Morning Wire
Le Pen Barred from Election & Wyoming’s Strict Voter ID Law | Afternoon Update | 3.31.25
Mon, 31 Mar 2025
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Chapter 1: What are the top headlines in today's update?
Five people are dead following severe storms in the Midwest. Marine Le Pen is barred from running for office. And President Trump floats the idea of a third term. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's Monday, March 31st, and this is your Morning Wire afternoon update.
Chapter 2: How did the Midwest storms impact power and lives?
Severe weather left hundreds of thousands of people in the Midwest without power on Monday. Michigan was among the hardest hit, with more than 300,000 customers left in the dark. Both Wisconsin and Indiana each saw the power for around 50,000 customers knocked out.
The power outages were the result of damaging wind and at least four tornadoes that swept through those states, as well as Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky on Sunday. At least five fatalities have been reported.
Chapter 3: Why is Marine Le Pen barred from running for office?
French populist leader Marine Le Pen has been barred from running for public office and faces several years behind bars. Le Pen is the current front runner for the 2027 presidential election. But after being found guilty of embezzlement on Monday, she's now blocked from running for public office for five years. She's also been sentenced to four years in jail.
Her ineligibility to run is expected to provoke protests from supporters who believe her prosecution is an attempt to keep her off the ballot.
Chapter 4: What happened to Virginia Giuffre in Australia?
High-profile Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre claims she's in critical condition following a traffic accident. She shared a photo and message on Instagram from her hospital bed, stating that she was hit by a school bus while driving. The location and circumstances of the crash aren't known, but the mother of three has been living in Western Australia.
According to her post, doctors have told her she is in renal failure.
Chapter 5: Why is the Wisconsin Supreme Court election crucial?
Wisconsin will vote for a new Supreme Court judge tomorrow, and the stakes are very high for both parties. Among those drawing attention to the race is Elon Musk. Daily Wire reporter Amanda Prestigiacomo has more on the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history.
Musk handed out $1 million checks to two Wisconsin voters on Sunday night in Green Bay. The tech billionaire said that Tuesday's pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court election could impact the future of civilization. He's poured over $20 million to back the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel, who's running against liberal Susan Crawford.
Chapter 6: What role does Elon Musk play in the Wisconsin election?
The election could shift the court's ideological balance and influence key issues in the battleground state, most notably redistricting. That could have a Democrat Attorney General Josh Kahl argued that Musk's payments violate state law, but the court declined to intervene. Here's Musk at the rally.
The reason for the checks is that it's really just to get attention. We need to get attention. And it's somewhat inevitably, when I do these things, it causes the legacy media to kind of lose their minds. And then they'll run it on every news channel. It would cost like 10 times more to get the kind of coverage that we get.
Recent polling suggests broad support for some of President Trump's signature policies, but also skepticism toward others. A survey conducted by the Associated Press found that immigration was Trump's strongest issue, while trade negotiations were his weakest. Nearly half of Americans 49% support Trump's immigration policies, while only 38% support his approach on trade.
Chapter 7: Which Trump policies are gaining support in recent polls?
Aggressive immigration enforcement and imposing tariffs on foreign goods have been key pillars of Trump's platform since he entered national politics nearly a decade ago.
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Three American soldiers who went missing in Lithuania last week during a training exercise have been found dead. It was determined that the armored vehicle the men were traveling in sank in a swamp. The search continues for a fourth soldier who is believed to have been with the group. The army has not released their names pending notification of next of kin.
According to an army statement, the soldiers went missing in the early morning hours of March 25th in their armored recovery vehicle while on a mission to repair a tactical vehicle. The massive recovery and engineering effort continues to extract the 63-ton vehicle from a peat bog surrounded by unstable ground conditions. The army has credited Lithuanian and Polish forces for their assistance.
President Trump floated the idea of running for a third term. In an interview with NBC's Meet the Press, the president said he was, quote, not joking about potentially running for president in 2028, despite the 25th Amendment making it unconstitutional to serve more than two terms. Several Trump allies have suggested the idea over the last months.
Trump himself has said that it's too early to think about 2028, but said there were possible methods to work around the third term ban.
Wyoming has passed the strictest voter ID law in the country, requiring proof of citizenship and residency. Morning Wire spoke to Wyoming's Secretary of State Chuck Gray about the years-long battle to get it passed.
This was actually a two-year standoff between the governor and I on this issue. We brought rulemaking in late 2023 to have a proof of residency requirement and also put procedures in place to make sure that illegal aliens would not be eligible to register to vote. And unfortunately, the governor vetoed rulemaking
that we brought in 2023 that would create a proof of residency requirement and create procedures to ensure that illegal aliens are not eligible for registering to vote and he vetoed that in early 2024 so that's why we went to the legislature to put this in place in state law and i'm glad that after this year and a half two year standoff the governor backed down and it was the people
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