Dear Weekend Jolter,
We’re left with three takeaways from this week’s presidential debate: In a general election, the event will always be a home game for the Democrat. RFK Jr. shouldn’t watch these things when he’s feeling peckish. And the biggest handicap Donald Trump has in 2024, is 2020.
Why does the Republican nominee struggle to take advantage of all the lucky breaks he’s gotten even with the legal system, media, and countless cultural institutions arrayed against him? Because he never quit his last presidential campaign. Given the chance in Philadelphia to acknowledge he lost that race, Trump would not and claimed any comments he had made to the contrary were sarcastic. “There’s so much proof . . . and they should have sent it back to the legislatures for approval,” he said.
Yes, the moderators’ questions and real-time fact checks were tilted against Trump and gave the Democratic nominee a built-in advantage. As NR’s editorial notes, however, “nobody forced Trump to go down the many blind alleys he took. He didn’t have to defend the January 6 rioters, claim that he won in 2020, or get in a dispute about crowd sizes.” Trump’s biggest problem, Jim Geraghty writes, was Trump, who kept “taking the bait that Harris laid out every single time.”
When Kamala Harris dinged Trump by claiming people leave his rallies early out of “exhaustion and boredom,” you could almost hear her declare, “Mr. President, I am going to manipulate you now. Are you ready?” He fell for it. And it didn’t get any better when the moderators turned to the election and January 6.
Trump has a prefab case to make against Harris, having to do with her many flip-flops and inherent ownership of the Biden administration’s record on immigration and inflation. But 2020 distracts him, it prevents him from applying full focus to that case, and his handling of the issue routinely reminds voters not already on his side why they’re reluctant to join. Here’s Andy McCarthy:
Trump had one job: stay on message about Harris’s dizzying renunciations of her positions — so inexplicable that Harris has dribbled them out through nameless campaign sources rather than addressed them in her own voice. All he needed to do was reduce to the punchline it deserves to be her claim that her “values” have never changed.
He couldn’t do it. “Indeed, it was only in his closing statement that Trump articulated what should have been his central argument: that Harris is a member of the administration whose record she is implicitly running against,” Noah Rothman writes. Trump’s most effective sound bite, and the one that got under his opponent’s skin nearly as much as her rally comment did under his, was, “She is Biden.”
But what makes Trump’s inability to move on from 2020 even more damaging is that other Republicans (wrongly) feel bound to his narrative, which hurts the brand down-ticket. Trump’s cues are why J. D. Vance gave the answer he did when pressed in a recent interview to say whether he would have certified that election had he been in then–vice president Mike Pence’s shoes. “I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors,” he said. Dominic Pino assiduously explains here why Vance’s handling of this question was so poor and detached from reality. But the simplest explanation for why Vance can’t simply say “Yes” is that Trump wouldn’t want him to, because he’s still running that race.
Polls consistently show roughly one-third of Americans think Biden’s victory was illegitimate. But Trump’s stance on 2020 and January 6 is not shared by the voters he needs to persuade in a general election, as the crosstabs from a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll released earlier this year demonstrate. On whether there was solid evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020, independents replied in the negative by two to one. Sixty-six percent agreed that Biden was legitimately elected. Trump isn’t talking to them when he dwells on his last campaign.
Democrats recognize, in spite of this, that the 2024 race is competitive, even with Biden out. Harris clearly prepared for the debate in ways Trump did not. More than two weeks after Harris accepted the nomination, her campaign at last put a policy section on its website (mea culpa). She continues to struggle with the reality that she is the incumbent, while running as a “change” candidate. Jeff Blehar, writing on a pre-debate poll that showed Trump narrowly ahead, noted that just a quarter of likely voters said Harris represents a major change from Biden, while 53 percent said Trump does.
The ABC debate may help Harris retain some post-convention momentum amid indications the race is reverting to a virtual tie. But the longer and louder Trump litigates 2020, the less likely it is that he can convince turned-off voters skeptical of both candidates that he’s the safer bet.
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Before turning to the best of the rest of the week, I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the newest National Review joint. Jeff Blehar is revving the engines to launch a new, weekly newsletter on American political culture called Carnival of Fools, and, frankly, I can make no promises that he will adhere to the normal boundaries of decorous discourse. Which is to say, you’ll want to get in on this. His first installment (setting the stage for debate day) is here, and you can sign up for the newsletter’s email list here.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The debate editorial, once more, is here: Trump’s Missed Opportunity
A bad, bipartisan idea: Trump’s Terrible Tariffs
On the Afghanistan-withdrawal report: The Afghanistan-Withdrawal Disaster, Revisited
ARTICLES
Tracy Wolfer Osborne: Poorly Managed Aurora Apartments Offered Easy Target for Nonprofit-Driven Migrant ‘Takeover’
Dominic Pino: The Full Context of Vance’s 2020 Election Comments Makes Them Even Crazier
Noah Rothman: Harris Missed Her Marks, Too
Alex Welz: Fair Debate Moderators Would Have Fact-Checked Harris on These Misleading Claims
Rich Lowry: Why We Bombed
Masih Alinejad: Authoritarian Regimes Abroad Threaten Americans Like Me at Home
Dan McLaughlin: A Second Trump Term Is Unlikely to Be Good
James Lynch: ‘Willfully Blind’: Biden Admin Ignored Repeated Military Warnings ahead of Disastrous Afghanistan Withdrawal
James Lynch: In Fiery Hearing Exchange, Cuomo Admits He Never Consulted Health Officials on Nursing-Home Directive
Christian Schneider: What Would Make the Perfect Democratic Candidate?
Ryan Mills: ShotSpotter Led to Hundreds of Arrests in Chicago This Year. Mayor Johnson Is Still Getting Rid of It
Joshua Crawford: San Francisco Should Try Punishing Criminals, Not Businesses
Mark Antonio Wright: The Criminally Stupid Chiefs Who Set Up a Secret Starlink WiFi Network aboard the USS Manchester
Jack Butler: The ‘Emergency’ Emergency
CAPITAL MATTERS
Akash Chougule writes on a new study he co-authored finding that the overwhelming majority of private-sector employees represented by a union never actually voted for that union: The Union Members Who Never Voted for Their Union
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Yet another installment from Hollywood’s sequel/reboot/spinoff machine — but Armond White finds a deeper problem in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: Tim Burton’s Stale Hollywood Gothic
Brian Allen heads upstate (in New York, that is) for a salute to horse racing and the famous heir who loved it: Paul Mellon and His Ponies, at Saratoga’s Racing Museum
NOTHIN’ EXCEPT THE EXCERPTS
Iranian-American activist Masih Alinejad writes of the brazen attempts on her life made by the regime in Iran:
In March 2025, I will confront the man who came to my Brooklyn home armed with an AK-47 to kill me. I will be testifying as a witness not just against the trigger man but also his handlers who orchestrated the assassination plot from an office at the headquarters of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. My story, while deeply personal, is also part of a broader, sinister pattern of transnational repression in which authoritarian regimes like those in Iran, Russia, China, and Venezuela extend their oppressive reach beyond their borders to target political dissidents. Even American citizens on U.S. soil are not safe when the world’s leading sponsors of terror act with impunity.
Plots like the one recently uncovered involving a man with ties to the Iranian regime who came to the United States to coordinate the assassination of U.S. government officials are in the news for good reason. But there is a quieter aggression against people who do not have the resources to defend themselves or the ability to draw media attention to their dire situations.
In 2021, the FBI foiled an audacious plot by the Islamic Republic to kidnap me from my home in Brooklyn, N.Y., and forcibly take me back to Iran. The kidnapping plot sounds like something out of a Hollywood thriller, but there is a pattern of the Islamic Republic seizing dissidents abroad and forcibly removing them to Iran. The story of Ruhollah Zam, a fellow Iranian journalist kidnapped by the Islamic Republic from France to Iran and executed, is a grim reminder of what can happen. On the day Zam was executed, Islamic Republic officials vowed that my abduction was imminent as the Iranian state media broadcast my image, hung in effigy.
I am a tiny woman, weighing only 90 pounds, but the threats against me are enormous.
After the kidnapping plot was exposed, I thought I was safe. Then a year later, in 2022, a man brazenly came to my home with the intention of killing me and even offering my head as a birthday gift to his boss. He had been monitoring my movements for more than a week, lurking outside my house, and even ordering food to be delivered to his car as he maintained his surveillance. Thanks to the efforts of multiple U.S. agencies, the assassin and his handlers, all members of an Eastern European criminal mob, were arrested and will face trial. But without deterrence, other assassins may be dispatched. This is the reality I face every day.
These threats are not just personal; they are assaults on the fundamental freedoms that democratic societies cherish. They are intended not only to silence the individuals they target but also to send a chilling message to anyone who dares to speak out against tyranny.
Rich Lowry follows up on the Tucker Carlson interview with a Churchill-vilifying podcaster, and explains why the prime minister pursued the tactic that he did during World War II:
You might have heard that Tucker Carlson had a Nazi-sympathizing podcaster on his show the other day.
The friendly — indeed, admiring — interview has engendered a lot of commentary, but I’d like to delve into one thing in particular: the podcaster Darryl Cooper’s harsh condemnation of the Allied bombing campaign in World War II.
Although Cooper is very understanding of how it is (through unfortunate happenstance, apparently) that the Nazis came to wage a war of annihilation in the East, he’s full of moral indignation about the bombing of German cities.
Cooper calls it “rank terrorism,” and “the greatest scale of terrorist attacks you’ve ever seen in world history.” In addition, Winston Churchill’s launching a bombing campaign while waiting for help either via the Soviet Union or the United States was “a craven, ugly way to fight a war.”
Throughout this part of the discussion, Carlson repeatedly asked very earnestly what Churchill was trying to accomplish, as if this were some mystery to be unlocked by a random podcaster.
Cooper’s view is that Churchill sought to deny Hitler his rightful victory after the Nazi conquest of France, and because “all he had were bombers,” he did it via the bombing campaign that Cooper finds so objectionable.
Well, yeah. What else was Churchill supposed to do? . . .
As it happens, Hitler couldn’t bring Britain to heel because he didn’t have the air or naval forces for the job. Thus, he lost both the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic — and ultimately the war.
Cooper’s suggestion that ground battle is less craven and more manly than other forms of conflict is absurd. Atrocities aside, was the war in the East edifying? Were Stalingrad and Kursk anything other than complete horrors?
Given the choice, any rational person would rather fight World War II on the British and U.S. model that emphasizes air and sea power and out-produces our enemies to dust rather than the German or Soviet model of largely grinding it out on the ground in tremendously destructive and costly campaigns of attrition. (The German Blitzkrieg victories at the outset and initial, although illusory, successes in Barbarossa were exceptions.)
All that said, it’s difficult to exaggerate the scale of the Allied air campaign. Bomber Command dropped nearly a million tons of bombs. We devastated dozens and dozens of German cities.
What was the alternative?
Early on, the British could have told their own people and the Americans, Sorry, we are just going to sit tight for now. We have no means to hit Nazi Germany that meet our exacting moral standards, so we will wait until something comes up.
This would have been intolerable as long as Britain didn’t opt for Cooper’s preference of capitulating to Hitler. (Also, of course, the Soviets wouldn’t have been appreciative if, unable and unwilling to launch a premature invasion of France, we refused even to bomb Nazi Germany.)
ICYMI, House Republicans released their report on the Afghanistan-withdrawal debacle. James Lynch has the story:
President Biden’s insistence on withdrawing entirely from Afghanistan no matter the cost — despite repeated warnings from the military and NATO allies — exposed American personnel to security threats and allowed the Taliban to quickly remake the country into a terrorist safe-haven, according to a new congressional report.
Taking their cue from Biden himself, senior State Department officials were hellbent on getting every last U.S. troop out of Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, regardless of the security situation on the ground or the Taliban’s compliance with the previously negotiated Doha Agreement, according to a 354 page report compiled by the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Republican majority.
The Biden administration disregarded warnings that the Taliban was not holding up its end of the agreement, which was negotiated by the Trump administration several years earlier, and ignored advice from multiple top military officials and NATO allies to reconsider the Afghanistan departure.
“Mr. Biden has demonstrated distrust of America’s military experts and advisors and has prioritized politics and his personal legacy over America’s national security interests,” the report observes.
The Foreign Affairs Committee GOP’s report is the culmination of an investigation that included public hearings, closed-door transcribed interviews, and analysis of more than 20,000 pages of State Department documents, despite obstruction and obfuscation from the Biden administration at every turn.
The report pins a significant portion of the blame for the botched withdrawal on the State Department’s decision to disregard senior military officials who repeatedly warned that the timeline for withdrawal was too short and that, if troops were to be drawn down rapidly, diplomatic personnel should be withdrawn at a similar pace for security reasons. Both of those arguments fell on deaf ears, according to the report.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the diplomat responsible for the Doha agreement, is accused of excluding the Afghan government from the negotiations and dismissing concerns that the Taliban were bad-faith negotiating partners. The report accuses Khalilzad of keeping military leaders in the dark during the negotiations and undermining the legitimacy of the Afghan government, accusations he countered on social media ahead of the report’s release.
“No agreement was made on any military issue without the full knowledge of our military leaders and their participation in decisions made by our leaders,” he said on X.
Against the military’s advice, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ross Wilson and secretary of state Antony Blinken pushed to keep the U.S. embassy in Kabul open, a decision general Kenneth McKenzie called the “fatal flaw” behind the Afghanistan mess. State Department officials even watered down and re-wrote warnings from diplomatic security and the Pentagon about the plan to maintain a large embassy presence to conceal how precarious the situation had become.
“This report proves senior Biden-Harris administration officials were willfully blind to warnings about the degrading security situation on the ground given to them by U.S. military personnel, U.S. intelligence assessments, American and international media reports, and State Department personnel in Kabul who sent a Dissent Channel cable in July 2021. Instead, they consistently prioritized the optics of maintaining a large U.S. embassy presence over the safety of embassy personnel,” the report reads.
And the Winner Is . . .
The winner of this year’s National Review Institute William F. Buckley Jr. Essay Contest is John Hatzis, a sophomore at Grove City College majoring in history and philosophy. You can read his essay here: Rescuing Patriotism in a Nation on the Brink
Congrats, John.
CODA
Who’s up for some mid-career Radiohead? I know I am. “Life in a Glasshouse” shows up at the very end of Amnesiac, and it’s well worth the wait (really, any time a clarinet shows up outside the usual genres, count me in). It’s a song that illustrates the subtle power of tempo, in this case an almost unreasonably and defiantly slow one. By the end, the multiple guest musicians lift off into a wailing, New Orleans–inspired dirge, every instrument crying. A helluva closer, and one I’m happy to borrow.
Have a fine weekend, and thanks for reading.