Trump’s Foreign Policy Blitz & Foster Parent Prejudice? | 10.21.25

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President Trump applies pressure on several foreign policy fronts and locks in a critical deal with Australia.

In about a year from now, we'll have so much critical mineral and rare earths that you won't know what to do with them.

They'll be worth about $2.

I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley.

It's Tuesday, October 21st, and this is Morningwire.

President Trump's Caribbean war on drugs ramps up as he accuses Colombia of doing more to make drugs than fight them.

They are a drug manufacturing machine, Colombia, and we're not going to be part of it.

And a Christian couple in Massachusetts loses their foster care license after refusing to sign a, quote, gender-affirming policy from the state.

These are kids who have experienced untold abuse and neglect, and the idea that we would restrict where they can live based on some kind of ideological agenda, I think is outrageous.

Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire.

Stay tuned.

We have the news you need to know.

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Welcome to the table.

The weekend protesters may have cleared out, but it's shaping up to be another wild week in Washington with a major presidential focus on foreign policy.

Tim Rice is here with an update from Daily Wire's DC Bureau.

So, Tim, a busy week on Capitol Hill.

Where should we start?

Well, Georgia, I think we have have to begin with the latest on the Ukraine war.

President Trump met with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky at the White House on Friday, and while it wasn't their most contentious meeting ever, it wasn't as positive as their last.

Trump seems a little less bullish on Ukraine since his recent conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and he suggested that he's not ready quite yet to provide Ukraine with the Tomahawk missiles they've requested.

So we're going to keep an eye on that, along with a bunch of other foreign policy stories, because as our White House correspondent Mary Margaret Olihan told me, this week the White House is primarily looking abroad.

I saw some people joking that while he is a very America first president, a lot of his dealings over the past two weeks have not had to do on American soil, but actually are international affairs.

So Gaza, Argentina, Venezuela, Russia, Ukraine.

Trump talked about the Israel-Hamas situation.

There's been a lot of talk about Hamas being more violent towards its citizens and also towards Israel.

They're going to be very good.

They're going to behave.

They're going to be nice.

And if they're not, we're going to to go and we're going to eradicate them if we have to.

They'll be eradicated.

And they know that.

Now, on a more positive note, Trump had a pretty productive meeting with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday.

Mary Margaret, again, has the details.

They were signing a critical minerals and rare earths deal.

This is a huge deal.

We just got the fact sheet from the White House on it.

And they are talking about investing more than $3 billion together in these critical mineral projects over the next six months.

And the deal also includes a lot of enhanced burden sharing and making new defense investments.

So just strengthening the alliance between the United States and Australia.

But even with all this going on, the president still has time for domestic politics and recently decided to weigh in on some upcoming elections here at home.

Here's Daily Wire political reporter Cameron Arkand on Trump's late-breaking endorsement of Virginia Lieutenant Governor Winsom Earl Sears.

Yeah, so we hadn't heard too much from the president on the Virginia race.

And this is coming at a time where the race is definitely tightening.

This has to do with stuff happening lower down on the ticket involving Jay Jones, who's the Democratic Attorney General candidate.

So this is really kind of a final pitch to voters.

Now, Virginia is just one of two gubernatorial races that we have this year.

The other is right up the coast in New Jersey.

Here's Cameron again.

Jack Chittarelli ran back in 2021, came very, very close to winning that race.

Trump endorsed him back in May of this year because he was in a bit of a primary battle at that time.

And so these stateride races kind of have their own rhythm to them as opposed to more senator-congressional races.

But we could maybe see an increase of Trump's presence in these races in the closing couple of weeks.

Amazing that we're even talking about New Jersey being in play.

Moving on, we're now on day 21 of the government shutdown.

Any signs that that could be ending soon?

You know, not really.

There's all these rumors on Capitol Hill about rank-and-file Democrats negotiating some kind of off-ramp with Republicans, but no one's really said what that looks like.

I think our congressional correspondent Amber Joe Cooper put it best.

She told me, we're just kind of in a waiting period, waiting to see, are the Democrats going to vote to reopen the government or not?

Well, I think with the pressure from the no kings protests, it's gotten even harder for Democrats to come to the table.

Tim, thanks for reporting.

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The Trump administration is massively escalating its counter-narcotics campaign in the Caribbean.

Joining us now with more is Daily Wire immigration reporter Jenny Terre.

Hey, Jenny.

So first, what is the Trump administration seeking to do in the Caribbean?

Right.

So they're looking at what happened under the last four years of President Joe Biden, which was the borders were wide open to not only the narco-traffickers from Venezuela, but also the Venezuelan regime saw this as an opportunity to bring in violent gangs like Train De Aragua, who came from their prisons there and wreaked havoc on our country.

They unleashed violent crime and were involved in high-profile murders, such as the killing of Lake and Riley and apparently also the murder of Jocelyn Nungre in Houston, Texas.

So the Trump administration is wanting to go full force against the Maduro regime for this and holding them to account over these issues.

And so right now they're escalating, you know, these kinetic strikes, these really dramatic strikes on vessels going out in the Caribbean that are trafficking drugs into the United States.

I just spoke with the former DEA U.S.

attache to Venezuela who spent time there on the ground.

And he said that Maduro's days with all this pressure, that his days are really numbered at this point.

Listen to what he said.

There's an internal pressure that's boiling between Nicolas Maduro

and between Diestado Cavallo, who is the basically the head of the military and also in the Senate.

And he has a lot of power with the military, whereas Maduro is the figurehead.

He's the president.

Those two are battling it out right now in the country.

And we've heard rumors.

I've heard rumors from my sources.

in Venezuela.

They're saying, you know, there have been a few times that Nicolas Maduro is thinking about bugging out.

He's going to get out of there.

He's going to fly out of there and he's going to go somewhere.

President Trump has also said that he's looking to raise tariffs on Colombia.

This comes after striking a vessel said to be trafficking drugs off the country's coast.

He's also been feuding with the country's leader.

What do we know about this ongoing operation?

So the Trump administration is basically looking at the Colombian president and what he's doing, which is slowly pulling away those U.S.

relations that have long existed there.

We have worked with Colombia for years on counter-narcotics operations, and the president there is slowly chipping away at that relationship.

One of the things that he's actually stopped doing is spraying these coca fields used to make cocaine, spraying them down to stop the growth of these drugs.

He's totally abandoned that effort.

You know, Wes Tabor, who's the former attaché to Venezuela, spoke to this.

Here's what he said.

Anytime you have a democracy, and that's a republic, democracy, if you will, and the Republic of Colombia, and they elect these people in sometimes and they go a little haywire.

Now, we've seen legacy media outlets trying to undercut this effort by saying this isn't a route for deadly drugs and that it won't have any real impact on overdose deaths in the U.S.

anyhow.

Do these complaints have any merit?

What's the administration's case here?

Right.

So you can go back for years on the DEA's website and see that it has been well documented that this is a drug smuggling corridor, that narco-traffickers have used semi-submersible vessels that go in the water to move these drugs.

And they're not moving migrants.

You're not seeing packed vessels that often capsize in the water.

The only thing that these are packed with are drugs.

On top of that, when the Trump administration closed the southern border, we saw a drop in fentanyl, and the transnational criminal organizations have sought to find new ways to keep their profits.

And one of the things that we've seen is that cocaine smuggling has skyrocketed as a result.

So this is the Trump administration really trying to stop these narco-traffickers in their tracks and hold these countries to account over this.

All right, so lots of evidence that this operation is working and motivation for the Trump administration to do nothing but ramp this up, not tile it back.

Jenny, thanks so much for reporting.

Thank you.

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The state of Massachusetts has revoked the license of foster parents Lydia and Heath Marvin, both Christians, after the couple refused to sign a gender-affirming policy.

The couple is now taking legal action, claiming religious discrimination.

Daily Wire Culture reporter Megan Basham is here now with the details.

So, Megan, just to start, can you give us some background on the Marvins and why their foster care license was revoked?

Yeah, so Lydia and Marvin Heath started fostering back in 2020, and they particularly specialized in kids with special medical needs, special care needs, really the kind of kids that other families had turned down and were not taking in, primarily babies and toddlers.

In April of this year, the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families revoked their fostering license.

The reason that the Marvins were given was that they refused to sign the state's revised LGBTQ non-discrimination policy, specifically a section that requires foster families to affirm a child's quote-unquote gender identity or sexual orientation.

So the Marvins argue that signing that document would conflict with their sincerely held religious beliefs and that it would be a violation of their First Amendment rights.

So that's why they're bringing this suit.

And what was the state's response to that lawsuit?

Yeah, so DCF officials insist that their duty is to protect the child's welfare.

And in their view, that means placing kids only with those foster families that are going to affirm a child's gender identity.

Critics, though, like journalist and well-known child welfare expert Naomi Schaefer-Riley, are saying that the state is really losing sight of the bigger mission here.

They're clearly, you know, I think putting the interests of their ideological agenda, you know, in my opinion, over the interests of kids.

A lot of these states have just really lost sight of the goal there.

I'm much more concerned about the question of whether we are providing as many options for safe, loving homes as possible to these kids.

Riley, who has written extensively on child welfare policy, says that this case fits a growing national pattern where religious foster families are feeling pressure to abandon their beliefs or stop fostering altogether.

So she said that's a serious problem because, according to a study that was released just last month, Christians are more than three three times more likely to foster children.

And they're also more likely to adopt out of the foster care program.

So this study that just came out really confirms what we have seen for many years from a variety of research.

Well, as Riley has reported in the past, including on this show, this kind of screening out of religious families isn't new, particularly in blue states, correct?

Yeah.

So in Massachusetts, another couple, Mike and Kitty Burke, were rejected as foster parents last year for expressing Catholic beliefs about marriage and gender that didn't align with the state's policies.

Now, Riley says, though, that the real problem is that a lot of these cases never even make the headlines.

Once an agency kind of makes clear that, you know, they're looking for parents who fit into a particular mold, you know, what you find either is, you know, people who are sort of violating their own principles in order to accede to that, or, you know, they're just not signing up at all because they know the agency is going to be hostile to their viewpoints and their religious practice.

Regarding the Marvin's pending legal case, is there precedent for situations like this?

Yeah, there are a few.

And one of those major precedents is the 2021 Supreme Court decision, Fulton v.

City of Philadelphia.

Now, in that case, the court ruled that the city violated the free exercise clause when it stopped contracting with Catholic Social Services because the agency wouldn't certify same-sex couples for fostering an adoption.

The court said that because because Philadelphia's rules allow for exceptions, the city therefore could not deny a religious exemption.

So, the Marvin's lawsuit, which they filed with Alliance Defending Freedom, that's still in the early stages.

They're asking for a reinstatement of their foster license, and they also want this ruling to reflect that Massachusetts violated their constitutional rights.

If they win, it could compel the state to allow religious accommodations in this foster program.

But if they lose, faith-based families may be further discouraged from participating in the program.

And that would come at a time when Massachusetts is actually facing a shortage of foster care families.

Well, these LGBT policies are hitting the courts in a lot of interesting ways.

Megan, thanks for reporting.

Yep, anytime.

Thanks for waking up with us.

And if you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to like and subscribe.

We'll be back this evening with more news you need to know.

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