A Senate Republican warned Monday that Congress would likely have to change the law following deep Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill.’

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said during an appearance at the Global Health Innovation Forum at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston that ‘pressure’ would grow over time for lawmakers to make a change to the megabill’s steep cuts to Medicaid.

She said she supported other big-ticket items in the bill, like extending provisions from Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the beefing up of Medicaid’s work requirement.

But Collins argued that while there should be an effort to trim the costs of Medicaid and Medicare in the country, the deep, nearly $1 trillion cuts to Medicaid would hurt Americans.

‘They don’t go into effect next year, they go into effect the following year,’ Collins said. ‘But a year is not going to make any difference at all, and I’m just very concerned that people who need the care aren’t going to get it.’

Collins warned that once ‘we start seeing Americans getting sicker as a result of this, having delayed treatment because they no longer have the coverage,’ then lawmakers will have to take a better look at the cuts they greenlit in June.

‘I don’t see the states having the ability to step up and fill the gap here. I just don’t. Even wealthy states,’ she said. ‘I just don’t see that happening. And as the implications of the bill become better known, I think there’s going to be tremendous pressure on Congress to change the law. But we’re going to need the evidence, the stories, the research that didn’t occur.’

She was one of only three Senate Republicans — the others were Sens. Rand Paul, of Kentucky, and Thom Tillis, of North Carolina — to vote against the colossal package in June. At the time, she cited Medicaid cuts as the key reason behind her decision not to back the bill.

Collins noted that before the bill ever went to the floor for what would become a marathon, 29-hour vote-a-rama before final passage in the upper chamber, she told both Republican leaders in the Senate and officials at the White House that she was a hard ‘no’ unless changes were made to the bill.

She offered leaders and the administration a list of 10 items she took issue with, including cuts that would affect rural hospitals. Maine has 32 rural hospitals, she said, with one having just been closed.

‘We have five that are teetering on the brink of closure because they’re already in trouble, because the Medicaid reimbursements are not high enough, and also because of population changes,’ she said.

Collins and other skeptics of the Medicaid cuts, including Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., did notch a minor victory with the inclusion of a $50 billion rural hospital fund to help offset the broader cuts — and she vowed to pressure Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Mehmet Oz to hustle that funding out the door.

Still, in a state like Maine, which has roughly 31% of the population on Medicaid, she worried that the cuts would see hospitals shoulder more of the costs of care.

‘These cuts, I worry, are going to be devastating for states like Maine, for the people who rely on it,’ Collins said. ‘But you know, a lot of those individuals are still going to show up in the hospital emergency room.’

‘They won’t have been getting the care that they need to keep them out of the hospital emergency room,’ she continued. ‘They’re going to be coming to you with their problems, and they’re not going to be covered by Medicaid, and the problem with that is it’s going to be uncompensated care for hospitals.’

Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment but did not immediately hear back. 

President Donald Trump doubled down on his demand that European nations cease all energy purchases from Russia as he mulls his first sanctions on Moscow since re-entering office amid its war in Ukraine.

Speaking to reporters Sunday evening, Trump said European nations, especially those in NATO, are not doing enough to counter Russia, despite the new round of sanctions enacted by the EU last week. 

‘They’re not doing the job. NATO has to get together. Europe has to get together,’ Trump said. ‘Europe… they’re my friends, but they’re buying oil from Russia, so we can’t be expected to be the only ones that are, you know, full bore.’ 

‘Europe is buying oil from Russia. I don’t want them to buy oil,’ he continued, noting that the sanctions Europe has issued on Russia and Russian officials ‘are not tough enough.’

 ‘I’m willing to do sanctions, but they’re going to have to toughen up their sanctions commensurate with what I’m doing,’ Trump confirmed. 

While European nations have drastically cut their reliance on Moscow’s oil following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, they have not cut it off entirely – particularly nations like Hungary, Slovakia, France, Belgium and Spain, which are Europe’s top importers of Russian energy. 

Hungary – whose president remains friendly with Putin despite being a NATO nation – is Europe’s chief importer of Russian crude oil and pipeline gas, purchasing more than double any other European nation’s Russian energy imports.

France, which is the second-largest European purchaser of Russian energy, continues to import liquefied natural gas (LNG), which has largely bypassed EU sanctions, in part due to long-standing legally binding commitments.

These agreements mean Paris has committed to ‘take-or-pay’ contracts through the early 2030s or would face arbitration or penalties. Reporting suggests, however, that the LNG imports are not only slated for French consumption, but are also being passed on to third-party nations like Germany.

Last month, the EU’s Data Protection Authority confirmed that the bloc had imported nearly $5.2 billion worth of Russian LNG in the first half of 2025. 

Trump’s comments came just one day after he sent a letter to NATO that said he is ‘ready to do major sanctions on Russia when all NATO Nations have agreed, and started, to do the same thing, and when all NATO nations stop buying oil from Russia,’ according to a post he made on Truth Social. 

But when asked on Sunday about his plans to hit Russia with additional U.S. sanctions – which have not been expanded since the Biden administration – he suggested Europe might need to stop all LNG imports as well.

The president claimed that all Russian imports are supposed to be barred at this time and said, ‘The deal is, they’re not supposed – whether it’s natural gas or whether it’s cigarettes, I don’t care – they’re not supposed to be buying from Russia.’

The president didn’t expand on which deal he was referring to, and he didn’t comment on the U.S.’s $2.1 billion worth of Russian imports it has purchased in the first five months of 2025, largely consisting of enriched uranium, palladium and fertilizers. 

In addition, he called on NATO allies to hit China with ‘50% to 100% tariffs’ that he said would be withdrawn only after the war in Ukraine concluded – a rate which is currently higher than the 30% tariffs Washington has slapped on Beijing, though which could significantly expand given Trump’s recent threats to hit China with tariffs as high as 200%.

The White House did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s questions regarding this reporting. 

Law enforcement officials arrested the man accused of shooting and killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah on Friday after a frantic 33-hour manhunt. The suspect’s fate now hinges on whether the state pursues capital charges as political pressure mounts.

Prosecutors have not yet filed charges against Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old accused of killing Kirk after driving nearly four hours to Utah Valley University, where the longtime Trump ally was speaking. It also remains unclear whether they will seek the death penalty, a step publicly urged by both President Donald Trump and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. 

At a Friday news conference, Cox said investigators used surveillance footage from the stadium and tips from Robinson’s family and friends to identify him before the arrest. He also said charges would be filed ‘soon.’ 

‘We got him,’ Cox said. 

The governor vowed that Robinson would be ‘held accountable’ for Kirk’s death, which he called a ‘political assassination.’

‘This is certainly about the tragic death, assassination, political assassination of Charlie Kirk, but it is also much bigger than an attack on an individual,’ Cox said. ‘It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the American experiment.’ 

Kirk’s graphic death and the scant public information revealed in its wake have left the nation reeling and revived heated debate about political violence in the U.S. It’s also sparked a litany of questions about how prosecutors will bring the case against Robinson, with Utah law and years of precedent making capital punishment difficult to pursue. 

Robinson is being held at Utah County Jail. A probable cause affidavit reviewed by Fox News Digital lists potential charges including aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm causing serious injury and obstruction of justice.

Utah law allows prosecutors to seek the death penalty only in cases where an individual is charged with ‘aggravated murder’ — or a murder that knowingly ‘created a great risk of death’ to another person besides the victim or defendant. The offense is listed in the affidavit, which could open the door for prosecutors to seek the death penalty. 

The clock is ticking: Utah law requires state prosecutors to file a specific notice of intent within 60 days after an individual is arraigned on aggravated murder charges to notify the court and defense attorneys that they plan to try the case as a capital felony. Doing so sets into motion a complex legal process — including a two-part, or bifurcated trial, to decide both guilt and whether the defendant should receive capital punishment. 

Otherwise, the case is tried under charges of a ‘noncapitalist fist-degree penalty,’ eligible for a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole. 

Cox and Trump both suggested in interviews earlier this week that the state should seek the death penalty against Kirk’s killer, even before Robinson was named as a suspect. 

‘I hope he gets the death penalty,’ Trump said Friday morning on ‘Fox & Friends,’ calling Kirk ‘the finest person.’ 

The Beehive State is one of 27 states that still allows the death penalty, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. It’s also one of just five states where execution by firing squad remains legal.

Even so, capital punishment cases are rarely pursued in Utah. The state has carried out only two executions in the past 20 years, and inmates spend an average of 34 years on death row.

Only four men are currently on death row in Utah, each for ‘decades,’ according to KUTV.  

For Robinson, whose criminal trial will draw national attention, particularly from the president and his allies, it’s still far too early to predict the outcome. 

Already, Robinson’s case has fueled intense speculation — even as some lawmakers urged calm.

‘History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country,’ Cox said, ‘but every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us.’ 

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, it took more than a decade before Americans saw the infamous Zapruder film.

Today, the killing of conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk can be replayed in dozens of high-definition clips across social media, reshaping how the nation confronts political violence in real time.

‘You’ll never have an assassination again that we don’t have footage of,’ Tevi Troy, a presidential historian and former secretary of Health and Human Services under the Bush administration, told Fox News Digital. 

‘I have an image in my head of what Lincoln’s assassination might have looked like, but every assassination since the Kennedy era, or even assassination attempts, there’s generally going to be footage about it now, and that’s just a very difficult thing.’

The Zapruder footage of Kennedy’s assassination remained largely unseen by the public until 1975, when it aired on national television more than a decade after his death. Its grainy frames shocked viewers. Americans, at the time, were ‘much more dependent on what the caretakers of the culture would put on TV,’ Troy said, and if a broadcast was missed, there was often no second chance to see it. 

‘The gatekeepers controlled what you saw.’

In the minutes after Kirk was shot in the neck on his ‘American Comeback Tour’ at the Utah Valley University on Wednesday, graphic video clips captured by bystanders using phones flooded social platforms like X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. 

Traditional outlets held back from airing the moment of impact, but social media users shared multiple angles — including real-time replays and slowed-down segments — many without content warnings or editing.

‘Desensitizing is the right word. … It’s not good for you,’ Troy said when asked what the impact of such high-speed graphic footage could do to the public. 

‘It’s not good for your soul. It’s not a question of not being available. It is available. Then you have to make an effort not to see it,’ he said.

Troy noted that in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s killing, some voices on the left appeared to rationalize or downplay the violence, while others rushed to frame the suspect’s background in ways that minimized political fallout for their side. He called the reaction ‘a ghoulish exercise.’

‘There’s a horrible tragedy where this person who just wants to have political conversations was murdered with three young kids,’ Troy said. ‘But this is where we are today. If there is political violence, they want to make sure it’s framed in such a way that it doesn’t bring their side down.’

Kirk, 31, was killed Wednesday by suspected shooter Tyler Robinson while answering a question at Utah Valley University. He leaves behind his wife and two children, ages one and three.