The Peace Plan: What Will Zelensky Do? Mamdani Quickly Breaks Love Fest Spell. Incarceration Works. MTG, Bless Her Heart. And More!
The Trump administration’s 28-point plan to end the war in Ukraine has not been met with overwhelming approbation.
“Disaster Peace,” the New York Post trumpets on its cover. “US Scrambles to Save Plan that Gives Russia All It Wants in Ukraine” is the subhead. Inside the paper, Colin Freeman details the “harsh realities” for Ukraine.
“For a Weakened Zelensky, Yielding to Trump Is Riskier Than Defiance” is the headline on a Wall Street Journal news story. A corruption scandal in Ukraine factors into the decision for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky:
“Trump seems to repeat the mistakes that Putin already made several times, underestimating the strength of Ukrainian society and not understanding what Ukraine really is,” said Nico Lange, a former senior German defense official who is involved in European efforts to help Ukraine. “No Ukrainian president—and especially not a weakened Zelensky—has a mandate to agree to anything like this. If he does, he would not be president anymore when he comes home.”
“What Ukrainians Think About Trump’s Peace Plan,” by Adrian Stretch, at The Free Press, argues that Zelensky has been hurt by the corruption scandal, but Ukrainians are rallying around him now.
While Washington and Kyiv tout “highly constructive” talks to amend the plan, and there is an updated peace plan agreed upon by the U.S. and Ukraine, National Review’s Andrew McCarthy sees the latest developments as “Trump’s Inevitable Ukraine Fiasco”:
All hell broke loose last night when Marco Rubio, left to be the face of the Trump administration’s shameful policy of squeezing Ukraine on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s regime, was overcome by a fleeting fit of honesty: The secretary of state admitted to a bipartisan group of senators that the administration’s vaunted “28-point plan” was essentially a Russian wish list.
When some of the senators inconveniently went public with this concession, the Trump State Department, instinctively, accused them of a bald-faced lie and insisted that the plan was made-in-the-U.S.A., albeit with some inputs from the parties.
That’s what, in the Watergate era, used to be known as a non-denial denial. If, as obviously happened, Russia gave the president’s emissaries its wish list and the emissaries then wrote them into a plan, it is both a Trump administration plan and a Russian wish list. There is no daylight between those two things, which is no surprise since this has been the dynamic since Trump won the 2024 election.
Can Somebody Please Tell Me What Just Happened? The love fest between President Trump and socialist Mayor-elect of New York Zohran Mamdani after their Friday meeting in the Oval Office was not what Ms. Must had on her bingo card. Maybe the president’s weird, kindly words for the antisemitic socialist were designed to keep rich New Yorkers from deserting Trump’s hometown?
At any rate, Mamdani quickly broke the spell yesterday with a defiant speech. City Journal has an alarming take on the protests against the Park East Synagogue protest and Mamdani’s unsatisfying response. “Is Moving to Israel Now a Crime in New York City?” asks the headline.
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won’t put her “sweet district” through a bitter race, bless her heart, is resigning her seat in January. In an editorial headlined “The Meaning of Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Wall Street editors propose that Greene won’t go quietly”:
It’s tempting to dismiss the abrupt retirement of Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress as the end of an odd, cranky political career. But the Georgia Representative, and one-time Donald Trump favorite, may return to haunt the President and the Republican Party in the future, and the ideas she represents are a warning to JD Vance in particular.
There is an infuriating advertisement running on TV that features unflattering pictures of law enforcement officers and says that putting people in jail is not what stops crime. Oh, yes, it is. Please, if you read one thing today, let it be Tal Fortgang’s “Incarceration Works” in City Journal. Citing James Q. Wilson’s dictum that removing dangerous people from the streets helps communities, Fortgang writes:
As Hyland’s case [explained in Fortgang’s piece] exemplified, violent crime is overwhelmingly the work of a small group of repeat offenders—that is, it is highly concentrated. The remedy, as Wilson argued half a century ago in his classic book Thinking About Crime, is not social engineering but incapacitation: keeping the violent few from striking again.
Most people are not teetering on the edge of felony, waiting to become, in the Left’s favored euphemism, a “justice-impacted individual.” The overwhelming majority of Americans never engage in serious criminal behavior, let alone commit violent felonies like murder or armed robbery. But those who do are likely to do so again, the evidence shows.
In “How a City Dies,” John Kass writes about the career criminal who set a woman on fire on Chicago’s public transit system with the words “Burn alive b****!” Miranda Devine proposes that it is high time liberal judges be held accountable for failing to lock up violent career criminals.
“The Billionaire Who Made California Unaffordable” is the headline on Allysia Finley’s Wall Street Journal column. The billionaire is Tom Steyer, a hedge fund manager who became a climate change zealot. Steyer, who used his money to push policies that made California expensive, is now running for Governor. Finley writes:
Yet most workers aren’t sharing in Big Tech’s wealth creation, thanks to policies that raise costs for other types of businesses. The state’s average weekly wages have increased 20.8% since January 2020, compared with 28.6% nationwide. Mimicking Mr. Mamdani’s class warfare, Mr. Steyer says, “The richest people in America think that they earned everything themselves. That’s bull—.”
That’s rich coming from a billionaire. But he has a small point: To the extent some businesses in California prosper, it’s because the progressives who run the government haven’t decided to destroy them—yet.
What if somebody accidentally put $5 million in your checking account? Examiner Chief Political Correspondent Byron York asks that question in connection to Florida Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who is charged with stealing COVID funds:
On May 14, 2021, Edwin Cherfilus [Rep. Sheila’s brother[] submitted an invoice to FDEM for payment of $50,578.50 for work done in Jacksonville. On July 1, 2021, FDEM paid the bill, but instead of depositing $50,578.50 into Trinity’s bank account, which the indictment refers to as Bank Account 1, it deposited $5,057,850.00. In what the indictment called “a clerical error,” FDEM moved the decimal point a couple of spaces, added two zeroes, and bingo, the Cherfilus family had $5 million.
On the day the $5 million showed up, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick took a screenshot of Bank Account 1’s activity and texted it to Edwin Cherfilus. Then, it appears the two did nothing for a month. And then, according to the indictment, they did a lot.
York says this strange saga serves to (among other things) remind us of the days when the government was ”shoveling billions out the door in the name of COVID relief. Would the government, either in Washington or Florida, ever have noticed that it had mistakenly sent $5,057,850.00 when it meant to send $50,578.50? Who knows? And who knows how much of the COVID billions was stolen or wasted in ways the government never knew.”
Catherine Herridge is an old-fashioned, just-the-facts reporter. So, her damning “The Case against Comey” on X carries weight.
In “Insurrection Chic,” Victor Davis Hanson writes about how Democrats are now celebrating nullification tactics they once identified with January 6. VDH cites this:
Democratic lawmakers and veterans Sen. Elissa Slotkin, Sen. Mark Kelly, Rep. Jason Crow, Rep. Maggie Goodlander, Rep. Chris Deluzio, and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan appeal to U.S. soldiers to “disobey” their superior officers’ orders if, in their own legal opinion, they feel the orders are “illegal” by contravening the Constitution. How or why, they do not say.
Bathos Alert. Kamala Harris and her supporters continue“to work through their grief.”
