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Fox News hosts Lawrence Jones and Steve Doocy argued that President-elect Donald Trump would have pardoned Hunter Biden after President Joe Biden did the same thing.

While reporting on the pardon Monday, Fox News correspondent Madeleine Rivera noted that Republicans in Congress "have found no concrete evidence of wrongdoing by the Biden family."

Host Lawrence Jones asserted that the president did not need to pardon his son.

"You know, as I think the fear may have been misplaced, though, I think that the Democrats, including the president, Joe Biden, thought that Donald Trump would treat them like they treated him with political prosecution," Jones said. "I think they're wrong. I think Donald Trump would have pardoned Hunter Biden."

"I think we would have gotten some type of report about the corruption and what's been happening in Department of Justice," he continued. "I think he's going to clean house when it comes to the FBI and Department of Justice, but I don't think he would have went after Hunter Biden."

Doocy agreed that the incoming president "probably would have gone ahead and pardoned him."

ALSO READ: Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.

"The only difference is if Donald Trump would have pardoned Hunter Biden, you know, in 50-some-odd days, is it wouldn't be for that 10 year period," Doocy remarked. "It would just be for those two things that he's been convicted but not sentenced to a good point."

ALSO READ: Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.

Trump has previously said that he was open to pardoning Hunter Biden. But on Sunday, he called the current president's use of the pardon power "an abuse and miscarriage of Justice."

Watch the video below from Fox News.

Have you ever noticed how a particular song can bring back a flood of memories? Maybe it’s the tune that was playing during your first dance, or the anthem of a memorable road trip.

People often think of these musical memories as fixed snapshots of the past. But recent research my team and I published suggests music may do more than just trigger memories – it might even change how you remember them.

I’m a psychology researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Along with my mentor Thackery Brown and University of Colorado Boulder music experts Sophia Mehdizadeh and Grace Leslie, our recently published research uncovered intriguing connections between music, emotion and memory. Specifically, listening to music can change how you feel about what you remember – potentially offering new ways to help people cope with difficult memories.

Music, stories and memory

When you listen to music, it’s not just your ears that are engaged. The areas of your brain responsible for emotion and memory also become active. The hippocampus, which is essential for storing and retrieving memories, works closely with the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center. This is partly why certain songs are not only memorable but also deeply emotional.

While music’s ability to evoke emotions and trigger memories is well known, we wondered whether it could also alter the emotional content of existing memories. Our hypothesis was rooted in the concept of memory reactivation – the idea that when you recall a memory, it becomes temporarily malleable, allowing new information to be incorporated.

Memories are malleable. Artur Debat/Moment Open via Getty Images

We developed a three-day experiment to test whether music played during recall might introduce new emotional elements into the original memory.

On the first day, participants memorized a series of short, emotionally neutral stories. The next day, they recalled these stories while listening to either positive music, negative music or silence. On the final day, we asked participants to recall the stories again, this time without any music. On the second day, we recorded their brain activity with fMRI scans, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.

Our approach is analogous to how movie soundtracks can alter viewers’ perceptions of a scene, but in this case, we examined how music might change participants’ actual memories of an event.

The results were striking. When participants listened to emotionally charged music while recalling the neutral stories, they were more likely to incorporate new emotional elements into the story that matched the mood of the music. For example, neutral stories recalled with positive music in the background were later remembered as being more positive, even when the music was no longer playing.

Even more intriguing were the brain scans we took during the experiment. When participants recalled stories while listening to music, there was increased activity in the amygdala and hippocampus – areas crucial for emotional memory processing. This is why a song associated with a significant life event can feel so powerful – it activates both emotion- and memory-processing regions simultaneously.

We also saw evidence of strong communication between these emotional memory processing parts of the brain and the parts of the brain involved in visual sensory processing. This suggests music might infuse emotional details into memories while participants were visually imagining the stories.

Musical memories

Our results suggest that music acts as an emotional lure, becoming intertwined with memories and subtly altering their emotional tone. Memories may also be more flexible than previously thought and could be influenced by external auditory cues during recall.

While further research is needed, our findings have exciting implications for both everyday life and for medicine.

For people dealing with conditions such as depression or PTSD, where negative memories can be overwhelming, carefully chosen music might help reframe those memories in a more positive light and potentially reduce their negative emotional impact over time. It also opens new avenues for exploring music-based interventions in treatments for depression and other mental health conditions.

Music could help reframe negative memories into something less painful. Delmaine Donson/E+ via Getty Images

On a day-to-day level, our research highlights the potential power of the soundtrack people choose for their lives. Memories, much like your favorite songs, can be remixed and remastered by music. The music you listen to while reminiscing or even while going about your daily routines might be subtly shaping how you remember those experiences in the future.

The next time you put on a favorite playlist, consider how it might be coloring not just your current mood but also your future recollections as well.

Yiren Ren, Adjunct Researcher in Cognitive Brain Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Donald Trump posted a statement on his meeting with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau ahead of a possible trade war.

The prime minister flew Friday to Mar-a-Lago to discuss sweeping tariffs threatened by the former president against Canada, Mexico and China, and Trump provided additional details the following day on his Truth Social account on their three-hour meeting over dinner at his private resort.

"I just had a very productive meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, where we discussed many important topics that will require both Countries to work together to address, like the Fentanyl and Drug Crisis that has decimated so many lives as a result of Illegal Immigration, Fair Trade Deals that do not jeopardize American Workers, and the massive Trade Deficit the U.S. has with Canada," Trump posted.

The president-elect has threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on products coming from Canada and Mexico if the North American neighbors don't stop what he calls the flow of drugs and migrants into the U.S.

ALSO READ: 'Back off of stupid': Ex-RNC chair warns Trump will wreck economy with 'bully' threats

"I made it very clear that the United States will no longer sit idly by as our Citizens become victims to the scourge of this Drug Epidemic, caused mainly by the Drug Cartels, and Fentanyl pouring in from China," Trump posted. "Too much death and hardship! Prime Minister Trudeau has made a commitment to work with us to end this terrible devastation of U.S. Families. We also spoke about many other important topics like Energy, Trade, and the Arctic. All are vital issues that I will be addressing on my first days back in Office, and before."

Trump and Trudeau were joined at the dinner by commerce nominee Howard Lutnick, interior nominee Doug Burgum and national security adviser nominee Mike Waltz, along with Canada’s public safety minister Dominic LeBlanc and Trudeau chief of staff Katie Telford.

“It is important to understand that Donald Trump, when he makes statements like that, he plans on carrying them out. There’s no question about it,” Trudeau said before his visit to Florida. “Our responsibility is to point out that he would not just be harming Canadians, who work so well with the United States, but he would actually be raising prices for Americans citizens as well and hurting American industry and business."

Donald Trump has nominated a Cabinet full of loyalists with questionable qualifications, but his critics predict they'll quickly become consumed by chaos and infighting.

Trump began his first term as a political newcomer surrounded by more experienced and conventional conservatives he eventually drove off, and the former president's critics told The Guardian his leadership will lead to predictable results.

“The same thing that happened last time will happen this time,” said Rick Wilson, co-founder of the anti-Trump conservative group the Lincoln Project. “He cannot resist chaos. It is his drug. He will eventually start doing what he always does and turn on different people and start sandbagging his own choices for these various jobs."

“It’s that pattern he has," Wilson added. "He comes out one day and says, ‘I love so and so,’ and then the next he’s talking to his friends saying, ‘Hey, you think Tillerson’s doing a good job or is he screwing me over?’ Those things are patterns we’ve seen in Trump’s personal life, his business life and his prior administration. An 80-year-old man is not going to be a changed person.”

The once and future president has assembled "a revenge team," according to one analyst, while another compared his Cabinet picks to the "wretched hive of scum and villainy" found in the Star Wars cantina, but it's not clear how the hodgepodge of missions and political ideologies will mesh with one another.

"Regardless of whatever individual ideological leanings these people have had at varying points in their adult lives, it’s largely irrelevant because the only litmus test we have seen put forward is absolute fealty to Donald Trump," said Democratic strategist Kurt Bardella. “As we have seen in the Republican party overall, absolute fealty to Donald Trump overshadows any ideological belief. We could take almost every issue that used to be a part of the Republican party and show how the party has moved to a diametrically opposite position. This is not a party governed by ideology any more. It is governed by personality. It is governed by loyalty to Donald Trump.”

"They’re all going to get in a room and they’re just going to go: ‘Here’s what we think – what do you think, boss? Oh, okay, well, that’s what we’re all going to do,’" added Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide. "The idea that there’s going to be ideologically rooted debate, vigorous debate happening in the Trump administration is absurd. It’s laughable.”

Some of Trump's nominees, like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as top diplomat and Wall Street billionaire Scott Bessent to head the treasury, are somewhat conventional picks for their roles, but seasoned Trump watchers believe he'll once again govern on impulse and thrive on conflict.

“I don’t think there’s any evidence that Trump has learned anything about governing since his first term," said Chris Whipple, the author of The Gatekeepers.

“There’s a lot of wishful thinking among a lot of commentators that, okay, he’s had four years in office, he learned a lot, he’s had all this time to plan with Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute and he’s got his act together," Whipple added. "I just don’t think that’s true. I don’t see any evidence that there’s any sort of plan here other than ‘this guy looks good for that job, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has got a cool last name.'"

Donald Trump has nominated one of his in-laws to serve as ambassador to France.

The president-elect tapped son-in-law Jared Kushner's father, real estate developer Charles Kushner, to the diplomatic post on Saturday touting his business accomplishments and public service but studiously avoiding mention of his criminal conviction for a scheme to hire a sex worker to seduce his own brother-in-law and send a recording of the encounter to his sister.

"I am pleased to nominate Charles Kushner, of New Jersey, to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to France," Trump posted. "He is a tremendous business leader, philanthropist, & dealmaker, who will be a strong advocate representing our Country & its interests. Charlie is the Founder & Chairman of Kushner Companies, one of the largest & most successful privately held Real Estate firms in the Nation. He was recognized as New Jersey Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young, appointed to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, & served as a Commissioner, & Chairman, of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, as well as on the Boards of our top institutions, including NYU."

"Congratulations to Charlie, his wonderful wife Seryl, their 4 children, & 14 grandchildren," the former president added. "His son, Jared, worked closely with me in the White House, in particular on Operation Warp Speed, Criminal Justice Reform, & the Abraham Accords. Together, we will strengthen America’s partnership with France, our oldest Ally, & one of our greatest!"

ALSO READ: 'He can't resist chaos': Critics reject 'wishful thinking' about Trump's second term

Jared Kushner, who is married to Trump's eldest daughter Ivanka, served as a White House adviser during the ex-president's first term and received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia after leaving, but the couple is not expected to rejoin his second administration.

Charles Kushner was convicted in 2005 illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering in the scheme against his brother-in-law, which resulted in a two-year prison term and his disbarment, but the former president pardoned him Dec. 23, 2020, and his nomination surprised many.

"Like Trump, Charles Kushner is a convicted felon," said former Hillary Clinton senior adviser Zac Petkanas.

"Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, recorded their sexual encounter, and sent the tape to his sister, all in retaliation for his brother-in-law's cooperation with a federal investigation into other crimes Kushner had committed," said Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

"In 2020, Chris Christie called Charles Kushner's hiring of a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law and subsequent filming of the act to obstruct justice 'one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes' he prosecuted," posted X user Lemon Sturgis.

"'From pardoned to Paris,'" added X user David Kenah. "For those who don’t remember, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner right before leaving office in 2021."

Donald Trump caused alarm in the medical community by picking anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head up the Department of Health and Human Services. But less noted was a similarly-minded pick to head up the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, profiled by The New York Times on Friday.

Last week, Trump announced the CDC nominee will be Dave Weldon, a doctor and former Florida congressman known for his anti-abortion views and for seeking to intervene in the Terri Schiavo brain death case. In addition to all these things, The Times noted, Weldon is an outspoken anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist himself.

"Over the years his views have aligned in many ways with those of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump’s choice for health and human services secretary, and Dr. Weldon’s potential boss. The two have maintained a 25-year relationship," said the report. "Like Mr. Kennedy, Dr. Weldon, 71, has claimed that some children may develop autism when vaccinated against measles because of genetics or other factors, despite dozens of robust studies that thoroughly disproved the claim."

The autism-vaccination theory was most widely popularized by Andrew Wakefield, a discredited British gastroenterologist whose study purported to suggest autism was caused by an intestinal abnormality triggered by the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.

Follow-up studies failed to replicate these results, and it subsequently was revealed Wakefield had falsified his data, leading to the retraction of his paper and the loss of his medical license. Despite this, he continued for years after to push anti-vaccine activism.

The CDC is one of the most critical agencies responsible for tracking and containing pandemics, and was on the front lines of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed over 1 million Americans and required the development of multiple vaccines to get it under control.

Despite all of this, Kennedy, a former Democrat with some views that cut against the traditional GOP orthodoxy on food and medicine, has had mixed results in getting other key allies confirmed to other positions in the government; Trump reportedly snubbed his advice in his appointment for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.