Dear Weekend Jolter,
“This is not normal” became a refrain in Washington during the Trump years. It never should have been retired. The crime wave that continues to grip the nation’s capital, plaguing its residents and the politicians who represent them, is most certainly not normal.
When crime rates are, finally, moving in the right direction in American cities after their Covid/Floyd-era climb, Washington, D.C., has been an outlier even among outliers, at least where violent crimes such as carjacking are concerned. The public’s realization of this helps explain the newly forming recall efforts aimed at members of the D.C. Council. Even without that pressure, the District’s superlative standing in the category of mayhem — a ten-year-old boy was struck last weekend by a stray bullet, as one recent example — should convince its leaders to treat the identification and incarceration of root perpetrators just as seriously as the focus on root causes.
For an idea of the severity of the problem, take a few minutes to fiddle with the chart (Figure 20) at the end of this report by the Council on Criminal Justice. It reflects a massive increase in overall crime in the capital between 2019 and 2023, with carjacking up 565 percent (at least; city data indicate an even bigger jump), more than in any other city surveyed. The Metropolitan Police Department reported a 39 percent increase in violent crime last year, compared with 2022, though violent crime is down so far in 2024. D.C.’s grim tally of 274 homicides last year was the highest in more than two decades.
Dominic Pino captured how remarkably routine crime has become in the capital by highlighting the blotter from a single day in mid February. By his tally: “Three police officers were shot,” “climate activists vandalized the case holding the Constitution at the National Archives,” “two armed men robbed someone just outside the city’s main arena,” “three people were found shot dead in an apartment,” and “three more people were shot on the street.”
Dominic points out that this, again, is not reflective of national trends:
This proliferation of crime is not happening in most other American cities. This is a local problem with a local solution: more police, more arrests, and more prosecutions.
As NR recently editorialized, “ideological passivity” on the part of D.C. attorney general Brian Schwalb, who infamously said a few weeks ago that “we cannot prosecute and arrest our way out of” this problem, is part of the issue. “Prevention” and youth “resources,” the priorities Schwalb elevated instead, do matter, but won’t by themselves reverse the trend.
Juveniles are a huge part of the crime wave, with the average age of arrested carjackers just 15 years old, per CNN. If D.C. prosecutors don’t treat these crimes seriously, why would criminals? This comprehensive breakdown of the data charts how arrests plummeted during and after Covid, while prosecutions by the U.S. Attorney’s Office followed a similar trend. The author, Joe Friday (a pseudonym), observes that this breakdown left D.C. highly vulnerable to a crime outbreak heading into 2023, as “the certainty of punishment in DC was weaker than it had been in decades” and “more people than ever had firsthand experience getting away with crimes.” A bad combination, which produced predictable results.
The good news is that parts of the D.C. government are beginning to seriously grapple with the problem. Police, now under new leadership, and prosecutors appeared to adjust their approach in the latter half of last year, which could account for recent improvements. The mayor and police chief in December unveiled a “Real-Time Crime Center,” launching soon. The D.C. council, after an ill-timed and ultimately thwarted effort in late 2022 to reduce criminal penalties, is moving on a crime bill that would crack down on an array of offenses and broaden the definition of carjacking.
D.C. will need to stick with it; the past year was a painful demonstration of the correlation between arrests/prosecutions and violent crime. There’s no reason to accept a system of Grand Theft Auto-cracy in the nation’s capital. Contra the declinists, Washington is a great city, still. And unless the rest of the federal government goes the way of the USDA and relocates divisions to Missouri, it will remain the ultimate Company Town, with a perma-workforce of educated, well-paid people spending that money locally. Long-term, the biggest risk for D.C. proper may be not that people leave the area but that they bolt for the burbs (full disclosure: I live in NoVa) so they can sample the capital’s delights and minimize risk. That would spell grave danger for the District’s tax base and its efforts to correct course — in this respect, prevention should be priority No. 1.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The cost of Biden’s vote-buying is getting ridiculous: Biden’s Desperate Student-Loan-Relief Giveaway
Mike Johnson signed up for this kind of work; he should do it: The House Should Find a Way to Vote on Supporting Our Allies
Let’s not stop honoring Washington: George Washington Should Still Guide Us
ARTICLES
Andrew McCarthy: Trump’s Post-Judgment Financial Peril Is Real
Andrew McCarthy: David Weiss’s Very Peculiar Smirnov Indictment in the Biden Case
Dan McLaughlin: It’s Not Fraud on the Voters to Lie to Your Own Checkbook
Jeffrey Blehar: We Need to Talk about Tucker
James Lynch: Yale Reinstates Standardized Testing Requirement for Admissions
Madeleine Kearns: Sacrilege in the Cathedral: How St. Patrick’s Was Set Up
Haley Strack: Hamas’s ‘Sadistic’ Sexual Assault Detailed by Israel’s Rape Crisis Centers
Noah Rothman: The Democratic Party’s Bad Math
Caroline Downey: VA Psychologist Reassigned after Publicly Opposing Men in Female Vets’ Medical Spaces
M. D. Aeschliman: American Amnesia: Losing Lincoln?
Charles C. W. Cooke: About That Viral $50,000 Scam Story: I Have Questions
Neal B. Freeman: FAQs about Donald Trump and William Buckley
Ari Blaff: CAIR Leader’s Praise for Palestinian Terror Should Come as No Surprise
Ryan Mills: Chicago Education Board Moves to Pull Cops from Schools
Christian Schneider: America Is Running Two Presidential Elections at Once
CAPITAL MATTERS
Dominic Pino, on AI and the law: The Legal System Is Still Figuring Out How to Handle AI
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Wander through (virtually) this collection that Brian Allen calls the best of its kind: Westchester’s Neuberger Museum at 50: Classy, Sleek, and Modern
Armond White is not a fan: We Are the Poorer for Poor Things
FROM THE NEW, APRIL 2024 ISSUE OF NR
Dan Blumenthal & Derek Scissors: Sideline China with Free Trade
Christine Rosen: Democratic Women Trade Hope for Fear in ’24
Seth Cropsey: America’s Role in Gaza’s Fate
Meir Soloveichik: What Jews Mean to America
Jay Nordlinger: Against the Jew-Haters
EXCERPTS ON TAPE WILL CATCH ON EVENTUALLY. UNTIL THEN, SETTLE FOR THIS
Andy McCarthy breaks down the extent of the financial peril Trump could find himself in with respect to the succession of yuge-money judgments against him:
Questions abound about former president Donald Trump’s anticipated appeals of the two latest, crushing civil judgments against him — last week’s nearly $355 million verdict in the New York civil-fraud case, imposed by elected progressive Democratic judge Arthur Engoron of the New York state court in Manhattan; and last month’s $83.3 million verdict in the second E. Jean Carroll case, imposed by a jury in Manhattan federal court. These come after last year’s $5 million verdict in the first E. Jean Carroll case, imposed by a different jury in Manhattan federal court. . . .
Basically, in the two relevant jurisdictions, a defendant who has been found guilty has 30 days to appeal. But unlike in the criminal system, there is no automatic right to appeal civilly. Rather, a defendant has to post the amount of the judgment, plus interest, in order to assure the court that the appeal is not simply for purposes of delay, and that the defendant will pay up if he loses.
Thus, Trump has already had to post about $6 million to appeal the first E. Jean Carroll judgment. If he follows through with his promised appeal of the January 26 jury verdict in the second E. Jean Carroll case, he will have to file a notice of appeal by early next week and post around $90 million. Judge Engoron’s astonishing verdict was rendered last Friday, February 16; hence, to appeal, Trump will have to post over $400 million. In total, then, we’re talking about half a billion dollars, or more. . . .
About six months ago, Forbes estimated Donald Trump’s net worth at $2.6 billion — indicating that he’s not nearly as wealthy as he sometimes claims, nor as faux rich as many skeptics suppose. It’s a lot of money. But oh, the leverage and the mounting peril.
In October 2021, ten months after Trump left the presidency, Forbes estimated that his businesses were saddled with $1.3 billion in debt. Actually, in terms of liquidity, this position was a slight improvement over what it had recently been; but the long-term picture was iffy, with huge payments coming due between 2022 and 2024. Forbes anticipated that Trump would probably be able to negotiate new loans, but that was before these three civil verdicts, the organization’s tax conviction, and the indictments.
Trump claims to have over $400 million in liquid assets, but we can’t know whether that is the case; even if it is, that sum is now markedly outstripped by civil judgments and debt (to say nothing of exorbitant, accumulating legal fees).
In the new issue of NR, Christine Rosen checks in on the emerging strategy of Democratic women in the 2024 race:
As President Joe Biden casts about for a winning campaign theme (“Dark Brandon,” “Bidenomics,” and whatever that bizarre Andy Rooney–style disquisition on “shrinkflation” was that he delivered on Super Bowl Sunday have not caught fire), perhaps he should take a page from some leading Democratic women, who are honing a message: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
In January on The View, Vice President Kamala Harris told host Joy Behar she was “scared as heck” of the possibility of another Trump presidency. “We should all be scared,” she added, that Trump could get reelected by “the crazies.”
Fear of “the crazies” electing someone Democrats don’t like might appear to be a reiteration of Hillary Clinton’s declaration in 2016 that Trump voters were a “basket of deplorables,” but it’s different in scale and tone. Clinton quickly had to express regret for calling American voters deplorable, although it was too late to undo the damage she had caused. By contrast, today, Democratic women are leaning into fear and terror about the possibility of anyone other than a Democrat controlling the country, particularly if the alternative is another Trump term. As Harris put it on The View: “There’s an old saying that there are only two ways to run for office: Either without an opponent or scared. So on all those points, yes, we should all be scared.”
This was a winning strategy for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and they are determined to keep using it. “Democrats can win if they embrace the politics of fear,” wrote Ana Marie Cox in the New York Times in 2022. “Plenty of progressive voters don’t need to be made aware of the danger. They are already terrified for the future. But everyone should be.”
It’s a sentiment now echoed by Democrats about politics in general, not just the politics of abortion. Appearing recently on Jay Shetty’s podcast On Purpose, former first lady Michelle Obama said, “What’s going to happen in this next election? I am terrified about what could possibly happen.” She complained that too few people appreciate everything government does: “The fact that people think that government — ‘Eh, does it really even do anything?’ — and I’m like, ‘Oh my God does government do everything for us, and we cannot take this democracy for granted.’” She added, “Those are the things that keep me up.”
This is a significant change of tone from Barack Obama’s message in his 2008 presidential campaign, “We choose hope over fear.”
Biden’s latest student-debt amnesty gets the proper treatment in NR’s editorial:
On Wednesday in Los Angeles, the president announced that 153,000 more borrowers will have their student loans “canceled” — which, in practice, means paid by the people who didn’t take them out and spend them — at a cost of $1.2 billion. In January, Biden “canceled” 74,000 loans, at a cost of $5 billion, bringing the total cost to that point to more than $130 billion. By the time he is finished, Penn Wharton records, the president will have spent $475 billion on the program. Never, in the history of buying votes, have so many been so fleeced for so few.
Last year, the Supreme Court held that Biden’s effort to “cancel” up to $20,000 for every borrower in the United States was illegal — a fact that Biden knew all too well. Astonishingly, he responded to this rebuke with rank defiance, vowing that he would “stop at nothing to find other ways” to achieve the same aim. And so he has. Biden delivered the news to the affected students in an email that contains five uses of the word “my” and five uses of the word “I,” and is signed “Joe Biden,” but at no point refers to “Congress” or the “legislature.” This, suffice it to say, is not how the United States government is supposed to work — especially when it is transferring nearly half a trillion dollars from one group of citizens to another. At best, Biden has found a way to achieve piecemeal what he was prohibited from achieving in one fell swoop. At worst, Biden is thumbing his nose at his oath to uphold the Constitution. Either way, it is a disgrace — and all the more so coming from a president who promised to restore American norms. . . .
By current projections, the 2024 federal budget deficit will be $1.5 trillion. That, against this disastrous backdrop, President Biden believes that his fiscal priority ought to be shoveling money to people with the privilege of a college education is incredible. Per the Pew Research Center, there exists “a growing earnings gap between young college graduates and their counterparts without degrees,” and that gap only “widened as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.” College graduates have better employment prospects, better health outcomes, and lower divorce rates than everyone else. Despite this, the federal government chose to spend around a quarter of a trillion dollars during the pandemic on an unnecessary pause in student-loan repayments. Now it wants to double that number with an amnesty?
ICYMI, our “Presidents’ Day” editorial (sneer quotes intended) is well worth the read too:
The federal holiday we celebrate today is not Presidents’ Day: It is George Washington’s birthday. It has been celebrated as such since 1778 and has been an official federal holiday since 1879. In order to give three-day weekends to federal workers, it is often not celebrated on Washington’s actual birthday of February 22. That is no excuse for downgrading his preeminence.
Washington may or may not have been the greatest American; he surely was the most indispensable American. We should remain grateful for what he bequeathed us and be guided by his example. . . .
Washington was a model of many virtues. A natural leader and a man of great physical vigor, he embodied the active virtues: courage, industry, endurance, perseverance, resiliency, and a powerful sense of honor. A man of fundamentally conservative outlook and temperament, he nonetheless risked everything for a revolution that changed his country and the world. He was visionary for his day in inoculating his army against smallpox.
Yet he also imposed upon his great natural passions, ambition, and aggressiveness the virtues of restraint. He walked repeatedly away from power and declined entreaties to crown himself king. He declined a salary for eight years as commander of the Continental Army. He bore personal slights in silence and would not be goaded into fights for honor alone. He adopted a Fabian military strategy against his own nature and allowed his advisers to talk him out of his own plans when they were too ambitious. As president, he steered America away from European entanglements it was unready to undertake, and he counseled his successors to do the same. . . .
That Washington did not solve all of the nation’s flaws from the start, and that he was doubtlessly self-interested in his hesitance in addressing slavery, should not overshadow the colossal scale of his accomplishments, the vast debt we owe to him, and the towering nature of his virtues. Those virtues left his contemporaries in awe and exercised a compelling and positive moral influence on everyone around him and all who followed him. The day that we stop honoring Washington, we will no longer be America, and no longer deserve to be America.
Shout-Outs
Ian Garner, at UnHerd: Alexei Navalny has no heir
Peter Berkowitz, at RealClearWire: Harvard’s Crisis Stems From Debased Curriculum
Samuel Mangold-Lenett, at the Federalist: Florida Bill Could Help Left-Wing Groups Sue Conservative Media Into Oblivion
CODA
Travel with me, back to 1994. Clinton was president; Gingrich would soon be speaker. The Simpsons was not only still good but in its prime. Schindler’s List cleaned up at the Oscars. Mark Zuckerberg was ten, and could still be stopped. Cobain’s death marked the winding down of the dominant era of grunge in rock music. And a British group called Portishead released a debut album that had little at all to do with that scene. One might sneer at a genre called “trip hop,” but it’s hard not to like . . . every darn song on Dummy. A couple low-simmer tracks, “It’s a Fire” and “Roads,” should serve as convincing entry points for the uncertain. The latter haunts.
Thanks for reading, and have a good weekend.