Dear Weekend Jolter,
That sound you hear is Congress stirring after a long slumber.
Even before Democrats have a chance to take power, the combination of Republicans with axes to grind and nothing to lose, the upcoming midterms, and a president whose second term is increasingly defined by provocation and fan service is producing friction between the two branches that until recently had more of a feudal relationship.
Democrats, to be sure, provide most of the votes in opposition on a given issue. But enough Republicans are joining in to create problems for President Trump and for his whim-driven style of policymaking.
The latest impasse is over renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. While most Republicans support an extension of the surveillance authority, Democrats insist that Trump pull his appointment of Bill Pulte, a housing official and loyalist with no intel background, as acting director of national intelligence. Several Republicans have piled on, with Senator Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) bluntly describing the official as an “incendiary attack dog.” (For the record, our editorial urged Trump to revoke the Pulte pick. Andy McCarthy deadpans, “A minion whose administration function, to this point, has been to mine government files for confidential information that the president might be able to spin as inculpatory evidence against his political enemies would not seem to be a model DNI candidate.”)
With the authority set to expire and tensions rising, Trump offered a midweek olive branch by vowing to seek a “permanent” DNI with relevant experience, then naming federal prosecutor and former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton. But votes on a temporary extension had already collapsed. As Andy sums up, “Democrats will not relent on FISA Section 702 unless Trump rescinds the Pulte appointment, which Trump refuses to do,” but Andy also floats a possible way out of this cul-de-sac.
That’s one front. The FISA fight coincided with a separate confrontation over immigration-enforcement funding centered in part on the Trump DOJ’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which committed nearly $1.8 billion toward payouts to Trump allies who believe they were victims of unfair prosecution. The immigration bill finally cleared Congress this week, after Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche pledged not to proceed with the fund, though efforts to effectively codify that pledge faltered. This, as a handful of Republicans cause headaches for the president on the Iran war.
The acting AG’s compelled pledge, NR’s editors write, is “a sign that Senate Republicans in particular have remembered that they run an independent branch of the federal government.” Dan McLaughlin explains how political reality (as well as Congress) has reasserted itself:
John Thune and his caucus are increasingly exasperated with their relationship with the White House. Trump’s demands for loyalty look like a one-way street after John Cornyn did everything but buff Trump’s shoes with his tongue, and Trump still endorsed his primary opponent. Now, Trump no longer has leverage over Bill Cassidy, or Cornyn, or Thom Tillis, or Joni Ernst — each of whom is leaving the Senate due at least partly to clashes with Trump — or over Mitch McConnell.
Dan’s latter point is perhaps most important of all. The Economist recently described GOP lawmakers defying Trump as the “YOLO Caucus.” Some want to limit political damage in the midterms, but others are newly unchained, free to vote as they please, even if only to exact revenge after the president backed their primary rivals. As Dan notes, there are nine outgoing GOP senators today: “That’s a lot of votes that can’t be coerced.” Axios reported a week ago that even Senate Majority Leader John Thune has hit his “breaking point” with Trump, including over Pulte and the anti-weaponization fund.
Elliott Abrams, in an analysis of how and why Trump’s second term is coming undone, writes that the president’s move to back Cornyn’s deeply flawed primary rival, along with the Section 702/Pulte fight, tell us “a lot about Trump’s second term, which is now one-third over. The common thread is Trump’s indiscipline, his egotism, his reliance on a motley crew of advisers.”
Taken together, the environment means Trump is likely to face mounting pushback, in some cases outright hostility, from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue in the months leading to the midterms, to say nothing of what awaits in 2027. If Trump can’t check his worst impulses, just maybe the motley crew that gets top billing in the Constitution will.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
“It does not have to be this way”: California’s Dysfunctional Elections
The Senate should stop this: No to Todd Blanche for Attorney General
The pool looks better: The Absurd Reflecting Pool Freak-Out
In the end, the jury called this crime what it was: Jurors Got It Right on Karmelo Anthony
ARTICLES
Caroline Downey: Democrats Bury the Me Too Movement
Jim Geraghty: Why Graham Platner’s Supporters Don’t Care
Matthew X. Wilson: How Nancy Mace Self-Immolated
Kamden Mulder: Kik Messaging App Is a ‘Predator’s Paradise,’ Child Safety Advocates Warn
Abigail Anthony: Before the Ambulance Came for Henry Nowak
John Gustavsson: Bernie Sanders’s ‘Wealth Fund’ Scheme Has Already Been Tried
Noah Rothman: Trump’s Revealing On-Air Meltdown
Richard Brookhiser: Gordon Wood’s Honest Approach to History
Allen C. Guelzo: In Memoriam, Gordon S. Wood
Inez Feltscher Stepman: The Four Sources of Voters’ Economic Rage
Rachel Cuda: Republicans Are Standing Up to Sexual Misconduct — and Washington Should Pay Attention
Skyler Safriet: Can the Senate Save College Sports?
Daniel J. Flynn: Is America 250 Not Really in 2026?
Seth Cropsey: In Europe, Trump Can Embrace the Opportunity Russian Weakness Presents
Will Swaim: Payback for Gavin Newsom’s Fiscal Folly
CAPITAL MATTERS
Jamie Tronnes & Emily Kilcrease look ahead to the USMCA review period: Trump’s Replacement Tariffs Will Have Unintended Consequences for USMCA
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen, with a bit of trivia: Where can you find what’s thought to be the only memorial to an overseas enemy combatant in the U.S.A.? Read on: Nathan Hale, Roger Sherman, and One Noble Scot
Armond White, on Spielberg: Disclosure Day: An Unequal Sequel
FROM THE NEW, AUGUST 2026 ISSUE OF NR
Ramesh Ponnuru: The Fights on the Right
Yuval Levin: The Trump-Era GOP’s Dangerous Drift
Christine Rosen: Why Americans Fear the AI Future
Andrew Roberts: Keir Starmer Has Destroyed a British Tradition
Jim Geraghty: Club Dread: On the Ground in NATO’s Nervous Eastern Flank
Jennifer Tiedemann: My Favorite SOB
Luther Ray Abel: Brothers and Blessings
Cynthia Ozick: Devices
TAKE A BREAK, GRAB A BITE — THE EXCERPTS AWAIT
The new issue of NR is out, and you can flip through its digital pages here. Ramesh Ponnuru kicks us off with his cover story on intra-movement struggles:
A well-known and recurring vice of conservatism is a bias toward a pessimism tinged with nostalgia. Think of Whittaker Chambers’s remark about leaving the winning side when he turned against communism, or about the most common understanding of National Review’s opening statement that it meant to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” Or think of Burke’s lament that “the age of chivalry is gone” and “the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”
And while Americans have a self-understanding as an optimistic people, we also have a tradition of deep worry about the republic’s future. Lincoln in 1838 spoke of “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country.” The salutary civic memory of the revolution, he said, was inevitably “fading.” James Madison had the same concern as early as 1788, when he wrote that it was “too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting” the fundamental principles of the American Revolution — which presupposes that with time we would forget them. A little earlier still came Franklin’s famous remark that we had “a republic, if you can keep it.”
In recent years, those conservatives who believe in limited, constitutional government and the free markets it makes possible have had our own reasons to bemoan the passing of a better era. Some of us “freedom conservatives” were surprised to learn, for one thing, that we are not the only kind of conservatives in the wild. In both parties, we have seen an increasing, if baffling, confidence in the ability of central governments to bring about desired economic outcomes via targeted tax increases, subsidies, and government stakes in formerly private enterprises. A debate over controlling the growth of entitlement programs has been replaced by one over expanding them yet more recklessly.
Those of us who retain the skepticism about ambitious government that once seemed to define the right are ceaselessly told that we are obsolete. We do not, the cliché has it, know “what time it is.” It is, to judge from various articles and social media posts, a time for strongman rule; a time to let go of a Constitution that has served our country reasonably well (exceptionally well when we have actually adhered to it); a time to forget everything we have ever learned about how government plans can go awry.
Let’s reset the clock. It’s a time of tax cuts: State after state governed by Republicans has cut its top tax rate and flattened its tax structure. It’s a time of constitutional reclamation: The Supreme Court is as attuned to the original understanding of constitutional provisions as it has been in a hundred years. Even as some of the justices in the majority face criticism from the right for their alleged uselessness, their commitment to undoing the left’s rewriting of the law from the bench has delivered one practical victory after another: on racial preferences, on religious freedom, on the right to life, on the power of bureaucracy, and more.
It is also a time when school choice, including private- and parochial-school options, has expanded much faster and further than in the many previous decades when conservatives and libertarians were advocating it. This victory deserves more attention. School choice is a classic fusionist policy, one that unites most supporters of markets with most religious traditionalists. And it runs directly counter to a set of arguments that have been raised against freedom conservatives. According to these arguments, it is naïve, hopeless, or even wrong to seek any governmental retreat from morally freighted social domains in the name of pluralism and the autonomy of civil society. The thing to do instead is to capture the state and use it to impose sound values.
In truth, of course, both courses of action can be pursued simultaneously. We can, for example, both allow people to contribute more to educational savings accounts and mandate reasonable disciplinary policies in public schools.
The defect of the anti-libertarian argument is its absolutism and practical misjudgment. It turns out that in some important cases, it is possible for government to step back in a way that creates more space for traditionalists; and this can be easier to accomplish, and have more benefits in general, than maintaining the same degree of government control while changing its ends.
Caroline Downey explains what Graham Platner’s primary win tells us about the state of Me Too:
As it turns out, the standard established during the Me Too era is, at least today, conditional on the answer to one question: Can the accused deliver more power to the Democrats? If so, then never mind.
With the candidacy of Maine’s Graham Platner, who won yesterday’s Senate primary as expected, we’ve seen Democrats ditch their supposed reverence for decency and get behind a man with a checkered past involving women, among other serious problems. Unlike in Kavanaugh’s case, the allegations are backed by documentation.
Between his wife catching him in several sexting relationships, the New York Times reporting that he was allegedly abusive with women he’s dated, and his own record revealing a half-nude profile photo on an app that’s been called a “predator’s paradise,” there’s ample cause for Democrats as well as Republicans to drive Platner from public life. But from most mainstream figures in the party, it’s been crickets or waffling, for the single reason that they think he could actually win this thing and thus help Democrats gain control of the Senate.
The mantra of the Me Too movement was “Believe women.” Well, Platner’s ex-girlfriend Lyndsey Fifield came forward and told the Times that he once, during a heated spat, “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm.’” But Fifield is a Republican, so Platner’s supporters are pretending not to hear her.
John Gustavsson, who knows a thing or two about Sweden, cautions that his home country has already tried a version of Bernie Sanders’s AI “wealth fund” idea. It went poorly:
Bernie Sanders announced last week that he will be introducing legislation aimed at creating an artificial intelligence sovereign wealth fund. Sanders proposes confiscating 50 percent of AI equity and putting it into a public fund, having the government act as an active shareholder. Sanders falsely implies that this is a mainstream practice around the world. It is quite telling that Sanders does not understand how Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, built from oil revenue and currently buying small stakes in a number of AI firms at the market price, differs from his own proposed state confiscation. In fact, only Sweden provides a real historical precedent — and that experiment ended in a disaster that forever changed the country’s political environment.
In 1976, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation proposed the creation of löntagarfonder, or employee funds. The issue had been debated since 1971, when the Confederation funded a study to lay out how such funds might work. This study was released to a warm reception in 1975 and officially was endorsed by the government the following year. Under the original plan, any corporation with more than about 50 employees would be required each year to issue new shares equivalent to 20 percent of its profits. Control of these shares would go to the individual unions that made up the Confederation. Gradually, these unions would gain a majority stake, effectively socializing the economy.
This was a radical deviation from traditional Swedish social democracy. . . .
The Social Democrats, a party that had once founded the Confederation and was bankrolled largely by union contributions, found themselves unable to disown the idea.
The timing could not have been worse. After enjoying a post-war boom even stronger than the United States’, the Swedish economy had already stalled under the weight of high oil prices and increased international competition. The mere prospect of the employee funds greatly contributed to families behind iconic Swedish firms like IKEA and Tetra Pak leaving the country.
In 1976, after an election campaign dominated by the employee-funds issue and Sweden’s infamous above-100 percent marginal tax rates, the Social Democrats were defeated, ending a 44-year streak in power. Despite this, the party, still in the unions’ headlock, officially endorsed and ran on establishing employee funds ahead of the next election in 1979. They were again defeated.
Finally, after returning to power in 1982, the employee funds became a reality, albeit in a watered-down form. The minister of finance at the time, Kjell-Olof Feldt, was caught on camera furiously writing a poem in the plenary on the very day the funds legislation was passed. In the poem, he cursed the funds that he — despite publicly endorsing them — knew would hurt Sweden’s economy and cursed the union bosses who forced him, an old-school social democrat, to implement them. Outside the Riksdag, over 75,000 people gathered to protest the funds, in what was (and continues to be) the largest right-wing demonstration in Sweden’s history.
Almost one-sixth of Sweden’s business dynasties had left the country by 1988. This number conceals a far greater capital flight: 67 percent of the wealth held by the 50 wealthiest Swedes was by the early 1990s held by those living abroad.
After the victory of the right in the 1991 election, abolishing the funds became the very first act of the new coalition government.
Allen C. Guelzo, on Gordon S. Wood:
The past six months have not been good to American historians. On Christmas Day, we lost the eminent Daniel Walker Howe, whose books were my nominees for accompaniment to a desert island. Six weeks later, we lost the pioneering Lincolnian, Gabor Boritt. And now, the list has been lengthened to include Gordon Wood, the victim of a parking-lot accident less than a month before the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution he did so much to celebrate as the greatest event of modern world history.
The honors and plaudits he won are the Everests of American historical writing: the Bancroft Prize in 1970 for The Creation of the American Republic, the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for The Radicalism of the American Revolution (and nearly a second Pulitzer for Empire of Liberty in 2009) — even a line in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, Creation was one of the urtexts I was expected to admire and to master, and especially for its description of how Americans developed their own domestic revolutionary ideology (and applied it through their Revolutionary state constitutions).
For my part, however, it was The Radicalism of the American Revolution which made a greater impression. Wood made me understand how thoroughly stuck in the antique ways of pre-modern European society Americans were on the eve of 1776, a world in which slavery was treated with a shrug of the shoulders as just one more practice of servitude, and where commerce functioned within webs of patronage, not customers. The Revolution, Wood explained, constituted a sharp and decisive break with that world. Servitude disappears in America and slavery becomes an aberration that demands either bizarre excuses or unprecedented denunciation. Gentleman is no longer a rank for those who do not work with their hands, but merely a description of polite behavior; honor shrinks as a symbol of importance, and business becomes dominated by the mobility and impersonality of banks and paper money. With a jolt, it becomes clear how, in the span of a single generation, Americans become the people whom Tocqueville admired and who elected Lincoln as president.
CODA
I saw Gary Clark Jr. play last weekend at Wolf Trap — my first time seeing him live and first time catching a show there, though I’ve been in the D.C. area more than two decades. My mistake to have waited so long. Wolf Trap’s easily my favorite (drive-able) venue, and I’ll have to make up for lost time by revisiting often. Gary Clark is a phenom I’ve mentioned here before — once again, I direct your attention to this song, which happened to be his pre-encore closer last weekend — but his opening act deserves a call-out: Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, a true Mississippi bluesman.
Enjoy, and go get outside.