This is Jim Geraghty, filling in for Noah Rothman, who filled in for Dominic Pino, who filled in for Audrey Fahlberg, who — hey, wait a minute, I’m the guy who writes this newsletter! Thanks to everyone who filled in during my two-week absence. More on the cruise below.
On the menu today: Donald Trump promised a green card to every foreign student graduating from any U.S. college, including community colleges; the five-year anniversary of a typically grandiose unkept Joe Biden promise; previewing tonight’s debate; and the North Koreans are reportedly headed to Donetsk in Ukraine to help the Russians.
Bracing Ourselves for a Disappointing Debate
Before we dive into tonight’s debate, let us note that former president Donald Trump said during a June 20 appearance on the All-In podcast, “You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges too. Anybody graduates from a college — you go in there for two years or four years. If you graduate, or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country.”
Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) notes, “Even lobbyists for higher ed and the tech industry aren’t this brazen. They exploit the appeal of keeping the ‘best and brightest’ among foreign students as a means of protecting broader cheap-labor schemes, but I’ve never heard one seriously argue for giving green cards to graduates of community colleges. . . . It would turn every university (and community college!) into a citizenship-selling machine. There are no numerical limits on the admission of foreign students — who number about 1 million now — and foreign students are already a major profit center for schools large and small.”
John Miano, also of CIS, fumed, “In a stab to the back to his middle-class supporters, Donald Trump announced that he would support stapling a green card to degrees of foreign students. Donald Trump now sounds exactly like Mitt Romney.”
But beyond that, did anyone else in MAGA-land even notice or care? Did you see anyone at Fox News Channel object to Trump’s proposal? Did any major Trump ally announce they would no longer support him? Did it get more than cursory coverage at Breitbart?
Trump proposed the most sweeping expansion of legal immigration in decades, and it barely made a ripple in the news cycle. Because by now, almost everyone realizes that what Trump says, off-the-cuff, schmoozing with some Silicon Valley tech guys on some podcast, isn’t likely to have any connection to the actual policies he will enact if he returns to office. Trump just says things.
Meanwhile, we recently passed the five-year anniversary of Joe Biden declaring, “I promise you, if I’m elected president, you’re going to see the single most important thing that changes America: We’re going to cure cancer.”
This year, roughly 2 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer. Forget curing cancer in every American; Biden can’t even keep track of cancer cases in his own cabinet.
What Trump or Biden say at any given moment rarely matters. Their words are often no more than distant cousins of their real-world records and policies. They are both consumed by a desperate desire to please the audience that is in front of them.
In light of that . . . we’re supposed to believe that some bold promise or egregious gaffe in tonight’s debate is going to dramatically alter this close race?
A lot of talking heads are going to tell you that the stakes of tonight’s debate are astronomical. (Politico, this morning: “The most important night of the 2024 election.”) But this glosses over the fact that it’s a matchup between two extremely well-known and widely disliked candidates. Joe Biden’s approval rating is at 39 percent over at FiveThirtyEight — actually up a tiny bit. Donald Trump’s favorability rating at the same site is 41.5 percent.
Tonight’s debate is not likely to resolve or change much. In fact, you could argue that what happens on the debate stage will be less consequential than the post-debate spin fight to shape the perceptions of the night’s events. The odds are good that every Democrat you know will insist that Biden was sharp, energetic, and astute, while every MAGA fan you know will insist that Trump mopped the floor with the current president. And the one Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fan you know will insist it was egregious that he and his brain worm were excluded.
Many critics of the president wonder, or perhaps hope, that Biden will “freeze up” or have some glaring memory lapses, or start referring to recent conversations with European leaders who died years ago.
But if you’re pulling for Trump, you don’t want Biden to go out there and prove himself to be so egregiously senile that he creates a consensus among Democrats that he must be replaced at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Trump has a straightforward message against Biden: “Had enough?” If the Democrats were to panic and somehow replace Biden (and Kamala Harris?) with Gavin Newsom or Amy Klobuchar or Cory Booker, the Democrats would be able to shed the burden of the past four years, like a snake shedding its skin, and pitch themselves as a party of change.
The polling numbers of Democratic Senate candidates suggest that Biden is a uniquely weak candidate — old, tired, widely perceived as ineffective and hapless. Trump fans should be pulling for Biden to be bad, but not quite so bad that Democrats unite around the desire to replace him.
Biden’s mouth will get him in trouble; the question is whether Trump has the discipline to let Biden talk. Trump says he knows he overdid it in his first debate against Biden in 2020.
Biden is almost certain to bring up Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records. Trump is almost certain to respond by bringing up Hunter Biden’s convictions. If Biden remembers, he’ll point to his son’s convictions as a sign that the U.S. Department of Justice pursues criminals regardless of party affiliation or surname. It is highly likely that the president will paint Hunter Biden’s criminal acts as “a story of a fight against addiction, one that is familiar to so many families across this great nation,” blah blah blah. As if a common side effect of using hard drugs was shady foreign businessmen giving your family millions of dollars.
I won’t give you a bingo card, but I suspect that CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will ask about Israel and the Palestinians, but not the Gaza Pier. They’ll ask about inflation, and Biden will blame “corporate greed” and maybe “shrinkflation.”
I suspect we’ll get at least one, “My dad used to say to me, ‘Joey,’” “I’m not being facetious,” “God’s honest truth, folks,” and at least one use of “literally” when President Biden means figuratively.
The debate will begin at 9 p.m. Eastern and will run for 90 minutes. There will be two commercial breaks. There will be no on-site audience, and no opening statements. Each candidate will get two minutes for answers, one minute for rebuttals, and one minute for follow-up. When one candidate is speaking, the other candidate’s microphone will be muted, minimizing the odds of incoherent crosstalk.
More than 158 million Americans voted in the 2020 election. A bit more than 73 million Americans watched the first Biden–Trump debate in that cycle, and just under 63 million tuned in for the second one. The viewership of tonight’s debate will probably be about half the voters casting ballots this year.
The debate will air on CNN, but all kinds of networks will carry the simulcast — PBS, Fox News, MSNBC, Newsmax, NewsNation, Scripps News, and Univision.
The ratings will be high, in part because the debate will seem like the only thing on. Tonight’s debate will probably be the most-watched event of the campaign season. Right now, there’s only one other debate scheduled, on September 10.
North Korean Engineers Helping the Russians in Ukraine
NATO weapons and international legions on the Ukrainian side, Iranian drones and Chinese tech support on the Russian side. This regional war doesn’t seem quite so regional anymore. Now, allegedly, North Korean engineers will be arriving on the Russian side of the battlefield. A translation of a recent South Korean TV news report reads:
A government official said, “North Korea is expected to dispatch a large engineering force to Donetsk as early as next month,” adding, “The purpose is to rebuild the city destroyed by battle.”
North Korea has dispatched active-duty soldiers from the “Engineer Corps” to various overseas regions, including the Middle East. Although they are disguised as working for companies such as “Namgang Construction”, they are thoroughly controlled by the military system.
Ryu Hyun-woo / Former Acting North Korean Ambassador to Kuwait [said] “All the soldiers belonging to Namgang Construction Company had their own ranks. For example, the president of Namgang Construction Company in Kuwait was a colonel.”
This is interpreted to mean that North Korea’s “dispatch of troops” to Russia, which is at war, is imminent after President Putin and Kim Jong-un signed a treaty that in effect amounts to “automatic military intervention”.
Han-Beom Cho / Senior Research Fellow, Korea Institute for National Unification [said] “(Russia) is experiencing a worsening labor shortage due to deaths in combat, conscription, and those who evaded conscription. An institutional foundation has been created between the two countries for various cooperation, including military cooperation.”
A government official said, “Soldiers of the engineer units that are dispatched will earn an income of about $800 per month,” adding, “From North Korea’s perspective, it is also a means of earning foreign currency.”
The Pentagon press secretary, Major General Pat Ryder, said these unlucky North Koreans sound like “cannon fodder”:
Q: A quick follow-up — North Korea’s Central Military Commission announced that North Korea would join forces with the Russian military. And as part of the North Korea and Russia military alliance, the North Korean Army engineer unit would be dispatched to Donetsk, Ukraine, which remains occupied by Russia. It will be dispatched as early as next month. How do you assess about the rapid situation in which North Korea and Russia are moving toward Ukraine?
GEN. RYDER: So, just to clarify, you’re asking what do I think about Russia assigning North Korean forces to the battlefield in Ukraine?
Q: North Korean Army.
GEN. RYDER: Yeah, sending North — yeah, I mean, that’s certainly something to keep an eye on. I think that if I were North Korean military personnel management, I would be questioning my choices on sending my forces to be cannon fodder in an illegal war against Ukraine. And we’ve seen the kinds of casualties that Russian forces — so — but again, something that we’ll keep an eye on.
Well, we all know how much “North Korean military personnel management” care about the men under their command. North Koreans soldiers are poorly fed, endure years of hard labor, and rarely have sufficient equipment or clothing for cold weather. And apparently in the not-so-de-militarized Demilitarized Zone, North Korean soldiers keep getting killed by their own mines and explosives.
ADDENDA: For a good stretch of the past two weeks, I was on the National Review Institute cruise, and it was so great to see so many readers who have become old friends. I don’t know when the next NRI cruise is, or where it’s going, or whether I’ll be on it, but every time, it’s an unforgettable experience. I know it costs a pretty penny, but the fact that we have so many cruisers who join us year after year is a sign that those who join us relish what often combines a great vacation with a conservative-writer fantasy camp for people who are into politics, conservative philosophy, William F. Buckley’s legacy, and the news.
Yes, my family and I encountered a moose in the wilds of Denali National Park, and lived to tell the tale.
The Washington Post asked its columnists to suggest questions for tonight’s presidential debate. A portion of my suggestion: “Can either of you do math, and do you grasp how much additional borrowing in the here and now means more interest payments in the future, which means more incoming revenue has to be used on interest payments?”
Thanks to everyone who has purchased and read Dueling Six Demons so far. Greg and I talked about the book on an episode of the Three Martini Lunch podcast last week.