Dear Weekend Jolter,
I’d say the October surprise arrived early, except August has a history of surprising us.
Either way, the media’s love/hate relationship with a Trump-centered news cycle — a relationship that was on a break only so that the respective parties could see other sociopaths — can comfortably resume. But in the maelstrom of takes about the FBI’s not-at-all-low-key sweep of Mar-a-Lago, there is reason to question one regnant narrative: that this is a political mission driven by Democrats who have “weaponized” the DOJ.
To be sure, the department can be and has been weaponized, something John Durham’s investigation has helped demonstrate, even if the Michael Sussmann trial ended in acquittal. Andrew McCarthy has catalogued this conduct at length. Dan McLaughlin has chronicled how the Garland Justice Department at times looks like a left-wing blog come to life.
Based on Democrats’ spending in the midterms, however, we know they want to elevate and go up against MAGA-fied opponents wherever possible. Few in positions of power seem to worry about the risk that the people they decry as dangerously unfit might, then, win a general election. Given this cold calculus, it must still be the case that they would rather face Donald Trump in 2024 than, say, Tom Cotton.
Under one scenario that is the subject of much dispute, the Mar-a-Lago house-swarming party could complicate that proposal. The search reportedly pertained to the possible mishandling of classified documents (though this explanation invites some skepticism). Setting aside the possibility that this leads to a case that leads to a conviction that leads to Trump’s incarceration, there’s another — albeit rather far-fetched — way this saga could sideline the former president. Prominent Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, in the immediate aftermath of the news, noted that what makes the raid a “potential blockbuster” is a section of the U.S. Code barring anyone committing such records violations from holding federal office.
The claim touched off a heated debate among legal scholars, with others arguing this wouldn’t supersede the constitutional qualifications for president and any attempt to wield that statute against Donald Trump would lead to a fierce legal challenge, as Elias later acknowledged.
But there’s another, perhaps more urgent complication for Democrats in this raid, in the likely scenario that Trump’s eligibility holds: It has absolutely incensed Trump’s base and, if we’ve learned anything about the man since his entry into politics, hardened his resolve to reclaim what he views as rightfully his.
“If Trump wasn’t already running in 2024, he definitely is now,” RCP’s Tom Bevan remarked.
Only this wouldn’t be the wounded, 2020-obsessed Trump consumed by ghosts of the “steal” that only his most loyal adherents can see; it would be Trump in his element, battling, once more, his favorite enemy, the “Deep State.” It would be a hot war, and not the sort of Trump rerun Democrats had envisioned. While this Donald could certainly lose another general election, the environment becomes more unpredictable — and could turn on whether the feds are building a damning case or a trivial one. For the time being, Phil Klein says the FBI has reestablished Trump as the “alpha dog” among Republicans:
There was a time when having one’s home searched by federal law enforcement would trigger talk about the end of somebody’s political career. . . . But assuming Trump actually gets in the race, who could be in a better position to capitalize on outrage over the FBI searching Trump’s home than Trump himself?
If Democrats were truly looking to “weaponize” the DOJ to improve their chances in 2024, or even 2022, this could well go down as the face-palm at Palm Beach. So I’m willing to take the White House at their word that President Biden was not party to the law-enforcement hit on his old 2020 rival, or at least not behind it. Maybe this was in fact the action of the Justice Department and FBI alone, “personally approved” by Merrick Garland. That doesn’t mean that it was the right or righteous call, or that Democrats inside the DOJ aren’t acting out of personal animus. That doesn’t mean that it was the wrong call. It does mean that ultimate transparency is in order.
The AG took a step in that direction on Thursday, acknowledging his own involvement and moving to unseal the search warrant (you can find the gory details here) — while promising to release more information when “appropriate.” NR’s editorial makes the case for sunlight:
If, as it will undoubtedly insist, the federal government had no choice but to take the action it did, it will presumably feel comfortable making that case before the American public. It should do so immediately. Transparency is the bare minimum that law enforcement can provide to reassure the public that it understands the delicate balance between enforcing the law and abusing its discretion.
* * *
Back to things that are not Trump: NR is out with a special issue on education, which you can dig into right here. There’s lots and lots and lots to digest. How schools are wasting Covid cash, the “reading wars,” sex ed in the classroom, campus censorship . . . and a guest essay by Betsy DeVos. Check it out, you’ll be glad you did.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Details, please? Americans Deserve an Explanation on FBI’s Mar-a-Lago Search
These are not trustworthy negotiating partners: Iran Targets Bolton as Biden Courts Tehran
Hmm, turns out the Inflation Reduction Act wasn’t about inflation: Democrats’ Tone-Deaf Spending Bill
ARTICLES
Andrew McCarthy: The FBI’s Mar-a-Lago ‘Raid’: It’s about the Capitol Riot, Not the Mishandling of Classified Information
Dan McLaughlin: How to Prosecute Donald Trump
Charles C. W. Cooke: Bored to Death by Trump
Isaac Schorr: ‘A Wall of Flame in the Women’s Restroom’: Why Starbucks Is Closing Stores across the Country
Isaac Schorr: Peter Meijer Reflects on Trump’s Hold on the GOP after Primary Loss
John Bolton: What We Can Learn from Pelosi’s Taiwan Visit
Caroline Downey: FBI Investigations into Wave of Pro-Life Pregnancy Center Vandalism Stall
Rich Lowry: No, Joe Biden Still Isn’t a Good President
Kevin Williamson: Big Lies Matter
Ryan Mills: Colorado’s Offender-Centered, Anti-Cop Policies Blamed for ‘Crime Tsunami’
Jimmy Quinn: Taiwanese Official Warns of ‘Possible Invasion’ as China Ramps Up Military Activity
Roger Wicker: A National-Defense Renaissance
CAPITAL MATTERS
Andrew Stuttaford reports on a “dilemma” that’s not really a dilemma: China and an ESG ‘Dilemma’
Daniel Pilla explains who is likely to suffer when the IRS gets billions more for enforcement: Expect the IRS to Turn the Dogs Loose
Kevin Hassett flags the danger in recession denial: Recession Deniers Will Give Us a Depression
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Steven Spielberg tries something completely different. From Armond White: In Cannibal, Spielberg Returns to Realism
If you’re not reading Brian Allen’s art reviews regularly, remedy that. I learn something new every time: for instance, that Nashville has the only full-scale replica of the Parthenon in the world. The backstory has a real Devil in the White City vibe to it: The Parthenon in Nashville Brings Temple Ruins Back to Life
FROM THE NEW, AUGUST 29, 2022, ISSUE OF NR
Ryan Mills: Schools Are Wasting Covid Cash
Madeleine Kearns: Sex Talk
Betsy DeVos: Classroom Disruption
Nat Malkus: Covid Costs for Kids
Jay Nordlinger: One Ukrainian’s Life
Jessica Hornik: Chuck It
THE ONLY PLACE YOU’LL FIND EXCERPTS FOR UNDER $3 A GALLON
Andrew McCarthy sorts out the Mar-a-Lago mess:
There’s a game prosecutors play. Let’s say I suspect X committed an armed robbery, but I know X is dealing drugs. So, I write a search-warrant application laying out my overwhelming probable cause that X has been selling small amounts of cocaine from his apartment. I don’t say a word in the warrant about the robbery, but I don’t have to. If the court grants me the warrant for the comparatively minor crime of cocaine distribution, the agents are then authorized to search the whole apartment. If they find robbery tools, a mask, and a gun, the law allows them to seize those items. As long as agents are conducting a legitimate search, they are authorized to seize any obviously incriminating evidence they come across. Even though the warrant was ostensibly about drug offenses, the prosecutors can use the evidence seized to charge robbery.
I believe that principle is key to understanding the FBI’s search of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Monday. The ostensible justification for the search of Trump’s compound is his potentially unlawful retention of government records and mishandling of classified information. The real reason is the Capitol riot.
The Justice Department is not ready to charge Trump for the riot. It lacks proof that he is criminally culpable for the violence. As for the non-violent potential crimes it is investigating — obstruction of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the government — these are based on disputed theories that Trump and his apologists could persuasively frame as a partisan weaponization of the Justice Department against the likely 2024 GOP nominee. Consequently, the DOJ does not want to suggest that Trump is the subject of a criminal investigation related to the Capitol riot. Nor does it want to be perceived as having told a court it has probable cause tying Trump to Capitol riot crimes.
Nevertheless, prosecutors investigating did want to search Trump’s premises for potential evidence of Capitol riot crimes. The former president’s apparent violations of government records and classified information laws gave the DOJ the pretext it needed.
Charles C. W. Cooke, for one, has reached peak Trump exhaustion. Surely, he is not alone:
I am inordinately bored of Donald Trump.
I’m bored of the man himself. I’m bored of his opponents. I’m bored of his supporters. I’m bored of the manner in which every last question that animates our politics is eventually plotted onto a graph that has his face at its center. You name anything Trump-related, I’m bored of it. . . .
“Trump broke us,” people say. Indeed. We used to talk about ideas, rules, positions, consequences. Now we talk about him. Previous generations argued about slavery or tariffs or free silver or the interstate commerce clause. We argue about Donald Trump. And even when we don’t, we end up referring to him obliquely, as if he were the Earth’s core. “What do you think of the governor of Maryland?” someone will ask, and, immediately, it’s back to Trump. What do you think of the decision in Dobbs? Because, you see, Trump did that — or didn’t do that, if you prefer. Nothing can ever be about what it’s actually about; it has to be about Donald Trump. A few years ago, someone told me that my opposition to Trump’s position on American libel law was “actually” driven by my snobbish dislike of his “Queens accent.” Me! A guy who was born in rural England. Does that really seem likely? Never mind.
Ryan Mills, in the latest issue of NR, details how schools are blowing Covid cash:
Presented with more than $139 million in Covid-19 relief money, J. A. Gonzalez, the superintendent of the McAllen Independent School District in South Texas, vowed last year to spend the unprecedented sum creatively, strategically, and appropriately.
Speaking on his SuperTalk videocast in June 2021, Gonzalez called the federal funding “very special” and told parents that he and his staff were working hard to develop a spending plan focused on closing pandemic-related instructional gaps and providing teachers and students with the resources they needed to “get back to the level that we were at pre-pandemic.”
Not surprisingly, the district attracted scrutiny earlier this year after it released a spending plan that devoted millions to projects that some see as unrelated to those goals.
The 46-page plan dedicated $12 million to build intimate, multipurpose fine-arts theaters at the district’s three high schools; $4 million to construct educational pods at a city-owned nature sanctuary; $7.7 million for athletics, including new turf fields and gym equipment; and $1.75 million for an e-sports video-game center.
McAllen is not the only school district that has faced pushback for how it plans to spend its Covid-relief dollars. School districts across the country, finding themselves in the unusual position of being flooded with cash they need to spend fast, have found scores of questionable uses for the money.
Sewing machines, batting helmets, security cameras, band risers, T-shirts, and floor polishers are all among the items that school districts around the country plan to purchase with their Covid money, according to news reports. There are lots of proposals for new playgrounds and updated weight rooms. In Whitewater, Wis., the school district used $2 million in pandemic-relief funding to free up local dollars to install synthetic-turf sports fields. Another Wisconsin school district is paying the superintendent’s wife $130,000 to promote an online-learning tool to district parents, according to a local news report. A Michigan school district proposed spending $120,000 on a food truck for its culinary-arts program and $10,000 for a “nutrition room” to make smoothies for student athletes, Chalkbeat Detroit reported in April.
The questionable spending is just one troubling, though entirely predictable, outgrowth of the haphazard way Congress doled out more than $190 billion in Covid relief for schools. The money came with few guardrails, little guidance about what, exactly, it was for and how to spend it appropriately, and virtually no direction for how to measure success.
Isaac Schorr provides the crime stats — as well as the on-the-ground perspective — that help explain why Starbucks is closing stores:
Amelia Jones worked at the now-closed East Olive Way Starbucks in Seattle for about three years until this spring, and described her experience in an interview with National Review.
Jones acknowledged there is “a high number of houseless people in the neighborhood,” but pushed back on the idea that that represented a threat in and of itself, calling “most of them . . . quite polite.”
But there were exceptions: “Either late winter 2019 or early 2020, we had a lady come in and actually set fire to the women’s restroom,” recalled Jones. “One of my coworkers noticed a smoke smell and he’s like, ‘Hey, is that bathroom on fire?’ And we open the door and there’s like a wall of flame in the women’s restroom.”
“There was a guy who would routinely come in and threaten people. Either he would have a weapon on him — he carried around a broomstick, without the broom part, basically, and he’d threaten people and call people names,” she continued. “But that’d maybe happen once a month.”
A review of crime data from those urban centers confirms that Jones’s experience was not unique to her Seattle location.
A National Review analysis of statistics compiled by the Los Angeles Police Department found that between January 1 and July 20 of this year, 1,777 crimes — including only vehicular break-ins, assault, burglary, vehicular theft, robbery, larceny, arson, and homicide — were committed within a radius of 1,500 feet of the six closing stores.
That includes 326 assaults, 141 robberies, 17 instances of arson, 173 stolen vehicles, and 452 vehicles broken into within an area of the city spanning less than two square miles.
Shout-Outs
Miranda Devine, at the New York Post: FBI searched Melania’s wardrobe, spent hours in Trump’s private office during Mar-a-Lago raid
Christopher Rufo, at City Journal: Soldiers for the Gender Revolution
Geoff Edgers, at the Washington Post: How a Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
Bar Niazov, at the College Fix: CUNY group wants Jewish students to ‘unlearn’ support for Israel
CODA
We’re all starting to feel it, and there ain’t no cure for it. Here’s the Who, singing it. I type, of course, of the “Summertime Blues.”