Trump Does Asia. NY Post: Beware of the Mam-Child. Christine Rosen on ‘Trans’ Dangers. ‘Toxic Femininity’ Debate. WaPo: Build the Ballroom & More

President Trump’s weeklong Asia tour is in full swing. The New York Times has updates: The president meets with the New Japanese Prime Minister tomorrow. China and the U.S. agreed to “a framework for a possible trade pact ahead of a crucial face-to-face meeting between Mr. Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping.” Early morning stock market rally based on the U.S.-China pact. More on the tentative trade deal.

Don’t Cry for Javier Milei. The Argentine President and Trump ally defied expectations. Cry instead for those who desire more socialist experiments in Latin America. Reuters reports:  

Argentine President Javier Milei’s party cruised to victory in midterm legislative elections as voters handed him a mandate to keep pushing through his radical overhaul of the economy despite widespread discontent with his deep austerity measures.

A relief to Milei, whose poll numbers had sagged in recent weeks, the results are also likely to please U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration had faced criticism after providing Argentina with a hefty financial bailout.

Newsweek described the Argentine elections as “the other midterm election Trump is hoping to win.”

The New York Post cover this morning: “Mam-Child: Beware, NYC Is No Toy to Hand to Nepo Baby Like Zohran”

Early voting for the next Mayor has begun in New York, and socialist, anti-Israel candidate Zohran Mamdani is favored to win. Kyle Smith writes in the New York Post:  

Mamdani is not Vladimir Lenin. He’s something much more recognizable: our own Bowdoin Beto of the Boroughs. He’s a bluff, a hope, a whimsy, a rumor of a man who has no knowledge of anything, no experience running so much as a halal hot-dog stand and nothing to offer except vibes.

His stock answer to everything, when he even pretends to answer, is to smile charmingly and leave the details to the future.

Smith calls former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is also running, a “grubby jerk,” but says he has had experience in governing. But he suggests that it doesn’t matter because Curtis Sliwa, third in the polls, makes a Cuomo win well-nigh impossible.  

An editorial in the Wall Street Journal is headlined “Democrats Fall Into the Mamdani Line.” The editors write:

The big question now is whether Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, will endorse Mr. Mamdani. Doing so would betray his long career as a supporter of Israel and opponent of antisemitism. Only after months of criticism did Mr. Mamdani say he’d “discourage” the “globalize the intifada” chant of Hamas sympathizers.

But as the left rises in the Democratic Party, the pressure to go along for the socialist ride will become more intense.

Meanwhile, an opinion piece in the Washington Post urges voters to learn from leftist London’s sad decline. London has seen its economy crushed in the three terms of leftist Mayor Sadiq Khan.

National Review’s Becket Adams says that the media’s Nazi-symbol hunters have taken a holiday when it comes to the Nazi-tattooed Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine. Townhall’s Kurt Schlichter says that “The More Disturbing the Dirt, the Better Democrats Like Their Dirtbags.” Dirtbags is Mr. Schlichter’s word for candidates:

How about [candidate for state AG in Virginia) Jay Jones, the guy running for chief law-enforcement officer of the Commonwealth of Virginia, who wants to murder Republicans and watch their children die? Oh, and he might be indicted himself for scamming his way out of his community service sentence, which he received as a sweetheart deal after being caught driving 116 mph. He’s still competitive in his race – in fact, I bet he gets into office on the votes of people who stick “Hate Has No Home Here” signs in their front yards. I guess hate does have a home there.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem takes to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal this morning to pen an important piece headlined “The Left Attacks the Rule of Law.” Noem tells how Antifa terrorists, gang members, and rioters are endangering federal officers in American cities.

IW alum Christine Rosen has an excellent piece in Commentary magazine headlined “The Danger of Trans.” Christine’s starting point is Nicholas Roske, who tried to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, but received a light sentence because he identified as transgender:

Unlike earlier activists who have sought to expand acceptance of minorities, trans activists have made little effort to persuade most Americans that their cause is either rational or just. They and their apologists have denied or ignored evidence of its active harms, particularly to children and women. And they have increasingly been demanding not simply equal treatment, but special treatment….

And it is not right that a man who sought to assassinate a Supreme Court justice for political reasons should get a pass from a judge in part to ease his path to a gender change. That is not tolerance; it is madness.

Helen Andrews struck a nerve in her Compact magazine piece headlined “The Great Feminization.” Now, Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle responds to Andrews in a piece headlined “Toxic Femininity and the Rise of Cancel Culture.”

“Over the past decade, we’ve talked a lot about toxic masculinity,” McArdle writes, saying that Andrews has “stepped in to fill the gap. She goes on:

Cancel culture, for example, does feel like female-style aggression — one might even call it “toxic femininity.” (My phrase, not hers.) Since that phrase will probably raise some hackles, let me explain: an all-out reputational attack that seems to come from everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. It’s a dynamic that will be familiar to anyone who has attended an all-girls camp….

Put a group of boys together, writes Benenson, and you’ll see structured play with elaborate rules and hierarchies of skill that they spend time negotiating, while the girls “shake their heads at what seems to them a bizarre emphasis on enforcing the rules at the expense of other more important concerns, such as someone’s feelings.” That’s a pretty good description of much of the Great Awokening: defenders of abstract norms such as free speech squaring off against critics who argued those norms permitted too much exclusion, hurt and offense.

Ms. Must mentioned Jen Psaki’s verbal attack on Second Lady Usha Vance last week. I know a lot of you do not subscribe to the London Telegraph, so I saved space for a longish piece from the Telegraph’s Kara Kennedy, who argues that Psaki’s jab “gave the game away: liberals think conservative women must be oppressed.” She writes:

What Psaki seemed not to know – or worse, not to care about – is that Usha Vance is not some docile appalachian Stepford wife cowering behind a wood-burning stove. She’s a Yale-educated lawyer who clerked for both Chief Justice John Roberts on the US Supreme Court and Brett Kavanaugh. She has three children, a formidable CV and a life that suggests she could probably argue most people in Washington DC into intellectual submission before breakfast with her beautiful family. She could certainly outwit the quivering, bumbling, pathetic excuse of a press secretary that was Jen Psaki.

To assume that Usha Vance has been brainwashed, bullied or captured by her husband’s politics is more than insulting, it’s revealing. It tells us that Psaki, and the many who nodded along to her “blink if you need help” joke, apparently cannot conceive of an intelligent, successful woman choosing conservatism freely. The liberal imagination has its limits, and one of them is the idea of female agency existing outside progressive orthodoxy.

This is what makes Psaki’s comment so much worse than a cheap laugh line. It’s a confession – not about Usha Vance, but about the patronising world-view of a certain class of feminist who cannot imagine disagreement without dysfunction. If you’re a conservative woman, they assume you must be brainwashed. If you’re married to a conservative man, you must be terrified.

Meanwhile, the increasingly sane Washington Post supports President Trump’s big, beautiful ballroom:

The White House cannot simply be a museum to the past. Like America, it must evolve with the times to maintain its greatness. Strong leaders reject calcification. In that way, Trump’s undertaking is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere.