Dear Weekend Jolter,
In the week since special counsel Robert Hur made President Biden’s age an unavoidable issue in ’24, there’s been some effort to reframe voter concerns about the president’s age and mental fitness, and coverage of that subject, as unfair and overblown. Hur was uncharitably likened to James Comey. “Brain experts” were called in to downplay Biden’s memory issues. Why, Hur isn’t even a neurologist, it was said. The complete “but his gaffes” service.
The effort won’t be very effective. Another, more realistic way of looking at it is: Age-related decline is a political liability that never gets better. Controversies can, and often do, pass, if only to be replaced by new ones. Investigations can clear their subjects. Criminal proceedings can exonerate them, or be spun as having done so; the same goes for impeachment proceedings. Illnesses can be cured; injuries can heal. One well-timed legislative victory can offset a record of failures. Even gaffes, taken individually, can be cleaned up.
But senescence? It is a one-way street, much as we would like to believe there’s room for a K turn.
As Jim Geraghty writes regarding the supermajority of Americans who think Biden’s too old to serve another term: “This is a problem that cannot be fixed. Biden cannot get younger.”
America has a rich tradition of politicians “brazening it out,” sometimes successfully. Donald Trump has taken this strategy to outrageous lengths yet remains free and atop his party, for now. Before him, of course, was Bill Clinton (confronting allegations that, yes, seem quaint by comparison). Former Virginia governor Ralph Northam weathered a 2019 blackface controversy with such resolve that the then-party-consuming incident is not so much as mentioned in the introduction to his Wikipedia page today. Even Terry McAuliffe reversed course from calling on him to resign to welcoming his endorsement to succeed him (spoiler: it didn’t help). While Andrew Cuomo was unable to withstand the pressure over sexual-harassment allegations, fellow Tri-Stater Bob Menendez is still holding on, Jersey Strong, in the face of cyclical scandal.
Brazening might work for Biden’s political team if he were “only” facing allegations that his family traded on his name and position for enrichment by foreign sources. But, as Rich Lowry writes on the competence question, “no matter how bad the Hur report is for Biden, there is almost certainly worse to come.” NR’s editorial makes the case that the noble thing to do would be to withdraw from the race. Phil Klein argues that, at this stage, Kamala Harris would be a safer choice for the Democrats, a scenario Jim Geraghty games out here. (For her part, Harris says, perhaps unsurprisingly, she’s “ready to serve.”)
Of course, this sequence of events is unlikely to play out, as Politico’s Jonathan Martin explains. So: Should Biden run and win again against his historically unfit likely rival, the greatest risk is not that he dies in office — the succession process is clear, setting aside concerns about Veep Harris’s completing the full Selina Meyer — but that he continues to decline and his staff and cabinet officers don’t tell the truth about it. As the editorial says, “the history is that White House insiders are rarely forthcoming about a president’s ill health, which raises the prospect of an effort to cover for a nonperforming president. This would constitute an ongoing crisis.”
The American public, of course, didn’t know the truth about Woodrow Wilson’s condition after his stroke, nor about the extent of JFK’s health difficulties. Meanwhile, FDR’s dire condition was kept from the public when he was running for a fourth term that he had no business attempting. . . .
Few self-respecting physicians with the trust of the president are going to betray it. By early 1944, FDR had been diagnosed with a life-threatening condition, namely “acute congestive heart failure.” An examining physician called his health status simply “God-awful.”
Nonetheless, the White House rolled out FDR’s doctor in September to pronounce the president’s health “perfectly O.K.,” with “absolutely no organic difficulties at all.”
There’s little reason to think Biden’s circle would behave differently in Term Two. This is not a time of relative calm in the world, when the executive branch can plead for patience with America’s wily antagonists. For the same reason Trump should not be calling NATO’s collective-defense obligations into question, the U.S. should not be exchanging, in Noah Rothman’s words, cogency and vigor at the White House for “fleeting moments of lucidity aided by a teleprompter.”
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
A man of unfathomable bravery, in the face of profound evil, has just died: The Brave and Great Alexei Navalny
The Biden editorial, once more, is here: Joe Biden Should Step Aside
Meanwhile, the likely top of the GOP ticket isn’t so reassuring himself: NATO Is Worth Defending
ARTICLES
Stanley Kurtz: Can Utah Save America’s Universities?
Ryan Mills: ‘We Asked for It’: Chicago Democrats Blame Progressive Leaders’ Sanctuary-City Policies for Migrant Crisis
Abigail Anthony: ‘Trad Bosses’ Are the New ‘Girl Bosses’
Noah Rothman: McConnell: ‘I Don’t Know How’ We Replenish Our Own Ammo If Spending Bill Stalls
Noah Rothman: J. D. Vance Thinks You’ll Believe Anything
Charles C. W. Cooke: Give Me Any American City over Moscow Any Day
Luther Ray Abel: Air Force Confirms Medical Disqualifications Doubled after New Med-Records System Implemented
David Zimmermann: House Republicans Successfully Impeach DHS Secretary Mayorkas after Failed First Attempt
Christian Schneider: What If This Is Just the Beginning?
Henry Olsen: Should Conservatives Care about CPAC?
Kayla Bartsch: Taylor Swift Won the Super Bowl
Jeffrey Blehar: Brandon Johnson Is Now the Most Tragically Stupid Big-City Mayor in America
Sarah Schutte: How to Botch English Muffins (PSA: Be sure to look for Sarah’s new food/cooking column on a biweekendly basis going forward)
CAPITAL MATTERS
Kevin Hassett looks to (recent) history for guidance on where the AI boom could take us: AI’s Upside Case Could Be Stronger Than the Internet’s
Dominic Pino explains purchasing power: Tucker Carlson Discovers American Tourists Are Rich
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen has the first of a two-parter, on “modern art’s premiere savant, lodestar, and lightning rod”: Picasso, the Stranger
“Hard to take,” but in a good way. Armond White praises The Palace: Polanski’s Samizdat Satire
STAY TUNED NEXT WEEK WHEN ALL THE EXCERPTS WILL BE PALINDROMES
Why Trump shouldn’t be so dismissive, and rhetorically reckless, toward NATO — from NR’s editorial:
NATO has been an extraordinary American success story. It held the line in Western Europe throughout the Cold War, and it did so peacefully, saving countless U.S. lives. It underpinned America’s leadership of the West, militarily, politically, and economically. It enabled the West to outlast the Soviets, and by accepting a number of previously Soviet-controlled nations into its ranks, it avoided the creation of a dangerously unsettled “grey zone” stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Without NATO, there would have been many more Yugoslavias and Ukraines.
The key to NATO’s effectiveness has been deterrence. To work, deterrence must, by definition, be credible. NATO is backed by American firepower and bolstered by its commitment to collective defense: An attack on one NATO member is treated as an attack on all. The Soviets never launched a war in Western Europe because of the danger of a devastating response from the U.S. Moscow never knew for sure whether the Americans would be prepared to risk their own homeland to save Western Europe, but its reading of Washington led the Soviet leadership to conclude that it did not want to find out.
Communists no longer preside in the Kremlin. However, with Russia now engaged on a revanchist mission, most bloodily in Ukraine, it is essential that no signal be sent out of the U.S. that could lead Moscow to think that it could get away with attacking a smaller NATO member — Estonia, say — that it regards as more properly belonging within Russia’s sphere.
The stakes are high. If Russia invaded Estonia without a major response from the U.S., it would not stop there. Some members of NATO, unable to be sure that they could rely on collective defense, might then well decide to come to an accommodation with Moscow. Others might punch back, offering the U.S. an unappetizing choice between a humiliating withdrawal from Europe or participating, once again, in a war “over there.”
Sadly, recent comments by Donald Trump sent a wrong signal. Speaking at a rally in South Carolina, he claimed that “NATO was busted until I came along.” He explained that he had said “everybody’s gonna pay.” This was a reference to the fact that most of the alliance’s members had been making no effort to live up to their commitment to be spending 2 percent of GDP on defense by 2024, something he had tried to change. Asked, he said, whether the U.S. would protect countries that weren’t paying their way, he had said “absolutely not.” And then, he claimed, he had gone further, telling the president of a “big country” that was not paying the right amount that not only would the U.S. not defend it if it were invaded by Russia, but that he “would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”
The migrant influx in Chicago is not going over well for the city’s progressive mayor, among local Democrats. Ryan Mills reports:
[Zerlina] Smith-Members, a leader in the Chicago-Cook County Coalition for Humane Migration Management, is among the growing chorus of Chicago residents, neighborhood activists, and business owners — many of them left-wingers and Democrats — who are calling foul over the city’s and the state’s handling of the ongoing migration crisis. Neighborhood leaders are increasingly angry over having their parks and community centers taken away and turned into shelters. Business leaders have complained about soaring cases of shoplifting as well as the deteriorating conditions outside some shelters that are driving their customers away.
The migrant crisis has also exposed sharp divides in Chicago’s Democratic base, with the progressive response to the crisis infuriating some more traditional Democratic groups. Black Democrats such as Smith-Members have been some of the most vocal critics.
“The immigration crisis is going to flip the state of Illinois purple,” Smith-Members said.
While Democratic leaders and mainstream news outlets have pointed the blame at Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, accusing him of orchestrating the crisis by busing tens of thousands of migrants to northern sanctuary cities, several Chicagoans from across the city who spoke to National Review said they aren’t buying it.
“It’s a Biden thing. It’s a Pritzker thing. It’s a Brandon Johnson thing. They wanted sanctuary cities,” said Smith-Members, who is running for Johnson’s former seat on the Cook County commission. “It’s not Abbott’s fault, because he didn’t ask for it. We asked for it.”
Dr. Lora Chamberlain, a peace activist on Chicago’s North Side, said she doesn’t blame Abbott “one little bit” for busing migrants to cities that previously said they would welcome them.
“What state could possibly take in millions of refugees?” said Chamberlain, who is angry at city leaders for converting her neighborhood’s beloved community center into a migrant shelter.
Chicago has been a sanctuary city since the mid 1980s. Days after Pritzker was sworn in as governor in 2019, during Donald Trump’s presidency, he signed an executive order saying that immigrants and asylum-seekers are “critical to the fabric of our state” and help to “make Illinois a great place to live.” He later sent a letter to then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo saying Illinois would “proudly consent” to helping refugees and that he was “committed to ensuring that Illinois is a welcoming state, especially for refugees and those seeking asylum,” according to a report in the Chicago Tribune.
Charles C. W. Cooke pens an explainer, informed by experience, on why Moscow is not actually nicer than “any city” in America. It needed to be said, apparently:
“The city of Moscow,” Tucker Carlson announced this week, from his populist redoubt at the World Government Summit in Dubai, “is so much nicer than any city in my country. I had no idea. It is so much cleaner, and safer and prettier, aesthetically. Its architecture, food, and services than in any city in the United States. And this is not ideological. How did that happen?”
The simplest answer to this inquiry is that it didn’t.
I daresay that Carlson did, indeed, have a nice time when he visited Moscow. As a rich foreign tourist who was being carefully minded by the Russian government, he was undoubtedly exposed to the Moscow that its champions wanted him to see. And that city, I’ll wager, is pretty swell. But still. Better than every city in the United States? The idea is ridiculous. I have been to Moscow. I have also been to most of the major cities in America. There is no sense in which Moscow could be placed at the top of the list. There is a small part of the place that is rather pretty, and, thanks largely to the mafia, a few good restaurants have popped up, but the rest of it remains as bleak and moribund and soulless as it was during the Soviet era. It is a museum, and an ugly one at that.
As for the “food” and “service,” which Tucker considers superior to that of the United States? What rot! Forget New York, New Orleans, Charleston, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, or Las Vegas, the food and service are better in Milwaukee than they are in Moscow. Walk into an average joint anywhere in the United States and you will likely leave pleased with your drinks and your meal. In Moscow? Not so much.
Carlson says that Moscow is “clean” and “safe.” When I was there, it was neither. Moscow has a chronic homeless problem — at night, you see people warming themselves by lighting fires inside discarded oil drums — and it is teeming with petty crime. I saw an old lady pushed down a flight of stone steps by a beggar, I saw a black teenager punched for no obvious reason (although we know why), and my father and I were mugged on that ornate subway that naive visitors always gush about. It is true that none of this would have happened to us if we’d been there to interview Vladmir Putin, but that’s rather the point, isn’t it? When you’re a guest of the government — especially of a totalitarian government — you’re treated to the full girlfriend experience.
Shout-Outs
Lisa Fickenscher, at the New York Post: Why McDonald’s is charging $18 for a Big Mac meal — and why there’s no relief in sight
Diana Falzone, at Mediaite: ‘The Campaign Is a Mess’: RFK Jr. Hit With Staff Exodus Over ‘Lavish Spending’ and ‘Amateurish’ Leadership
Matt Hanson, at Quillette: The Road Out of Nowhere
CODA
A good friend turned me on to a Thom Yorke side project, started during Covid times, called the Smile. If you’re into Radiohead at all, do check it out. Here is a sample.
Listen, and you’ll be fitter, happier, more productive.