Dear Weekend Jolter,
A golf course, I’ll readily concede, is not the most pressing matter of our time, with America’s commitment to Ukraine appearing to dissolve into a fine mist, France on fire, and midterm elections looming that could deliver a shock to the GOP.
But it’s that perspective that makes the latest project publicly undertaken by President Trump — a gesture, it would seem, toward his dream job as capital planning commissioner — all the stranger.
The president has vowed to convert D.C.’s public East Potomac Golf Links into a “World Class Championship” course. The goal, according to his Truth Social posts, is to be able to host major tournaments ranging from the U.S. Open to the Ryder Cup, while creating “many Jobs” and fixing up a course that “is old, broken, dilapidated, and of no further use or effect.”
Any honest local will readily concede, as well, that the course in question, which stretches southeast from the Jefferson Memorial, is in rough shape and that, to cite another presidential complaint, the nearby seawall is collapsing. But this entire enterprise is characteristic of Trump’s habit of identifying a real, specific problem and then overdoing the solution in a way that just ticks people off.
The Washington region, first of all, does not suffer for lack of upscale (albeit private) golf courses: Congressional Country Club and TPC Potomac at Avenel Farm in Maryland and Trump National Golf Club in Virginia among them. This project is not filling a metropolitan need. As to Trump’s claim that the East Potomac facility is “of no further use or effect,” the fact that it is the busiest public golf course in the region and logged nearly 125,000 rounds last year indicates otherwise.
The course is ragged, but it’s inexpensive and easy to access, with world-class views of the Washington skyline.
Trump says the course will still be public once the overhaul is finished — a process he claims will begin in November and will shutter the course for 15 months — but what fees and tee-time availability might look like is unclear. (Adding to the uncertainty, other officials have denied knowledge of any such concrete plans.)
For now, the course is the subject of a bitter and brutal court battle, which escalated when crews swooped in over the Columbus Day weekend and removed more than 400 trees from the grounds. Officials claimed this was related to recommendations from a 2019 report, but U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes rejected the explanation, saying the government has lost “all of its credibility” in the case, temporarily blocking further clearings, and warning of “contempt proceedings” in the event of violations.
She also rejected a request by the DOJ that she recuse herself, and Trump called her a “crazed lunatic.”
The casual golfer — which is to say, most golfers — tends to appreciate his local patch, in the way one gladly frequents the neighborhood watering hole or diner with a reliable breakfast special even if the doors creak. Sometimes, you want Olive Garden, not the Inn at Little Washington. On a personal note, and full disclosure, I semi-regularly use the course’s two-tiered driving range. It’s a welcoming environment for kids, and my son likes to putter around their practice green. One recent Saturday, I walked up with no tee time to see if he could tag along on one of the nine-hole courses (he likes to chase after my drives, like a Labrador). Minutes later, we were playing. A “World Class Championship” facility is unlikely to be so accommodating.
This is just one duffer’s opinion. Your yardage may vary. But there’s also the matter of priorities, and why projects such as this keep grabbing the president’s attention. Jim Geraghty writes,
Now, maybe you love golf, or maybe you don’t; maybe you love the idea of redesigning the East Potomac Golf Links, maybe you don’t. But it ranks very, very low on the list of priorities of the American electorate. President Trump has run into trouble on a lot of fronts in his second term, but one glaring problem is that Trump spends a lot of time and energy on projects that interest him, and that do not interest the American people.
Especially so, with midterms days away.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The situation in France gets worse: France in Flames
This is very much fair game in a Senate campaign: Scrutinizing Abdul El-Sayed’s Radicalism Isn’t Islamophobic
On the Ukraine fiasco: Trump Shouldn’t Throw Ukraine to the Wolves
The courts should step back: Courts Should Not Micromanage Prisons on Transgender Issues
ARTICLES
Daniel Foster: Could This Time Be Different on Ukraine?
George Weigel: Trump’s Strategic Blindness on Russia
Abigail Anthony: Has Woke 2.0 Started?
Rich Lowry: He Didn’t Ask
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Don’t Be Cowed by AI
Tanner Nau: Top RFK Adviser’s Resignation Sends Shock Waves Through MAHA Movement
John O’Sullivan: A New French Revolution
Noah Rothman: The Pogrom Inside the Riots
Richard Goldberg: It’s Time for a Reset in U.S.-Israel Relations
Brittany Bernstein: How PR Pros Are Convincing Americans to Hate Data Centers Less
Ludovic Hood: How Democrats Lost Their Way on Gaza
Christopher Nye: Xi’s Invitation to American Students Comes with Dangerous Strings Attached
Gregory W. Slayton: GOP Candidates May Pay the Price for Trump Administration Self-Dealing
Will Swaim: California’s Peculiar ‘N-Word’ Case Against Tesla
Eva Terry: China Is Still Haunted by Its One-Child Policy
Charles Hilu: Amy Acton’s Mom Claims Candidate Lied About Childhood in Attack Ad — Despite Extensive Record of Abuse
Jeffrey Blehar: Vivek Ramaswamy Reminds Voters Why They Never Liked Him
John R. Lott Jr.: Yes, Armed Civilians Can — and Do — Stop Mass Shootings
CAPITAL MATTERS
Ryan Bourne, on another side of prediction markets: Prediction Markets Are Not ‘Just Gambling’ Platforms
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White, with the review we’ve been waiting for: The Hideous Deceptions of You Can See Everything
Brian Allen jumps between continents for a celebration of mosaics. Take the tour: More Mosaic Madness, from the Adriatic to the Great Plains
FROM THE NEW, DECEMBER 2026 ISSUE OF NR
Jim Geraghty: Bracing for Two Years of Trench Warfare
Charles Hilu: Can Susan Collins Part the Blue Wave?
Charles C. W. Cooke: The Democrats Are Coming
Elliott Abrams: The Iran Conundrum
Eva Terry: NASA’s Next Mission
Andrew Stuttaford: OK, Joneser
Me: How the West Won Teddy Roosevelt
SOMEBODY LET THE EXCERPTS OUT
The new issue of NR is out, and you can thumb through its pages without any risk of paper cut here. Jim and Charlie grace the cover, the latter of whom I’ll excerpt here, on the election everybody should really be watching:
If the Democratic Party wins a majority in both houses of Congress in November 2026, I will be nervous, but it won’t keep me up at night. If the Democratic Party wins a majority in both houses of Congress in November 2028, I shall become a raging insomniac.
I don’t mean to imply by this that the election in November is unimportant. Au contraire. Justices Alito and Thomas are both getting on in years, and if something were to happen to them, President Trump would find it much easier to replace them with faithful originalists if the Senate remained in Republican hands than if it were populated by 51 Sheldon Whitehouses. Nor can one meaningfully separate what happens in 2026 from what happens in 2028 and beyond. Senate majorities, in particular, are built over time, which means that the most important predicate for a Democratic Senate majority in 2029 is a Democratic Senate majority in 2027.
Nevertheless, the immediate stakes are different. Trump doesn’t have much of a legislative agenda for a Democratic Congress to thwart, and because he is feckless and corrupt, the prospect of some oversight from the legislature is welcome. The Democrats are full of bad ideas at present, but they do not hold the White House — and, indeed, they cannot hold the White House — for at least another two years. I am not one of those people who fetishize divided government for its own sake, and yet, given the tumult of the last 24 months and the general directionlessness of our federal political class, I can think of worse things than a period of frothy deadlock.
After that, though? Well, I shudder to think of it. We hear a great deal of eschatological talk these days, and most of it is arrant nonsense. Pace the bobbleheads on TV, it is not in fact the case that the United States will be “over” if one’s favorite candidate does not win, or if a given policy is implemented by the legislature, or if the Supreme Court’s majority rules in this direction or that. But this scenario? This one is different in kind. To listen to the Democratic Party in 2026 is to hear a group that is not so much promising to enact a particular agenda as vowing to permanently change the key rules of the game. And that cannot be allowed to happen.
Naturally, the architects of this plan have been smart enough to smother their designs in euphemisms — “reform” being chief among them — and to develop academic-sounding theories that cover up their baser aims. But no clear-thinking person should be fooled by the ploy. Suffice it to say that if the more radical figures within the firmament get their way, the next period of Democratic dominance will lead to the end of the Supreme Court as a useful branch of government, to the transformation of the Senate into a smaller version of the House, and to the admission of new states for the sole purpose of making national elections less competitive. If completed, this project will gut the heart of the American system of government and render the citizenry angrier than it has been since the Civil War.
John O’Sullivan unpacks the tumult in France:
What is at present being enacted on our laptops, websites, and television screens is another French Revolution. It is possible — indeed, greatly to be desired — that this revolution will be contained, halted, and reversed, but that possibility seems remote at the moment. Rather, the contagion is spreading throughout France with minimal resistance from the authorities and currently leaping over borders to northern Italian cities and with almost identical slogans — Gaza! No longer an actual place but a Myth — that have little to do with either French or Italian life or serious politics.
This current Revolution also borrows from terrorism the doctrine of recognizing none of the usual distinctions between innocent and guilty, participant and bystander, soldier and civilian, foreign and domestic. Anyone who is not tearing down French institutions or is self-evidently prosperous or merely respectable is suspect and thus deserving of brutal punishment, not excluding rape. Such terrible confusions often happen in revolution as in war. But this Revolution has introduced some new and significant distinctions in its fragile and temporary blend of Islamo-Gauchisme — Muslim-owned stores are protected by some rioters and their advisors.
And because of technical advances in communications, almost every revolutionary moment — every building burnt, every bourgeois hauled from his car and stripped, every mob storming a police station, every fashion emporium or mom-and-pop shop looted — is being broadcast to the world. If or when the authorities seek to restore some semblance of order, their repression will be broadcast, too. But there will be this difference: Every revolutionary outrage will encourage the criminals and activists to greater efforts; every police overreaction will shame the authorities and be cited as an argument for “dialogue’’ and “restraint’’ by the one-eyed media.
There are no justifications for this upsurge of violent rebellion, of course — merely angry grievances by groups of discontented people, mainly young, many from immigrant backgrounds (even if born in France), all persuaded that they are either oppressed or uniquely sensitive to the plight of the oppressed, and protected by their ignorance and illiteracy from reality.
If there are no justifications, though, there are causes. Take, for instance, the original cause of their rebellion. Students stormed out of their schools complaining of poor conditions that required more expenditure. Doubtless there are some poor conditions. But why is that? Students and their communities could help to repair those conditions, but they think that is the job of the state. And it is. France spends massively on public schools as on everything else. Public spending amounts to 57 percent of the country’s GDP — among the highest rates in the European Union — but conditions are poor throughout the public sector as in all socialist societies which encourage demands but fail to reward responsibility. In schools and colleges, those low standards increasingly include the ideology that no one shall fail and all shall have prizes. The result is, as the distinguished philosopher Chantal Delsol writes in her commentary on the coming French presidential election: “Thus, in France today an immense group of illiterates is produced, wedded to screens, ignorant of spelling and deprived of a vocabulary.’’
Abigail Anthony spots a troubling trend:
Ever since AOC quoted a local city councilman as saying, “Woke 1 was crazy,” a troubling thought has been lurking in my mind: The phrase “Woke 1” means there must be a Woke 2 — and potentially a Woke 3, Woke 4, and so on. I never believed that “wokeness” died; it simply grew quieter because its loudest activists retreated to private rooms for off-the-record discussions. Still, I’ve been wondering when the second era of wokeness would emerge.
Now, I believe I’ve already seen it. This summer, I observed aggressive illiberal extremism in three particular cultural episodes that eerily resembled the fashions of 2020: the Cambridge cover-up, the Clancy trial, and the Cornell case.
For those who didn’t follow the story, Jason Arday was the youngest black professor ever at the University of Cambridge in England — except his entire scholarly career was replete with academic misconduct, including extensive plagiarism and research fraud. He also regularly fabricated personal feats, like saying he that he volunteered abroad with a charity that has a policy to not send volunteers abroad. (See my reporting in National Review for a more detailed summary of his fictitious biography and academic misconduct, including our discovery that he falsely claimed to be a visiting professor at Ohio State University.) Arday resigned as more of his lies were exposed in the press, and nine days later, he was found dead in his home.
Arday personified wokeness: His “research” (even if it had entirely lacked stolen data and language) was entirely bogus drivel designed to advance predetermined conclusions about “racism” that would justify increasing DEI, and he surely would not have been deemed qualified for an academic position anywhere (let alone at Cambridge) if he fell into the “straight white male” category. But since his publications and career ascent aren’t limited to this past year, he cannot be construed as marking a new chapter of wokeness. Rather, the relevant barometer is that academia and mainstream outlets reflexively supported him this summer, even as his claims and papers were being picked apart in some outlets. Cambridge University initially defended Arday, as did a large swath of academics within and outside the school. The mainstream media largely avoided discussing the incriminating evidence behind the accusations and further downplayed the extent to which he had exaggerated his life achievements.
Richard Goldberg calls for a reset:
It’s time for a reset in the U.S.-Israel relationship. No, not because Israel did anything wrong. To the contrary, it’s because Israel is so essential to America and too many Americans don’t understand why.
For decades, U.S.-Israel ties centered around foreign aid. Washington gives, Jerusalem takes, and American policymakers defend the cost as an investment in a solid ally. That model, however, no longer reflects today’s multifaceted, interest-based alliance.
Fundamentally, the United States wants to win the century over the Chinese Communist Party. And we should expect Israel to fully commit to that victory as well. After all, America’s most powerful adversaries are the leading enablers of Israel’s most powerful adversaries.
But America will only win the century if it dominates super intelligence, quantum computing, critical supply chains, and defense technology. Israel is one of the world’s most important centers of innovation in every one of these areas — with both a capability and will to align its own strategic investments for the benefit of the United States.
Americans should want Israel to invest billions of dollars, both public and private, into SI and quantum research and development in full cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy, national labs, universities, and corporations.
Last year, President Trump issued an executive order launching a national Genesis Mission — a new Manhattan Project for SI, quantum, advanced energy, and scientific discovery. This summer, the U.S. welcomed Japan as the Genesis Mission’s first international partner.
Israel should be the second to join the mission, bringing its own multiyear investment pledge and offering preferential U.S. access to Israeli innovations. The move would also build on last year’s U.S.-Israel SI and Energy agreement, which envisioned a joint working group to help make America energy and SI dominant with Israel’s help.
CODA
From that time Santana and McLaughlin produced a tribute to Coltrane.