Dear Weekend Jolter,
The John McCain comments, the Access Hollywood tape, the Russia investigation and then the Mueller investigation, Charlottesville, the E. Jean Carroll allegations, the “perfect” phone call and the first impeachment, “stop the steal,” January 6, the second impeachment, the investigations springing from “stop the steal” and January 6, the Alvin Bragg/Stormy probe, the Alvin Bragg/Stormy indictment . . . and now this.
Donald Trump’s folder of crises he’s so far survived is thick enough to counsel against a revival of “the walls are closing in” coverage following the Justice Department’s damning indictment, unsealed one week ago.
But, as NR’s editorial noted, “just as paranoiacs sometimes have enemies, people obsessively pursued for alleged violations of the law by their political opponents sometimes commit criminal offenses.” If ever the lonely assumption that Trump always gets away with it should be revisited, it’s now.
Jim Geraghty notes the elements working in Trump’s favor in the Mar-a-Lago documents case — namely, the Florida location and the judge for the proceedings. Christian Schneider argues here that the indictment is a “gift” to the defendant, and Dan McLaughlin takes a clinical approach to the text’s weaknesses and strengths. Trump, for his part, predictably vowed not to bow out of the 2024 race, pleaded not guilty to all 37 counts, raised money, and is playing the martyr. So far, polling suggests he’s not been terribly hurt by the charges among primary voters. That stated, the DOJ indictment is the heaviest blow to land on Trump since the billionaire’s fall to the presidency in 2016. Not only does the document detail reckless and foolishly defiant behavior, but the evidence, as Andy McCarthy points out, does not come from Trump’s enemies: It comes from his lawyers, as well as from “documents Trump does not (and could not) deny having.” His attorney general Bill Barr told Fox News Sunday, “He’s not a victim here. He was totally wrong.”
Republican officials, and particularly those who claim to be competing against Trump for the party’s presidential nomination, should craft a response that involves more than attacks on the DOJ “double standard.” That is a completely valid concern — and also one that sounds like caviling upon contact with the evidence that Trump treated classified files like an amazing Pogs collection. Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, among others, seem to be avoiding this trap. Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, is making the story about the “weaponization” of the DOJ; Vivek Ramaswamy has a pardon challenge he’d like to tell you about.
It sounds crazy, but the GOP front-runner’s rivals actually have a say in his inevitability. Here’s Noah, with some advice:
History suggests that Republican voters’ views are not static. They can change provided the right inputs. The real question is what Trump’s rivals for the 2024 nomination will do. If they press the case against him, they’ll stand a chance of winning voters away from his side. If they instead take the path of least resistance, dismissing the significance of the DOJ’s indictment because making the case that Donald Trump jeopardized U.S. national security is just too hard, his odds of being the Republican nominee in 2024 will remain good.
And here’s Dan, with a sensible question:
Why are we still doing this? Is there really nothing better we could do with our time and our talents? The men who signed the Declaration of Independence pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the formation of a great nation and the defense of God-given rights. We put ours into where one man stored his boxes, how he paid off one of his mistresses, and whether he really groped a lady in a department store.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Europe shows the way: The World Is Turning against Gender Experiments on Children
Meanwhile: California Is Losing Its Mind
ARTICLES
Dan McLaughlin: How to Read the Trump Boxes Indictment
Dan McLaughlin: The Questionable Case for Judge Cannon’s Recusal
Andrew McCarthy: Frivolous Trump Arguments against the Mar-a-Lago Indictment
Noah Rothman: Anti-Wokeness Isn’t Enough to Beat Trump
Noah Rothman: When the Scandal of the Century Has No Consequences
Jim Geraghty: The Truth about Covid’s Origin Is Coming Out
Ajit Pai: The Death of the Internet, Five Years Later
Charles C. W. Cooke: The Primary System Is Failing Americans
Caroline Downey: Sexually Abused by Her Father, Teen Sought Help but Was Steered into Medical Transition
Ryan Mills: After Shootings and Killings, Colorado School Leaders Backtrack on Anti-Cop Stance
Jay Nordlinger: ‘We Have to Resist’
Brittany Bernstein: Enes Kanter Freedom Calls Out Biden for Treating World Dictators with Kid Gloves: ‘Very Soft’
Michael Brendan Dougherty: The Democratic Spirit
Will Swaim: A Very California Coup
John McCormack: Texas Democrats and Republicans Find Common Ground on Abortion
Andrew Follett: UFO ‘Whistleblower’ Is a Trap for the GOP
CAPITAL MATTERS
Kevin Hassett says the Fed hasn’t gone far enough: Throwing Spitballs at Inflation
Robert H. Bork Jr. explains the workings of a “cartel”: An Insider View of ESG
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen is even-handed in his assessment of a new Picasso show — “part revelation, part pretense, part grift, and part delicious,” in his words. I would strongly recommend reading all of them: Picasso at the Brooklyn Museum: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Armond White finds the sincerity amid the artifice in Wes Anderson’s latest: Asteroid City’s Ground Zero Fantasy
THE EXCERPTS ARE CLOSING IN
Andrew McCarthy, who is providing the fairest-minded analysis out there of Trump’s legal woes and has been for years, just kicked off a series of pieces scrutinizing — one by one — the “frivolous” arguments we will be hearing and are hearing about the Mar-a-Lago indictment. Here you can find Part One, Part Two, Part Three. Starting at the beginning (as good a place as any): Andy tackles the argument that classified intel reports compiled by government agencies are “personal records” under the Presidential Records Act:
Trump defenders argue that the agency intelligence reports he took with him from the White House when his term ended, then stored in his Mar-a-Lago estate and resort club, were “personal records” that belong to him, pursuant to the Presidential Records Act (Chapter 22 of Title 44, U.S. Code). Leaping from this premise, they contend that Congress, in enacting the PRA in 1978, implicitly superseded the 1917 Espionage Act (Section 793 of the criminal code, Title 18), at least insofar as the latter had been applicable to presidents. Ergo, the argument goes, Trump cannot properly be charged with unlawfully and willfully retaining national-defense information — as he was last week by Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith.
These are frivolous claims.
I would like to give Trump apologists the benefit of the doubt that they are simply confused about the scope and purpose of the PRA, rather than that they are blind loyalists who are swaddling their What about Hillary? pique in some statutory raiment — hoping no one notices it doesn’t fit. So let’s go with confusion . . . which begins with conflation of two related but different concepts, ownership and control.
The American people spend roughly $5 trillion per year on the operations of their government. The reports of official business that government agencies generate belong to us, not to government officials who staff executive agencies, and not to the president, who is the chief executive. The president — within the bounds of the law — has control over government records during his term in office. But he does not own them, and they are not his property. . . .
The PRA has nothing to do with agency-generated records, such as the reporting generated by the Defense Department, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies. The PRA is not directed at reports of activities carried out by executive agencies that Congress created, authorizes, and funds, and as to which it conducts oversight of their operations (a big part of why record-keeping is required).
Rather, the PRA relates to records that the president himself generates, or personally causes to be generated, during the presidential term. . . .
Still, it’s not enough to observe how undeniable it is that the intelligence-agency documents pertaining to national defense described in the indictment could not conceivably be deemed a president’s personal records, as defined by the PRA. More fundamentally: They’re not presidential records at all.
China’s Covid cover-up is unraveling in real time. Jim Geraghty walks us through it here:
Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag report that multiple U.S. government officials have concluded that the first three people on Earth infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, were three scientists doing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. . . .
Through Freedom of Information Act requests, the public-research group Right to Know uncovered U.S. State Department cables that shed more light on what the U.S. government knew about the outbreak and when. Vast swaths of those cables have been redacted, but the headlines are sufficient to tell the story: “[Wuhan Institute of Virology] personnel with possible [People’s Liberation Army] ties.” “Official Chinese websites show robust cooperation between WIV and PLA Academy of Military Medical Sciences” “PLA presence at WIV continued after construction completed.” “Cyber evidence of PLA shadow labs at WIV and Bioengineering University.”
As the Sunday Times of London report emphasized, this is not a declaration that Covid-19 was a biological weapon. But it indicates that the research being doing on viruses at the WIV — including gain-of-function research that attempts to make viruses more virulent and contagious — was being done in the context of attempting to develop new and more deadly biological weapons. Keep in mind, this research on how to make viruses more virulent and contagious was being conducted right in the middle of a city of 8 million people that was a major transportation and trade hub. If you were deliberately trying to cause the biggest global catastrophe imaginable, you wouldn’t make choices that were all that different than those the Chinese government made.
Meanwhile, another State Department cable from July 2020 concluded, “Beijing knew earlier than they admit” and “Initial outbreak could have been contained in China if Beijing had not covered it up.”
Caroline Downey has published her most recent installment in NR’s “Detransitioners” series. These are difficult to read — painful to read — but the stories are important to tell, in order to give the full picture of what “gender-affirming care” means in some cases:
A few weeks shy of her 16th birthday, Evie got her first testosterone prescription. . . . Evie received the intravenous injections once a month at first. By the time she was 17, she received them twice a month.
A soprano II in choir as a child, Evie always had a high-pitched voice. She immediately noticed her voice dropping while taking T.
“I was happy at the time because I was like, ‘Oh it makes me sound more manly,’” she said. “While I was on it, I saw no issues with what was changing. I didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t care whether it was temporary or permanent. As long as I was taking it, I was happy.”
At 16, she brought up the idea of top surgery. Her mom recommended a breast reduction instead, but the therapists egged Evie on and promised to help her get a referral for a double mastectomy, she said. “They were almost pushing it on me,” she said.
In May 2021, Evie had the procedure. At the orientation, a doctor poorly explained what he was going to do, she said. A nurse mentioned that, if for whatever reason she didn’t like the result, she could have implants put in.
“I found out years later that’s completely false,” she said. “They flat-out lied to me. There’s not enough skin on my chest to have implants. They were explaining that it’s very low risk, they never have any complications.”
A few weeks after the operation, Evie developed a bad infection in the areas of her removed breasts where Jackson-Pratt drains — devices that collect bodily fluids from surgical sites — had been installed.
“There was pus going into my lungs,” she said. “I had to be admitted into the ER because I was in the most excruciating pain I had ever felt. Both locations were super inflamed, they were leaking pus, my chest was swollen, I could barely breathe.” While in intensive care for two weeks, the doctors told Evie that the infection could have been life-threatening if she hadn’t caught it when she did. . . . At 18, Evie and her mom moved to Brooklyn. She was hit with an avalanche of physical side effects from the transition. Her hair started falling out in chunks, for instance.
“My hair line was moving back really far,” he said. “I had bald spots all over my head, which you can imagine is very humiliating as an 18-year-old. My body hair started coming in way thicker. My voice didn’t go back to normal like they said it would.” . . .
Today, Evie is eight months into detransitioning. She’s committed to raising her child in a way that is insulated from the gender craze, including coercive therapists and peer-pressuring friend groups. “I would die before I let my kid go through that,” she said. She also vows to never let the medical field gaslight her the way her mom was.
ICYMI, former FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s piece marking the five-year anniversary of the repeal of “net neutrality” rules highlights the cynical hysteria that characterized that debate:
Shortly after the 2014 midterm elections (which went well for Republicans, delivering them control of the Senate and strengthening their House majority), President Obama published a YouTube video and blog post “urging” the FCC — an independent agency — to regulate the internet like a slow-moving utility. The FCC chairman at the time, who had previously proposed to maintain broadband’s “information service” classification, promptly caved, embracing a heavy-handed regulatory approach and delighting the White House and partisan activists.
I dissented from this decision at the time. I pointed out that the internet was just fine, rendering regulation pointless. As I put it then, the rules were “a solution that won’t work to a problem that doesn’t exist.” And I worried that they would reduce the incentive to invest in next-generation networks, slowing broadband deployment and prolonging the digital divide. That worry was well-founded. Following the FCC’s decision, and for the first time outside of a recession, independent studies showed that investment in broadband infrastructure declined.
In January 2017, times changed with the new Trump administration. The new president designated me chairman of the FCC shortly after Inauguration Day. In May of that year, we proposed to repeal these regulations. In December, we voted to do so. And on June 11, 2018 — five years ago today — that repeal took effect.
Going only on press coverage, social media, and political rhetoric, you would have been justified in preparing for civilization’s demise.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) proclaimed, as did “news” outlet CNN, that this was “the end of the Internet as we know it.” Not to be outdone, a columnist at the New York Times moaned that “the freewheeling internet has been dying a slow death,” and that repealing net neutrality rules “would be the final pillow in its face.” The Senate Democratic Caucus’s Twitter account proclaimed, “If we don’t save net neutrality, you’ll get the internet one word at a time” — putting each word on a separate line to emphasize the danger. Famed telecommunications regulatory experts like anonymous street artist Banksy and Silicon Valley representative Ro Khanna predicted that internet applications would become pay-per-view, with consumers having to pay $1.99 per Google search or to purchase them in packages. And for good measure, multiple U.S. senators called the decision “un-American.” . . .
In sum, the critics were confident and clear: A digital apocalypse was upon us. Half a decade later, we can now make a sober assessment of their predictions. Were they right?
In an era defined by the paranoid style of American political argument, it may not surprise you to learn that they were not. In fact, they were diametrically wrong. The evidence is indisputable today that in the five years since the FCC’s decision to repeal net-neutrality regulations went into effect, American consumers are benefiting from broadband networks that are stronger and more extensive than ever. According to independent measurement service Ookla, average fixed broadband speeds in the U.S. are 287 percent faster today than they were in June 2018 (269.28 Mbps download speeds today versus 93.98 Mbps in 2018). Average mobile broadband speeds have increased even more, at 570 percent (156.51 Mbps versus 27.47 Mbps). Millions more Americans have access to the internet today compared with 2018, thanks in large part to private investment in digital infrastructure.
Honorable Mention
An important notice about an important program, from our friends and partners at National Review Institute:
National Review Institute’s Burke to Buckley Fellowship Program is accepting applications for the fall in Chicago and Dallas. Burke to Buckley is intended for mid-career professionals from a wide variety of professions and industries. Over eight sessions, a small cohort gathers to engage in discussions of first principles and their application to current issues. Experts from academia and National Review serve as moderators for each session. To find more information and to apply, click here. Applications close on July 15.
Shout-Outs
Kate King, at the Wall Street Journal: Hotel Owners Start to Write Off San Francisco as Business Nosedives
Brooke Singman, at Fox News: Grassley: Burisma executive who allegedly paid Biden has audio recordings of conversations with Joe, Hunter
Abigail Anthony, at the College Fix: Parents angered by Princeton president’s graduation address
CODA
In the category of songs that are meant to be played, on repeat, for the duration of an early-summer drive with the windows down, Van Morrison provides. Enjoy, and thanks for reading.