Trump Gets Good News from Hoosiers. Project Freedom Paused. How Do You Solve a Problem Like Ketanji? Soave: Stop the (Medicaid) Steal! Pulitzers. Empty Celebs. And More

Secretary of State Marco Rubio reaped praise for a polished presidential tryout yesterday in the press briefing room, proving himself “a man of many parts.” Rubio’s boss received some good news too. USA TODAY’s Susan Page reports:

He’s still the boss.

President Donald Trump is beset by rising gas prices, falling approval ratings and an unpopular war in Iran. But in the Indiana primary May 5 he demonstrated his continued grip on the Republican Party by delivering a thumping to a half-dozen state senators who defied his demands to redraw congressional lines.

Of seven GOP senators who earned his ire, five lost their party’s nominations to challengers the president had endorsed, with one race still too close to call.

A Wall Street Journal headline announces that “Trump’s hold on the Republican base” held firm. Aside from the presidential pummeling of rebellious Hoosiers, Vivek Ramaswamy got the nod from Ohio Republicans in his bid to be Governor. Doesn’t the Trump-endorsed entrepreneur seem to have been running for governor forever? More on yesterday’s election results.

That’s not the only good news for the president. “Oil Plunge Quickens on Mideast Optimism” is a Wall Street Journal headline. The president has paused Project Freedom (escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz). Pakistan’s Prime Minister praises the pause, cites “progress” towards a deal with whoever is running Iran these days. Hmmmm…

Among former President Joe Biden’s gifts to the republic are the appointment of two DEI women to positions of prominence. One, Kamala Harris is subject to the will of the voters. Not so Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Jackson is forever (or for life). Justice Jackson has emerged as possibly the most outspoken member of the Court—and not in a good way. George Washington law professor and Fox Contributor Jonathan Turley writes about Justice Jackson’s latest foray, legal eccentric and insult (her dissent in an order finalizing the Court’s ruling in the Louisiana gerrymandering case):

Since her appointment by President Joe Biden, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has quickly developed a radical and chilling jurisprudence. Her often sole dissents and accusatory rhetoric have drawn not just the ire of her conservative colleagues but her liberal colleagues. This week, that tension deepened with a stinging rebuke from Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch).

… it was Justice Jackson’s language again that drew the attention of her colleagues.

Justice Jackson lambasted the court’s ruling “has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana.” In an Orwellian twist, Jackson suggested that others were playing politics as she sought to effectively protect unconstitutional Democratic districts. She suggested that the case exposed “a strong political undercurrent.”

In a post headlined “Alito vs. Jackson,” Powerline characterized Justice Jackson’s dissent as “vituperative” and “impugning” the motives of her colleagues. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal took note of Justice Alito’s “intriguing footnote” in the Louisiana case:

The footnote suggests some pique by Justice Alito about the Court’s long gestation on Callais, and understandably so since Justice Jackson is accusing the majority of playing politics.

With apologies to Rogers and Hammerstein, How Do You Solve a problem like Ketanji?

Unlike Justice Jackson, Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal says, “Good Riddance to Racial Gerrymandering“:

Under segregation, black Americans generally shared a common experience of being second-class citizens. That’s no longer the case, but the supporters of segregated voting districts and racial preferences in hiring and college admissions would have us believe that nothing has really changed. Racial-gerrymandering advocates today assume that black voters are essentially fungible and share identical political preferences. That’s not only false but insulting, and this Supreme Court corrective couldn’t come soon enough.

We now know the name of the suspect in the 2025 fires that ravaged Los Angeles County. The suspect is not somebody who accidentally forgot Smoky Bear’s injunction to snuff out campfires. Jonathan Rinderknecht, 30, the alleged firebug, is a full-fledged anti-capitalist admirer of CEO murder suspect Luigi Mangione. National Review’s Noah Rothman places Rinderknecht firmly in the elite Left’s tradition of espousing the destruction of other people’s property: 

“Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the New York Times’ 1619 Project. “To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral.” The New Yorker editor David Remnick agreed. “We don’t have time to finger-wag at protesters about property,” he wrote of the big-box and mom-and-pop stores alike that were put to the torch. “That can be rebuilt. Target will reopen.” Sure, “looting is counterproductive,” NPR CEO Katherine Maher conceded. “But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”

Then there’s other people’s money. The New York Post cover features New York Governor Kathy Hochul squeezing the Statue of Liberty for more taxes. “Hochul STILL pushes more taxes and a $260 B budget” is the caption. Meanwhile, in Washington state, voters will have no say on a referendum on a new 9.9% levy. Billionaire Ken Griffin says that New York under Mayor Mamdani doesn’t welcome success, so he might take some of his money elsewhere.

Welfare fraud has cost voters untold billions of dollars, but some blue-state leaders are closing ranks … to protect the fraudsters, according to the New York Post. Reason’s Robby Soave observes at The Hill that Medicaid fraud in Ohio is almost exclusively from the Somali community, but that both parties have turned a blind eye to it. He has a radical (in a good way) solution:

Here’s what I’m calling for: Since politicians aren’t going to do anything about fraud, can we get an AI on this? Maybe Claude, or ChatGPT? Let’s ask the computer where the fraud is and how we can get the money back, or at least shut off the fraudsters’ access to it. We need to restore faith in this system and end the stealing.  

Meanwhile, an editorial at the Washington Examiner proposes that Trump’s food stamp reforms are working. Apparently, it was the work requirement that did it.

The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced earlier this week. Or, as Powerline has it, “The Pulitzers Strike Again.” The New York Times, according to Ira Stoll at the Washington Free Beacon, “is scrambling to defend the integrity of its Gaza-based photographer and his work, which won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday, after a press watchdog organization accused him of ‘staged scenes’ that were closely coordinated with the Hamas terrorist organization.”

Stoll sums up the winning entries:

The prizes largely honored articles that bashed Trump—his alleged abuses of power, his destruction of the federal workforce, his venality—or Israel.

“The Economic Lesson from Weight-Loss Drugs,” by David Goldhill, at City Journal, reveals that selling directly to consumers makes health care more affordable:

Why are GLP-1s getting cheaper while health care remains expensive? The answer lies in what makes GLP-1 drugs different: actual consumers have to pay actual prices.

Writing at The Free Press, Ruy Teixeira tells us, “How the Far Left Tapped into a Money Machine.” It’s radical candidates such as Graham Platner, who is running for the Senate against incumbent GOP Senator Susan Collins, who attract the biggest Democratic donors. Teixeira explains how this happened.

Just Indulge Me. Please. Matthew Gadsa of Unherd put his finger on what so bothered me so much about the Met Gala:

At the heart of the Met Gala is a deep cynicism. It takes a premise with which it is hard to disagree — a world-class museum needs more money — and manages to turn the resulting attention and money on the world’s most banal people. All the while, this obscures the immense handicraft of the designers themselves and the larger cultural significance of the Met as an institution. The event further reifies the hold that celebrity has over the American psyche, while conflating fashion as craft or art with fashion as spectacle.

… The Diana Vreeland-era of the Gala during the Seventies and Eighties was at least worthy of envy: tasteful, aristocratic, and actually interested in the museum’s collections and exhibitions. It was a gatekept event, but it wasn’t a circus.