The President of the United States should be very competent. America has many such people. Millions even. And this basic litmus test shouldn’t be controversial. Yet the current president doesn’t pass. Joe Biden’s recent onstage fall at the U.S. Air Force Academy was yet another reminder of his declining physical and mental capacities.
Now Biden, to be sure, has had a storied political career. His intentions are in the right place. And his administration is brimming with intelligent and highly competent public servants. But the man at the top — POTUS himself — is well past his prime.
The main Republican contender, meanwhile, also fails the litmus test. But Donald Trump isn’t just far from very competent. He’s outright incompetent. He’s also — in stark contrast to Biden — dishonest, disloyal and concerned more with himself than America’s interests. He also happens to be very popular among Republicans. Current polls point to another Biden-versus-Trump presidential showdown.
But what about the third most-likely person to be inaugurated president in January 2025, Ron DeSantis? DeSantis is boring and stiff. He’s mean. He’s as likable as a stinky sock. And he’s on the wrong side of numerous important policy debates — from immigration, to taxes, to judicial appointments.
But unlike Biden and Trump, DeSantis passes the litmus test. He’s very competent. A Yale- and Harvard-educated lawyer, DeSantis served in the Navy (including on a tour in Iraq) before entering Congress and then becoming Florida’s governor. And he’s effectively achieved his objectives in Florida — regarding both politics and policy.
DeSantis’ competence matters. Why? Because the most important quality to have in a U.S. president is competence. The biggest questions facing the country do not fall comfortably along some left-right axis but instead require prudent and empirically effective leadership to address. How should we approach our global rivalry with China? How should we regulate artificial intelligence? How should we participate in an international economy complicated by dysfunction and violence around the world? And so on.
Indeed, domestic issues matter less and less the more interconnected the world gets — and it’s getting exponentially more interconnected as time marches on. This, in turn, decreases the relevance of a president’s political party and increases the importance of a president’s competence. Far better to get the culture wars wrong but get China right than vice versa. Same with taxation: Better to tilt the code a little more toward the rich if it means we also get smarter regulations protecting humanity from the downside of artificial intelligence. Appoint conservative judges all day long if it means America’s international effectiveness and leadership improves.
America’s domestic squabbles just don’t mean as much as they used to. And it’s a sign of our national decadence and complacency that our political focus is nonetheless still insular and myopic. The world is a dangerous and complicated place and the president of the United States should be — above all else — very good at dealing with global challenges.
A simple question establishes the point. Which candidate would be better at the helm in a global crisis: an 80-year-old who can’t walk straight (Joe Biden); a 76-year-old with the emotional intelligence of a 10-year-old (Donald Trump); or a 44-year-old Harvard-law-trained Navy vet who skillfully runs his home state (Ron DeSantis)?
This election, American voters will likely once again be asked to choose the least-worst option for the nation’s most important job. It would be much better if a highly competent, intelligent and well-intentioned candidate replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket. Until then, DeSantis all the way.
Category: US politics
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No comments on A Democrat primarily for DeSantis
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The Harvard/Harris poll, here, is not exactly known for beating the drum for conservative causes. So when it produces numbers like the ones it published yesterday, you can’t help but feel a bit better about the Republican Party’s chances next year. Let’s take a look.
— Country’s on the right track = 30%; wrong track = 62%.
— Roughly twice as many voters say their financial situation is getting worse than say it’s getting better, 49% to 26%.
— Biden is way underwater, with 53% disapproving his performance and 43% approving it. It’s been this way since last autumn.
— Biden is also in the tank on a big variety of specific issues. Oddly, he does best on handling COVID, with 49% approval. On no other issue does his approval reach even 45%. On dealing with crime and violence, it’s 37%; handling inflation comes in at 36%; and immigration (not surprisingly) brings up the rear at 35%.
— Neither political party is real popular. Republican approval is at 46% and the Democrats are at 45%. In my view, it’s remarkable that the parties are anywhere close, given the loud Democratic lean of almost all the MSM.
— None of the public figures the poll asked about is viewed favorably by a majority. Trump, Robert F. Kennedy and Elon Musk come closest with 45%. Right behind them are DeSantis (43%), Bernie Sanders (42%), and President Biden (41%). Hillary Clinton leads in public disapproval with 54%, followed by Biden (52%) and Trump (48%). Clinton also leads in strong disapproval with 40%, followed closely by Trump with 36%. The least disapproved figure among the arguably major candidates is Tim Scott, with only 25% disapproval.
— Public respect for major institutions has been falling for years if not decades, but two remain widely respected: the US military, viewed favorably by 79%, and the police, with 66%. Contrary to much of what we’ve been hearing from the press, the Supreme Court retains a decent favorability rating with 49%, well above the other two branches. Bringing up the rear are Black Lives Matter, CNN and MSNBC. But dead last are MAGA Republicans, the only group whose negative rating significantly exceeds its positive one.
— Trump overwhelms his Republican opposition for the nomination. This is hardly news, but the Harvard/Harris poll gives Trump even a bigger edge than I’ve seen before, 3 to 1 over Tim Scott and 2 to 1 over DeSantis. Biden is massively ahead of his Democratic rivals,
and totally swamps the field with those in assisted living(sorry, some things I write by instinct).— Biden’s major deficit (apart from ruinous policy), continues to be the public’s view that he’s just not up to it. By 3 to 2, respondents say he lacks the mental acuity for the office, and by 2 to 1, they say he’s too old. The press can hide a lot, and it does, but its ability to hide these facts has about run out.
— Trump wins a hypothetical matchup with Biden 45% to 39%, and with VP Harris, 47% to 40%. This is almost identical to the results the Washington Post/ABC poll found last month. DeSantis does not do nearly as well in such a matchup, barely edging out each. If this continues for very long, it’s going to do massive damage to DeSantis’ argument that he can beat Biden but Trump can’t.
— Of course Trump, like Biden, is no spring chicken. While 62% say Biden should not run for a second term, a reasonably close 55% say that Trump shouldn’t either. Big majorities of both parties (71% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans) say the county needs another choice beyond Biden v. Trump. (This tells me two things — that a third party could make some noise next year; and that despite their very large current leads, neither Biden nor Trump is a sure thing to get nominated. And the chance that public appreciation of either man will improve over time is, as we’ve seen, approximately zero).
— On the issues, Republicans retain their usual advantage when the discussion turns to taxes. Over 80% favor cutting taxes in their state while not even 20% oppose — although respondents were about evenly split on the idea of raising taxes on corporations and upper income individuals. On strengthening parents’ rights over their kids’ education and encouraging more charter schools, those in favor massively outnumber those opposed, by better than 3 to 1 (this was the issue that won Glenn Youngkin the Governor’s chair in blueish Virginia a year and a-half ago).
Abortion remains a potential trouble spot for Republicans. Evidence from last year persuades me that it’s a motivating issue for suburban voters who are vital to Republican success, but a majority of respondents (53% to 47%) were opposed to a law, like the one DeSantis recently sponsored in Florida, that would ban most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. A ban that firm and that early is simply not where the country is, and in my view, DeSantis is going to have to move toward the center on this question. Emphasizing his opposition to late term abortions (which opposition the poll finds wins a strong majority); or to abortions for sex selection or to harvest body parts, is one place he could start. With abortion as with everything else, you do not let the opposition frame the debate.
On the other hand, immigration is a DeSantis strong suit. More than two-thirds say that we should discourage illegal immigrants from settling in the United States. DeSantis’ bus rides and plane rides to states previously bellowing about their “compassionate” sanctuary status has been a masterstroke.
The poll also asked about the Trump indictment. I’ll save coverage of that for a later discussion, and will say for now only that decent majorities (55% and 56%, respectively) say that the prosecution is politically motivated and amounts to interference in the 2024 election, yet a slightly larger majority (58%) says that the Justice Department’s case is either somewhat or very strong — necessarily meaning that it thinks that Trump is probably guilty of some or perhaps many felony-level offenses. How that perception changes as the case unfolds is one of the head-scratching imponderables of the next several months.
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The notion that, through persistence, personal agency, and dedication, the remaining vestiges of institutional racial discrimination in America are obstacles that its minority citizens can overcome is one to which the nation’s first black president objects.
“There’s a long history of African-American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate America and say, ‘Everything’s great, and we can make it,’” said Barack Obama, in an interview with his 2008 campaign manager and CNN personality David Axelrod. The former president of the United States singled out Senator Tim Scott and, to a lesser degree, Nikki Haley for failing to qualify their sanguine assessment of the opportunity America provides its ethnic minorities with “an honest accounting of our past and our present.”
It’s worth dwelling on Obama’s objection to sentiments that, perish the thought, “validate America.” In his apparent estimation, such sentiments represent an ugly untruth. This slip is revealing of a disposition to which Obama was inclined during his years in the spotlight — one his critics often highlighted and his defenders insisted was a figment of their overactive and racially suspect imaginations. To wit: Obama’s casual disdain for the nation that twice elected him to its highest office.
In Barack Obama’s telling, America’s story is a morality play in which he assumes a central role. The 44th president’s ascension represented the crest of the country’s redemptive arc — a deliverance the nation then rejected as it descended back into irredeemable iniquity with his departure from the national stage. His patriotism seems only ever to have been conditional, and those conditions were rather personal.
When a majority of its citizens ratify his will, the country of his birth is “generous,” “compassionate,” “tolerant,” and “great.” When it suits his interests, America’s history of racial animus is surmountable, and “anger” over that history “distracts attention from solving real problems.” When he’s feeling less politically constrained, Americans are selfish and bitter. Their country is arrogant and dismissive. Its minorities should consider distinct demographics within the national tapestry as “enemies.”
The former president has a habit of accusing his opponents of being “unpatriotic” and “un-American,” but his highly contingent patriotism is suggestive of deep discomfort with the nation as it exists. It is telling that these two Republican presidential aspirants, in particular, have induced the reemergence of one of his most unlovely traits. It’s even more revealing that Obama feels compelled to distort their records and views to make the point that only those who share his skepticism can objectively assess the nation’s racial past and present.
“If that candidate is not willing to acknowledge that, again and again, we’ve seen discrimination in everything,” Obama continued, from “getting a job to buying a house to how the criminal justice system operates,” that somehow represents a rejection of the idea that “we need to do something about” the consequences of “hundreds of years of racism in this society.”
Tim Scott objected to Obama’s cheap strawman — one that perhaps reflected the former president’s admitted ignorance of Scott’s actual views. After all, the former president hadn’t “spent a lot of time studying Tim Scott’s speeches.”
“The truth of my life disproves the lies of the radical left,” Scott replied. That is consistent with the message Scott articulates in the speeches Obama couldn’t be bothered to peruse before critiquing them. The senator has not shied away from acknowledging the racism he and his family experienced in the deep South, noting that his family “went from cotton to Congress” in the space of his grandfather’s lifetime. Haley, too, rejected Obama’s effort to single out minorities as “victims instead of empowering them.”
The former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor has also described her ascent from the “isolation” she experienced as a dark-skinned girl in the birthplace of the Confederacy to the state’s highest office. Neither candidate has said, “Everything’s great.” They have said their experience attests that American minorities can navigate the nation’s casteless ranks without having their hands held by benevolent liberal sherpas. That reality — not some contemptuous caricature of their view that racial impediments do not exist — threatens Obama and the New York Times alike.
“I’m not being cynical about Tim Scott individually, but I am maybe suggesting the rhetoric of ‘Can’t we all get along,’” Obama concluded, while modifying some of his own hopeful rhetoric about the country. “That has to be undergirded with an honest accounting of our past and our present.” But Obama is not seeking honesty. If he were, he wouldn’t be attacking the experience of these — and, by reasonable extension, all — Republicans of minority extraction as unwitting victims of the false consciousness to which Obama seems to believe those who don’t subscribe to a persecution complex are prone.
Barack Obama once described the “promise of America” in collectivist terms. It was to him “the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.” The conservative rejoinder to this infantilizing conception of the American compact promotes individual excellence: the unfettered talents of the mind and soul, the full expression of which invariably benefits all. Neither Obama nor the targets of his criticism reject that idea per se, but Obama emphasizes the obstacles and languishes in fatalism, while the objects of his criticism emphasize resiliency and celebrate optimism. That’s a profound distinction and an illuminating one.
Someone should remind the nation’s first mixed-race president on Juneteenth Day that (1) slavery is an institution as old as civilization itself, carried out by non-white ancestors of Obama’s, but (2) civilized countries got rid of slavery, (3) including this country, at the cost of 360,000 Union Army soldiers, 12,000 of whom were from Wisconsin.
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Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, slammed former President Donald Trump over his handling of classified documents, saying that Trump—who is facing 37 felony charges—has no one to blame but himself.
“He has shown himself, particularly in his post-presidency, to be completely self-centered, completely self-consumed, and doesn’t give a damn about the American people, if what the American people want isn’t best for him,” said Christie.
Christie made these remarks during a CNN town hall with Anderson Cooper on Monday night. Christie is seeking the 2024 Republican nomination for the presidency; during his remarks, he laid into Trump, the frontrunner, as well as other rivals for the nomination—including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who have failed to condemn the actions of the former president.
“He’s angry and he’s vengeful,” Christie said of Trump. “And he said ‘I will be your retribution.’ He wants retribution for himself. I’m convinced that if he goes back to the White House, the next four years will be all about him settling scores.”
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Fewer than 72 hours have passed since the unsealing of the federal indictment against Donald Trump on charges relating to his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to mislead investigators. The revelations in that document inspired pollsters to take the temperature of the Republican electorate, and their findings confirmed Trump critics’ worst suspicions: GOP voters are still yet to rethink their allegiance to the dominant figure in Republican politics.
CBS News/YouGov pollsters found that 76 percent of GOP primary voters surveyed on Friday and Saturday dismissed the indictment as “politically motivated.” While 80 percent of all adults said Trump’s careless stewardship of classified materials represented a “national security risk,” only 38 percent of Republican voters agreed. Sixty-one percent of GOP voters said the news wouldn’t have any impact on their views of Trump, and 80 percent said the former president should still be able to serve in the White House if convicted.
In the same time frame, an ABC News/Ipsos poll produced similar results. Just 38 percent of self-identified Republicans described the charges against Trump as “serious,” compared with 61 percent of the general public and 63 percent of self-identified independents. That survey found that the public’s views on Trump’s fitness for high office remain largely unchanged by the indictment, which is hardly shocking given the recency of the event and the voting public’s hardened views on the candidate.
These results generated spasms of outrage among the GOP’s critics. How, they asked, could Republicans still stand by this man given the gravity of the allegations he is facing? Of course, recent history does indicate that Republican voters’ affinities for Trump are not conditional, and time alone will not suffice to convince the GOP-primary electorate that the revelations in this or any other forthcoming criminal indictments are disqualifying. If the details contained in the indictment are going to bite, Republican officials and the right-leaning media elites GOP voters trust will first have to press the case it makes against Trump.
There would be precedent for that sort of attitudinal shift. A survey of some of the most divisive issues among Republicans suggests that GOP voters’ views are fluid and subject to revision — a condition that is masked by the absolutist bombast so often deployed by recent converts to the emerging orthodoxy. Take, for example, the issue of immigration.
The conventional wisdom that emerged in the wake of Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection maintained that the GOP would have to soften its opposition to comprehensive immigration reform if it hoped to compete among Hispanic voters. That point of view was lent credence across the spectrum of right-wing influencers, from Sean Hannity’s primetime Fox News Channel program to much of the GOP conference in Congress. Accordingly, by 2014, six-in-ten self-described Republicans supported legislation that would establish legal residency for illegal migrants. All that changed with the rise of Donald Trump and his demonstration in 2016 that a hardline policy toward illegal immigration wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle to electoral success. By 2018, Republican voters indicated in polls that they not only opposed the legalization of the nation’s illegal population but wanted to reduce legal immigration into the U.S. Trump argued the case, and he won the argument.
A similar phenomenon characterized Republican voters’ schizophrenia when it came to American intervention in the conflict in Syria. In April 2013, while Obama was seeking any and every available means to avoid acting on his self-set “red line” for military action against the Assad regime, 56 percent of Republicans supported strikes on Syrian targets. But by late summer of that year, Obama seemed to acquiesce to pressure and handed the issue off to Senate Democrats, who were prepared to authorize those strikes. That was when Republican opinion flipped. On the eve of the most confused speech of Obama’s presidency, in which he made the case for action in Syria while insisting Moscow had saved him from having to act on his convictions, only about 20 percent of Republicans still backed the strikes. In the interim, Republican influencers had turned against the project, and their supporters followed their leads.
Early in his tenure, Donald Trump executed targeted strikes on Syrian facilities in response to a nerve-gas attack against civilians, which 86 percent of Republicans backed. Republicans were caught off guard in December of the following year, when Trump performed an about-face and sought the removal of U.S. forces from western Syria — a decision that prompted the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis. In the summer of 2018, nearly 70 percent of GOP voters endorsed U.S. involvement in the fight against “Islamic extremist groups in Iraq and Syria.” But when Trump flipped, so, too, did his loyalists with access to microphones, and Republican voters followed suit. By January 2019, only 30 percent of Republicans believed it would be the “wrong decision” to pull all U.S. troops from Syria.
More recently, the debate over the proper level of U.S. support for Ukraine’s effort to resist Russia’s war of territorial expansion has followed a similar trajectory. Within the first month of the invasion, Republicans sided with the majority of Americans who believed Joe Biden hadn’t done enough to support Ukraine in advance of the Russian onslaught. Most Republicans joined Democrats and independents in support of a NATO-backed no-fly zone over Ukraine. But a familiar pattern emerged as the loudest voices in Republican politics agitated against U.S. support for Kyiv. By April of this year, majorities of Republican voters and GOP-leaning independents concluded that the war in Europe did not imperil vital U.S. interests and opposed providing material support for Ukraine’s resistance.
None of this is to say that Republican voters are uniquely susceptible to influence; this is an observably bipartisan phenomenon. What it indicates is that these are complex issues that require deep historical knowledge and a background understanding of policy to fully grasp. As we might expect from representative government, voters outsource that work to their representatives and the experts in the world of politics whom they trust.
For now, the indictment has failed to change Republican voters’ affection for Trump. But we can only expect that condition to pertain indefinitely if influential Republicans who have earned the confidence of GOP voters decline to popularize the case made against Trump in this indictment. And perhaps that’s what will happen. After all, Trump’s opponents are hostage to the shadows on the wall, too.
History suggests that Republican voters’ views are not static. They can change provided the right inputs. The real question is what Trump’s rivals for the 2024 nomination will do. If they press the case against him, they’ll stand a chance of winning voters away from his side. If they instead take the path of least resistance, dismissing the significance of the DOJ’s indictment because making the case that Donald Trump jeopardized U.S. national security is just too hard, his odds of being the Republican nominee in 2024 will remain good.
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Ben Shapiro:
President Trump has apparently now been indicted on seven criminal charges in the classified documents case. You’ll recall that this case actually began after it turned out that President Trump had a bunch of documents at Mar-a-Lago and those documents were requested by the National Archives and Records Administration.
The National Archives warned Trump they could escalate the issue to prosecutors or Congress if he continued to refuse to hand over the documents. He had also been warned by former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann that he could face serious legal jeopardy if he did not comply.
After about 15 of those boxes were returned, officials discovered there were hundreds of pages of classified material in the boxes. Federal law enforcement was notified of the discovery, and they came to believe there were more materials that had not been returned, and then the DOJ issued a subpoena seeking additional classified documents.
A few weeks later, the DOJ decided to raid Mar-a-Lago after Trump’s legal team had signed a written statement claiming that all the classified material had been returned. The FBI executed a search warrant on the property and recovered more classified material.
Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, and Donald Trump are among the public officials who we know have had classified material in a place they weren’t supposed to. The only one of those four people who had the power to summarily declassify such material was President Trump.
The president can summarily declassify anything. He’s the head of the executive branch. None of the others were able to declassify anything. So that’s number one. Number two: Why exactly was Trump holding these classified materials in the first place?
As it turns out, according to pretty much everybody who has testified in this case, apparently Donald Trump just decided to hold onto the documents simply because he wanted to hold onto the documents. There was no nefarious reason. The likely thing that happened is, he left the White House and thought, Hey, look, it’s a letter. Kim Jong Un signed it. I’m going to bring it.
And he brought it. And that was the end of the story. The National Archives said, “Can we have the letter?” Trump said, “No.”
That’s pretty much the extent of it. Is that a national security threat to the extent that the former president of the United States and the current Republican front runner for the nomination should be indicted on criminal charges?
No. The answer is, no. And the reason the answer is no is because we have the disparate treatment of those other public officials, including most egregiously, Hillary Clinton.
Let’s look at what Hillary Clinton actually did, because it’s relevant in this context. The FBI and DOJ decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her activities surrounding taking home classified documents and loading them onto an unclassified server, a secret private server kept in a bathroom.
She wound up using BleachBit to clean the documents when it became clear she was suspected of holding those documents, and then those classified documents ended up on the very-not-classified computer of a pervert named Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin’s husband. Huma was Hillary’s close aide.
Hillary still did not get prosecuted. It’s hard to think of a looser use of classified material. It’s difficult to think of Donald Trump doing anything that is remotely as sloppy as that.
Trump’s prosecutors are going out of their way to say Donald Trump was willfully and maliciously hiding this material. The reason they are doing this is because if they say he accidentally mishandled classified information, then we are all going to ask the obvious questions: Why isn’t Joe Biden being prosecuted? Why wasn’t Mike Pence prosecuted? Why isn’t Hillary Clinton prosecuted?
This is differential prosecution. Everyone can see this is differential prosecution. Hillary Clinton stored thousands of documents on a private server in her home while she was secretary of state. Many of those documents were classified. Those documents were then bleached.
Announcing why he was not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton, James Comey stated, “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before deciding whether to bring charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Comey admitted there was a high likelihood that foreign eyes ended up on classified material because of Hillary Clinton. Is there a high likelihood that materials ended up being seen by the Chinese or Russians because Donald Trump hid this stuff in a closet at Mar-a-Lago? Is that a high likelihood?
Hillary deliberately wiped her server. Now, if you’re talking about covering up obstruction of justice, preventing the knowledge by law enforcement that you are covering up classified material, Hillary Clinton did all that.
There is still an investigation into Joe Biden keeping classified documents around the nation like Hunter Biden leaves illegitimate children. According to NBC News, “The federal investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents shows few signs of an imminent conclusion, even as the probes into former Vice-President Mike Pence and former President Donald Trump have reached or appear to be reaching the end.”
So is Donald Trump being prosecuted on the basis of doing something extraordinarily different from Hillary Clinton? The answer, of course, is no.
This is a malign use of law enforcement. There is no way in hell that they would be doing this if Donald Trump were a Democrat. There’s no way in hell and we all know it. And that’s perverse. It undermines the credibility of law enforcement, the DOJ, and the FBI. These institutions are at low ebb in terms of credibility among Americans.
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The Wall Street Journal:
Whether you love or hate Donald Trump, his indictment by President Biden’s Justice Department is a fraught moment for American democracy. For the first time in U.S. history, the prosecutorial power of the federal government has been used against a former President who is also running against the sitting President. This is far graver than the previous indictment by a rogue New York prosecutor, and it will roil the 2024 election and U.S. politics for years to come.
Special counsel Jack Smith announced the indictment in a brief statement on Friday. But no one should be fooled: This is Attorney General Merrick Garland’s responsibility. Mr. Garland appointed Mr. Smith to provide political cover, but Mr. Garland, who reports to Mr. Biden, has the authority to overrule a special counsel’s recommendation. Americans will inevitably see this as a Garland-Biden indictment, and they are right to think so.
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The indictment levels 37 charges against Mr. Trump that are related to his handling of classified documents, including at his Mar-a-Lago club, since he left the White House. Thirty-one of the counts are for violating the ancient and seldom-enforced Espionage Act for the “willful retention of national defense information.”
But it’s striking, and legally notable, that the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act (PRA) that allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office. It allows for good-faith negotiation with the National Archives. Yet the indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents.
This doesn’t fit the spirit or letter of the PRA, which was written by Congress to recognize that such documents had previously been the property of former Presidents. If the Espionage Act means Presidents can’t retain any classified documents, then the PRA is all but meaningless. This will be part of Mr. Trump’s defense.
The other counts are related to failing to turn over the documents or obstructing the attempts by the Justice Department and FBI to obtain them. One allegation is that during a meeting with a writer and three others, none of whom held security clearances, Mr. Trump “showed and described a ‘plan of attack’” from the Defense Department. “As president I could have declassified it,” he said on audio tape. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
The feds also say Mr. Trump tried to cover up his classified stash by “suggesting that his attorney hide or destroy documents,” as well as by telling an aide to move boxes to conceal them from his lawyer and the FBI.
As usual, Mr. Trump is his own worst enemy. “This would have gone nowhere,” former Attorney General Bill Barr told CBS recently, “had the President just returned the documents. But he jerked them around for a year and a half.”
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That being said, if prosecutors think that this will absolve them of the political implications of their decision to charge Mr. Trump, they fail to understand what they’ve unleashed.
In the court of public opinion, the first question will be about two standards of justice. Mr. Biden had old classified files stored in his Delaware garage next to his sports car. When that news came out, he didn’t sound too apologetic. “My Corvette’s in a locked garage, OK? So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street,” Mr. Biden said. AG Garland appointed another special counsel, Robert Hur, to investigate, but Justice isn’t going to indict Mr. Biden.
As for willful, how about the basement email server that Hillary Clinton used as Secretary of State? FBI director James Comey said in 2016 that she and her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” According to him, 113 emails included information that was classified when it was sent or received. Eight were Top Secret. About 2,000 others were later “upclassified” to Confidential. This was the statement Mr. Comey ended by declaring Mrs. Clinton free and clear, since “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
This is the inescapable political context of this week’s indictment. The special counsel could have finished his investigation with a report detailing the extent of Mr. Trump’s recklessness and explained what secrets it could have exposed. Instead the Justice Department has taken a perilous path.
The charges are a destructive intervention into the 2024 election, and the potential trial will hang over the race. They also make it more likely that the election will be a referendum on Mr. Trump, rather than on Mr. Biden’s economy and agenda or a GOP alternative. This may be exactly what Democrats intend with their charges.
Republicans deserve a more competent champion with better character than Mr. Trump. But the indictment might make GOP voters less inclined to provide a democratic verdict on his fitness for a second term. Although the political impact is uncertain, Republicans who are tired of Mr. Trump might rally to his side because they see the prosecution as another unfair Democratic plot to derail him.
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And what about the precedent? If Republicans win next year’s election, and especially if Mr. Trump does, his supporters will demand that the Biden family be next. Even if Mr. Biden is re-elected, political memories are long.
It was once unthinkable in America that the government’s awesome power of prosecution would be turned on a political opponent. That seal has now been broken. It didn’t need to be. However cavalier he was with classified files, Mr. Trump did not accept a bribe or betray secrets to Russia. The FBI recovered the missing documents when it raided Mar-a-Lago, so presumably there are no more secret attack plans for Mr. Trump to show off.
The greatest irony of the age of Trump is that for all his violating of democratic norms, his frenzied opponents have done and are doing their own considerable damage to democracy.
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Last week, the Washington Post attacked Nikki Haley for not taking the Confederate flag down at the South Carolina State Capitol.
You will recall that after the tragic 2015 shooting in Charleston, SC, wherein Dylan Roof murdered congregants at the Emanuel AME Church, Nikki Haley led the charge to take down the Confederate flag. The attack was premised on Haley not doing it sooner and, in her first campaign, assuring South Carolinians she would not pursue the issue.
The Washington Post ignored that Republicans, on the campaign trail during Haley’s 2010 gubernatorial bid, accused her of being a whore and a transplant from India. Those were actual allegations against her by her own side. She won.
She won, in part, by assuring South Carolinians that they could take a chance on her and she would not be disruptive but was one of them. It worked. She won. The Post ignores all that context to say Haley could have, had she wanted, taken on the issue in 2010. They ignore that she might not have won if she proved to be a more disrupting force than she already was.
The context matters. The context of the race, the state, etc. matters. The Washington Post never did a story about how Barack Obama campaigned against gay marriage only to push it in office. They never did a story about how he could have pushed harder on the campaign trail in 2008. But they went there with Haley because she is a Republican and they hate her for it.
In Florida, last week, NBC News reporter Jonathan Allen vented that Ron DeSantis refused to take questions from the crowd at an event. In the same tweet, Allen noted that DeSantis instead chose to mingle and visit one-on-one with the audience. In other words, DeSantis answered questions from people, just not the way Allen wanted.
Today, Allen is at it again. He accuses DeSantis of embracing the Florida “swamp” that he claimed he’d transform. Instead, in his latest NBC News rant, Allen claims DeSantis did not reform the culture of politics in Florida but used it to his own advantage.
Allen and NBC News will not tell you that Jonathan Allen, their reporter, had been an employee of Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s political operation. He left Politico for the job but eventually went back to Politico where the progressive spin-meisters waved it all away and claimed it was no big deal. Notably, the man who waved it all away for Allen, is John Harris, Politico’s Editor, whose wife was the Executive Director of NARAL before working for a Democrat in Congress.
Nope, no bias at all.
Allen left Politico, went to NBC News, and no one bothers to tell us he worked for Flordia Democrat Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz before turning his pen against Ron DeSantis.
The press really is the enemy of the GOP more and more. They would not put up with these antics from Republicans. By the way, it is worth noting that CNN had Valerie Jarrett’s daughter on the payroll as an anchor, but she too, is at NBC now.
Perhaps it is more NBC News is the enemy. With MSNBC at least, it is becoming the network most likely to hire Democrat partisans and weaponize them against the right behind the veneer of claims of nonpartisanship.
The GOP would be wise to avoid giving NBC a debate or even dealing with NBC journalists at this point. The network is weaponized against them.
So is the media generally and NBC specifically the enemy, or are they just doing their jobs badly? -
Miranda Devine on the source of the Eastern Seaboard’s current bad air:
While New Yorkers have become inured to the pungent smell of cannabis smoke wafting through the streets, the Canadian wildfire smoke currently turning the sky orange is taking our tolerance to new levels.
By Wednesday we were registering the worse air pollution of any major city in the world and COVID mask maniacs were back in their element.
But don’t fall for the propaganda that climate change is to blame.
The situation in Canada is similar to that in Australia, where green ideology and chronic government underfunding mean that the forests currently ablaze have not been managed properly for years.
Instead of dead wood and undergrowth being removed regularly using low-intensity controlled or “prescribed” burns, forests have become overgrown tinderboxes. Fire trails that used to allow first responders easy access to the forest have closed over as vast tracts of land are locked away from humans. Logging and other commercial practices that used to self-interestedly tend to forest health have been phased out.
Back in 2016 when Parks Canada had planned just 12 prescribed burns for the year, Mark Heathcott, the agency’s retired fire management coordinator of 23 years, warned about the importance of the practice to prevent future wildfires.
In 2020, a paper in the journal Progress in Disaster Science warned: “Wildfire management agencies in Canada are at a tipping point. Presuppression and suppression costs are increasing but program budgets are not.”
Canadian indigenous groups also have complained that bureaucratic obstacles hinder their ability to perform the controlled burns they have used for centuries to reduce fuel load, flush out food and regenerate forests.
But in our enlightened era, pressure from green activists using illogical emotional arguments about wildlife habitats have caused governments to underfund and curtail the scientific use of prescribed burning to mitigate wildfire risk.
The ensuing incineration of forests and critters by super-hot runaway wildfires is infinitely worse for wildlife habitats.
But for climate alarmists, the assault on New Yorkers air quality is a positive outcome that they can spin to prove their case. They’re like the arsonist who sets fire to a building and then profits from the clean-up.
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I am announcing a sectional baseball doubleheader with two local teams in the first game, with the winner possibly facing a parochial high school opponent for the right to go state.
Nevertheless, fair reporting is fair reporting, and the opposite is not.
Wisconsin Watch, a self-described “nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news outlet,” is a progressive outlet masquerading as a straight shooter. While this is a free country, the outlet’s reporting as if it is the last word on objective, incentive-free journalism is morally objectionable, as Watch’s priorities originate well outside the political center.
Part of the “Global Investigative Journalism Network,” sponsored by the left-leaning Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, among others, Wisconsin Watch also enjoys local donors such as the Joyce Foundation ($200,000), whose stated purpose is to effect “Gun Violence Prevention & Justice Reform” as well as fostering journalism that “shines a light on conditions we hope to change, policies we endorse, and success stories that present solutions to problems.” In other words, these are ideological nonprofits paying journalists they hope will write about pet interests under the guise of being “nonpartisan, nonprofit.” But for charity’s sake, let’s assume that there aren’t strings attached.
The vast majority of Wisconsin Watch reporter Phoebe Petrovic’s investigation into “anti-LGBTQ+” policies at Wisconsin private schools — Christian schools — relies upon left-wing advocacy groups for sourcing. You can read the whole thing here.
The report begins by interviewing Nat Werth, a controversial 2019 graduate of Sheboygan Lutheran — a Missouri-synod Lutheran school.
Petrovic writes:
As Werth was preparing to graduate, he drafted a valedictory speech in which he planned to come out as gay and critique homophobic Biblical interpretations as archaic, mistranslated or misconstrued. Administrators canceled his remarks.
Sheboygan Lutheran is a private school that receives public funding through tuition vouchers, which currently subsidize nearly 40% of its students. Administrators ignored repeated requests by phone and email for an interview. When a reporter recently again asked Executive Director Paul Gnan for a comment in person, Gnan smiled and said: “Absolutely not.”
As I wrote two years ago, Werth attempted to make about himself what should have been a speech about the whole of his graduating class. The school administration was well within its rights to deny him the platform to make a selfish speech. But of course the whole thing turned into a circus.
Werth told Petrovic that “I’m not against school choice.” “It’s that everybody has human rights and that they should all be protected no matter what, especially the rights of kids who go to private and parochial (voucher) schools in Wisconsin,” he continued.
In other words, Christian schools should do what the government tells them to do, even if it’s against their deeply held beliefs about natural law and order.
Petrovic then turns to Suzanne Eckes, an education-law professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for comment.
She writes:
Suzanne Eckes, an education law professor at University of Madison-Wisconsin, argued that language casting gay or transgender identities or behavior as sinful, even without policies codifying the perspective, “has a discriminatory intent behind it.”
She also pointed out how some policies, although not explicit, could result in LGBTQ+ students being treated inconsistently from others. For example, some schools specifically ban all sexual contact outside of a straight, cisgender marriage.
Note: Sexual contact outside of a “straight, cisgender marriage” is a universal prohibition on student sexual contact because high-schoolers aren’t getting married, gay or straight.
For me, the most troubling bit of the piece is when Petrovic reports that Beverly Yahnke, a guest speaker hosted by Sheboygan Lutheran, seemingly joked about sibling abuse during her “Transgenderism and Sexualization in Our Schools” presentation in April (held outside of school hours and free to the public, which Petrovic fails to mention):
In a striking moment, she also argued that children should go through natural puberty, without blockers, “to discover what it feels like to be a man, to feel their shoulders broaden to take out their little sister and smack her against the wall.” When an audience member reacted in shock, Yahnke added: “In playful jest, of course.”
It’s worth noting that Yahnke had visited Sheboygan Lutheran before, in 2020, and delivered the same speech minus the roughhousing part. She instead riffed about beards, an admittedly safer play. But, hey, at 35 minutes into a presentation before the clergy of apathy — high-schoolers — I’m sympathetic to getting a rise out of the crowd. It also happens to be true that pubescent boys are ogres discovering new strength with underdeveloped brains, which is why we pit them against one another in whatever sport is in season. Off-the-cuff jokes rarely read well on paper.
Petrovic did not indicate if she reached out to Yahnke or her organization for comment.
Further citations include the Trevor Project (a queer-advocacy group) on bullying stats, the Southern Poverty Law Center (a left-wing smear outfit) on which doctors can be authorities on transgenderism, TransLash (a revolutionary transgender zine that has partnered with the National Education Association, a public-teachers’ union) on the insidiousness of right-wing voucher programs, and GSAFE (which organizes LGBT clubs at schools) on the extracurricular nature of Gay–Straight Alliances or Gender and Sexuality Alliances.
Wisconsin Watch isn’t nonpartisan in a way that a layman would understand the term. Rather, it’s nonpartisan because there isn’t a party far enough to the left to earn its support. The publication uses deceptive presentation to advocate for progressive policies while using whatever activist outlet is at hand to lobby for unmaking successful programs such as Wisconsin’s voucher system — a program that allow kids to attend excellent schools and focus on their studies instead of on intersectionalist priorities.
Sheboygan Lutheran was a bitter cross-town foe of my school, but, on this matter, they did nothing wrong and a whole lot right. The public should use Wisconsin Watch’s reporting as a lesson that there are elements of the Left that would rather see kids fail than see them learn outside of the progressive orthodoxy.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 