Plus: Remembering James Watson and his complicated legacy.
• Just wait for the 50-year reverse mortgage.
• Anyone who closely followed Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City mayor saw that his and his followers’ passion was reserved primarily for their denunciations of Israel and the Zionist project. Those who didn’t defaulted to the messages in the candidate’s campaign script, which was focused on the unaffordability of life in the Big Apple. Mamdani’s proposed remedies—free child care, free buses, government-run grocery stores, etc., all paid for by expropriating the wealth of the rapacious capitalist class—appeal to those who have failed to familiarize themselves with socialism’s shortcomings. But what are Republicans doing to correct that misimpression? Surely, not enough. “I don’t want to hear about the affordability,” President Donald Trump recently told reporters. He later added in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham that Americans’ discomfort with the cost of living is the result of “a con job by Democrats.” That’s not going to cut it. But neither can the administration counter socialism’s charms with its version of socialism-lite. Introducing import taxes to reorder the economy along lines preferred by Washington bureaucrats, muscling private companies into giving the government stakes in their enterprises, and inflating consumer demand with “tariff rebates” (that cost more than the tariffs have raised): None of this is making life more affordable. Trump has forgotten why the voters elected him in the first place.
• The director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte, announced that he is working to develop a 50-year mortgage to aid prospective homebuyers who are beleaguered by high prices. This proposed loan, cheered by Trump, would be a terrible deal for borrowers and taxpayers alike. In exchange for slightly reducing monthly payments, a 50-year mortgage would require homeowners to pay nearly double in interest costs over the course of their loan. At the same time, homeowners would accumulate equity in their home at a far slower rate than they would under a standard 30-year mortgage. Taxpayers, meanwhile, would have to accept the financial danger of the government’s guaranteeing 50-year mortgages, which it would need to do to convince other lenders to make these inherently riskier investments. The Trump administration should instead seek to remove the countless supply-side impediments that block and drive up the cost of new housing construction. That effort would involve encouraging state and local governments to relax their stringent zoning laws and building regulations—a tougher but more promising task than simply extending mortgage terms by two decades.
• Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released new emails from Jeffrey Epstein that caused an instant frenzy in Washington. Given what we know so far, however, they are more of what one would expect: They are embarrassing regarding Trump’s relationship with Epstein but contain no smoking gun regarding any misconduct. In one email, Epstein claims that Trump spent hours at Epstein’s home with a victim, whose name Democrats conveniently redacted. The only reason to strike the name, Virginia Giuffre, was that people might go back and see what she said about Trump. In a deposition, she had said she never saw Trump and Epstein together, never saw him at Epstein’s home, and denied that he ever flirted with her. (Giuffre committed suicide in April.) In another email, Epstein said that Trump “knew about the girls,” a phrase that has gotten much play in the media, but the disgraced financier added, “as he asked ghislaine to stop,” a reference to Epstein’s girlfriend and procurer Ghislaine Maxwell. This is cryptic, but a very plausible interpretation is that it confirms Trump’s story that Epstein was recruiting girls from Mar-a-Lago and the future presidential candidate objected. It seems the push to release all the Epstein documents is an unstoppable train, at least in the House, but this isn’t the way to handle sensitive legal documents or to treat innocent persons who may be mentioned in them. Trump doesn’t want them to be released because there will surely be other awkward revelations, but we doubt, given all the attention to this case over the years, that he will suddenly be exposed as a perpetrator. Where there’s smoke . . . sometimes there’s just smoke.
• Rod Dreher recently went to Washington after being told by a “DC insider” that “between 30 and 40 percent” of twentysomething Republican staffers in the capital are “Groypers”—fans of noxious podcaster Nick Fuentes or others of his white-supremacist, Holocaust-denying, antisemitic ilk. Dreher came away convinced that this was an accurate figure. We are doubtful. But what he found is more than enough to alarm. “Even young Christians — especially trad Catholics, I learned — are neck-deep in anti-Semitism,” Dreher writes. He also warns that Vice President JD Vance, whom Dreher admires, is at special risk of being discredited if he cannot distance himself from this crew. We can debate the causes and likely consequences of this trend. Young men on the right seem particularly drawn these days to anything taboo, perhaps out of reaction to years growing up in systems full of censoriousness and woke excess. What is clear is that the right faces challenges in teaching anew to its young generation why the old hatreds are so dangerous, even if at first taken up lightly or in jest.
• Trump told Laura Ingraham that U.S. workers lack “certain talents,” which is why America at times needs to import foreign labor under the H-1B visa program. “You can’t just say a country is coming in, going to invest $10 billion to build a plant and take people off an unemployment line who haven’t worked in five years and they’re going to start making their missiles,” Trump said. “It doesn’t work that way.” H-1B visas are three-year visas for high-skilled workers, renewable once, for a total of six years. Trump’s base is divided on his recent statements. Some supporters resent Trump’s categorization of American talent and wish that the president would focus on reducing America’s dependence on imported labor; others agree with Trump that America benefits from bringing in talented immigrants. Both camps, however, generally agree that the H-1B visa program is flawed and that it is widely abused by many companies, especially in the tech sector, that seek lower labor costs. The administration shouldn’t lose sight of its worthy goal of reforming it.
• What was the point of the longest government shutdown in history? It’s not just frustrated Republicans who are asking. Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats talked themselves into believing that they could strong-arm Republicans into passing a permanent extension of the “enhanced premium tax credits” for purchasing health insurance on the exchanges set up under Obamacare. Extending the credits for the next ten years would cost almost half a trillion dollars. Unsurprisingly, Republicans were extremely reluctant to continue “temporary” Obamacare benefits, and they bet that Democrats would want to reopen the government before they did. After 40 days, seven Senate Democrats and Angus King (I., Maine) relented in exchange for a promise of a vote on the tax credits. Many on the left are apoplectic, convinced that their senators surrendered while their side was winning. (The Democrats, traditionally allies of government workers, shrugged off the American Federation of Government Employees when it called for a clean continuing resolution to reopen the government, way back on October 27.) Under the deal, certain priorities—military construction, veterans’ affairs, and the Department of Agriculture—would be funded through the full fiscal year, ending next September 30, while funding for the rest of the government would extend only until January 30. That will be long enough for Congress to make it to the other side of the holidays, but short enough that it will set the stage for another showdown. Democrats took a hostage that Republicans were not all that motivated to rescue. Will anyone in Washington remember the lessons from this?
• With the end of the shutdown, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is fully funded again. Belatedly, the government’s full November payment for benefits (about $8 billion) is being disbursed. That moots a legal controversy, sparing the Supreme Court the need to weigh whether the Trump administration acted lawlessly. When it seemed that a Senate deal to reopen the government was emerging, the Court extended by two days (to Thursday) an administrative stay reluctantly granted by its most progressive member, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, last Friday night. The extension occurred just before a midnight deadline to make the payment ordered by Judge John McConnell, an Obama appointee (later affirmed by a First Circuit panel comprising Obama and Biden appointees). The dispute fits a pattern: Trump officials rail that activist Democratic-appointed judges are usurping executive authority (here, to decide what bills to pay when government funds run dry); Democrats counter that Trump is a wannabe dictator. But the root of most of these controversies is congressional, not executive. SNAP, like immigration enforcement, deployment of federal forces, and tariffs, is controlled by statute, not presidential fiat. Sometimes the courts overstep, but disputes often boil down to good-faith disagreements about whether the president is faithfully executing the laws. Trump would probably have been better advised not to press this issue.
• Trump has too often abused the power of clemency, but his pardoning of dozens of his 2020 campaign advisers and supporters complicit in “fake electors” schemes is less objectionable than portrayed. Reports describing these as “prospective” pardons because the recipients haven’t been federally charged are misleading. The allegations have been around for five years (meaning the federal statute of limitations is about to expire), and Democratic prosecutors filed charges in several states. Federally, only Trump was ever charged with fake-electors allegations (in Jack Smith’s January 6 case, which was doomed by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling and Trump’s 2024 electoral victory). That’s because the allegations are weak. The electors themselves understood their standing as alternative Trump slates (in states won by Biden) as a contingency in the event the election results were overturned. Top Trump advisers did use the existence of ersatz slates to support their claim that Biden’s electoral votes were invalid, but that’s better understood as pushing a bogus legal theory, not perpetrating an actionable fraud. The pardons thus excuse no federal crimes that were ever likely to be charged, and they have no effect on state charges (those cases seem to be collapsing of their own weight). That said, the pardons continue Trump’s condemnable obsession with portraying Biden’s 2020 victory as a fraud.
• Norway and Denmark have turned, in no small part, to a large Chinese manufacturer, Yutong, to equip their electric bus fleets. Last month, a test run by Ruter, a Norwegian bus company, revealed that the software installed in its Yutong buses, which is connected online, could be used to disable the vehicles remotely. The same is true of Yutong buses in Denmark. This is probably innocuous–nothing more than a means to enable efficient updates and diagnostic checks. Nevertheless, it is yet another disturbing reminder of Europe’s growing reliance on Chinese technology to deliver its “green” transition. What is true of China’s buses could also be true, for example, of its EVs. It would be a disaster for their business if Chinese manufacturers switched off their customers’ equipment without permission, but if the Beijing regime insists on it, that is what they will do. The Europeans need to run checks on the equipment they have bought, and if it could matter, quickly begin the disconnection process. Americans should do likewise. When it comes to “transitions,” slowing the green to stop the red is an easy call.
• James Watson, the trailblazing scientist who discovered the structure of DNA alongside Francis Crick, has died. Born in Chicago in 1928, he had earned a Ph.D. in zoology from Indiana University Bloomington by the time he turned 22. At 25, he was pursuing postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge when he met Crick. Together, they used X-ray images made by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins to reveal that DNA is structured in the shape of a double helix—a breakthrough that would transform our understanding of biology and pave the way for future discoveries in genetics and medicine. Watson later became a teacher at Harvard, the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the head of the Human Genome Project. But his reputation was tarnished in 2007 when, in an interview with the London Times, he suggested that black people were less intelligent than whites. He apologized “unreservedly” but reaffirmed this belief in 2019 during an interview with PBS. The remarks caused him to lose several of his honorary titles. Both pro-lifers and gay activists took issue with his hope that women who did not wish to have homosexual children would be able to identify them in the womb and abort them. Watson leaves behind a complicated legacy, but his influence on science was colossal. Dead at 97. R.I.P.
• Paul John Tagliabue, the fifth commissioner of the National Football League, had a tenure that was nothing short of transformative. Between 1989 and 2006, he expanded the league from 28 to 32 teams, facilitated new stadium and television contracts—TV contracts that brought in more than $4.4 billion in rights fees—and notably postponed games after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Under his leadership, however, the league was criticized for its lack of concern regarding concussion awareness. After Tagliabue retired, the NFL was sued for fraud and negligence, resulting in large payouts to retired players. In 2020, Tagliabue was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame. Dead at 84. R.I.P.