Dear Weekend Jolter,
It is a testament to the otherwise frozen nature of the Republican presidential primary race that a candidate’s rise to 6 percent in the RCP polling average to share the shadow of Donald Trump can be described in good faith as a surge.
This reflects in part our desperation in the press to detect any movement that might indicate voter views haven’t completely calcified. That said, Nikki Haley does appear to be the one candidate to have gained momentum out of the first primary debate. While the national average puts her in fourth, a recent snapshot shows her rising to 10 percent in New Hampshire, into a tie for second with Ron DeSantis. An outlier, but perhaps not for long. A Wall Street Journal survey has Haley climbing to third nationally. Her campaign this week was eager to promote internal polling from rival camps showing her on the move in Iowa as well. This, as DeSantis has slipped nationally and some of his former top donors reportedly hold back. A CNN poll out Thursday showing the former South Carolina governor faring best among Republicans against President Biden helps her electability argument.
Brittany Bernstein writes that Haley is having a “moment.” Some combination of her debate attack on Vivek Ramaswamy’s experience, her answer on abortion (read more on that here), and her general presence as somebody in command of the material seems to have helped her elbow her way into the main tier of Trump alternatives, where the space between rivals is tightening. Her momentum, however limited and whether measured by poll standing or donations or crowd size, is a reminder that, with or without Trump on stage, the debates can and do have an impact on the race. What’s interesting with Haley is that she did not generate nearly the level of press and social-media attention as Vivek Ramaswamy last month, yet the latter has not (yet) converted that spotlight into added support. Haley has.
What’s also interesting is that it is very possible none of this matters, and Haley and DeSantis and perhaps Ramaswamy and someone else are battling for whatever prize second place comes with (the eternal scorn of Trump voters and a set of steak knives seems likely). “Squabbling over table scraps,” as Jeff Blehar describes it. Trump, with his windfall of federal and state indictments, is simply crushing the rest of the field, without mercy, from DeSantis on down. That New Hampshire poll? He’s up 37 points in it. These are Mugabe numbers.
Trump’s dominance, in a psychological sense, is a feat. Through decades of exposing the public to his antics, assiduously increasing the dosage as he went, he has developed within his base a resistance worthy of scientific study to external events and their influence. Daniel Foster put it well:
Polling consistently shows that a large and perhaps unvanquishable bloc of Republican primary voters has a direct personal loyalty to Donald Trump that transcends any news cycle, policy issue, or ideological commitment, and indeed any new information or input whatsoever.
Jay Nordlinger wrote about this phenomenon a bit ago. “LOL, nothing matters” obtains, and may represent Haley et al.’s biggest obstacle.
Read on — if you’re into that kind of thing.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The California AG is confused about who exactly is putting vulnerable children at risk: California Tries to Put the State Above Parents
The sequel looks worse: Donald Trump’s Destructive Trade Agenda
ARTICLES
Philip Klein: Elon Musk’s Ugly War with the ADL
Becket Adams: The Coverage of Ron DeSantis Is Historically Awful
Mark Mix: Time for Big Labor to Start Playing by the Same Rules as the Rest of Us
Kathryn Jean Lopez: On Abortion, Nikki Haley Has the Right Idea
Neetu Arnold: TikTok’s Secret Effort to Influence American Higher Education
Jay Nordlinger: Tweet and be killed, &c.
Dan McLaughlin: It Is Time to Institute Retirement Ages for Federal Officeholders
Laura Morgan: Wokeness Has Infected the Mayo Clinic
Rich Lowry: No, We Aren’t Rome
Jeffrey Blehar: The 2024 Presidential Field as Judged by Musical Favorites
Brittany Bernstein: Then-VP Biden Signed Off on Hunter Business Partner’s Burisma Talking Points, Email Reveals
Andrew McCarthy: A Question for the Very ‘Special’ Counsel, David Weiss
David Zimmermann: Mayor Adams Predicts Migrant Crisis ‘Will Destroy New York City’
Christian Schneider: Joe Biden Is Putting Himself before America
Caleb Nunes: Conservatives Must Reclaim the Founders’ Vision
CAPITAL MATTERS
Kevin Hassett breaks down the autoworkers’ strike threat: UAW Anticipating an Electric Shock
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen hits another museum in the great state of Maine, this one for an exhibition of paintings by Jacopo da Pontormo: Pontormo’s Ghostly Paintings Come to Bowdoin College in Maine
Dan McLaughlin, with a hot take: Passing the Last Golden Age of Pop-Rock Bands
Armond White searches for significance in one of the strangest movies ever: We Are All Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, Deranged by Vengeance
STEAL THESE EXCERPTS (OKAY DON’T, ACTUALLY)
Christian Schneider explains as only he can how President Biden is putting himself before the country this cycle:
According to a poll released by the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, incumbent president Joe Biden and the former president, who picks up felony counts at the same pace most Americans rack up McDonald’s reward points, are, if the election were held today, locked in a buck-naked tie at 46 percent apiece. When the poll included other, third-party candidates, Trump actually held a one-point lead over Biden.
That is because, while Donald Trump gets all the ink (deservedly) for being a terrible candidate, Joe Biden manages to be a wretched candidate without the benefit of a Bugsy Siegel–style rap sheet. The voters can see with their own eyes that Biden is a doddering old man, struggling to remember the nonsensical stories he makes up about his own life. What is worse — a politician who lies, or one who can’t even keep his falsehoods straight? . . .
Voters honestly believe that if left alone, Biden would go missing, only to be found in downtown Wilmington trying to call Winston Churchill using a discarded corncob.
Put more succinctly, there is only one thing keeping Donald Trump close to returning to the Oval Office in 2024, and that is the singular awfulness of Joe Biden, of whom only 39 percent of voters hold a favorable view.
So while it’s often said that Trump put himself before the country in trying to steal the 2020 election, and is justly reviled for it, what are we supposed to say about a barely ambulatory octogenarian whose continued presence makes Trump’s ascent to power all the more likely next year? If one believes the recent polls, supporting Biden means supporting Trump’s comeback. . . .
Certainly no president wants to willingly give up the reins of the most powerful job on earth, as one-termers are generally deemed failures. But what will Biden’s legacy look like if he stays in the race, continues his cognitive decline, and hands the presidency back to a man who is running so he can then pardon himself of any federal felonies on his record? Because as the polls stand right now, that is entirely possible.
Like Trump in 2020, Biden is now putting himself before his country. If Democrats were allowed to start fresh and run someone who hadn’t completely botched the Afghanistan pullout, who hadn’t overseen an economy viewed negatively by most Americans, and who isn’t older than Velcro and with a much weaker grip, they would have a significantly better chance of retaining the presidency. But their desire to spare the feelings of a man who (in their eyes) heroically saved America from a second Trump administration in 2020 could very well hand Trump that second term in 2024.
Kevin Hassett’s explainer on the ongoing UAW clash with the Big Three automakers includes some eye-opening figures:
While negotiations between unions and firms can often feature extreme rhetoric, it would be a mistake to think that [United Autoworkers president Shawn] Fain is just posturing. Indeed, the UAW clearly understands the reality that EVs pose the greatest threat to the UAW in its history. A few simple undisputed facts about auto manufacturing make the point obvious.
Currently, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 1 million workers are employed manufacturing motor vehicles and parts, with the vast majority of them currently producing cars with internal-combustion engines. That number is interesting, because it exposes President Biden’s promise to create a million jobs in the EV sector (a sector he defined broadly, by including “domestic auto supply chains, and auto infrastructure, from parts to materials to electric vehicle charging stations”) as a misleading sleight of hand. For that million is a gross, not the more meaningful net number. If the switch costs hundreds of thousands of jobs in the conventional car-manufacturing sector, then those should be deducted from the overall job-creation picture, and that’s before considering like-for-like comparisons. Is manning a charging station likely to pay as well as an auto-manufacturing job in Detroit?
The reality, according to Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Farley, is that it takes 40 percent fewer workers to make an electric vehicle than one with an internal-combustion engine. So, to use some back-of-the-envelope math, if baseline employment in the auto industry would, on average over the next ten years, have amounted to 1.2 million jobs, then the wholesale switch to EVs would cost 480,000 jobs.
While that number of jobs lost seems almost implausibly large, that dynamic is already visible in the data. One estimate suggests that the switch to EVs had by 2019 led worldwide to a loss of 80,000 jobs. Ford itself recently laid off 3,000 high-wage workers to free funds to invest in EV production.
While new EV factories will certainly create jobs, the productivity mathematics makes it virtually impossible for the net to be positive.
Dan McLaughlin has proposed a constitutional amendment (insomuch as non-lawmakers can propose these things) to set age limits for federal officeholders. Here’s what it, theoretically speaking, would look like:
Section One: No person shall be eligible for election to any federal office who shall have attained to the following Age on the date the person would take office: for president or vice president, seventy-five years; for senator, eighty years; for representative, eighty-five years.
Section Two: No person shall serve as a justice of the Supreme Court, or as a judge on the federal appeals or district courts, or any other court Congress shall hereafter create, who shall have attained to the Age of eighty years.
Section Three: Notwithstanding Section Two of this article, a justice of the Supreme Court who shall have attained to the Age of eighty years during an annual term of the Court shall remain eligible to serve until the completion of that term. Notwithstanding Section Two of this article, a justice of the Supreme Court, or a judge on the federal appeals or district courts, or any other court Congress shall hereafter create, may continue to serve after the age of eighty in senior status in the inferior courts, subject to such rules and regulations as Congress may provide.
Section Four: Nothing in this article shall apply to render any elected official already serving at the time of the ratification of this article ineligible to complete his or her term in office, nor shall any judge (including a justice of the Supreme Court) be rendered ineligible to serve until eight years after the ratification of this article.
ICYMI, as part of NR’s Labor Day weekend offerings, Mark Mix of the National Right to Work Committee had this startling piece on the favoritism unions still enjoy in the law:
As Labor Day weekend is once again upon us, we will inevitably see union partisans use the day to steal the spotlight from America’s hardworking men and women and plead for greater union-boss legal powers.
Their pleas should be ignored: Big Labor officials already wield numerous coercive powers enjoyed by no other private individuals or organizations. Still, union officials regularly attempt new power grabs.
Consider the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters. In the case, Teamsters lawyers argued that, when unions commit deliberate property damage as part of a strike, the union should be shielded from liability.
While the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 against granting union bosses a legal exemption from state lawsuits for such property damage, it isn’t hard to see why the Teamsters were able to persuade the Washington state supreme court to side with them, or why they thought they might be able to slip a new union-only loophole past the high court. All around the country, Big Labor plays according to a legal rulebook that is perpetually stacked in its favor.
While Glacier Northwest was a positive step, many pro-union legal carve-outs remain firmly ingrained in American law. For example, the 1973 U.S. v. Enmons Supreme Court decision still protects from federal prosecution those union bosses who resort to extortionate violence, if their goal is “to achieve legitimate union objectives.”
The Enmons standard has led to some outrageous results: In 2014, Boston-area Teamsters agents who faced a lawsuit for slashing the tires of Top Chef TV-crew vehicles and for telling show host Padma Lakshmi they would “bash that pretty face in” received a “not guilty” verdict. Why? Teamsters militants perpetrated such violence and intimidation in order to secure jobs for their members on the show, which by Enmons’ lights is a “legitimate union objective.” Such incidents are not isolated; conservative estimates suggest that more than 10,000 incidents of union-sanctioned violence have taken place since 1975.
Shout-Outs
Alana Goodman, at the Washington Free Beacon: Ramaswamy Appears on Anti-Semitic YouTuber’s Podcast
A. R. Hoffman, at the New York Sun: Could a New Georgia Law Defeat Fani Willis Before She Tries Trump?
Rana Mitter, at UnHerd: The dismantling of the Chinese mind
CODA
I’ve used this oddball space to throw out, from time to time, an unexpected cover — one where the song and the musician(s) playing it do not belong together, on paper anyway. Forgive me for mentioning a tune mentioned once before, but “Sleep Walk,” as recorded by Deftones (yes, Deftones), is something I recently stumbled across. Bemusing, and surprisingly faithful. See what you think.