On the menu today: It’s a smorgasbord. The latest inflation number is an improvement on paper but is unlikely to represent much of a change in Americans’ perception of the economy. The president . . . really wants to talk about the 2020 election. I offer a short rant in defense of “the Establishment” and against the idiotic swooning for outsiders because of their so-called “charisma.” And it’s time to throw some cold water on certain mainstream media institutions’ intense desire to believe that Hunter Biden is making some sort of comeback. Read on.
Inflation Nation
MS NOW reports, “President Trump’s Thursday speech is slated to address newly declassified intelligence reports that the White House asserts reveal plans by foreign nations to interfere in the 2020 election, according to two White House officials granted anonymity to discuss internal plans.”
So even the president is in summer reruns.
Only an exceptionally small percentage of midterm election voters are spending much time thinking about the 2020 election. We’re all in a different place in our lives compared to six years ago. I strongly suspect that if the president wants to improve the outlook for Republicans in the midterm elections — in Virginia, Minnesota, and South Dakota, voting starts in 66 days — he needs to talk about the here and now, and I don’t mean the White House ballroom or the reflecting pool.
In the RealClearPolitics average, Trump’s job approval rating is 40.9 percent, and his disapproval rating is 56.5 percent. On Sunday night, the president claimed he had a 59 percent approval rating on Truth Social, with no further details. In the same post, Trump wrote, “Prices coming down along with the lowering of oil and gas.”
This morning, the inflation rate was 3.5 percent, year over year, a bit better than the consensus expectation of 3.8 percent, and better than the 4.2 percent figure from May. But that’s still well above the 2 percent goal of the Federal Reserve. The last time the inflation rate was below 2 percent was March 2021, when it was 1.7 percent.
Once again, Trump keeps insisting that any sign that the rate of inflation is coming down means “prices” are “coming down,” and those are not the same things.
As for crude oil prices . . . yes, in July, they dropped to only a bit higher than the pre-Iran war average, but they’ve climbed back up again as hostilities have resumed.
As for gas prices . . . yeah, the national average of $3.85 for a gallon of regular gas is down about 20 cents from a month ago. But I don’t think anybody’s really that satisfied with gas prices; they’re still about 70 cents higher than a year ago. And they’re actually up a few cents in the past week.
I have insisted, over and over again, through Biden’s presidency and Trump’s second term, that a president cannot spin people about the condition of their own household finances. You cannot Jedi mind-trick people into thinking they’re doing better than they actually are. Apparently, no one in the White House wants to hear this, or cares.
What Even Is the ‘Establishment’ Anymore?
You’re not going to see this newsletter praise former Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison often, although considering how badly things went for Democrats on Harrison’s watch, it wouldn’t be surprising if a lot of Republicans had nostalgic warm feelings about him. (Then again, considering how badly things are going for current DNC chairman Ken Martin so far, maybe that job is just cursed.)
But Harrison reached his limit with the progressive grassroots and Graham Platner fanbase blaming a nebulous “establishment” for the disastrous implosion of Platner’s campaign:
I’m tired of this lazy “establishment” bull****. It’s become a substitute for making an actual argument. If someone has experience, they’re “establishment.” If they’ve built relationships, they’re “establishment.” If they’ve won elections, passed legislation, or know how government actually works, they’re “establishment.” No. They’re Democrats who have put in the work. You don’t build a stronger party by treating experience like a liability or pretending everyone who came before you is the enemy. You build it by respecting those who’ve laid the foundation while welcoming new leaders who are ready to add to it. Everything shiny and new ain’t gold.
The reaction from the progressive grassroots on X is about as receptive, warm, and friendly as you would expect.
There is a special kind of despair reserved for watching two political tribes, otherwise incapable of agreeing on the time of day, unite in perfect harmony around one core conviction: Knowing things is suspicious.
Not all things, mind you. Grassroots activists on both sides are perfectly happy to trust expertise when it’s, say, a plumber unclogging their drain or a mechanic explaining why the check-engine light is on. Very few people worry if their brain surgeon or oncologist is part of “the Establishment,” or demand that the firefighters responding to their house fire be mavericks who aren’t part of “the system.”
But hand these same people a ballot, and suddenly any experience in government at any level is a red flag instead of a resume line.
The term “the Establishment” has become so elastic it now stretches to cover basically anyone who has held a job, read a document, or failed to say something insane on television within the last calendar year. “The Establishment” gets blamed for everything that goes wrong and never gets credit for anything that goes right.
Who do you think made NASA’s Artemis II mission work, “the Establishment” or plucky inexperienced outsiders? This record-breaking successful ongoing World Cup tournament hosted in part by the United States — you think that isn’t being run by experienced people? All that ordinance that got dropped on Iran — do you think that was done by freelancers, or men and women working together as part of a larger institution? All those thriving companies driving the stock market to new heights and helping everyone’s 401Ks grow — they don’t count as “the Establishment”? Yeah, you can define “the Establishment” as a bunch of geriatric senators. But “the Establishment” is also Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, Walmart, the Supreme Court, DARPA, the Red Cross, and the National Weather Service.
“He tells it like it is” is not the same as “he understands what he is talking about.” A man can indeed “tell it like it is” — more accurately, tell it the way his audience wants to believe it is — and still be catastrophically, confidently wrong about it. This may actually be worse than a traditional liar, because the liar is at least conscious of what the truth is.
But no — swagger is currency. Knowing how the Big Beautiful Bill got passed is a character flaw. Having ever worked in, near, or adjacent to a functioning institution is basically a confession.
Since last fall and through the implosion of Graham Platner’s campaign, I kept seeing people describing him as charismatic — see here, here, here, here. I never found Platner charismatic or charming, and I suspect you didn’t either. That suggests that either we are psychologically damaged in a useful way that makes us immune to charismatic people, or, to quote one of my favorite fictional heroes . . . “Nazis. I hate these guys.” The moment we heard about the tattoo, we were never going to believe anything this creep told us. (Speaking of Nazis, in theory, Hans Landa is superficially charming, too.)
The problem isn’t charisma itself. The ideal is to find a knowledgeable, competent person who is also charismatic. The problem is when charisma becomes the entire application, when “seems like he gets it” becomes a full substitute for “has ever demonstrated that he gets it.” The paranoia about “the Establishment” is now so intense in some corners of both parties that actual, hard-won competence gets treated as the disqualifying trait instead of the whole point of the exercise.
I was about to write “you can’t sum up ‘the Establishment’ as ‘the Bidens,’ because the Bidens aren’t on the scene anymore. But that’s . . . not quite as true as I would like it to be.
The Hunter Biden Comeback That Isn’t a Comeback at All
It’s not the most important story in the news cycle, but Hunter Biden did a sit-down conversation with hateful little alt-right white nationalist troll Nick Fuentes. Seeing that story made me think of all the times we were told that the Biden family were such good people. We were told that they were so empathetic, and that so many families related to the Biden family and their struggles and challenges. That “the Biden family is a good family.”
(“Could Hunter become his father’s secret weapon to win reelection in 2024?” asked The National Interest in November 2023. No. No, he could not.)
No good person sits down with Nick Fuentes to see where they can reach common ground. No one needs to know or hear more about what Fuentes thinks; he rants on his podcast for hours each day.
You only sit down with Fuentes in front of cameras if you are shameless and desperate for the spotlight in any way, shape, or form.
Quite the family, huh?
We have barely seen Joe Biden since he left the presidency. He completed his radiation therapy for prostate cancer last October. I wish him well, but there was no way that man was going to be able to serve a second term as president; he was obviously too old to adequately serve his first term as president. We spent more or less of Biden’s entire presidency arguing that something was wrong with him and that he was too old for that job. We were right, they were wrong, they lied to us when they said he had so much energy they had trouble keeping up with him, and no, there will never be a discussion of the Biden presidency or his legacy that does not have this giant glaring Edith Wilson-level lie front and center.
Jill Biden has spent the past year writing a memoir so self-serving and so thoroughly dishonest in its recounting of recent history that not even The Guardian could come up with anything nice to say about it.
The New Yorker — again, not the toughest publication for a prominent Democrat looking for praise – concludes, “A surprising aspect of the book is how little time she spends backing up that claim [that her husband’s condition was fine], which, in the wake of other reporting on the administration, both before and after the election, is increasingly dubious. She more or less shrugs and declares the debate business a mystery; again and again she retreats to her main theme, which is that her life in the White House was ‘magical,’ like being in a beautiful ‘snow globe.’ The public was expected to trust her when she said that, seen up close, he was well, and so it doesn’t help that View from the East Wing is full of blind spots. She doesn’t persuade; she just insists and elides.”
And then there is Hunter.
BuzzFeed declared that Hunter Biden is “a new belle of the social media ball.” In other news, BuzzFeed still exists. (They shut down their news division in 2023.)
Axios wrote on June 5 that Hunter Biden “is staging one of the most unlikely reinventions in politics.” Is he? Has anyone really changed their mind on Hunter Biden in the past few months?
“Hunter has been oddly charming,” wrote David Graham in The Atlantic last month. Like hell he is. One of the things that prompted Graham to write this was Hunter Biden’s choice to appear on Candace Owens’ podcast. One perpetually messed-up man choosing to appear on the podcast of a perpetually messed-up woman is not charming.
I thought we had an extremely broad bipartisan consensus that we wanted the Biden family to go off into quiet, private retirement. Bidens, how can we miss you if you won’t go away?
ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, an observation that while Democrats have a socialist problem, Republicans in Colorado have a Marxist one. GOP primary voters had a perfectly fine and accomplished state senator as an option for their gubernatorial nominee, and instead they picked a loonie who claims that as a civilian he called in an airstrike against ISIS, and refuses to elaborate on how he did that.