On the menu today: Happy approaching Independence Day weekend. There will be no Morning Jolt tomorrow, July 4. The next book in the Dangerous Clique series is progressing only slightly faster than George R. R. Martin’s next Game of Thrones novel, but if you’re looking for some summer beach reading, the four books in the series can arrive in your Kindle or mailbox pretty quickly. They’re an even more dangerous clique than . . . er, the infamous MS-13 transnational gang, or “clique,” as ABC News characterizes them.
Today, the surprising news is that former President Joe Biden has emerged from his post-presidential protective cocoon of privacy, seen his shadow, and predicted six more weeks of summer.
Scranton Joe Is Back (with Excuses)
Yesterday, former President Joe Biden walked out onto a stage at the San Diego convention center, stood between two teleprompters, and addressed the annual conference of the Society for Human Resource Management. This speech was Biden’s first public remarks since the announcement that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, back on May 19.
The former president did not address his diagnosis. He did mention that he’s still talking to foreign leaders. “They ask to see me, and I see them. I’m also laying rubber with my ’67 Corvette in my driveway.” (It’s the Corvette that was right next to all those classified documents.)
Since leaving the presidency, the 82-year-old Biden hasn’t completely disappeared from the public eye, but his public appearances have been few and far between.
He’s done one major televised interview, with the ladies of The View. His office has intermittently released brief statements, such as his insistence that he “made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.” (Note the irony of Biden insisting he was always aware of what he was doing and signing and did not simply trust his staff’s directions and requests . . . through a brief written statement distributed to the press by his staff.)
As with Biden’s speech to the conference of the National High School Model United Nations, there was not a lot of media coverage of the remarks of the former president, beyond a little local television coverage. As far as I can tell, no transcript of Biden’s remarks has been released.
Perhaps the most extensive coverage of Biden’s remarks that we can find are from the Wall Street Journal, in an article under the headline, “Biden, in Rare Remarks Since Presidency, Warns His Accomplishments Are Coming Undone.”
Biden is quoted as saying, “Many of the things I worked so damn hard, that I thought I changed in the country, are changing so rapidly.”
You can almost hear everyone who voted for Trump answering, “Yes, that’s the point.”
The Journal reports:
“We strengthened NATO in a significant way,” Biden said in San Diego Wednesday. Now, he said, “I’m getting calls — I’m not going to go into it, I can’t —from a number of European leaders asking me to get engaged.”
He added: “I’m not, but I’m giving advice.”
I haven’t loved every detail of how Trump has treated NATO, but there’s no getting around the fact that the recent announcement that (almost) every member of the alliance is going to get military spending up to 5 percent of GDP represents A) a giant win for American interests, B) a major deterrent to further Russian military aggression on the European continent, and C) a stronger alliance in the years to come.
This is why President Trump’s reaction to the commitment by NATO members at their recent summit to more than double their defense-spending target is welcome, even if a partial opt-out for Spain is not. NATO, said Trump, was not a “rip-off,” high praise from this president. NATO’s European members “really love their countries . . . and we’re here to help them.” Critically, Trump emphasized that the U.S. still regarded itself as bound by Article 5 of the NATO treaty, the mutual-defense provision: “I stand with it, that’s why I’m here. If I didn’t stand with it, I wouldn’t be here.”The new spending target of 5 percent (of which 1.5 percent can comprise defense-related infrastructure spending, a conveniently elastic concept in this case) does not have to be hit until 2035. However, some countries, painfully conscious of geography and history, are racing ahead. Poland is set to spend 4.7 percent of its GDP this year, while Estonia has locked in a program that will mean it should spend 5.4 percent in 2029. No less significant is that Germany — for years one of the worst of the deadbeats, given its economic strength — appears, at last, to give the long-term threat posed by Russia the seriousness it deserves. Berlin will take its spending to 3.5 percent by the end of the decade. Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has declared that the Bundeswehr must “become the strongest conventional army in Europe.”
(Cue the Conan O’Brien tweet.)
The compromise that made it easier to get to that 5 percent threshold is a point that I’ve been emphasizing for years — a decent amount of what NATO counts as military spending is dual-use and can be used to make life easier or better for civilians as well:
Equipment for search-and-rescue operations? That can count as defense spending. Radar systems that can help with civilian air-traffic control? That’s defense spending! Salaries for military personnel and their pension systems counts as military spending! Police forces such as national police forces, gendarmerie, carabinieri, coast guards, etc. can be counted if they are “trained in military tactics, are equipped as a military force, can operate under direct military authority in deployed operations, and can, realistically, be deployed outside national territory in support of a military force.”
Biden argued that he unified NATO through his words. (It’s fair to contend that Vladimir Putin launching the largest war in Europe since World War II played a pretty big role in that, too.) Trump has strongarmed our NATO allies into becoming stronger and more unified by making it clear that if our European allies and Canada didn’t pull their weight, he wasn’t interested in remaining in the alliance. We may not always like the methods, but it’s difficult to argue with the results.
Now, if Biden wants to argue that Trump’s second term has been a destructive force, he may have a point.
The current president is indeed destroying a lot of the Biden record of accomplishments, alongside destroying a whole bunch of Houthis and large chunks of the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
The once widespread belief that you can easily sneak into the United States and illegally immigrate without any serious consequence is also largely destroyed. What isn’t being destroyed is being removed; since Trump took office, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested more than 38,000 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions and 2,711 alleged multinational gang members. As of the end of April, about 65,682 illegal immigrants have been removed from the country, with 1,329 accused or convicted of sex offenses, 498 accused or convicted of murder, 9,639 accused of assaults, 6,398 accused or convicted of DWIs or DUIs, and 1,479 accused or convicted of weapon offenses.
Since January, the Trump administration has also “destroyed” any inflation rate above 3 percent. The traditional midsummer spike in gas prices is, if not destroyed, then significantly mitigated compared to recent years. I’m underwhelmed with the results of DOGE so far, and Elon Musk clearly overpromised and underdelivered, but it’s at least taken some nibbles out of the runaway spending.
After a calamitous stretch in spring, the stock markets have rebounded. The day Trump took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 43,487.83, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite closed at 19,630.20, and the S&P 500 closed at 5,996.66. Last night, the DJIA closed at 44,484.42, the Nasdaq closed at 20,393.13, and the S&P 500 closed at 6,227.42 — record highs for the latter two.
Compared to January 20, that’s modest growth; compared to the low points of spring, that’s a phenomenal comeback.
The record of Trump’s first six months or so hasn’t been all sunshine and roses, and you know this newsletter and the rest of NRO will tell you about the bad parts, again and again and again, much to the annoyance of some readers. And we’ll also give Trump credit where he’s due. You should expect that attitude from all the news sources you consume.
Let’s also point out that if Biden is lamenting that his legacy is being destroyed right before his contact-lens-assisted eyes . . . he has a lot to do with that! In the past months, we’ve seen whole bunch of books detailing how a slew of videos taped for the 2020 convention were deemed unusable, as Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all”; how he couldn’t remember the names of national security adviser Jake Sullivan and communications director Kate Bedingfield; how Senator Mark Warner ended a phone call with Biden concluding that the president had no idea what was going on in his own counterterrorism policy; how in the early months of 2024, the Biden campaign’s high command debated whether Biden could get away with refusing to debate Trump; and how Biden couldn’t get through a single 2024 debate practice session.
Just how durable a legacy did Biden and his top staffers think they were building under President Mr. Magoo?
Finally, from that article in the Journal:
Johnny C. Taylor Jr., SHRM’s president who joined Biden on stage after his address, asked him what he would most like to be remembered for.
“Being a good father,” Biden responded.
Beg pardon?
Oh, that’s right, the former president already did that.
ADDENDUM: Credit our Michael Brendan Dougherty for a revealing insight into how increased immigration (both legal and illegal) often goes hand-in-hand with a declining birth rate:
The costs of immigrating from the third world to the first are far less than the cost of immigrating the ten inches or so from the womb of a first world woman to the delivery room. The average American childbirth costs between $15,000 if it’s a vaginal birth to $26,000 if it’s a caesarean. That doesn’t include the co-pays on the many, many appointments beforehand, or the excess charges that are common along the way.
If it continues to cost more to bring one American child into the world than it costs to bring a family to America from Pakistan or Somalia, well . . . price theory should predict what you’re going to get.