Plus: Ukraine’s surprise invasion of Russian territory.
• Finally, Columbia’s president has figured out how to fold up a tent.
• When Joe Biden abandoned his reelection bid on July 21, it was a sinking ship. The electorate disapproved of his performance and overwhelmingly considered him too old for the job. Trump led consistently in the polling averages in every key battleground state in the Midwest and the Sun Belt—even Nevada, which Trump had lost twice. What a difference four weeks and a new candidate make. In the RealClearPolitics national polling average, Trump’s three-point national lead on Biden has shifted to a one-point lead for Kamala Harris. Swing states have swung. Democrats haven’t even held their convention, which could produce a bigger bounce. All is far from lost for Republicans, especially if the sugar high of Biden’s departure wears off after Labor Day. But Trump can no longer hide his age and unpopularity behind Biden’s greater age and greater unpopularity.
• “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” wrote Donald Trump on his social-media site. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST! She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport.” This was a nutty fantasy. At a press conference, Trump said he took a near-fatal helicopter ride with Willie Brown, who told him “terrible things” about Kamala Harris. Available evidence contradicts him; wags labeled his story “the Chopper Whopper.” In one of his posts, Trump referred to the journalist Maggie Haberman as “Maggot Hagermann.” And on and on. Thirsty as conservatives are to beat the Left, we should remember that these things—lying, name-calling—are wrong.
• Biden turned over leadership of the Democratic Party to a new generation, a younger leader who can carry the country into the future. And in her first major policy announcement of the campaign (besides the comments from her staff that she no longer holds the policy positions she said she held in 2019), Harris is putting forward . . . price controls. She wants a ban on so-called price-gouging by food companies, to be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. Price stability by decree was Diocletian’s idea of good policy. His Edict on Maximum Prices, issued in a.d. 301, prescribed the death penalty for profiteering; Harris, great modernizer, wants only fines. No matter who is in charge, the Left’s policy ideas always come back to one thing: government power. And if government really has the power to make food cheaper by decree, why hasn’t the Biden-Harris administration done it already?
• Trump at one point proposed that income from tips not be taxed, and some Republicans in Congress introduced legislation to that end. Now Harris has said she also supports not taxing tip income. It makes sense to understand these statements as bipartisan pandering in an election year rather than as a serious effort at tax reform. Even as pandering, it is not very effective. It was supposed to be a political maneuver to court low-income voters, but less than 4 percent of workers making under $25 per hour work in tipped occupations. Many low-income workers already effectively pay no federal income tax, and with refundable tax credits they end up making money off filing their taxes. Rather than batting around bad tax ideas that aren’t even effective political moves, the candidates should focus on building on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the individual provisions of which expire at the end of 2025 and will thus need to be dealt with by the next administration.
• For months, the line of contact separating Russia’s invading forces from Ukraine’s defenders had been relatively static. But this month has seen a flurry of activity as Russian forces began breaking through Ukraine’s lines in the Donbas. Western observers fretted that Moscow’s advance signaled that Russia was taking advantage of Ukraine’s reported manpower shortages. But Ukraine’s absent defenders suddenly reappeared in a surprise lightning advance into Russian territory—a speedy operation that has resulted in Ukrainian forces’ capturing what Kyiv says is about 1,000 square kilometers of Russian borderlands. Despite its initial successes, Kyiv’s gambit has its Western allies worried. Some observers fret that Ukraine’s incursion into Russian territory, which is supported by units pulled from weakening front lines in Ukraine, sets the embattled country up for failure. Kyiv disagrees. It sees the risks it is running as worth the rewards—forcing Russian troops to withdraw and reinforce the domestic front, capturing a significant number of Russian troops, and holding territory inside Russia to be used as a bargaining chip at a later date. At the very least, the maneuver has upended the trench-warfare dynamic that had characterized Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine for over a year.
• Pressured by Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) after months of stonewalling, the Biden-Harris administration’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) finally dribbled out a statutorily required report on the state of Iran’s nuclear-weapons development. It is alarming, though not surprising. Customarily, the administration assures Congress that Iran is not engaged in weapons development—even as it enriches uranium ever closer to weapons grade and builds ballistic missiles. This time, however, ODNI conceded that Tehran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device.” Even so, administration analysts continue to claim that Iran has no military nuclear program and that nothing indicates that it has decided to build nuclear weapons. The mullahs already have enough fuel for at least a couple of bombs and have the capability to enrich it, within a couple of weeks, to weapons grade. To know how close they are to “breakout,” one would have to know what “activities” they’ve undertaken. ODNI doesn’t say. Biden has vowed that Iran will not become a nuclear-weapons power on his watch; the press, of course, is not asking Harris about her position. Before going on vacation, Congress took no action on Graham’s proposed authorization of military force if Iran is found to have produced an atomic device. We can only hope Iran is so lackadaisical.
• A federal judge ruled that Google is an illegal monopoly in search services and advertising. The ruling is a solution in search of a problem. It is true that, in the United States, Google pays billions of dollars to the makers of Web browsers and cellphones to have its search engine listed as the default option. It is also true that in the EU, where regulations force users to choose which search engine they would prefer to use, 90 percent choose Google—almost exactly the same percentage as choose Google here in the U.S., where default options are typically easy to change. Which consumers, then, are being harmed? The timing of the DOJ’s suit is off: The search market is in greater flux today than it had been in two decades. Indeed, while the case was pending, Google supplemented its traditional search engine with a new chat-based AI product, Gemini, that is intended to replace Google search over time. The scale of the competition in the AI space is such that Google is guaranteed to have its work cut out if it wishes to maintain the position that it has reached with its traditional search engine. Even if it manages to do so, however, the change that AI will bring to the market is likely to render moot whatever remedies are imposed by the courts.
• Totalitarian states spend gobs of money on the Olympics, often through stealing from their relatively poor citizens to train athletes, who are selected by the state from childhood to specialize in certain sports and then cheat to demonstrate on the world stage the glory of the regime, all while the government manufactures enthusiasm and censors dissent. Meanwhile, the United States, which does none of those things, is by far the most successful Summer Olympics nation of all time. Many Americans don’t care about the Olympics at all, and it’s somewhat fashionable to dislike them. The U.S. won the most medals at the Paris games this year, as it has done in 19 of the 28 Summer Olympics that have awarded them. It has 2,755 medals all-time; among existing countries—sorry, Soviets!—Great Britain ranks second, at 981. Some U.S. metro areas win more medals than entire countries, and some U.S. states would be near the top of the leaderboard. Many athletes who compete under other countries’ flags train here. Unlike even most democratic countries, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee does not receive a penny of government funding. Team USA owns the Summer Olympics as a national side hobby, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
• Taylor Swift’s plans to perform in Vienna were canceled after Austrian authorities received word of an ISIS-inspired plot against her scheduled concerts there. Police arrested three teenagers they said had plotted the attack. One of them revealed that he had pledged allegiance to ISIS; another had ISIS and al-Qaeda propaganda at his home. The terror group was rooted out of its original center of operations in Syria and Iraq during the exhaustive bombing campaigns of the Obama and Trump eras, though it has found a foothold in Central Asia in recent months. Between Vienna, the attack that ISIS-tied individuals carried out at a mall in Moscow this year, and revelations that individuals linked to ISIS and other terrorist groups have entered the U.S. at the southern border, it’s worth recalling that FBI director Chris Wray recently told the Senate that he sees “blinking red lights everywhere.” Americans have largely dropped their focus on the terror threat as other dangers have emerged. But the terrorists have not forgotten about us.
• Britain’s new Labour government appears ready to use the recent rioting as an excuse to clamp down on what remains of Britons’ free speech. That was predictable, but some comments by Mark Rowley, the commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, were more of a surprise. He warned that Britain’s authorities would be “coming after” not only “those committing crimes on the streets” but also those who did so “from further afield online.” The latter, it was clear, included “keyboard warriors” posting beyond Britain’s shores. Rowley’s remarks reflected anger over comments made on Twitter, including remarks by Elon Musk. While some Britons have already been convicted (and imprisoned) for social-media posts deemed connected to the unrest, Americans could be extradited to George III’s former realm to face the same fate only if their online remarks crossed into territory no longer protected by the First Amendment. Rowley’s threats, like the gathering storm over the EU’s Digital Services Act, are a useful reminder that, across the Atlantic, free speech is, despite fine words to the contrary, a privilege. In the U.S. it is a right. That must not change, whether online or off.
• Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, has resigned. She follows Claudine Gay of Harvard and Liz Magill of UPenn, both of whom stepped down after they failed to effectively handle a series of antisemitic protests on campus—among other issues. In her resignation letter, Shafik said that “it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.” But that was not the problem she faced. The problem Shafik faced was that she was transparently sympathetic toward the protesters—even after they had started shouting in support of “intifada,” declaring “death to Zionists,” demanding “Jews out,” and threatening Jewish students that “the 7th of October is going to be every day for you.” Asked in Congress whether she believed that there had been any antisemitism on campus, she replied that she had seen none. Faced with an extended occupation of the university’s grounds and buildings, she did nothing. Told unequivocally that the atmosphere at Columbia was hostile, she equivocated until the anarchy escalated to the point that the university had no choice but to call in the NYPD. “Over the summer,” she lamented, “I have been able to reflect and have decided that my moving on at this point would best enable Columbia to traverse the challenges ahead.” Maybe. Certainly, Shafik’s conduct was egregious. But it was not unique. Rather, it was symptomatic of a pernicious ideology that has taken hold in academia. If Columbia genuinely wishes to “traverse the challenges ahead,” it will look to the model laid out by Ben Sasse at the University of Florida. Faced with the same questions, Sasse published a comprehensible explanation of what the First Amendment protected and what it did not, laid out clear rules as to what would yield punishment and what would not, and then followed through on his vow. Good riddance to Shafik.