Dear Weekend Jolter,
Whether Donald Trump returns to the White House or not in January, Apprentice politics have already made a comeback.
Made-for-television gladiatorial combat was mostly missing from a primary season during which both eventual winners sat out the debates. Americans were served the undercard event instead, and viewership steadily fell. Nikki Haley had her zingers and “scum” riposte, Chris Christie was Chris Christie, and Trump simulacrum Vivek Ramaswamy toggled between preloaded character modes that included a button-pressing bomb thrower, but the encounters were 2016 Lite. Nothing approached the chutzpah of inviting your rival’s husband’s sex-abuse accusers to watch the show, or the “smash that like button” effect of discussing genital dimensions onstage.
Fret not. The drama returns this spring.
Stormy Daniels’s salacious, gratuitous testimony in Alvin Bragg’s hush-money/business-records-falsification case against Trump more likely than not foretold the direction this year’s politics are headed. As Andy McCarthy’s coverage summed up earlier this month, prosecutors elicited from the porn star “that Trump assured her that he and his wife did not sleep in the same bedroom; that she (Stormy) reminded him of his daughter Ivanka . . . [and] that the now-former president and de facto Republican presidential nominee became more polite after she ‘spanked’ him with a rolled-up magazine.” Michael Cohen followed with only slightly less juicy testimony. The trial is expected to wind down next week.
Whatever happens, its revelations will be weaponized in the presidential race. Trump will have his own arsenal of dirt with which to fight back, including what emerges in two upcoming Hunter Biden trials. Credit the showrunners for the fact that one of them gets under way just in time for the first debate, assuming it goes forward, between the presumptive nominees. Another subplot to watch for: Trump’s (inane) suggestion that his opponent was prepared to have him killed. Stay tuned.
The court/campaign nexus is not the only place for the reliably tart and tawdry. The elected cast members who put on Capitol Hill’s daily proceedings clearly aspire to make C-SPAN your guilty pleasure this season.
It was, fittingly, discussion of the Bragg case that triggered a talk-show-style shouting brawl at a recent House committee session. Marjorie Taylor Greene brought up the family of the judge overseeing the trial, and, when Representative Jasmine Crockett questioned the relevance to the matter at hand, Greene made fun of her “fake eyelashes.”
In a snap, Congress was high school. AOC called out MTG. “Are your feelings hurt?” Greene teased. “Oh girl, baby girl, don’t even play,” Ocasio-Cortez shot back. Crockett escalated alliteratively, commenting on the Republican’s “bleach-blonde bad-built butch body,” and then swore. If the dais could have been flipped, it would have been. So chuffed with this comeback was Congresswoman Crockett that she has since filed a trademark application for the phrase, as reported by USA Today. (Jerry Seinfeld’s best-received line in his recent commencement address was, “We’re embarrassed about things we should be proud of and proud of things we should be embarrassed about.” How quickly this was instantiated.)
Armond White, invoking perhaps a better cultural reference point than The Apprentice, draws a bold line between such antics and those of producer Andy Cohen’s Real Housewives. “This form of narcissism relates to political selfishness,” Armond writes. “Cohen has normalized the catfight.” Jeff Blehar suggests calling the House of Representatives offshoot Catfighting in Congress. Either way, he muses,
I would say that such trashy behavior is beneath the dignity of the House, but that would raise the question: Is this really beneath the dignity of the House at this present low point? . . . How much dignity can we reasonably expect out of a gridlocked body whose most prominent members are in Washington, D.C., not to legislate but to build their own grassroots “brands” by creating viral video moments and sparking dramatic confrontations?
Reality-show politics are back. We saw flashes during the Kevin McCarthy ouster, when Matt Gaetz staged his coup without a cause and Nancy Mace strutted around wearing a scarlet “A” to protest not only her treatment for participating but, evidently, the failure of her childhood school to provide any Hawthorne. There was the short-lived public service of George Santos, and that business with Lauren Boebert in a theater (the details have been lost to history, sadly).
As with Survivor or Jersey Shore or Top Chef, connections will be forged with a niche but loyal audience this season. Stars will be made; money, raised; the overall caliber of the artform, debased. And the Mike Judge prophecy will come ever closer to being fulfilled.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The flag story is getting silly, fast: The Alito Flag Nonsense
The ICC’s latest warrants may end up being a grave mistake for the body that issued them: End the International Criminal Court
Biden’s reason for blocking the release of the Hur tape is simple, really: Biden’s Baseless Executive-Privilege Claim
On the president’s commencement address: Biden’s Cynical Effort to Scare Black Voters
ARTICLES
Wesley J. Smith: How Collins and Fauci Shattered Our Trust in Public Health
Dominic Pino: People Would Serve in a Second Trump Administration
Andrew McCarthy: Trump’s Lethal Farce
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Seinfeld and ‘Jesus’ Had the Right Commencement Stuff
Jay Nordlinger: Blue and Yellow in Our Time
Neal B. Freeman: Trump’s Short List Is Too Short
Douglas J. Feith & Ze’ev Jabotinsky: Biden’s ‘Ironclad’ Promises to Israel Are Hollow
Noah Rothman: Joe Biden’s Bleak Verdict on America
Noah Rothman: The Fantasy World of the International Criminal Court
Ryan Mills: Chicago Council Votes to Block Mayor Brandon Johnson from Eliminating ShotSpotter Citywide
Dan McLaughlin: Don’t Look Now, but the Alito Flag Story Just Got Even Dumber
Brittany Bernstein: Justice Alito Well Within His Rights to Sell Cratering Bud Light Stock, Legal-Ethics Experts Say
Audrey Fahlberg: Trump Campaign Bringing on Corey Lewandowski for GOP Convention
Audrey Fahlberg: Can Larry Hogan Pull Off a Blue-State Upset?
James Lynch: Progressive Portland DA Ousted as Voters Overwhelmingly Reject Soft-on-Crime Policies
James Lynch: DOJ Prosecutors Insist on Authenticity of Hunter Biden Laptop, Will Use Data as Evidence at Gun Trial
Christian Schneider: Is the Anti-Woke Backlash upon Us?
CAPITAL MATTERS
Andrew Stuttaford looks for lessons in the fall of Red Lobster: Red Lobster: Sunk by Shrimp (Maybe)
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Did you know that Yale has its own natural-history museum? Not only that, but it’s gotten a facelift. Brian Allen gives the tour: Ask Yale How to Make a Dinosaur Smile
Armond White, on the latest Mad Max installment: Furiosa Exhausts Feminism and Comic-Book Culture
Madeleine Kearns, on a new biopic: Amy Winehouse’s Tragic End
EXCERPTS, BREAKFAST O’ CHAMPIONS
More, from NR’s editorial on the ICC warrants:
The International Criminal Court just took, one hopes, a massive step toward its own demise by seeking warrants for the arrest of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant.
The team of ICC prosecutor Karim Khan alleges that Israel has “intentionally and systematically” deprived Palestinians of food, water, electricity, and other necessities during its campaign in Gaza and that it is carrying out a “widespread and systematic” attack on Palestinian civilians.
These are absurd assertions considering Israel’s consistent efforts to get aid into the territory and its painstaking work to minimize civilian harm — a regime so stringent that it likely exceeds what Washington has done in its own campaigns against ISIS and al-Qaeda.
It’s also morally abominable that Khan announced his intent to prosecute top Israeli officials alongside his announcement that he’s seeking the arrests of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, Hamas commander Mohammed Deif, and Hamas political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh. That decision supports the idea that Khan is seeking to create an equivalence between Israel and Hamas and that he’s being driven by political considerations.
Primarily, though, the application is a problem because the ICC has no right to insert itself into this matter.
It doesn’t have jurisdiction here. Israel is not party to the ICC’s Rome Statute. Khan’s petition concerns a fake case brought forward on the specious legal theory that “Palestine,” a fake country, can join the ICC — a fake global court.
Even by the court’s own standards, this application for arrest warrants is wrong. Under the court’s principle of complementarity, the ICC claims that it defers to the national authorities of the states that it investigates for possible crimes.
Moreover, Israel clearly has a competent, independent judiciary that is willing to investigate prospective war crimes. Whatever the merits of those cases, the Israeli courts have also demonstrated a willingness to go after the country’s leaders, including Netanyahu, on other matters. The ICC is intervening here without providing any explanation of why it believes that other avenues at the national level have been exhausted. It’s a transparently political move.
Andrew McCarthy fact-checks Trump’s latest inflammatory charge:
Having been at the Trump trial in Manhattan for the last couple of days, I cannot say I’m surprised at former president Trump’s inane claim that President Biden authorized the use of lethal force in connection with the FBI’s execution of a court-authorized search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
The claim is political red meat for conspiracy theorists. . . .
All search warrants involve the possibility of forced entry. All of them involve police seizures of property, which can subject the personnel involved to legal risks as well as safety risks. The cops or federal agents usually do a good job of identifying themselves during the process of seeking or forcing entry; yet there are tragic instances in which people inside the premises mistakenly believe violent criminals, rather than cops, are trying to get in, resulting in physical confrontations including, sometimes, exchanges of gunfire.
As a result, and as a matter of common sense, the FBI always has an operational plan for carrying out a court-authorized search. That plan customarily involves reminding the search teams of the FBI’s use-of-force policies. Those policies, of course, include a refresher on the conditions under which lethal force may be used. This is to prepare law-enforcement officials for contingencies that are all too familiar, and to protect the agency and agents in the event of later legal claims.
If you don’t instantly grasp why police agencies would perform these prudential steps, you must have been living under a rock for the last decade or so, which has featured no shortage of instances in which allegations of excessive police force have been made (and a thankfully small percentage of instances when excessive force was actually used), with intense scrutiny and occasional rioting in the aftermath.
It would have been surprising if the Mar-a-Lago search hadn’t been conducted in accordance with an operational plan of which use-of-force policies were a component. It was important to do this search by the book — more on that momentarily. But there was never anticipation that force, much less lethal force, would be used, and there was never any threat to the former president. My understanding is that the FBI was reluctant to do the search — it was Justice Department officials who ran out of patience with Trump’s intransigence. The bureau intentionally carried out the search when it was known that Trump was not on the premises.
Noah Rothman skewers Biden’s commencement address last weekend, the president’s own version of Trump’s “American carnage”:
President Joe Biden and his allies have invested mountains of political capital and mortgaged their credibility trying to convince American voters that, but for their leadership, the country would be in a far darker place than it is today. Apparently, that public-relations campaign was a failure. That’s what we must conclude from Biden’s address to the graduates of Morehouse College over the weekend. There, the president shifted tactics. Rather than promote his administration as an obstacle before the forces of regression and misrule, he insisted that those forces are on the march — successfully implementing their nefarious program despite the Biden White House’s best efforts.
“Extremists closed the doors of opportunity,” Biden informed the school’s deflated student body. He castigated the Supreme Court for striking down affirmative action — a body that is representative of those who would “attack the values of diversity, equality, and inclusion.” He savaged Republicans, who he claimed have embarked on a successful “national effort to ban books” to “erase history.” Those Republicans “don’t see you in the future of America,” he informed the audience at the predominantly black school.
Who are these ugly calumnies for? Biden’s lament for the fate of affirmative action is meant to mimic a sentiment Democrats assume black Americans share, but there’s little evidence for that presupposition. A Gallup poll produced shortly after the Court’s decision in June 2023 found that a majority of black adults (52 percent) and even more younger black Americans under the age of 39 (62 percent) said doing away with racial preferences was “mostly a good thing.”
Likewise, these students are unlikely to be enlivened by the threat posed by a campaign to “ban books” insofar as the campaign he alleges is not happening. If Biden objects to the attempt to impose age-related restrictions on accessing sexually explicit material in publicly operated libraries, he should say so. If he takes offense to restricting access to literature in whatever form it takes, he might spare a word of condemnation for the book “de-emphasizers” on his side of the aisle who have limited students’ intake of classic works such as the Little House series, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Cay, Of Mice and Men, The Odyssey, and so many other déclassé titles. Biden abandoned a foolish consistency on this subject because honesty would get in the way of his attempts to depress his audience.
The bleakness of life in modern America is unrelenting, as the president explained. . . .
The president wants us to believe that the American social fabric is coming apart, and it will only fray further absent dramatic changes to the status quo. If Biden is not careful, a critical mass of voters might agree with him.
Shout-Outs
Heather Mac Donald, at City Journal: California’s Looming Crime Catastrophe
J. Peder Zane, at RealClearPolitics: The Rise of Gut Politics
Aaron Sibarium, at the Washington Free Beacon: ‘A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA
Ross O’Keefe, at the Washington Examiner: UK threatens to take US to International Court of Justice for millions in unpaid traffic fees
CODA
We’ve got space for one more instrumental, this one from an album a bit better charting than what was linked last week. “Glad” is perfect inner-soundtrack music for strolling on a sunny day. The song is sui generis, even if it borrows, to my ear, elements of the contemporaneous Zappa Hot Rats sound. And if you’re (like me, inevitably) stuck in traffic this holiday weekend, there are worse things than being stuck in traffic with Traffic.
Have a restful weekend. To those who serve, and sacrificed, thank you.