Plus: Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas faces impeachment.
• If the deep state can get Taylor Swift hitched, maybe it really is all-powerful.
• The NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs—currently in the news for being Super Bowl–bound as well as for the fact that tight end Travis Kelce is dating musician Taylor Swift—are apparently participating in the most sinister conspiracy ever foisted upon an unwitting American public, if you believe social media’s least reputable yet highest-profile Trump-affiliated “influencers.” Many of them, including former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, now pursuing his natural calling, argue in all purported sincerity that Taylor Swift is an “op.” Her success, apparently, is the product not of savvy branding and decades of work but rather of a series of shady agreements between her, the NFL, and George Soros to achieve peak crossover appeal right before she endorses Joe Biden in 2024. Needless to say, the argument is absurd and reflects the combination of lunacy and cynicism of those promoting it. The response it has received among the grassroots, however—and, reportedly, among Trump’s staff—also reflects something much more consequential: Trumpworld’s well-founded anxiety that his unpopularity with young and even middle-aged women may be irreparable.
• A Manhattan federal jury walloped Trump with an $83.3 million damages award for journalist E. Jean Carroll in the second civil trial arising out of her claims that he sexually assaulted her in the mid Nineties and then defamed her in denying it. The verdict, though not its staggering amount, was inevitable. Trump failed to testify or even show up at the first trial last spring. Because the case is civil, not criminal, the first jury was told it could draw a negative inference against him. He was found liable even though Carroll could not fix an exact year when the assault allegedly happened, and no supporting forensic evidence was admitted. Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee, ruled prior to the second trial that Trump could not contest the first jury’s findings of sexual assault and defamation. Hence, even though Trump deigned to show up and briefly testify in the second trial—involving two remaining defamation claims—he could not truly defend himself. The verdict appears excessive, given that in the first case, where sexual assault was at issue, the jury awarded Carroll just $5 million. Trump will have to post the entire $83.3 million, plus interest, to appeal.
• Fulton County, Ga., district attorney Fani Willis dodged a bullet: Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she hired to indict Donald Trump and 18 others on RICO charges, and with whom she was allegedly having an affair, settled his divorce case. She therefore need not testify about whether they used the fees she paid him to take luxury vacations. But there are other bullets coming. The judge in the RICO case has ordered that she respond by today, February 2, to defense motions that she and Wade be disqualified and the case dismissed. She is under investigation by the Georgia legislature and the House Judiciary Committee, both controlled by Republicans. And a new toxic allegation has emerged: A whistleblower claims Willis fired her and had her escorted out of the DA’s office by armed guards after she complained about misuse of funds by a close Willis adviser. Willis has defiantly asserted that she will not withdraw from the Trump case or resign from office. This prosecution has often been described as “sprawling,” and now so are its scandals.
• The House Homeland Security Committee, on a party-line vote, approved two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. This is a salutary step. Only one cabinet secretary has ever been impeached, in 1876, and he resigned before the Senate could remove him. Mayorkas has been the willing implement for this administration’s blatant refusal to enforce federal immigration law. He has ignored federal statutes requiring that illegal immigrants be detained until they are removed, given asylum, or otherwise legally adjudicated. He has twisted the definitions of legal status, incoherently extended protected status to 700,000 Venezuelan migrants, and handed out meaningless court dates, sometimes a decade in the future, as a substitute for enforcement today. He stands charged with “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” in disregard of seven different enumerated statutory requirements and with a “breach of the public trust” for false statements to Congress and obstruction of congressional oversight. House Republicans, with few other levers to compel executive compliance with the law, should vote to impeach, even if the Democratic Senate will not convict.
• Donald Trump on the campaign trail seems increasingly content to make a massive tax increase a major part of his domestic agenda. His proposal for a 10 percent tariff on all imports (which would not be on all imports, as exceptions would inevitably be doled out according to lobbying and political preference) would cost Americans about $300 billion per year, according to an estimate from the Tax Foundation. Notwithstanding recent comments to the contrary by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, tariffs are taxes on Americans. Perhaps more damaging than the tax increase itself would be the harm it would do to U.S. relationships with other countries. This ought to be a time when the U.S. is forging closer commercial ties with countries other than China instead of trying to freeze them out of the U.S. market. Retaliation from other countries would be swift, and U.S. exporters would be harmed by their trade restrictions in response to Trump’s. One of Trump’s campaign arguments is that the economy was better, and stuff was cheaper, when he was president. In this case as in others, he seems determined to undermine himself.
• Yusef Salaam was one of the Central Park Five, teenagers arrested for a wild night of assaults in the spring of 1989. Salaam, then 15, admitted at his trial that he had gone into the park carrying a 14-inch metal pipe—matching the weapon used in some of the savage beatings. That evening’s crime spree included the brutal rape of a woman jogging in the park. The five were convicted and imprisoned for the rape but later exonerated after another man confessed. A $41 million settlement in 2014 paid Salaam $7.125 million. In 2023, after a decade of being lionized in the media, he was elected to the New York City Council, where he chairs the Public Safety Committee. Last week, a cop in Harlem stopped Salaam for having tinted windows on his BMW, which bears Georgia license plates. Salaam said he was a councilman and was let go after a short, polite encounter but then publicized an inflammatory account of the stop that was contradicted by body-cam footage. The controversy poisoned the well as the city council was overriding Mayor Eric Adams’s reasonable vetoes of new laws banning solitary confinement and requiring the NYPD to document every encounter, no matter how slight—and track them by race. Lies and injustice, in Salaam’s case, are a two-way street.
• Evergrande used vast amounts of borrowed money to become China’s second-largest property developer and quite a bit more besides. Other ventures included theme parks, a soccer team, and, almost inevitably, an electric-vehicle company. Its wide-ranging portfolio is evidence of the way that the dazzling spectacle of China’s growth obscured the economy’s unsound foundations. By the time the Beijing regime finally accepted that China’s real-estate sector was headed for disaster, it was too late. The measures it took to introduce some financial discipline merely brought forward the reckoning. The recent decision by a Hong Kong court to put the company into liquidation is likely to mean that creditors, both international and domestic, will receive scraps. And Evergrande’s is by no means a unique case. Its excesses are just one example of a far wider financial irresponsibility enabled by the unaccountability of China’s ruling party and the gullibility of investors, including a good number from the West.
• Recent allegations against the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, based on Israeli intelligence, have led to calls for its abolition. The charges made against it: Twelve of its employees took part in the October 7 attack, and two directly participated in the slaughter at the kibbutzim in Israel’s south; some 190 UNRWA employees are operatives of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terror group in Gaza; and approximately 1,200 UNRWA employees of the 12,000 in Gaza are otherwise linked to Hamas. Put simply, U.N. employees participated in a horrific terrorist attack. It’s arguably the biggest scandal in the U.N.’s history. Although the U.S. and more than a dozen other states have suspended funding to the group, this is likely to be only a temporary pause; administration officials are already setting the stage to return to the status quo—which would be a massive mistake. John Bolton once said that if ten floors of the U.N. headquarters were to disappear it “wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” But it might lessen international support for Hamas terrorism.
• In 2022, former cricketer Imran Khan was close to becoming the first prime minister of Pakistan to complete a full five-year term since that country’s independence in 1947. Now he is on his way to prison. With just one week before the general election, he has received a ten-year sentence for leaking state secrets and a 14-year sentence for corruption. Cui bono, you might suspect. Khan’s successor occupied the office for little over a year and isn’t in the running. The apparent front-runner is that successor’s elder brother: a man who previously held the premiership for three nonconsecutive and incomplete terms and was ousted all three times, jailed in 2018, and cleared of all charges a couple of months ago. There’s corruption, there’s comprehensive corruption, and then there’s whatever is happening in Pakistan.
• Vladimir Kara-Murza is a political prisoner of the Kremlin. He is a democracy advocate who once worked alongside Boris Nemtsov, who was known as the “leader of the opposition” (to Putin). Nemtsov was murdered in 2015. Kara-Murza himself has survived two murder attempts. He refused to go into exile, saying that his place was with his fellow Russians. He was arrested in April 2022. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison—but everyone understands that the real sentence for political prisoners is “for as long as Putin is in power.” Kara-Murza has now been transferred from one harsh Siberian prison, IK-6, to an even harsher one, IK-7. He will suffer the strictest form of isolation. The authorities’ excuse is that when they commanded him to “rise,” he did not. Kara-Murza was able to communicate to his lawyer that this is untrue. The well-being of Vladimir Kara-Murza ought to be a worldwide cause.
• It’s the hope that kills you. Had the Detroit Lions missed out on making their first Super Bowl appearance by losing in a blowout, it would have been sad for the team’s many long-suffering fans. But to lose 34–31, having been up 24–7 at the half, having declined to kick two relatively easy field goals, and having turned the ball over at the worst possible moment? Somehow, that made it so much worse. After the game, the Lions’ coach, Dan Campbell, was admirably honest about the situation. “This may have been our only shot,” Campbell said. “It’s going to be twice as hard to get to this point next year as it was this year.” How acutely the Detroit faithful know it. The Lions have never made a Super Bowl, they had not won a playoff game for three decades, and they had not made it to an NFC Championship Game since 1992. By the end of this year’s run, most of the country was rooting for them—as underdogs among underdogs. Whether they’ll get a chance to repeat that support over the next couple of years is anyone’s guess.