God on the Mall. Trump Crosses Off Cassidy’s Name. Massie Next? Yes, Kamala, There ARE Bad Ideas. You Should Know. China Summit: Not Inscrutable to Gordon Chang. More
God was a guest at a “prayer festival” that drew thousands to the National Mall yesterday. Well, as usual, wherever He goeth, He stirreth up controversy. Specifically, what kind of nation is the U.S.? Did we leave the religion stuff back with the Pilgrims?
“Trump-backed prayer festival on National Mall draws thousands: ‘We welcome Jesus!’” the Washington Post headline (linked above) declared. Called “Rededicate 250,” the event, to no one’s surprise, drew critics: The beef is that the eight-hour event was “explicitly Christian”—also explicitly joyful and, yes, backed by President Trump. President Trump’s appearance, by video, was more admonitory than joyful. He read from the Old Testament.
One of the speakers was Bishop Robert, perhaps the country’s leading Roman Catholic evangelist. Bishop Baron told the DC Examiner before his talk that for “free exercise of religion” to thrive, the United States must continuously affirm and bolster its explicitly Christian identity. I’ll sneak in Roger Kimball’s highly germane American Greatness piece on “The Golden Thread and the Defense of the West” as chock-full of related ideas up for discussion as our country’s 250th birthday approaches.
From the sublime to the grime … of politics. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana lost his primary, vanquished by President Trump, who endorsed an opponent. Trump has never forgiven Cassidy for voting to convict him in his second impeachment trial. Cassidy’s defeat shows again how Trump dominates the Republican Party. Cassidy took swipes at Trump, without mentioning him by name, in his concession speech. President Trump took a victory lap.
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, is headlined “Holding the Senate Matters More Than Defeating Bill Cassidy”:
President Trump proved again Saturday that he can crush Republican dissenters by helping to defeat Sen. Bill Cassidy in a Louisiana primary. The question is to what end? …
Louisiana is a conservative state, so whoever wins the GOP runoff between Rep. Julia Letlow (Mr. Trump’s favorite) and state treasurer John Fleming is likely to hold the seat in November. But Mr. Trump may find he’s now liberated Mr. Cassidy, who can vote as he pleases this year without fear of further retribution. Watch what happens if Mr. Trump tries to nominate Jeanine Pirro as Attorney General.
Mr. Trump is desperate to hold off the day when he is seen is a lame duck, but what matters more than his sway over the GOP is his overall approval rating. At 40.1% in the RealClearPolitics polling average, that rating puts Republican control of the House and Senate in serious jeopardy.
Mr. Trump’s revenge campaign has already made the Senate harder to hold. He drove incumbent Thom Tillis into retirement in North Carolina, and Democrats have a strong candidate who is now the favorite.
Flexing Muscles. MAHA put enough money into defeating Cassidy that The Free Press suggests that it may have sunk him.
Next Up: Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, another thorn in President Trump’s side (and rather less accommodating than Senator Cassidy), has a primary tomorrow. National Review says that Massie deserves to lose:
We have a lot of time for quirky, go-it-alone libertarians, but prefer if they aren’t conspiracy theorists or noxious critics of Israel.
Representative Thomas Massie, the maverick libertarian from Kentucky in the Ron Paul tradition, is in a titanic primary fight with a Trump-backed opponent, and deserves to lose.
Rep. Lauren Boebert, who campaigned with Massie, better look out.
Guess who’s back … or never went away. “Kamala Harris Is at It Again” is the headline on Byron York’s latest. York addresses Kamala’s recent claim that there are “no bad ideas.” Oh, yes, there are:
“And in that no bad ideas brainstorm, we talk about what we need to do, and think about doing, around the Electoral College,” she continued. “We talk about the idea of Supreme Court reform, which includes expanding the Supreme Court. … [And] let’s talk about statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C.”
There’s an obvious flaw in Harris’s premise. There most certainly are bad ideas. One way to know if an idea is bad is to see what Kamala Harris thinks about it. If she thinks it’s good, it’s probably bad.
York explains that Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign was beset by bad ideas. One, for example, was taxpayer funding for sex change operations for illegals and incarcerated people, which Harris espoused in an ACLU interview. For some reason, when it resurfaced, this idea proved unpopular.
You know who else might be accused of having bad ideas? Yes, you’re right—AOC. Matthew Continetti writes in the Wall Street Journal that the source of AOC’s bad ideas might be … ignorance:
Try listening to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, for example. “You can’t earn a billion dollars,” she said recently. AOC graduated from Boston University in 2011 with a double major in international relations and—wait for it—economics.
Large fortunes, she went on to explain, are the result of exploitation—of cheating, abuse and miserliness. Hence billionaires mask their ill-gotten gains with lies. “You have to create a myth of earning it,” she said. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez believes she has exploded the myth. And because no billionaire has earned his wealth, the state is justified in taking it from him. It’s about fairness, you see.
The comments caused a stir. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has little, if any, awareness of where money comes from—no knowledge of finance, of savings and investment, of creating a product or conceiving an invention that adds value to the economy. She operates in a stark and static universe without consequences and trade-offs, without growth or mobility. There are only victims and victimizers. And according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, she’s in fourth place in the 2028 Democratic primary.
Sometimes bad ideas kill people. “Worst Prosecutor in America Struggles to Explain Why Democrats Keep Protecting Illegal Alien Murderers” is a Federalist story on Steve Descano, the George Soros-backed Fairfax County, Virginia, Commonwealth’s Attorney, who keeps freeing people who should be detained. This is an astonishing exchange:
In a heated exchange with Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, regarding Descano’s preferential treatment of illegals in sentencing — requiring that their immigration status be considered in a way that will protect them from deportation — Descano claimed the promise to shield illegals was merely an empty campaign promise.
“I didn’t realize people were so obtuse that they could not realize what the difference between a campaign statement and an actual office policy is,” Descano said. “We’re not protecting undocumented individuals, we prosecute people who commit crimes in Fairfax County regardless of their status.”
Inscrutable. That’s how Ms. Must found the recent superpower summit. China authority Gordon Chang wasn’t so baffled. Chang’s assessment: “‘Round One Goes To China’ But Trump Is Taking China’s Proxies ‘Off The Board’“:
Columnist and China hawk Gordon Chang said President Trump did not achieve much during his trip to China, in an interview with Forbes, saying it made the U.S. look weak for the president not to walk out when Xi Jinping mentioned the “Thucydides Trap” at the welcoming ceremony….
I think Trump just should have stopped the summit right there and said: If Xi Jinping, if you can’t respect me, if you can’t do this, then there’s no point in talking,” Chang said. “Xi Jinping needs the U.S. far more than we need him.”
However:
“This is only one round of a 15-round match, which won’t be decided until September 24, when Xi Jinping is scheduled to come to Washington,” he said. “But you have to look at this and say round one goes to China.”
Meanwhile, John Bolton—whom President Trump likes about as much as he likes Cassidy and Massie—accuses Trump of playing a dangerous game with Taiwan. “Does the US president really think he reduces the chances of a war with China by undercutting Taipei’s defences?” asks the U.K. Telegraph.
I hope this is true: “From Sleeper Cells to Liberation Army: Trump’s Genius Plan to Free Iran and Secure America” at American Greatness.
