Dear Weekend Jolter,
There’s a Simpsons scene for everything. Recall the one in which Mr. Burns is told by the doc he has so many diseases trying to infect his body they’ve miraculously blocked one another from breaking through. The stampede of indictments against Donald Trump conjures this same (perhaps medically suspect) idea — he faces so many sets of charges, with the latest and third brought Tuesday by special counsel Jack Smith and another potentially forthcoming in Georgia, it’s unclear any can break through, politically, in the primary.
The new indictment is typically damning and suffused with the former president’s lies pertaining to his 2020 election sabotage. One passage that would be amusing if this were happening to another country:
The Defendant claimed that 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia, causing the Georgia Secretary of State to respond: “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong. . . . The actual number were two. Two.”
That gentleman leads the primary field by 36 points in the RealClearPolitics average. He commands a majority — not just a plurality — of support among GOP voters, still.
Of course, it takes just one finding of guilt on one count for Trump’s freedom to be threatened. NR’s editorial voices doubt on Smith’s J6 indictment and warns that it rests on “flimsy legal theories.” Noah Rothman dissents, arguing that Supreme Court precedents indicate “that efforts to defraud the United States government extend to the obstruction of its conduct.” But in the context of the primary race, whether the latest charges hold up or not, the pile-on achieves the effect Trump aims for whenever controversy surrounds him — a cloud so swollen with allegations and counterclaims that the blot can confirm whatever voters already think about this world-historical martyr or felon. The needle doesn’t move.
Two other factors work to Trump’s advantage for now. First, with President Biden getting drawn deeper into his son’s myriad scandals, Trump can more easily make his case about a double standard of justice. Devon Archer’s Monday testimony that Biden the elder joined or called in to Hunter’s business meetings at least 20 times is not a good look, no matter how the White House spins it. Related bribery allegations are becoming more concrete. And the Biden DOJ’s handling of Hunter’s plea deal faces mounting scrutiny, most recently from the judge on the case.
Second, Trump’s putative rivals for the GOP nomination, with one or two exceptions, are helping him make that case and can’t seem to muster the vitriol to truly attack him. While several have criticized the front-runner for his January 6 conduct, the candidates either leapt to his defense over the Smith indictment or exercised studious restraint. Vivek Ramaswamy submitted perhaps the strongest application for Trump’s cabinet, doubling down on his commitment to pardon Trump if elected and then absolving him of responsibility by declaring “the real cause was systematic & pervasive censorship of citizens in the year leading up to it.”
Rich Lowry wrote this past week about the “fear factor” that holds back Trump’s GOP rivals. If they can’t shake it, it could be fatal:
Generally, they’ll evade questions, reject the premise, or revert to an answer that has been as carefully crafted as an official statement by one of the parties to negotiations over the Paris Peace Accords. . . . If they can help it, his opponents will never say Trump’s name — he’s the most unnamed major politician in American history. Mike Pence tends to call him “my former running mate.”
This means that Donald Trump’s political dominance of the rest of the field extends to a kind of personal and psychological dominance. They are afraid, and he’s not.
Rich noted Chris Christie doesn’t play this game — Pence also held his ground this week — but others will criticize Trump only politely (Will Hurd, Asa Hutchinson) or “without having to grasp the nettle” (Ron DeSantis).
The first GOP primary debate is coming up August 23. Traditionally, this is an opportunity for a middle-tier candidate to break out. But the stakes involve something more fundamental this year. It is the crucial chance for every other candidate on stage to show that Trump has rivals to speak of — who don’t feel obliged to amplify his grievances, and who could plausibly defeat him without having a Christie to hide behind once the field is culled. Otherwise, Trump slides into a likely Biden rematch in which, to quote Andy McCarthy, “he’s going to get drubbed.”
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Fitch sounds a warning on America’s debt addiction: America Downgraded
The Trump-indictment editorial, once more, is here: This Trump Indictment Shouldn’t Stand
The corona-saga gets worse: The Covid Cover-Up
ARTICLES
Dan McLaughlin: What’s Missing from the Third Trump Indictment
Noah Rothman: They’re Bluffing
Rich Lowry: The Merrick Garland Fraud
Wilfred Reilly: Not Everyone Who Lived the Day before Yesterday Was ‘Evil’
Jay Nordlinger: I Met a Book
Andrew McCarthy: A Special Counsel for Hunter Biden and His Family Business?
Andrew McCarthy: Trump Can’t Win
Madeleine Kearns: The Irony of Michigan’s ‘Conversion Therapy’ Ban
Brittany Bernstein: Facing Tough Election, Kentucky Governor Rewrites His Record on Child Gender Transition
John McCormack: Incandescent Light-Bulb Ban Takes Effect
Beth Akers: Biden Is Misleading Student-Loan Borrowers — Again
CAPITAL MATTERS
Dominic Pino reviews the good, the bad, and the demagoguery in DeSantis’s latest big policy plan: Ron DeSantis’s Economic Demagoguery
About that Fitch downgrade: America’s Credit-Rating Downgrade Is a Symptom. Debt Is the Disease
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen gives Toledo its due, and some tough love: Toledo Museum: A Treasure Trove of the Best
Armond White looks back on a “classic,” not necessarily fondly: The Truman Show’s Hoax and Hokum
Jeff Blehar pens an appreciation, with a Political Beats tie-in: Nick Lowe: The Greatest Singer-Songwriter You May Never Have Heard Of
BACK FOR SECONDS? HAVE SOME EXCERPTS
Andrew McCarthy’s piece on why Trump can’t win a general election got a good deal of attention this past week. (And for more on the debate in-house, see here, here, and here.) This is Andy’s reasoning:
The problem for Trump is he has no upside. He is as known a quantity as has ever sought the presidency. In a normal race, the 46 percent of Republicans who do not favor Trump could be expected to “come home” in droves in the general election if he is the nominee. That is not true of Trump. As the Guardian reports, recent Pew polling indicates that just a hair under a third of Republicans now view him very or mostly unfavorably. The remaining two-thirds view him favorably, but that is down from three-quarters last year. It is reasonable to forecast that at least a quarter of Republicans will not support Trump under any circumstances. That doesn’t mean they will vote for an unpopular Democrat, they just won’t vote (or will vote third-party, write-in, or some similarly futile vehicle for registering discontent).
To have a chance in the general election, Trump has to make up that support. But from where? Polls consistently show that Democratic opposition to Trump is nearly universal. They also consistently show that his unfavorability with the general public hovers around 60 percent. There is no reason to believe this will change. To the contrary, about 54 percent of voters cast their ballots for someone other than Trump in 2016 and 2020, when he was more popular nationwide than he is now. He couldn’t win in 2020 with 46 (he won by a miracle in 2016 with 46). He is not going to win with less than 46, but there’s no reason to think he would ever sniff 46 again.
As unpopular as Biden is, recent Monmouth University polling had him beating Trump soundly even if there were a third-party “unity” ticket (the one hypothesized was Joe Manchin (D., W.V.) and Jon Huntsman (R., Utah). Maybe this is an outlier (910 registered voters), and maybe the Quinnipiac University poll discussed by CNN, showing Trump currently one point ahead of Biden in the battleground state of Pennsylvania (47–46) is more noteworthy. But I doubt it. Trump has done material damage to Republicans in the Keystone State — in 2022, he did more to get Democrats John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro elected, as senator and governor respectively, than any single political actor, and the GOP lost control of the state house for the first time in a dozen years.
I suppose my main point is that polling is a snapshot while races are dynamic. You can’t appraise Trump’s chances in the general election without assessing what is going to happen in the campaign’s final phases. The Democrats have calculated that the criminal and civil cases they are now bringing will come to hearings and trials next year. That’s when all the dramatic testimony most damaging to Trump would come out, and when the intended audience would be the general electorate, in which Trump is already deeply unpopular.
Maddy Kearns takes a closer look at Michigan’s “conversion therapy” ban, and the damage it will inflict:
Last Wednesday, Governor Gretchen Whitmer handed another victory to trans activists, signing a bill into law that will outlaw therapies helping reconcile gender-distressed youth with their sexed bodies.
Once again, Democrats excel at branding. . . . This latest assault on child welfare is packaged as a ban on the sinister practice of “conversion therapy.”
As we have editorialized previously, users of this term seek to conflate several distinct issues in order to mislead the public.
The term “conversion therapy” was once used for coercive and even physically abusive practices (which are already illegal) aimed at changing a person’s sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual. In that sense, “therapy” was a euphemism.
Democrats are now conflating the term with voluntary talk therapies aimed at redirecting a patient’s unwanted sexual desires (speech protected by the First Amendment).
Second, and more troubling, they are conflating the abusive practices of “conversion therapy” with time-tested therapies aimed at helping children with gender dysphoria.
Until recently, the standard therapy for minors distressed by their sexed bodies was “watchful waiting” combined with exploratory talk therapy to reveal any underlying causes for their distress. It was found that most children, when treated this way, grew out of their dysphoria by the end of adolescence. A significant portion grew up to be same-sex-attracted as adults.
By contrast, “gender affirmation” glosses over the reasons for a child’s distress and puts them on a pathway to irreversible harm.
In case you’re wondering how the White House and its allies are able to somehow spin Hunter Biden’s ex-business partner Devon Archer’s testimony as vindication, Noah Rothman has an explainer:
Democrats have settled on a new line in their effort to defuse the underlying claims against Joe Biden, which are increasingly substantiated by the details emerging from congressional Republicans’ investigations into Hunter Biden’s conduct.
The president’s son, you see, is just a con man.
That is reportedly what Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer, told the House Oversight Committee. The younger Biden was merely dangling before his marks the “illusion” that, through him, they could have influence over Joe Biden and, therefore, shape American policy in ways financially advantageous to them. Knowingly or otherwise, President Biden tacitly served as the inside man to his son’s roper by joining phone in conversations and appearing at social events with Hunter’s prospective clients.
Democrats have not disputed this characterization. Rather, they’ve latched onto it as proof that the president remained at a legally safe remove from his son’s shady dealings. In the attempt to render this facially ridiculous spin believable, Democrats have ornamented their arguments with a lot of theatrical bluster. . . . Democrats are bluffing. Their defenses of the president’s behavior are contradictory, fluid, and always very loud because they are improvising.
On a related note, Rich Lowry looks at the disconnect between Merrick Garland the nominee and Merrick Garland the AG:
No one keeps records on such things, but Merrick Garland is certainly a contender for greatest disparity between the praise lavished on him as a level-headed, by-the-books moderate for years and his hackishly partisan conduct once in office.
The latest example is the Hunter Biden plea deal that blew up because it was so favorable, so irregular, and so damaging to the supposed investigation of Biden’s business dealings, which appears to be ongoing only so the DOJ can say there’s an ongoing investigation.
That the Justice Department took years to get to this point and that this was the end product — or the hoped-for end product — is its own scandal.
Somehow, Garland has let the clock run on the statute of limitations on potential crimes related to Hunter’s overseas “work,” and since there still hasn’t been any indictment of Hunter for anything, the clock is still ticking. . . .
Strange New Respect is, of course, the phenomenon of conservatives getting newly respectful treatment in the press and in the Beltway when they turn left or betray their party.
As attorney general, Garland has been running on the fumes of his Commonly Repeated Old Respect, which was a central pillar of the forlorn case for him after Barack Obama nominated him to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court.
“I have selected a nominee who is widely recognized not only as one of America’s sharpest legal minds, but someone who brings to his work a spirit of decency, modesty, integrity, evenhandedness, and excellence.” (Barack Obama)
He is “a moderate federal appeals court judge and former prosecutor with a reputation for collegiality and meticulous legal reasoning.” (NPR)
Shout-Outs
David Brooks, at the New York Times: What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?
Robert Zubrin, at Quillette: How Accurate is Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’?
Rachel Schilke, at the Washington Examiner: Tim Scott’s messaging and strategies could shift DeSantis out of second place
CODA
I heard this bluegrass cover of “Time” crying out from the speakers of an ice-cream-shop sanctuary in blazing Santa Fe last week. It sounded familiar. I sleuthed around (translation: 15 seconds of Google) and found it’s by Greensky Bluegrass, a Michigan band that brings a certain panache to the genre — certainly to this song.
Bluegrass-y groups have a rich tradition of pop/rock covers, which this one honors. If any casual (or committed) bluegrass fans out there have their own favorites, please do share them with this list, by sending them to me, at jberger@nationalreview.com. Have a great weekend, all.