The Week that Was. President Trump’s China Syndrome. Wheel of Fortune: Marco Up/ JD Down. For Now. DSA: the Party that Parties. What Does It Want? If You See Paul Pelosi Behind the Wheel: Run! More
With apologies to the BBC, this was the week that was.
We started the week with the sudden and shocking loss of Senator Lindsey Graham and are ending with “a new normal of increased strikes against Iran ‘to break the impasse’ over Strait of Hormuz.”
And President Trump went there. President Trump delivered a much-anticipated White House address last night. USA TODAY puckishly remarked on the president’s timing:
With 110 days to go before crucial midterm contests, President Donald Trump was naturally focused on the election in his primetime address to the nation.
The election six years ago, that is.
Joking aside, the president made the serious charge that U.S. elections are “riddled with vulnerabilities that hostile foreign actors and unauthorized immigrants are exploiting.” Axios, which is not sympathetic to the president, reports:
President Trump alleged Thursday that U.S. intelligence agencies covered up information about alleged Chinese efforts to influence the 2020 U.S. election.
The document release is likely to renew scrutiny of Trump’s claims about foreign interference in the U.S. election and the government’s past intelligence assessments.
The documents release allege that foreign adversaries — including Russia, China and Iran — were viewed as real threats to U.S. elections. Multiple released documents say large-scale manipulation of U.S. voting systems would be difficult to accomplish without detection.
The New York Times says that the documents the president presented “fall short” of proving his case. An Unherd story frames this in a different way: “As is typical of Trump’s favorite targets, the evidence of some wrongdoing is not entirely ludicrous. The scope of it, however, is what will matter to voters.”
Your response to the president’s address will likely hinge on how you feel about Trump. The New York Times sees it as “a Trump obsession that carries a cost for democracy.” For Townhall, the president last night “revealed what we all suspected about the 2020 election.” You may read the entire address here.
The speech was part of the president’s push to pass the Save America Act. A report in The Federalist that “More Than 250,000 Noncitizens Are Registered to Vote in Four States” is germane.
I think we have to say that Vice President JD, Father of the MOU, has been going through a rocky patch. “ JD Vance is wrong to blame Israel for his Iran peace deal’s failure thus far,” according to an editorial in the New York Post. Et tu: Then the Veep’s (former?) good buddy Rod Dreher writes in The Free Press of “JD Vance’s Time for Choosing.” The subtitle: “Stab-in-the-back theories about Israel will only accelerate America’s Weimar spiral.”
As if that is not enough, Kimberley Strassel writes that “President Vance Has Gone AWOL“—Vance is President of the Senate, from which he’s absent to push his new book—and Matthew Continetti writes that “Vance has a steep climb to the White House.”
By contrast, Vance’s chief rival for the White House, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is walking on water just now (though as you know, reversals of fortune are dizzying in our nation’s capital). Fresh from advocating the dismantling of the noxious International Criminal Court, Rubio is winning plaudits for his warning on the rise of left-wing terrorism:
For far too long our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot — a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left.
Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It’s treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference.
In spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear this organized — that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.
“What DSA Wants” is the alluring headline on Examiner Chief Political Correspondent Byron York’s column:
They want to destroy the government of the United States as it was created in the Constitution. They want to destroy the U.S. capitalist economy, the most powerful in the world. And they want to destroy the way millions of Americans live their lives. The DSA’s astonishingly destructive goals are laid out clearly in the organization’s just-released 2026 national platform.
The document starts by describing a DSA “future without capitalism.” What would life be like for a person of working age in DSA world? “You enjoy your work; it’s interesting to you, and you’re well trained for it,” the platform says. “You work as much as you are able and no more than needed, and you would control your own labor and see it going to good use. It’s not just a job to pay the bills.”
But the DSA is fun. It’s the party that parties. From its hootenannies to book clubs, it attracts young people. Kendall White has been to quite a few DSA soirees:
At the new-member social, I sipped a seltzer while conversing with fellow travelers in a spacious apartment. A copy of Mao’s “Little Red Book” and a Russian fur hat with a Soviet red star sat together on a bookshelf. The communist paraphernalia was mirrored by a collection of Mamdani campaign signs on the opposite side of the room. Comrades cracked open a Riesling that retails for nearly $100 a half-bottle.
It’s not just the Riesling that’s expensive. It’s the DSA agenda that’s costly. Do they know what their fantasy programs would cost? Think of retirement in France, where pensions consume 14.1% of GDP, and are not getting any less burdensome.
“New York’s Ban on the Future” in The Free Press deals with Governor Kathy Hochul’s ban on data centers, which “will hurt New Yorkers and help foreign adversaries—while stifling progress in AI.” Stu Smith, meanwhile, takes us “Inside the Rise of the Anti–Data Center Movement“:
Resistance to the facilities has become a left-wing rallying point,linking environmentalism, anti-Big Tech politics, immigration activism, Native American issues, and “anti-imperialism.”
Meanwhile, there’s resistance to scientific knowledge. In “Gender Medicine’s Regulatory Capture” in City Journal, we read about the Health Council of the Netherlands, which backed a controversial transition protocol against best evidence. The Health Council is a hotbed of conflicts of interest:
Six of the twelve members of its Advisory Committee were either directly or indirectly involved with providing endocrinological interventions to dysphoric minors. While two of these advisors lacked voting rights, they still possessed the ability to shape the nature of the conversation. The heavy representation of gender medicine practitioners on the committee, Dutch law professor Lodewijk Smeehuijzen argued, effectively amounts to asking the field’s practitioners to evaluate both their own work and that of their friends and colleagues.
Goodness! I don’t want to slight former President Joe Biden, whose memoir is imminent. It’s titled “Promise Me, America.” I can do no better than quote from Nellie Bowles’ review in her “TGIF” column:
I keep repeating the title out loud to sort of understand the tone. I guess it’s supposed to be like, promise me you’ll do good. Like a “keep your head up, kid, I’ll be watching from the sky.” But it reads more like, “America was promised to me on my Christmas list.”
Anyway, he released a video announcing the book, and it’s very sad to watch. Biden has declined further, as happens in life. The camera cuts every two seconds. His voice is slurred and hushed. Some of his longer words are barely intelligible. After 80, why even be on camera? Who is the one saying “we need him to be doing more on-camera stuff”? And why do I feel like Dr. Jill is gearing up to get him onto Dancing with the Stars?
I hope I won’t be accused of ageism because my next item is about hard-driving dude Paul Pelosi, 86. The ex-Speaker of the House’s hubby has had another mishap with his car.
“Should Paul Pelosi be on the road?” the London Spectator asks:
When President Trump refers to Nancy Pelosi as “Nervous Nancy,” you might assume he’s talking about her policies or leadership style. But maybe she’s just worried about her husband’s driving.
