Poor People's campaign, a national movement to challenge inequality in all its forms through moral protest and policy change, has spent years preparing people for moments like this. Barber draws on a tradition that views justice as a covenant rather than charity, as a sacred demand to confront moral rot. Right now, that means challenging the Trump administration's second-term agenda – and the Republican-controlled Congress advancing legislation that would slash Medicaid, food assistance and public education, while simultaneously giving tax breaks to some of the wealthiest Americans – or, what Barber has simply called 'policy murder', a wholesale dismantling of services for the poor and vulnerable. But Barber's battle is both a moral rebellion against Trump's America and against the deeper architecture of inequality that has survived every administration. His movement doesn't simply resist a president. It challenges a political theology that weds nationalism to capitalism and cloaks exploitation in scripture. In Barber's view, Trump isn't the disease – he's the symptom of a nation that never fully confronted its sins. 'Jesus was not crucified because he was just talking about private sin,' he told me. 'He was crucified because he turned over the money tables. That's where government and religion had come into an unholy relationship, and were robbing from the poor.' In a sermon the day before, Barber had turned to 2 Kings – to four lepers outside a besieged city, caught between certain death and uncertain deliverance. 'Why sit we here until we die?' they ask, before rising to move toward the enemy camp. That movement, Barber reminded his audience, is what made the miracle possible. The lepers rose to risk the unknown and found the enemy had already left, leaving behind food, shelter and silver. Deliverance had already come; it just took the marginalized to move first. The US is in its own such moment, Barber said. 'This is murder by policy,' he preached, pointing to the $1.1tn in proposed cuts to healthcare, food aid and climate infrastructure. 'We cannot stay here and die.' Organizers passed protest signs around the sanctuary like communion: Fund Life, Not Death. Our Faith Demands Justice, Not Policy Murder. Handouts followed: 13.7 million people are at risk of losing health insurance. Eleven million at risk of losing food assistance. Billions redirected from public programs to tax breaks for corporations, defense contractors and deportation forces. Congress was deliberating over what Barber calls a 'big, bad, ugly, disgusting, deadly budget', and they wanted to take a moral stand. The room was intentionally diverse – it's what Barber calls a fusion movement, rooted in the idea that poor and working people across race, religion and region have a moral force capable of reshaping the nation. They prayed. They assigned roles. Some would march. Some would risk arrest. All would bear witness. Slowly, deliberately, the congregation began to move. First, those in wheelchairs; then the people along the walls peeled off. Then, one section at a time, released with care – no rush, no clamor. They lined up two by two, like they were boarding an ark. It was a practiced procession, not chaos. The organizers had been clear: move like the black-and-white footage you've seen, like those who marched before you – with order, with discipline, with conviction. 'When politicians and priests bless policies that hurt the poor,' Barber said, 'that's when the prophets have to rise.' For Barber, this is the prophet's role: to expose, to indict and to force a moral reckoning in the public square. The structure of his movement's actions, the insistence on grounding resistance in both scripture and strategy, is shaped by a long religious protest tradition in the US. Now, under a second Trump term, with safety nets unraveling and rights under siege, that witness feels urgent again. As the movement experiments with decentralized leadership, more youth recruitment and a sharper digital presence, it will have to decide: is it a movement to awaken the conscience, or to seize the wheel? Can this movement still meet the scale of today's coordinated assault on democracy, rights and the poor? Barber met the demonstrators at the corner of East Capitol St NE and 1st St SE, where the procession paused before the slow walk towards the steps of the supreme court. He stood with his cane in hand, a white stole slung over his shoulders that read: Jesus was a poor man. He joined the group like a hinge between past and present. No microphone. No grand announcement. Just a nod, a steadying breath, and then a turn toward the supreme court. Passersby smiled and posed for selfies, unaware or unbothered by the stakes. The procession kept moving, singing as they went. The air filled with hymns and the weight of memory. At the court steps, the crowd swelled; marshals implored folks to move closer. They sang battle hymns through the speaker system, a thread of the sacred pulled taut across the concrete. The day was structured to echo the civil rights movement, orderly, solemn and visually potent. When Barber took the mic, he drew on the movement's rhetorical authority as well. 'We gather here not in protest alone,' Barber said, 'but in prophetic power. We stand not just as people of faith, but as stewards of moral memory. Injustice has written itself into the budget lines, and silence is not an option when lives hang in the balance of a ledger.' Barber reminded the crowd that the country's wounds were not just policy failures; they were moral abscesses. 'There can be no healing of the soul of America without healing the body,' he said. Not while people are starving. Not while they're uninsured. Not while injustice is passed off as fiscal responsibility. He said something similar in 2020, in the days after Biden was elected president and many people across the nation released what felt like four years of held breath. Biden called for unity; Barber pushed back. 'There has to be division before there can be healing,' he said. In Barber's theology, peace doesn't mean calm. It means justice. False unity, he warned, is not reconciliation – it's complicity. And that is the deeper challenge beneath Barber's movement: not just to resist one budget, or even one party, but to confront the country's underlying sickness: its habit of mistaking cruelty for order, and order for peace. 'They say they're cutting waste, fraud and abuse. But what they're saying is it's wasteful to lift people fraudulent to help them live, and abusive to make sure they have healthcare,' he said. For a moment, it felt like the church services I'd grown up in. Come on, Barber! a clergyman shouted. Yessuh! a resonant voice rang from the other side of the crowd. By the time Barber started whooping – stretching his syllables as his voice reached a thunderous crescendo – the crowd had been whipped into a passionate holler. Barber told stories of movement members who died without care – Pam in Alabama, Jade in North Carolina – who called him not for comfort, but for commitment. Don't quit, they said. 'They had the courage to fight even while they were dying,' he said. 'We ought to have the courage to fight while we're living.' Then he slowed and asked a simple question to those gathered: 'What will you do with the breath you have left?' The question hung in the air. He didn't wait for an answer. A few days later, he told me why it sticks with him. 'That was George Floyd's cry. That was my brother's cry – he died in his 60s, waiting on healthcare. That was the cry of people during Covid: 'I can't breathe.' That's what I hear when I say that,' he told me. 'The breath you have left – that's what you've been given. That's what you owe.' Breath was a gift and a responsibility. 'We're not gonna sit here and let healthcare die,' he said. 'We're not gonna sit here and let living wages die. We're not gonna sit here and let democracy die. It's time to live. It's time to stand. It's time to speak. To protest. To live justice.' The line echoed down 1st Street. Whether it reached the halls of power was another question. Barber has always insisted this movement isn't built for the news cycle. 'Movements are not driven by whether the media covers it,' he told me. 'They're driven by whether it's right. You don't build fusion coalitions because it's sexy, you build it because it's necessary.' The spotlight matters, though. And as the glare has dimmed since 2020, so too has the movement's leverage in elite policy spaces. For Obery Hendricks, a professor in the department of religion at Columbia University, the tension is theological and tactical. Barber speaks from the Black prophetic tradition, a tradition that calls out injustice with moral clarity. But clarity alone isn't always enough. 'Too often, prophetic rhetoric is co-opted as performance,' Hendricks told me. 'It becomes poetry without praxis.' But even when the national spotlight is not focused on the organization, that hasn't stopped the Poor People's campaign from lining up in moral opposition to what it sees as destructive policy across the country. 'People say, where's the movement?' Barber told me. 'We say, where are you? The movement is here. Maybe you're just not paying attention.' Fusion organizing in 2025 isn't theory – it's practice. Amazon workers marching with choirs in Alabama. Climate activists linking arms with veterans on Capitol Hill. Disability advocates and union reps shaping policy in North Carolina. Barber's once-local campaign is now connected with movements across the country, from Georgia's voting rights drives to Los Angeles's housing struggles. Sometimes, the actions pay off. Inside of St Mark's, I met Emma Biggs, a childcare advocate from North Carolina who had made the trip to DC for the rally. She had joined similar protests before. In June of last year, she was among those who were arrested inside the state legislature while protesting a looming childcare shortfall. The state legislature had passed a stopgap funding bill by the time protesters were released. To Vaughn A Booker, a scholar of religion and African American history at the University of Pennsylvania, though, the power of Barber's model lies more in its moral insurgency than the results it produces. 'He has this style that's like a preacher reading out the names on judgment day. He's not just naming problems. He's naming people, policies and outcomes,' Booker said. 'It lands differently when it comes from the pulpit.' And maybe that's the point. In an era of institutional drift, moral confrontation remains a kind of clarity. 'Moral discourse may not be a dominant mobilizer anymore,' he said. 'But that was always the case. The prophets didn't expect to win. They expected to witness.' Barber echoed the sentiment. Bearing moral witness matters even when it doesn't automatically produce results, because failing to show up at all cedes ground unnecessarily. 'A moral fight is one that you have to engage, because not to engage is to risk damage that might not be reversible,' he said. 'If a group of politicians were going to crucify voting rights and crucify healthcare, then every crucifixion needs a witness.' Not everyone will be reachable through scripture, though. Whereas nearly half of Americans attended weekly religious services at the height of the civil rights movement, only about 30% of Americans do so now, according to a recent Gallup poll. Barber sees the rising suspicion of moral language, and the growing distance from the church, but he doesn't see it as an obstacle; rather, he sees an opportunity. 'Young people are not leaving the faith because they don't want justice,' he told me. 'They're leaving because we've too often offered them religion without justice, and theology without truth.' So, he remains committed to preaching in public, to claiming a tradition that doesn't just soothe, but disrupts with the intent of building a kind of moral pressure. Barber believes the system has rotted at its core. It's why he often refers to a sickness in the country's body, a deterioration of its heart – but he also believes it has the capacity to be reformed, and is drawing on a prophetic tradition to push it towards change. 'He's operating within the system,' Booker told me. 'He's not outside of it burning it down. He's trying to get the system to live up to its stated values.' Barber's strategy mirrors that of Martin Luther King Jr a generation before: not to write legislation personally, but to focus enough attention on a moral crisis that the system has to respond. The marches weren't meant to replace lawmaking, but to expose it – to show where justice had failed, and to make action unavoidable. Barber began a labored walk to the Capitol. A woman caught up to him quietly and asked if he had a moment to speak. His eyes were forward, fixed on the entrance. 'If you don't mind,' he said gently, 'I'm trying to focus on what I'm doing.' She apologized and nodded, but had to say her piece. She walked beside him and told him that the A was missing from DEI – the A for accessibility. So many movements, she said, leave out people with disabilities. People who walk with a limp. Barber smirked. 'Oh, people like me?' he said. The procession stopped and Barber, alongside a small group, descended down the elevator. This is where conviction met cost. At the Capitol rotunda, the group prayed with the purpose of arrest. Suvya Carroll, a disability rights advocate born with cerebral palsy, clutched a Bible. Carroll told Barber she and her friend were there because 'people like us always get left out. But we believe this movement sees us.' As Capitol police moved in, she was arrested along with Barber and five others. Barber later reflected on Carroll's arrest in particular: 'That child looked the Capitol police in the eye and said: 'I'm ready.' And we all prayed. Right there, in the middle of that dome. And I thought, Lord, if this doesn't matter, what does?' The arrest was symbolic – the third time Moral Monday activists had been detained since April – but it also surfaced a deeper truth. The witness came from many, but the weight still fell on one. When Barber turned toward the elevator, others followed. And once inside the rotunda, all eyes returned to him. As questions swirl around the future of his organization, a harder one remains: how long can a movement built on moral clarity lean on a single voice? Barber's voice remains central, but the campaign's future may depend on how well it distributes that moral authority across a broader base. If the theology is prophetic, the structure has to be plural. Barber's protest is grounded not in outcome, but in obligation. He's asked: what will you do with the breath you have left? For Barber, that's not just a question. It's a way to keep moving. 'This country gets amnesia,' he told me. 'We forget. That's why prophetic work is not about a moment. It's about building a memory that resists the lie.' Even though he's become a brand, he's trying to build a witness. 'I don't want people to follow me, I want them to follow the truth,' he said. 'Prayer,' he likes to say, 'is never the end of protest. It's the beginning of a demand.' That day in the rotunda, his prayer echoed through marble. Maybe it reached no one. Maybe it moved someone. But it was heard. That's the point of prophecy. Not certainty. Witness.
The Guardian
35 minutes ago
- The Guardian
I chaired the FCC. The 60 Minutes settlement shows Trump has weaponized the agency
It is time to unfurl the 'Mission Accomplished' banner at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Paramount Global, the parent of CBS Television, has agreed to pay $16m to settle a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Presumably, the FCC can now cease its slow-walking of the Paramount-Skydance Media merger. Just two days after the president took office, the agency's new chair, Brendan Carr, inserted the FCC into the issues in the Trump lawsuit that alleged 'news distortion'. As the New York Post headlined: 'Trump's FCC pick Brendan Carr says '60 Minutes' editing scandal could affect Paramount-Skydance merger review.' That lawsuit was filed in the final week of the 2024 presidential campaign under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a statute historically used against false advertising. The case was filed in a single-judge federal district court that one legal publication characterized as 'a favored jurisdiction for conservative legal causes and plaintiffs'. CBS characterized the case as 'without merit'. The 60 Minutes broadcast aired in October; the day before, a different excerpt had appeared on Face the Nation. Soon after, the Center for American Rights – a group that describes itself as 'a public interest law firm dedicated to protecting Americans' most fundamental constitutional rights' – filed a complaint at the FCC alleging CBS had engaged in 'significant and substantial news alteration'. The complaint was dismissed as seeking 'to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment'. Immediately upon becoming the FCC chair, Carr reversed that decision and ordered a formal proceeding on the matter (but let stand the dismissal of a complaint against a local Fox station over its 2020 election coverage). The election of Trump and the installation of a Trump-appointed FCC chair transformed the Paramount/CBS merger from a review of the public interest merits of the transfer of broadcast licenses into a broader question that included the 60 Minutes editing. Carr told an interviewer: 'I'm pretty confident that the news distortion complaint over the 60 Minutes transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction.' The formal paperwork for FCC approval of the license transfers was submitted 10 months ago, on 6 September 2024. Now that the lawsuit has been settled, it will be interesting to see how quickly the FCC acts. The CBS case is just one example of the tactical leverage the Trump FCC regularly exerts over those it regulates. Carr, who wrote the FCC chapter in the 'Project 2025' Maga blueprint, has not been shy about using this authority to achieve such political goals. Even before formally assuming the FCC chair position, Carr began exercising chair-like authority to advance the Maga agenda. This began with a letter to the CEOs of Alphabet (Google and YouTube), Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Microsoft and Apple alleging: 'you participated in a censorship cartel … [that is] an affront to Americans' constitutional freedoms and must be completely dismantled.' Going beyond traditional FCC authority, he threatened: 'As you know, Big Tech's prized liability shield, Section 230, is codified in the Communications Act, which the FCC administers.' Carr suggested he might investigate whether those editorial decisions were made in good faith. Recently, Carr conditioned the approval of Verizon's acquisition of Frontier Communications on Verizon agreeing to drop its corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Continuing his anti-diversity efforts, he launched an investigation into Comcast Corporation because it promotes DEI as 'a core value of our business'. In his pre-FCC chair days, Carr championed press freedom. In a 2021 statement, he wrote: 'A newsroom's decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official.' Once he became Trump's FCC chair, however, he not only picked up on the 60 Minutes matter, but also launched an investigation into the public broadcasters NPR and PBS 'regarding the airing of … programming across your broadcast member stations'. The FCC's regulatory authority directly covers about one-sixth of the American economy while also affecting the other five-sixths that rely on the nation's communications networks. What was once an independent, policy-based agency has been transformed into a performance-based agency, using any leverage it can discover or invent to further the Trump Maga message. Tom Wheeler was the chair of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013 to 2017
The Guardian
35 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Summer without cherry pie? Michigan's signature crop faces battery of threats
Nearly 100 years ago, north-west Michigan cherry farmers and Traverse City community leaders started a festival to promote the city and their region's tart cherry crop as a tourist destination. Now known as the 'cherry capital of the world', Traverse City's National Cherry Festival draws 500,000 visitors over eight days to this picturesque Lake Michigan beach town to enjoy carnival rides and airshows, and to eat cherries. It also sparked a thriving agrotourism industry amid its rolling hills that now boasts dozens of shops, wineries, U-pick orchards, and farm-to-table restaurants helmed by James Beard-award-winning chefs. All the sunshine, hustle and bustle, however, can't hide an ugly truth: Michigan's cherry farmers are in dire straits. Climate change, development, labor shortages and tariffs threaten their ability to grow one of Michigan's signature crops. Cherries are the epitome of Michigan's 'specialty crop' production that also includes apples, asparagus and other fruit and vegetable crops. Altogether, the total economic impact of Michigan's specialty crop industry is $6.3bn, according to Michigan State University. The state overall grows 75% of the US's tart cherries, most coming from multigenerational family farmers in the unique microclimate along Lake Michigan's eastern shore, with the bulk of production in the north-west. 'Cherries are a volatile crop all of the time. But over the last 10 to 15 years, we've really seen more of those ups and downs,' says Emily Miezio, a second-generation farmer and part-owner of Cherry Bay Orchards in Leelanau county. Climate change makes early spring hazardous for northern Michigan fruit farmers. Lake Michigan's sandy soils and cool breezes are ideal for cherry production, but warmer temperatures cause trees to break dormancy earlier, making them more susceptible to late brief cold spells, such as what happened this year. A prime example of the weather volatility happened in late April when a cold snap damaged the fruit-producing flower buds. Farmers will start picking cherries in mid-July, and Dr Nikki Rothwell, extension specialist and Northwest Michigan Horticulture Research Center coordinator at MSU, estimates north-west Michigan will harvest 30m pounds, versus 100m last year. Climate change is causing other adverse weather events. Rothwell says the late-April temperatures weren't typically cold enough to harm buds, but wind accompanied the cold, which caused unexpected damage since previously scientists didn't think wind chill harmed trees. A rare hailstorm in June also caused some damage. Rothwell says an unusually dry fall may have left cherry trees susceptible as well. 'It blows my mind a little bit as a scientist because you think you can find answers in the chaos … but I feel like we're always being thrown curveballs,' she says. Land prices are rising sharply as wealthier residents move to the area seeking either primary residences or vacation homes, and developers can edge out farmers for prime orchard land, often on top of rolling hills that offer scenic vistas. Labor issues are also hampering cherry production. The supply chain relies on a mix of local and migrant labor, and there is a shortage of both. Some migrant laborers are hired through the H-2A visa, a temporary work visa for agricultural jobs, and some migrant laborers are undocumented, says Dr David Ortega, a professor at MSU's department of agricultural, food and resource economics. Cherrypicking is often done mechanically, but packing and processing relies on human labor. Ortega says producers and other stakeholders have seen how Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids make some workers afraid to show up because of deportation fears. Without enough agricultural workers, many of Michigan's specialty crops could spoil. Specialty crop farmers rely on shared equipment, facilities and workers, and this interdependency means the loss of one crop has a domino effect. Unlike farmers who grow annual crops such as grains, cherry trees can produce for nearly 30 years and farmers need to continually care for trees even when they lose money. Estimates by MSU show the land, operational and harvest costs for productive farmers is about 44 cents a pound, but last year the average farmer received 11 cents a pound for cherries. Tariffs are a double-edged sword for Michigan farmers, Ortega says. Farmers will pay more for imported fertilizer or equipment, and tariff uncertainty makes it harder to plan. However, farmers may see a slight benefit from tariffs if it raises the costs of imported cherries, as the food industry relies on imports to meet year-round consumer demand, he adds. Local retailers also work with farmers. Bob Sutherland, founder of Cherry Republic, a regional, 37-year-old cherry-focused snack and gift retailer, works exclusively with local farmers and other suppliers to promote the area's bounty. The firm's longstanding relationships means Cherry Republic can acquire enough local cherries to ensure a year-round supply. Still, the destination-retailer has allowed some cranberries and blueberries as part of their line of more than 200 products out of necessity because of climate change's unpredictability, he adds. Michigan's farmers are facing stiff odds, but Rothwell says despite all the hardships, farmers remain optimistic. 'Every spring they're like, 'this is it. This our year. We're gonna do it.' They always remain optimistic,' she says.
