On the menu today: Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell suspends his campaign for governor of California, but he deserves a lot worse. You can’t blame Vice President JD Vance for not reaching a deal with the Iranian regime in the peace talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, but there are fair questions of why we’re even trying to talk peace with an intransigent regime with nuclear ambitions that chants “death to America.” Meanwhile, the era of Viktor Orbán comes to an end in Hungary. Read on.
Don’t Let the Door Hit You Where the Good Lord Split You, Eric Swalwell
Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell, currently the leading member of his party to make it past the state’s June 2 “jungle primary,” is “suspending” his campaign for governor.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday that a woman who worked for Swalwell for nearly two years said he twice sexually assaulted her when she was too intoxicated to consent. Earlier in the week, Swalwell issued a statement denying accusations of inappropriate sexual relationships with his congressional interns.
Later that day, CNN reported, “Three other women also alleged various kinds of sexual misconduct by the Democratic congressman — including Swalwell sending them unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos.”
Swalwell initially vehemently denied the allegations in a video recorded at the Beverly Hills mansion of his billionaire benefactor. (This man is a California Democrat, through and through.) The representative’s lawyer, Elias Dabaie, told CNN that Swalwell was “busy” and unable to answer questions about the accusation, but that he “categorically denies any wrongdoing.” Yeah, that’s not going to cut it.
But Sunday night, the representative relented, saying, “to my family, staff, friends, and supporters, I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past,” but adding, “I will fight the serious, false allegations that have been made — but that’s my fight, not a campaign’s.”
As you might expect, Swalwell did not specify what “mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past,” nor which serious allegations are false.
Swalwell is suspending his campaign, not ending it, so he clearly envisions some scenario where he convinces the public to ignore the accusations, and he manages to remain one of the top two finishers. If Swalwell did withdraw from the race, people would fairly ask why these accusations are serious enough to end his gubernatorial campaign but not serious enough to end his congressional career. (It certainly wouldn’t have anything to do with the narrow margin of GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives, now, would it?)
Whatever we think the lesson of the Me Too movement ought to have been, the dominant takeaway from Me Too was that “men who were already disliked for reasons unrelated to their sexual misbehavior should resign and be driven from public life when they are accused of sexual misconduct.”
Large swaths of the public are righteously and furiously angry about sexual misconduct when it is committed by people they dislike but strangely forgiving or simply uninterested in the topic when it is committed by people they like or deem a necessary political ally. Lots of people who justifiably fume about Bill Clinton and remember the names Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick found a way to vote for Roy Moore or to dismiss President Trump’s “grab them by the” you-know-what. Lots of people who can quote lots of details from the accounts of E. Jean Carroll against Trump also have talked themselves into believing Al Franken got a raw deal.
Perhaps the most vivid demonstration of the politically convenient moral flexibility at work in Me Too’s advocates was Roberta A. Kaplan, the chairwoman of Time’s Up and the co-founder of its legal defense fund, being forced to resign after the revelation that she had attempted to discredit women accusing former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment. “Believe all women,” right up until the moment they accuse a political ally.
“Believe all women” is as flawed a philosophy as “believe all men.” The lesson of Me Too should have been that the presumption of innocence cannot be hand-waved away, but that accusations should be taken seriously by someone who has genuine authority of the transgressor. (The HR department that answers to the CEO cannot conduct a fair or reliable investigation into allegations of misconduct on the part of the CEO.)
Basic questions like, “Can we prove that the accuser and accused were in the same place at the same time when the alleged misconduct occurred?” should be resolved before moving forward. (Sorry, Kavanaugh accusers.)
Last week, I tongue-in-cheek called the prospect of a “Governor Swalwell” a fitting punishment for California’s sins — reflexive partisanship, a nonchalant willingness to ignore worsening problems, a blind insistence that the state is paradise when it is slowly choking itself through excess taxes, regulation, waste, and a runaway cost of living.
If Swalwell, through sheer stubbornness, hangs on to be one of the top two finishers, then a whole bunch of Democrats who are currently denouncing Swalwell as one of the world’s biggest creeps will abruptly turn around and insist that everyone must hold their noses and vote for Swalwell because the state must never elect a Republican. Better to elect a rapist than elect a (gasp) conservative.
The Pakistan Talks with Iran Failed, but It Isn’t Vance’s Fault
You can’t give Vice President JD Vance much grief for not reaching a deal with the Iranian regime in the peace talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, because there was never a realistic chance of reaching a deal.
That does, however, raise the question of how many times the Trump administration will fall for the perennial Iranian con of appearing to want to negotiate, without ever getting any results because of Iran’s refusal to make serious and verifiable concessions. The history of U.S.-Iranian dealmaking, and Iran breaking its word at the first opportunity, is akin to Charlie Brown’s history of kicking Lucy’s football.
Last night, on Truth Social, Trump fumed that “Iran promised to open the Strait of Hormuz, and they knowingly failed to do so.” (If only someone could have warned him!) Trump added, “There is great dishonor and permanent harm to the reputation of Iran, and what’s left of their ‘Leaders.’ . . . As they promised, they better begin the process of getting this INTERNATIONAL WATERWAY OPEN AND FAST! Every Law in the book is being violated by them.”
Did the president miss everything that the Iranian regime has done since the hostage crisis in 1979? Does the Iranian regime act like they worry about their reputation much?
And if we absolutely must negotiate with the Iranians, it seems fair to ask why Vance, Steve “Hamas duped me” Witkoff, and Jared Kushner are always the top U.S. representatives in high-stakes talks, instead of anyone from the cabinet agency specifically designed to handle diplomacy with other countries. (Of course, the Trump administration dramatically thinned the ranks of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, which would usually coordinate U.S. diplomatic outreach to the Middle East.)
Then again, the Americans could have sent an all-star team of George Kennan, Allen Dulles, George Marshall, and Dwight Eisenhower and it was unlikely the Iranian negotiators would have agreed to give up their nuclear weapons program.
In a situation with no good options and certainly no easy ones, the latest Trump administration strategy of a blockade of Iranian ports may well be the best remaining option. The Iranian regime operating a tollbooth through the Strait of Hormuz is utterly unacceptable, and would be a formula for a stronger, more powerful, even better-armed regime in a few years’ time. If non-Iranian allies can’t get their ships through the strait, then the Iranians aren’t allowed to get their and their customers’ ships through the strait, and we’ll see how the Iranian regime does when it can’t export any oil.
U.S. Central Command forces will begin implementing a blockade of all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports on April 13 at 10 a.m. ET, in accordance with the President’s proclamation.
The blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. CENTCOM forces will not impede freedom of navigation for vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from non-Iranian ports.
“Neutral transit” ships going from non-Iranian ports to other destinations are free to sail wherever they like, according to Central Command.
The world energy markets may well be freaked out that the blockade means that the shooting is about to start again. But in Iran, that already desperate pre-war economy has been crushed, even worse, by the effects of the U.S. and Israeli bombing. From Reuters:
One Iranian official said the scale of damage meant the biggest industrial facilities driving the economy would take months or years to repair and the country “will face a disaster” if sanctions are not lifted.
Damage to factories and other industrial sites created a chain reaction, forcing dozens of other companies depending on major facilities to halt their own work, leaving many thousands of people out of work, the official added.
Strikes have targeted Iran’s production facilities at the South Pars gas field, which cost billions of dollars to build. Other attacks have hit its main petrochemicals producers.
Iranian press reports have charted shutdowns at the massive steel works in Khuzestan and Isfahan, with many thousands of workers affected at each plant, along with closures at industrial zones on the Gulf coast affected by power plant outages.
Even if Iranian industry can be revived, critical relationships have been poisoned by Tehran’s targeting of Gulf states during the war.
Over in that other publication, back on March 17, I wrote, “When the Iran war ends, the mullahs will be broke.”
Viszontlátásra*, Viktor Orbán
I’ve never been much of a fan of Viktor Orbán. It seemed like every time you turned around, the head of a NATO member country was always shaking hands with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and even signing a trade deal with the Iranian mullahs. And as I wrote in that other publication last week, the current MAGA lovefest for Orbán never made much geopolitical sense.
If, two decades ago, you had predicted that the prime minister of the 54th-largest economy in the world (two spots behind Angola) would speak at Conservative Political Action Conference gatherings at least six times — five times hosting it in his home capital! — and his reelection would be a high priority for a Republican president, people would have checked you for a concussion.
After a sixteen-year run, Orban’s time in power is coming to an end. His party, Fidesz, dropped from 135 seats in the Hungarian parliament to 55 seats, with the new Tisza (“Respect and Freedom Party”) winning 138 seats.
Yesterday I saw the argument that because the man who is likely to be the next prime minister, Péter Magyar, is right-of-center, an immigration hardliner, and a former member of Fidesz, Hungary’s policies won’t change very much. But the Trump administration sure seemed intensely invested in an Orbán victory.
Vance traveled to Budapest last week for a series of events with Orbán. In February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the same trip, touting the “golden age” of U.S.-Hungarian relations. Late last month, President Trump gushed on Truth Social that Orban is “a truly strong and powerful Leader, with a proven track record of delivering phenomenal results.”
It’s not surprising that American presidents have traditionally preferred some foreign countries’ political parties over others. Left-of-center leaders are more aligned with other left-of-center leaders, and vice versa. But presidents rarely made their preferences all that open or explicit — and if they did, they were usually subtle, like a conveniently timed state visit and photo op.
The standard boilerplate when discussing foreign relations was “I consider Prime Minister So-and-so a good friend and a steadfast ally of the United States, but the U.S.-Grand Fenwick relationship is strong and has been forged over many years, so I am certain that it will remain strong no matter who wins the election.”
The general sense was that because a U.S. president can never control how a foreign population would vote, there wasn’t much upside to tying the American government to one candidate over another. This helped dispel accusations of meddling and usually avoided any bad blood with the other candidate, lest he win. A close personal relationship between leaders can help two countries’ relations, but in the end, governments make foreign policy decisions based on shared interests.
Trump clearly sees things differently; three days ago, he posted on Truth Social, “My Administration stands ready to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian People ever need it. We are excited to invest in the future Prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued Leadership!”
As our John Fund observes from on the ground in Hungary, the lack of prosperity is one of the reasons Orbán lost the race.
I wouldn’t expect Magyar to be too hostile to Trump; the U.S. is too important for Hungary to waste too much time carrying a grudge. But it does raise the question of why the president puts so much effort into attempting to influence the outcome of foreign elections.
*This is Hungarian for “goodbye.”
ADDENDUM: In other news, last night President Trump shared images on Truth Social depicting himself as Jesus healing the sick. A very stable genius, indeed.