Plus: More plagiarism at Harvard and Minnesota’s terrible new state flag.
• Not surprising that the Colorado supreme court is the highest in the land.
• For the past three years, prosecutors, courts, and congressional committees have attempted to finish Donald Trump. But there is no legal shortcut: His fitness to be president is now for the voters to decide. It would be particularly explosive to disqualify Trump from the ballot after more than a year of campaigning, at the end of which he leads in the polls. Such a drastic step should be taken only on the most definitive legal grounds. The Colorado supreme court, in trying to disqualify Trump under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, has no such mandate. Incitement has never been a basis for disqualification under Section 3, so the court had to stretch its language to claim that Trump “engaged in” an insurrection on January 6 through his lassitude and a few tweets during the riot. But as U.S. attorney general Henry Stanbery wrote in 1867, “the force of the term to engage carries the idea of active rather than passive conduct.” The 4–3 decision divided even the Colorado justices, all of them appointed by Democratic governors. It likely now heads to the U.S. Supreme Court ahead of the January 5 deadline to set the Colorado primary ballot. We still hope that Republican primary voters reject Trump’s candidacy and put disputes over insurrection behind us. Trying to short-circuit that decision in the courts, however, is likely to make things worse rather than better.
• The acquisition of a medium-sized company usually attracts some attention in trade publications and maybe gets a perfunctory article in the Wall Street Journal. But Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel has a bipartisan group of senators melting down. John Fetterman (D., Pa.), Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio), J. D. Vance (R., Ohio), Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), and Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) are outraged that what they characterize as a vital part of the U.S. industrial base would be acquired by foreigners. They also invoke the last refuge of a protectionist: national security. U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel are both publicly traded companies, which means they are both already owned by Americans and foreigners, because anyone in the world can purchase their shares. Even if U.S. Steel totally disappeared, the U.S. would still have production capacity to spare to meet defense needs. But that’s not what’s happening. U.S. Steel isn’t bankrupt, and Nippon Steel isn’t liquidating it. It is joining the throng of companies headquartered in other countries that seek to invest in the United States, employ Americans, and make stuff here. Japan is one of America’s closest allies, especially with respect to their shared adversary China. As long as both companies’ boards and shareholders support this deal, it should go through.
• Harvard president Claudine Gay’s plagiarism scandal has become a slow burn worthy of a Sunday-night slot on premium cable. After initial allegations that Gay plagiarized much of her 1997 doctoral dissertation, reporting uncovered three more publications in which Gay had seemingly copied others’ work and passed it off as her own. Soon after, Harvard’s board acknowledged “a few instances of inadequate citations” but affirmed their support for the president, who the board claimed committed “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.” Then the other shoe dropped. The New York Post reported that it had contacted Harvard in October about potential plagiarism, only to receive a letter from a high-powered law firm accusing the Post of defamation. Dozens of other potential instances of plagiarism—not confined to the initial four publications—emerged, including one in the acknowledgments of Gay’s dissertation. Gay eventually requested three more corrections, these addressing certain uncited language in her dissertation, but Harvard once again found that her behavior fell short of violating its academic-integrity standards. Subsequent developments call into question how thoroughly the university investigated the claims: A National Review report found that Harvard never reached out to academics who believed Gay had plagiarized their work, and former Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain questioned the validity of Gay’s doctorate, based as it was on a dissertation—meant to introduce new research into the academic world—scavenged from Swain’s own work, without attribution. As the plagiarized statements pile up, Harvard is choosing to keep Gay as its face, which is a statement of its own.
• A federal jury in Washington, D.C., ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay $148 million, including $75 million in punitive damages, to two Fulton County, Ga., poll workers for defaming them in the aftermath of the 2020 election. A judge had already ruled that Giuliani’s statements were defamatory, and Giuliani declined to testify in his defense with criminal charges pending against him in Georgia. The former New York City mayor and Trump-campaign attorney identified the two women in security-camera videos from a ballot-processing facility and falsely claimed they had inserted a USB drive into election machines and were adding fake ballots to the vote count to boost Joe Biden. After these claims were publicized by Giuliani and the website Gateway Pundit, the women, who are black, received a torrent of threats and harassment, often racist. The mistreatment of these private citizens is emblematic of why it has become so much harder to find public-spirited volunteers to staff elections around the country. Even if the courts properly reduce the $148 million figure, the outcome is likely to wipe out what’s left of the fortune Giuliani amassed in the years after he left Gracie Mansion. The damage Giuliani has done to his once-sterling reputation will be even harder to repair.
• Boston mayor Michelle Wu sent an invitation for an “electeds of color” holiday party to state officials who didn’t meet that criterion. She publicly regretted the faux pas. She did not regret, but certainly should have, her agreement to host an “electeds of color” gathering in the first place. Individuals have the right to associate with or dissociate from whomever they wish, however divisively, but public servants–in their capacity as public servants–shouldn’t self-segregate from their colleagues and fellow citizens. The mayor is a Massachusite and a Bostonian first, and in her public role she should identify with her entire political community.
• The show trial of Jimmy Lai, the 76-year-old Hong Kong pro-democracy icon and former newspaper owner, recently began. If Lai is convicted–a near certainty, given the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on Hong Kong’s previously autonomous legal system–he could spend the rest of his life in prison. The persecution of Lai is part of the party’s merciless campaign to crush the remaining freedoms of the island city. Demonstrators no longer take to the streets. Major figures in the pro-democracy movement have been forced to flee or face arrest. Independent media have been shut down; Lai’s Apple Daily was raided and forced to close. Americans, Hong Kongers, Taiwanese, and everyone else in Communist Chinese crosshairs should regard the sham proceeding as a warning of things to come.
• News outlets far and wide reported that the Vatican had declared that priests might bless same-sex unions. Many Catholics protested that it was closer to the truth that the Vatican had said that priests might bless people in same-sex unions. The document explicitly states that same-sex marriage will always be a contradiction in terms and that “any rites and prayers that could create confusion [around] what constitutes marriage . . . are inadmissible.” But the Vatican did not rush to clear away any of the confusions that the statement itself created, while progressives seeking thorough doctrinal change claimed victory. It has become the standard procedure in this pontificate: Francis never embraces heresy but often winks at it.
• In summer 2020, James Bennet was the editorial-page editor of the New York Times. He decided to publish an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), who suggested federal force to stop the riots occurring alongside the George Floyd protests. The newspaper’s staff responded by erupting in a panic and outrage, and publisher A. G. Sulzberger tossed Bennet out. Three years later, Bennet has offered his side of the story in 17,000 words for the Economist. His assessment of what ails the Times will leave third-degree burns. Choice excerpts include “The Times’s problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favor one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether” and “The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.” Sulzberger responded by declaring, “I could not disagree more strongly with the false narrative he has constructed about the Times,” but offered no specific refutation of the facts. The idea that narratives can and should float free from facts is of course part of what Bennet is diagnosing.
• This week, the state of Minnesota released its contribution to a growing trend toward reimagining state flags. But quite unlike the elegant redesigns Utah and Mississippi produced, Minnesota’s new banner is reflective more of the faddish intellectual temptation to bulldoze the past and replace it with the new and, at times, entirely imaginary. The North Star State replaced the five-pointed star, evocative of both Polaris and Minnesota’s membership in the American Union, with an eight-pointed star of dubious historical provenance. The flag’s inverted chevron is supposed to be an abstract depiction of the state’s borders, but all it conveys is abstraction. Its contrasting shades of blue are supposed to reflect Native Americans’ reverence for the state’s waterways—at least, according to a member of the State Emblems Redesign Commission, who admitted that his interpretation was entirely made up. Lest it discredit the whole enterprise of redesigning state flags, Minnesota would be well advised to go back to the drawing board.
Not Again
O n January 15, Iowa Republicans will caucus to say who the party’s next presidential nominee should be. On January 23, New Hampshire will vote in a primary to do the same. Donald Trump ends 2023 with fat leads in the polls in both states.
His supporters recall good things his administration did: diminishing the flow of illegal immigrants, nominating constitutionalist federal judges and justices, midwifing the Abraham Accords. They find something admirable in his communication style: half strident, half goofy, almost always flowing and informal. Or they think he would be the best candidate to stop a second Biden term.
They are mistaken.
The problems that hobbled his term remain. Trump took conservatism and the GOP in some wrong new directions. His economic ideas leaned toward protection while his foreign policy flirted with isolation, as if the relative prosperity and peace of the post–World War II world required no ongoing structures or effort. His admiration for the world’s dictators, frequently expressed, threatened to blow America’s moral example to smithereens. Trump did not have to be blackmailed or bribed by Putin to like him; he genuinely admired the KGB vet’s style. Add to this the foibles and quirks that made his policies hard to execute: disorganization, laziness, capricious treatment of cabinet secretaries and staff. Even when he was right, he got a lot wrong: Immigration slowed because he made a deal with Mexico to hold wannabes there while they could be vetted; the big beautiful border wall was BS, and immigration law remained the same.
Trump comes now trailing new problems like cans tied to the tail of a dog. He hopes to repeat Grover Cleveland’s feat of winning the White House after first winning and then losing it. But he does not admit he actually lost it in 2020. After filing a raft of futile legal challenges, he sicced a mob of his followers on the Capitol to disrupt Congress’s counting of the electoral votes. This vicious stunt should have discredited him even among his sympathizers. But he has spent the years since repeating his tales of ballot stuffing while grooming denialist yes-men and -women. His obsessions cost the GOP two Senate seats in Georgia in the 2021 runoffs and several more races in the 2022 midterms.
Trump captured attention his first time around, in part, by talking about issues that other candidates scanted: the threat of China, chaos at the southern border. This time around, the issue, always close to his heart but now crowding out all others, is himself. He says he is hated and was kept from his 2020 victory because he is the tribune of his audiences. He showed his real priorities when he pardoned Steve Bannon for defrauding his supporters.
If he were to win, who would help him govern? Capable or at least ordinary figures populated his inner circle last time around, balancing the Bannons and the Stones, the Scaramuccis and the Omarosas. Most left his service slandered by him and disgusted by his antics. A few might volunteer out of concern for the republic; more would be time-servers; the rest would be scraped from the rotten logs of media and politics.
Realistically, how can he win? Polls, which are poor predictors this far out, show him leading Biden in swing states and national averages. They do not account for his likely status next year as the defendant in numerous prosecutions, bound by gag orders, perhaps wrongly or rightly found guilty by astounded juries. Conservatives, Republicans, and the country need a GOP candidate who is younger, smarter, truer, and above all saner. No Trump in 2024.
The next edition of “The Week” will be emailed on January 5.