The Week

• Sinwar? Sinwere.

• Once again demonstrating his genius for the publicity stunt, Trump worked a shift at the drive-through window of a McDonald’s in a swing county of Pennsylvania. The photo op was intended to needle Harris over her unsubstantiated claim that she worked at a McDonald’s around the time she was an undergraduate. But it also highlighted Trump’s star power and showbiz chops, his skill at retail politics, and his ability to deploy humor and fun against his notably joyless opponents. The media coverage was, of course, apoplectic. Newsweek deployed investigative reporters to suss out whether the McDonald’s franchise in question had failed recent health inspections. MSNBC whined that the McDonald’s visit distracted from Trump’s lack of an economic plan. One could say that they weren’t lovin’ it.

• Through Election Day in 2020, Liz Cheney had a solid conservative record. She was in House leadership, defended conservative Supreme Court nominees, denounced Court-packing, and professed fidelity to the Second Amendment. As late as 2021, she co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, which would have declared unborn children to be human beings entitled to legal protection from the moment they are conceived. Cheney sacrificed her career in Congress and her position in the party in an effort to hold Trump accountable for January 6, and we have admired her courage in doing so even when we have questioned some of her judgments. In campaigning full-throatedly for Kamala Harris and Colin Allred (the Democratic candidate against Senator Ted Cruz), however, she is throwing her old principles overboard. Cheney has echoed some of the Harris campaign’s false narratives in criticizing state pro-life laws while lending undeserved credibility to the false idea that Harris is respectful of the Constitution and no danger to the Court or the Second Amendment. The stump is rarely a place for nuance and principle. We understand why Cheney has broken with her old friends; we are sad to see what else she forgets.

• For Democrats, lawfare’s big enchilada was always the January 6 case: special counsel Jack Smith’s election-interference prosecution, an effort to nail Trump on crimes arising from the “stop the steal” campaign that culminated in the Capitol riot. In the courtroom of the complaisant Obama-appointed judge Tanya Chutkan, Smith pushed to get a trial before a jury in Trump-hostile Washington, D.C., during the 2024 campaign stretch run. But he underestimated the complexities of presidential immunity, and a Supreme Court ruling on the topic derailed the plan. But while Trump v. United States dashed hopes for a pre-election trial, it did give Smith a pretext to publicize the evidence he wished to use in the case. The justices instructed Chutkan to determine which parts of the case concern acts that might be immune from prosecution. Smith supplied a book-length proffer, with a voluminous appendix of supporting evidence. Over Trump’s objection, Chutkan ordered its public release less than a month before the election. The timing is unabashedly political: Pre-election publication serves no law-enforcement purpose. Trump’s behavior was appalling, but the public witnessed it in real time and has heard it retold — via impeachment, the House January 6 committee, and Smith’s indictment — for four years. Absent a sensational trial and guilty verdicts, January 6 has done as much political work for Harris as it’s going to do.

• They say that once is an accident, twice a coincidence, and three times a pattern. If so, Harris has a pattern of trying to impose draconian gun-control measures on the citizenry of these United States. On the stump, Harris claims that she has no interest in “taking away your guns.” Yet in 2006, as district attorney of San Francisco, Harris supported Proposition H: a radical measure that, had it not been swiftly struck down by the courts, would have prohibited residents of that city from buying, selling, or owning handguns of any kind. Even Dianne Feinstein opposed it. Three years later, Harris signed an amicus brief in D.C. v. Heller that argued that the Second Amendment furnishes Americans with no legal protections whatsoever. And, in 2019, when running for president for the first time, she enthusiastically endorsed the confiscation of the more than 20 million AR-15s that are already in circulation. Today, Harris insists that, for unspecified reasons, she no longer holds these views. Americans who wish to preserve their Second Amendment rights ought not to believe a word of it.

• Trump left people scratching their heads when he called himself “the father of IVF,” but the Harris campaign’s response was somehow even less tethered to reality. It claimed that in vitro fertilization is “under threat across the country because Trump ended Roe v. Wade” and “his Project 2025 plan could effectively ban IVF altogether.” The truth: In no state is IVF illegal or on the verge of being made illegal; Roe is irrelevant as no court ever read it to protect IVF; Trump has repudiated Project 2025; and Project 2025 does not mention IVF in any of its hundreds of pages. Give the Harris crew points for efficiency, at least: That’s more than one falsehood for every five words.

• In a speech on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse during the final weeks of her campaign, Harris was heckled by a pair of pro-life students. As she castigated Trump for appointing the justices who made it possible to overturn Roe v. Wade, the students shouted, “Christ is Lord!” and “Jesus is king!” Harris then said, apparently addressing them: “You guys are at the wrong rally. I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street.” The crowd roared with approval. At a different event on the same day, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Harris faced another student heckler, who yelled at her for supporting Israel’s “genocide” of Palestinians. After the student was escorted out, Harris told the audience, “Listen, what he’s talking about, it’s real,” adding, “it’s real and I respect his voice.” He, it seems, was at the right rally.

• The Secret Service was one head twitch away from failing to stop the murder of Donald Trump. That’s according to a Senate report on the agency’s work at the July rally in Butler, Pa. Convoluted communication channels left agents and law enforcement unsure who was in charge of what. It says that people raised concerns about lines of sight to Trump from nearby buildings but that those concerns were not acted upon. Nearly 30 minutes before the would-be assassin fired on Trump, the Secret Service got word of a suspicious person with a range-finder. The Secret Service has admitted to “complacency” among some of its agents and promised discipline. But incompetence and lack of professionalism have pervaded the agency for more than a decade, with several security breaches at the White House and various scandals. Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) is now raising concerns from a whistleblower who alleges financial mismanagement. Congress should rebuild the agency from the ground up, beginning with its authorizing statutes, and demand that anyone associated with the Butler failure be fired. We cannot just hope our luck continues.

• “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country,” ABC News’ David Muir said, seemingly fact-checking Donald Trump during his debate with Kamala Harris. But those statistics count only crimes that are reported to police and often omit cities that haven’t turned in their data. There’s another, better source for calculating crime rates: the National Crime Victimization Survey. Each year since 2001, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has collected data from a nationally representative sample of about 240,000 people in about 150,000 households. The survey indicates that, in 2023, the rate of nonfatal violent victimization in the United States was 22.5 per 1,000 people age twelve or older. The 2022 rate was 23.5. That decline is nothing to brag about. Perhaps most troublingly, “a smaller percentage of robbery victimizations that occurred in 2023 (42%) than in 2022 (64%) were reported to police, and the percentage of motor vehicle thefts reported to police decreased from 81 percent in 2022 to 72 percent in 2023.” Important categories of crime are down a little, but Americans’ confidence that law enforcement will do anything about it is down a lot.

• Kristen Clarke and the Civil Rights Division of Merrick Garland’s Justice Department have placed ideology over law and good sense in suing Virginia for removing noncitizens from the voter rolls. Governor Glenn Youngkin (R.) has noted that he’s enforcing a Virginia law signed in 2006 by then-governor Tim Kaine, a Democrat who is currently running for reelection to the Senate, and that the law was precleared at the time by DOJ. The suit argues that during a 90-day “quiet period” before an election, the law does not permit “any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.” This is a ridiculous characterization of Youngkin’s executive order, which asks only for individualized, daily review of new information received when a Virginian informs the state’s department of motor vehicles that he or she is not a citizen. Acceptance of the DOJ’s legal theory would make it impossible for states to act on the most recent information they have to protect the integrity of elections.

• Since Hurricane Helene left a swath of devastation through America’s Southeast, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) has spent much of her time insisting that the hurricane was the result of some sinister governmental manipulation of the weather: “If your home or business or property is damaged or a loved one is killed by their weather modifications shouldn’t you be eligible for compensation? After all, did they ask you if you agreed to our weather being modified?” Her fellow representative Chuck Edwards (R.), who represents some of the hardest-hit communities in a western North Carolina district adjacent to Greene’s, issued a press release, which was emailed to constituents, to address some bizarre rumors he was hearing in his district. He reiterated that no one has the ability to engineer a hurricane; applying for disaster assistance does not grant the federal government, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, authority over or ownership of your property or land; the Federal Aviation Administration is not restricting access to airspace for Helene rescue-and-recovery operations; and FEMA is not confiscating or seizing supplies. When a crisis strikes, all of us face a choice of whether to be part of the solution or part of the problem. Edwards and Greene have made their choices clear.

• A ballot initiative in Florida would amend the state constitution to erase protections for unborn children. In a post-Dobbs world, many professed pro-life politicians have been running for cover, fearing that they can only be hurt by talking about the issue. By contrast, Governor Ron DeSantis (R.), as on so many other issues, has studied the law assiduously and understands that Amendment 4 would eliminate not just Florida’s post-six-week abortion ban but even the possibility of instituting a ban on late-term abortions. He has contended that the language of the measure has been designed to eliminate laws requiring that minors seeking abortions obtain parental consent and that only licensed doctors perform abortions — but without making any of that clear to the voters. Crucially, DeSantis has appointed pro-life medical personnel to the state health department. Together with them, he has clarified that protections for unborn children do not require doctors to delay a minute in acting to protect women’s lives. He has used the bully pulpit and his considerable political capital in the state to challenge the media and its “blizzard of lies” on the issue. At a time when we need them, he has been a pro-lifer in courage.

• Eric Adams is the first mayor of New York City to be at the wrong end of a federal indictment while in office. The charges (so far) revolve around allegations of illegal foreign campaign donations and other benefits from Turkish nationals. Allegedly, Adams showed his gratitude for this generosity by pressuring the fire department to permit the opening of a Turkish consular building without the necessary permits ahead of a visit by Turkish president Erdoğan. Adams denies the charges and claims they are retaliation for his criticism of the way that the migrant crisis has spilled over into New York City. For now, the amiable if eccentric and scandal-prone Mayor Adams, a Democrat, is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He insists he can still discharge his duties, which some 30 percent of New Yorkers (realists all) think he is doing acceptably. A former cop, Adams takes fighting street and subway crime far more seriously than the unlamented Bill de Blasio. And even a distracted Adams would be preferable to the man who would become acting mayor, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, a self-described democratic socialist who would use his temporary standing to propel himself into Gracie Mansion on a longer-term basis, the last thing Gotham needs.

• What are those champions of the working man at the International Longshoremen’s Association doing with their money? Reporting by the New Jersey Monitor answers. President Harold Daggett makes over $1 million per year. Two of his sons are vice presidents, and his daughter is the “political-affairs director.” A retired federal judge makes nearly $200,000 as the union’s “ethical-practices officer.” The ILA’s convention at a top Florida beach resort cost $6 million to stage. Over $300,000 in payments went to 40 people branded “sergeants at arms.” One, who received $10,000, was convicted of fraud in 2018 after he made $500,000 per year working less than eight hours per week. His son got $6,000. Other ILA expenses include $4.6 million in legal fees, $900,000 for lobbying, $130,000 for Yankees tickets, and $20,000 in membership fees for the New York Athletic Club. This arrogant corruption got a pass because the union counts among its supporters the governor of New Jersey, who called Daggett a “dear friend” in a speech at the ILA convention, and the president of the United States, who publicly sided with the union when it held the U.S. economy hostage with a coast-wide strike.

• The 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear-power plant in Pennsylvania is widely known as the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. It did not cause a single death or injury, yet it spurred generations of fear and regulation that have largely prevented new nuclear plants from being built, and it has given politicians license to close existing ones. Never mind that, on the same site in Pennsylvania, another reactor provided nuclear energy through 2019. That reactor is now coming back online because Microsoft needs more power for AI. It is expected to be up and running again by 2028, three years after Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan will, according to current plans, have become the first closed reactor in the U.S. to reopen. The change in attitude toward nuclear power, spurred by the energy needs that accompany technological advance, is welcome. It ought to lead to the construction of new plants, not merely the reopening of old ones.

• The Portland Press Herald released a searching report on Maine’s mental-health laws, which, had they been applied, might have prevented the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston by 40-year-old Robert Card. Card killed 18 people and shot another 13 that day. To the surprise of his acquaintances, he had been released from a New York psychiatric hospital in August. He had been acting strangely for months, believing that more and more people were out to get him. Medical staff diagnosed psychosis. He had a growing “hit list.” But after he made promises to take his meds and attend follow-ups, he walked out. Eighty-three days later, the massacre. Maine has a law to compel people like Card to comply with outpatient treatment or face involuntary commitment. But law-enforcement officials in the state hardly knew such a law existed, and the legislature has done little to fund programs that would make the law easier to use. What lies at the bottom of the Card case are a thicket of regulations, precedents, and prejudices that bias law enforcement and health-care workers toward releasing obviously psychotic patients into their own care. Those who might do so are discouraged from intervening decisively even in the presence of threats and are given a clear go-ahead only when psychotic patients do hurt someone. Not just safety but common decency and justice require that those suffering dangerous psychosis be put into the care of those trained to deal with them.

• Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County, Va., has for years been America’s best science, technology, engineering, and math school — so successful that Chinese Communist Party–linked entities bought the curriculum and cloned the public school at least 20 times across China as part of a state-sponsored program called “Thomas Schools.” In the last decade, three Chinese institutions have given $3.6 million to a nonprofit affiliated with the school in exchange for its curriculum, floor plans, and intellectual property. Parental-advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed this month that school administrators, via the affiliated nonprofit, falsely earmarked the $3.6 million as “charitable donations,” when the cash payments actually gave Chinese delegations unfettered access to TJ. After National Review reported on the claim, a spokesman for Governor Youngkin vowed that the state’s department of education would “get to the bottom” of the CCP’s “deeply disturbing efforts to infiltrate educational institutions in the United States.” Virginia’s attorney general has placed the case under review. The report comes after a recent investigation by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party revealed that partnerships between U.S. universities and Chinese schools have helped China develop more-advanced equipment and technology for the People’s Liberation Army. Evidently China is working on even earlier parts of the pipeline.

• Jack Phillips must be the only baker in Colorado, given the amount of time he has spent in court defending his right not to confect baked goods that would display messages with which he, as a devout Christian, disagrees. In and out of courts, including the highest, since 2012, Phillips has been targeted by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and by a litigious and zealous transgender lawyer who likes to request bizarre cakes and then sue when declined. With the Supreme Court’s help, Phillips prevailed against the Colorado commission in 2018, albeit on narrow grounds that did not sufficiently guard against further legal harassment. In October, he defeated the activist lawyer in the Colorado supreme court. Phillips was, fortunately, not without assistance during his trials; Alliance Defending Freedom deserves considerable credit for its steadfastness. He endured his ordeal with admirable aplomb and courage, from which the rest of us can learn. The man himself deserves a reprieve — and a celebration. Perhaps a cake would do for the occasion.

• To paraphrase Lenin, there are decades when nothing happens in the Middle East and weeks when decades happen. The last month has been one of those epochal periods in which the earth shifted under the region’s feet. On September 17, the explosive payload that Israel’s Mossad spy agency smuggled into about 5,000 pagers reserved for Hezbollah operatives detonated. Twenty-four hours later, Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies exploded in similar fashion. The tactic was followed by an Israeli ground incursion into southern Lebanon, but not before Israel had decapitated via air strike almost all of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, including its chief, Hassan Nasrallah. The decimation of Iran’s foremost terrorist proxy in the region compelled Tehran to retaliate. It fired directly at Israel a volley of ballistic missiles, many of which penetrated Israeli air defenses and hit their targets. While more successful than Iran’s April barrage, it still produced no casualties. The world now expects an Israeli response to the attack on its cities and citizens, but Israel is not just waiting around. Combat operations in the Gaza Strip are rolling up remaining Hamas assets. Most recently, that campaign neutralized its highest-value Hamas target yet: the foremost architect of the October 7 massacre, Yahya Sinwar. Israel’s government promised to bring the war imposed on it on 10/7 to a victorious conclusion, and it is delivering.

• On Taiwan’s National Day, the country’s president, Lai Ching-te, affirmed Taiwan’s sovereignty, saying that the nation would “resist annexation or encroachment.” The Chinese government responded with a massive air-and-sea drill, simulating the blocking of Taiwanese ports. A week later, it held live-fire drills, again to show the Taiwanese what it could do to them. Taiwan is a shining example of a free and democratic country. This is one reason Beijing resents and loathes it. The United States may not be able to deter a Chinese takeover of Taiwan — but we should do everything we can to try.

• Day after day, Russian forces commit war crimes in Ukraine: bombing hospitals, stores, and schools; bombing electrical grids and other infrastructure. The Ukrainians, determined to keep their country, resist. According to reports, North Korean troops are now arriving to fight in Ukraine alongside Russians. North Korea is an important ally of Russia — as are China and Iran. These are determined foes of the United States, and of the civilized world in general. The speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, says he has no “appetite” for “further Ukraine funding.” The thing about Vladimir Putin and other expansionist dictators: Their appetite doesn’t wane. If they are not stopped, they will not stop.

• Alexei Navalny was the foremost opposition leader in Russia, which, of course, made him a political prisoner. He died — was finished off — on February 16, 2024. He was 47. His last prison was one of the harshest in Russia, up in the Arctic Circle, known as “Polar Wolf.” In various prisons, Navalny managed to keep diaries, which his wife edited into a book that has now been published. In one passage, Navalny speaks of Russia’s rulers and how to combat them: “We must do what they fear — tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.”

• The (too-)celebrated author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who took the literary world by storm in the last decade with his severe outlook on American race relations, reemerged to promote a new book that layers American racial dynamics over the Middle East, only to oversimplify the region, erase recent history, and cast Israel as the foremost malefactor. But he was not treated to the same fêting his earlier work brought him. This latest book, The Message, all but wipes from view non-Jewish Israelis, the Palestine Liberation Organization, Iran’s terrorist proxies, and the wars that overtook the region in 1948, 1967, and 1973 — only to indict the Jewish state’s penchant for aggression and oppression. After CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil politely if pointedly critiqued Coates’s assumptions, Dokoupil was raked over the coals by his own employer and sentenced by CBS’s “race and culture unit” to a struggle session, where staffers reportedly cried anguished tears. At CBS News today, nothing is more controversial than journalism.

• There are two sides to Elon Musk. There’s the brilliant innovator. A multibillionaire, he founded rocket company SpaceX and the car company Tesla. These and other enterprises that he has started or to which he is connected already have accomplished marvelous feats — SpaceX recently landed a reusable 223-foot booster rocket on a launch tower — and will likely achieve more yet. And then there’s the wannabe political influencer. He has moved to the right in recent years; he endorsed Donald Trump and has spoken at Trump rallies. Last year, he was seemingly memed into purchasing Twitter, which he renamed X. There’s evidence that the platform may be breaking his brain: Musk has retweeted (and then often deleted) conspiratorial posts there. He is given to political stunts calibrated more for attention than for efficacy — or perhaps even legality, such as his ongoing $1 million daily lottery for which any registered voter who signs a petition affiliated with his super PAC is eligible. Great innovators often have their eccentricities, a by-product of having a perception of reality uncomfortable with convention. But Musk may be letting his new hobby consume him.

• That Britain’s University of Nottingham has attached a trigger warning to The Canterbury Tales is yet another reminder that peak woke has yet to be reached. True, Chaucer himself, at the conclusion of the Tales, wrote — we think; authorship is disputed — a “retraction” of some of his racier works, in which he asked his readers to “preye . . . that Crist have Mercy” on him and forgive him for some of his work dedicated to “Worldly vanitees.” He stood by duller-sounding works, such as his “bookes of legendes of seintes, and omelies and moralite and devocioun.” Nottingham’s note sounded the alarm about descriptions of “violence and mental illness” and “expressions of Christian faith” — “expressions” that even the most lightly educated student must already have been braced to expect in writings from the Middle Ages. Taboos change but perhaps grow no less strict.

• The Catholic Church holds that the Eucharist is “the source and summit of the Christian life.” So perhaps it was natural for John Nepil to want to say Mass atop mountains. Nepil, vice rector and professor of theology at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in the Archdiocese of Denver, recently concluded a series of Masses atop all 54 of the mountains in Colorado that are at least 14,000 feet above sea level. It was not his first time on the peaks, all of which he had hiked before entering the priesthood. Starting shortly after his ordination in 2011, he embarked on this second, liturgical lap. He told the Catholic News Agency that he considered the experience “the summit” of his priestly life and attested to the rich spiritual and relational rewards of the journey. The rest of us need not follow his exact example to be inspired by it.

• A new composition — a serenade in C major — has been found in a Leipzig library. It is by a Salzburger, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who wrote it between the ages of ten and 13. It is hard to pinpoint a date. In any case, the kid shows promise.

• Dame Margaret Natalie Smith, that great lady of the stage and screen, passed away at the age of 89 on September 27. This sharp-witted — and equally sharp-tongued — actress began her career with a production of Twelfth Night and never looked back, earning herself myriad accolades over her decades-long run. A versatile performer, Maggie Smith could be found acting opposite Laurence Olivier in stage (and movie) productions of Othello and starring as a homeless woman in the movie The Lady in the Van. While American audiences knew her from her roles in Sister Act and the Harry Potter movies, it was her performance as the dowager countess in Downton Abbey that truly made her a household name. This multifaceted, deeply gifted woman will be greatly missed by colleagues and fans alike. R.I.P.

Politics

Hard Times

It has not been the longest presidential campaign in American history — that distinction belongs to the eight-year, four-man scrum to succeed James Monroe. It only seems so.

Obviously, no conservative should vote for Vice President Harris. The child of left-of-center academics and the political product of deep-blue San Francisco and (these days) California, she could not make it to the Iowa caucuses when she sought the nomination four years ago, and has found herself forced to chuck old positions after Joe Biden’s layoff made her the nominee (she once promised to end fracking, but that is up the smokestack now that she must carry Pennsylvania).

There is still too much leftism left. Her fresh economic proposals channel progressive primitivism: a ban on grocery-store price-gouging; assistance on down payments for houses, as if subsidizing demand could make up for restrictions on supply. Democratic Party proposals to pack the Court by adding a justice and, worse, stripping sitting justices of the power to give opinions are an unconstitutional attack on a branch of government. Harris is not anti-Israel. But like Biden and Barack Obama before her, neither is she anti-Iran. It was Democratic softness on the mullahs that allowed their proxies to strengthen their arms. One issue to which she is unbendingly devoted is abortion on demand. President Harris and a Democratic Congress would pass a national abortion law guaranteeing abortion up to the moment of birth.

Democrats worry, reasonably, about their lack of appeal to men — especially, because it is new, to black and Hispanic men. The solution of some Democrats, including Hollywood ad-makers and Obama, is to tell men that their reluctance to vote for Harris stems from their fear of women. No, just of the policies and attitudes of one particular woman and her allies: transphilia, tampons in boys’ bathrooms, DEI discrimination. Tim Walz hunting pheasants will not remove the curse.

Personally, the vice president shows a degree of insecurity puzzling in a 60-year-old politician. Politicians are tightly scripted these days; some hit their marks less dependably than others. Harris’s excessive stage management, her defective off-the-cuff performances, and aides’ anonymous reports suggest she brings an unusual load of anxiety to the task — not reassuring if (make that when) there are storms.

Although most conservatives will vote for Donald Trump, they shouldn’t do it with untroubled conscience. The policies of his administration, on balance good, nevertheless included a number of clinkers. Their proportion has increased in his campaign promises now. His romance with tariffs has become a grand passion, one that takes no account of alliances, the needs of American businesses for foreign inputs, or indeed any costs at all. Trump offers tax breaks like raffle tickets: exemptions for car payments, overtime, tips, collect them all. The man whose Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe would now, Stephen Douglas–like, leave life to the states without even recommending to them a principle. He proposes to bring the health crackpot RFK Jr. into his cabinet. His hand-picked running mate, Senator J. D. Vance, is young, smart, and highly flexible. Things can always change with him (he once compared Trump to Hitler), but what Vance says now is that the reason Mike Pence, his predecessor as veep nominee, no longer backs Trump is that Trump won’t start a nuclear war with Russia, a propagandistic smear worthy of RT.

Trump’s grotesqueries have always been with us, and they are part of his brand. It is hard to know whether their present tempo suggests campaign excitement or aging. Trump blamed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for supposedly starting the Ukraine war. He went on a riff about Arnold Palmer’s penis. He calls unfavorite Democrats “the enemy from within.” He suggests that critics of judges and justices be jailed. That would have put Abraham Lincoln in the slammer for what he said about Dred Scott, but then Trump also thinks Lincoln could have avoided the Civil War by cutting a deal with the South about slavery. This from a candidate of the Republican Party. Regarding recent history, he reposted a meme saying that January 6 would go down as “the day the government staged a riot.”

He meant the internet conspiracy theory that federal agents planned and launched the attack on the Capitol. The portion of the government that was actually at fault was Trump himself, who summoned hard-core followers to Washington, whipped them up at a rally, sent them down the Mall, and then sat on his hands for hours while they broke doors, bear-sprayed, and chased frightened congressmen to bolt-holes. And this, not his bad policies or potty mouth, is why Trump should be out of bounds: His narcissism could not accept defeat and cannot accept it still.

What were the missing issues in this miserable campaign? America’s debt rises like a soufflé, with no thought given to curbing entitlements, the main ingredient. Yet the world we live in requires a robust defense. Harris will hobble Israel, Trump might cut off Ukraine (he also hints his lack of concern for Taiwan). Neither candidate sees the world as a whole.

The best that can be hoped from this grim MMA bout is a Republican Senate. If led with half Mitch McConnell’s savvy, a GOP Senate could limit the damage a President Harris might do. It would be beholden to a President Trump. Yet since he would be a second-term lame duck, presumably his grip would loosen over time.

Take the down-ballot seriously, while praying over the top. The best advice for bad times.

The Stat

11 percent—how much federal revenue increased last fiscal year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The 2024 fiscal year concluded on September 30, and the CBO released its summary of the wreckage. The deficit was $1.8 trillion. Some politicians want to call this a revenue problem, claiming that the rich, or corporations, or just people in general, aren’t paying enough taxes. Despite the massive deficit, federal revenue rose by $479 billion year over year, an 11 percent increase. The bulk of that increase, $343 billion, came from individual-income taxes and payroll taxes. Corporate-tax collections increased by $109 billion. For perspective, U.S. GDP grew by around 2.5 percent for the 2024 fiscal year, so revenue growth is far outpacing economic growth. That’s true with the 2017 tax cuts still fully in effect. If the federal government can’t figure out how to make the math work with revenue increasing by 11 percent per year, that is not taxpayers’ fault, and they should not be punished with more taxes to make up for politicians’ lack of spending restraint.

by Dominic Pino