Author: Charlotte Hays

Where were you when then-candidate Donald Trump got shot?

Come Sunday, it’ll be one year since President Trump survived the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. USA Today leads off with veteran journalist Susan’s Page’s reflections on how Butler changed everything:   

What becomes a legend?

On that list would surely be an assassination attempt that grazed the ear of a former-and-future president, prompting a flash of fist-pumping defiance that became instantly iconic.

One year ago, the shooting of Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was an extraordinary news story in the moment − and an event that would reverberate for him and in the American landscape.

Well, it took nearly a year, but the Secret Service has finally responded to Butler by suspending six agents who were on hand for the near end of Donald Trump. The New York reports:

The suspensions for the six agents ranged from 10 to 42 days, and they won’t be paid while on leave, Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn told CBS News on Wednesday. 

The agents will not be fired, but upon return to work, they will be placed in roles with diminished operational responsibility. 

“We aren’t going to fire our way out of this,” Quinn told the outlet. “We’re going to focus on the root cause and fix the deficiencies that put us in that situation.”

Gee whiz: I’d think you could at least partially fire your way out of this? Quinn “insisted that the Secret Service is “totally accountable for Butler.” Ya think?

Highly recommended: National Review’s Q&A with Salena Zito, author of “Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland.” Great review of Zito’s book a few days ago in The Free Beacon; Zito’s latest is “McDonald’s vs. the Media: There Will Never Be Another Political Showman like Trump.” In a just world, Zito, who knows more about why the 2024 election turned out the way it did than any other journalist in America, would get a Pulitzer. But she’s too good for that tarnished prize.  

Biden White House doctor (not Jill—the other one) Kevin O’Connor is a legend too. Called before the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating former President Biden’s mental decline, the pint-sized physician pleaded the Fifth for every question. The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman unearthed O’Connor’s February 2024 memorandum on Biden’s condition. Powerline comments:

What do you think the odds are that Biden could have passed Medicare’s pitiful cognitive assessment test? I would approximate the chances somewhere between zero and zero. Maybe that’s why the report doesn’t mention a cognitive test.

James Freeman comments: “What a disgrace.” True — but also a complete and utter farce.

President Trump’s first term was partially held captive by the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax to which much of the Left still clings. A piece in The Federalist argues that the investigations of former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan are the last chance for accountability:

The CIA recently released a damning Tradecraft Review that shreds the credibility of the Obama-ordered Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) — the report that famously concluded Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump. Much of the attention has focused on the discrepancy between the findings of this new review and what former CIA Director John Brennan told Congress in 2017. Indeed, multiple credible reports suggest Brennan is now under investigation for perjury.

One of the most glaring examples is Brennan’s sworn testimony that the Steele dossier — a collection of fabricated claims about Donald Trump funded by the Clinton campaign — “was not in any way used as a basis for the ICA.” The new review makes clear this was false. It was Brennan himself who pushed to include the dossier in the assessment, despite its complete lack of credibility. Brennan’s apparent goal was to launder Clinton campaign lies into the bloodstream of U.S. intelligence and, from there, into the media.

Margot Cleveland reports in a Federalist “exclusive” that “henchmen” behind Brennan’s Russia assessment remain at the CIA. Oh, why not binge on The Federalist: Beth Brelje has a good story on Douglas Mackey, they guy who was sentenced to seven months in federal prison reposting for silly memes about Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, Ned Ryun says we must restore the rule of law in the wake of Comey and Brennan.

Pegged to New York’s mayoral race, Tyler Cowen poses a germane question in The Free Press: “Why won’t socialism die?” “The simple explanation is that people like free stuff,” he replies to his own question. Socialism won’t die, but it could put some nails in the coffin of (arguably) the world’s greatest city. Public policy analyst Bennett Nuss explains in a WSJ op-ed headlined “We’ll All Pay for New York’s Mamdani Folly“:

Support for Mr. Mamdani derives in part from his promise to freeze rents and tax millionaires. Both proposals would materially harm the city and state. Freezing rents eliminates the rationale for owning a leasable apartment, and the property-tax burden would still fall on real estate holders, making every investment a value loss. Further, freezing rents would undermine the rest of Mr. Mamdani’s agenda. If landlords are losing money, the city budget will suffer from reduced revenue from income-tax collections. The same is true at the state level, jeopardizing crucial funding support for poorer communities upstate.

The proposed tax on millionaires would chase many high earners out of the city and perhaps even the state…. If wealthier families leave the state, the total revenue collected by city and state will decrease substantially.

To put it bluntly: Upstate can’t afford a socialist New York mayor. The city pays for most of the services Albany provides.

You know who’s not putting things bluntly? New York’s Senior Senator Chuck Schumer. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal ponders whether Schumer’s “Mamdani moment” will cause him to abandon long-held convictions:

Mr. Schumer is the Democratic Party’s Senate leader, and Mr. Mamdani is the Democratic Party’s candidate for mayor. Then again, Mr. Mamdani is a socialist who spoke as an Assemblyman of “seizing the means of production” and blamed Israel, not Hamas, on Oct. 8, 2023.

You’d think Mr. Schumer, the author in March of “Antisemitism in America: A Warning,” would have a lot to say about that. But the Senator who used to boast of being the shomer, or guardian, of the Jewish people today mainly guards his left flank. He fears a primary challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another socialist, but Mr. Mamdani is more than a test of right-left politics. This is a defining moment in Mr. Schumer’s political career.

As long as we’re on anniversaries, it’s the 100th birthday of the play “Inherit the Wind” about the Darwin-Scopes trial (the movie starring Spencer Tracy and Frederick March came five years later in 1960). David Mamet, the great American playwright, suggests that a little ambiguity might have improved the play, which deals with Darwinism and education. The play may be an early milestone in pre-MAGA condescension.

If I Have Offended Anyone: The Texas pediatrician who said Trump voters got what they voted for in the horrific tragedy of the Texas floods, which took the lives of so many children, says she is taking “full responsibility” for her remarks. So no one twisted her arm? She’s speaking as “a mother, a neighbor, a pediatrician, and a human being.” In other words, blah, blah, blah.

Bad Things That Just Won’t Go Away: John Murawski argues in Unherd that California is setting a “dangerous precedent” regarding “trans” athletes. And the issue isn’t going away:

Trans participation in sport — and trans rights more broadly — is a hill progressives are willing to die on, despite public opinion surveys showing that they’re defending an unpopular position. 

We last met when the OBBB seemingly hung in the balance on the eve of our 249^th Independence Day, also popularly known as “the real No Kings Day.”

Famed cat herder Mike Johnson, aka Speaker of the House, said yesterday on Fox News Sunday that the bill, which President Trump signed on the Fourth, will be” jet fuel for the economy” because of tax cuts for the middle class. Speaking of tax cuts, the New York Times seized upon what it called a celebratory letter” from the Social Security Administration, to claim that older American are being misled about tax benefits of the OBBB. The Times misstated the SSA letter, which claimed tax relief for “most” Social Security recipients (about 90%). But you know what? It doesn’t matter. You can’t fool people when it comes to pocketbook issues (See, Biden, inflation, “transitory.”)

Nevertheless, The Free Press’ “Is the One Big Bill a Masterstroke—or a Disaster?” with contributions from Newt Gingrich, Larry Summers, Tyler Cowen, and Jason Furman, is a good read. Meanwhile, Peter Van Buren of The American Conservative hails the OBBB as “a big, beautiful, financial weapon against illegal immigration.”

With the OBBB passed into law, the Trump administration faces a crucial week for trade deals.  

Sure, I’m wasting my breath telling my lefty friends that the OBBB is “not gutting the social safety net,” as a Wall Street Journal editorial explains; another WSJ editorial criticizes, however, “Trump Accounts” as potentially an inadvertent first stop towards guaranteed basic income.   

The death toll for the catastrophic Texas floods reached 81 early this morning. It was a grim scene as rescuers continued to search for the missing (via the New York Times):  

Survivors and family members shared stories about rescues and reunification, as well as accounts that ended in tragedy. In Kerr County, the hardest-hit region, a Christian girls’ summer camp was a hub of loss. A veteran high school teacher camping with his family near the Guadalupe River, which rose 20 feet in two hours on Friday, was also killed. So was a woman driving to work at Walmart when her vehicle was caught in rising waters.

At least five girls who were at Camp Mystic, the Christian camp for girls in Texas hill country, a haven for generations of girls, are confirmed dead and ten remain unaccounted for. CNN journalist Pamela Brown, an alumna of the camp, reported on the tragic scene. Two teenaged counselors wrote the names on campers—just in case. There were stories of heroism such as the young father who died saving his family. Two little girls, 13 and 11, who were vising their grandparents in a gated community were found dead, their hands locked together.

President Trump has declared the area “a major disaster area” and federal assistance is being rushed to Texas. The president plans to visit Texas this week. Texans are being told to brace for more flooding. I suppose that we should not be surprised that there was an instantaneous attempt from progressives to blame the Trump administration. Hot Air has a post on “the party of empathy” blaming DOGE cuts at the National Weather Service for a supposed lack of warning. Matt Vespa of Townhall also challenges this allegation, peddled by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

What’s the first thing that springs to mind when you hear about a tragedy of this magnitude? Well, if you are a prominent mayoral appointee in Houston, your first thought is that Camp Mystic, draped in sorrow, was … get ready … racist. This deserves to be quoted:

A former Houston mayoral appointee raged at a Texas girls camp for being “white-only’’ — hours after deadly flooding ripped through the facility, killing at least five little campers and leaving 11 more missing.

“I know I’m going to get cancelled for this, but Camp Mystic is a white-only girls’ Christian camp. They don’t even have a token Asian. They don’t have a token Black person. It’s an all-white, white-only conservative Christian camp,” Sade Perkins said in a widely condemned video on her private TikTok account.

“If you ain’t white you ain’t right, you ain’t gettin’ in, you ain’t goin’. Period,” Perkins said — as the state’s overall death toll from the devastating flooding soared, with the number of dead now at 80.

She then claimed no one would care if the victims were minorities.

Ms. Perkins, honey, I can’t cancel you quick enough. Ditto this vile pediatrician.

There is some old business from the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax era.

The New York Post’s Miranda Devine, of laptop from hell fame, writes that John Brennan, Obama CIA Director, may have opened himself up to perjury charges:

Brennan is said to be under renewed scrutiny by authorities over discrepancies between his sworn testimony to federal investigations and his written orders to underlings conducting the Intelligence Community Assessment commissioned by President Barack Obama in December 2016 that found Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump.

The review, declassified last week, found that Brennan insisted on the inclusion of the discredited Steele dossier, over the strong objections of the CIA’s two most senior Russia experts, who said it “did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.”

President Trump hosts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House today. The Wall Street’s Elliot Kaufman writes about an astounding new Palestinian offer for peace—Hebron’s sheiks propose leaving the PLO and joining the Abraham Accords:

The idea of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians has never seemed more futile than in the months since Oct. 7, 2023. But maybe that opens the door to a new way of achieving peace.

“We want cooperation with Israel,” says Sheikh Wadee’ al-Jaabari, also known as Abu Sanad, from his ceremonial tent in Hebron, the West Bank’s largest city located south of Jerusalem. “We want coexistence.”…

…

 Asked if he is worried his vision of coexistence with Israel will be called a betrayal of the Palestinian people and their cause, Sheikh Jaabari scoffs. “The betrayal was done in Oslo. You forgot, but I remember—33 years of it,” of false promises, violence, theft and poverty, even as billions of aid dollars poured in from the West. “I believe in my path,” the sheikh says. “There will be obstacles, but if we confront a rock, we will have iron to break it.”

Betsy McCaughey is suspicious that New York public financing for campaigns is being doled out in a way that benefits socialist, pro-Palestine mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Wall Street Journal columnist Alyssia Finley says forget all the “abundance” chatter on the left. Finley argues that the Left’s goal is to drive out the middle class and solidify control of major cities:

Might the flight of middle-class families be driving California’s political culture left? Same in New York City, which has lost 163,000 children since 2020. The hipsters who have taken over Brooklyn and Queens no doubt vote differently from the families who left. Mr. Mamdani was the ironic beneficiary of population flight caused by progressive policies.

Progressives are trying to drive more people to live in cities even as their policies make them unlivable, which is driving people who don’t share their politics to leave. Whether they use nudges or brute force, the goal is the same: Expand liberal government control over how people live. You either put up, or get out.

In a similar vein, Victor Davis Hanson finds Mamdani’s “radical chic dream” frightening.

We just celebrated the birthday of our country. We’ve been reading a lot of dismal reports that pride in America is at a new low. There is a real danger to so many Americans losing faith in our country, according to Joel Kotkin. Kotkin writes:

Such unraveling demands urgent attention. At its core, America remains a capitalist superpower. But without a deeper connection to its founding ideals and a shared sense of future purpose, this exceptional Republic risks devolving into something like post-national Europe or modern Britain: diminished, adrift, and lacking even the consolation of historic charm.

As you no doubt have heard Elon Musk is founding a new political party. Kudos the PJ Media’s Stephen Kruiser for his headline: “Mars Will Have a Tesla Dealership before Elon Has a Viable Third Party.”