Dear Weekend Jolter,
The Democrats appear to have before them three possible paths: double down on progressivism and its avatars, and on the politics of confrontation; take the James Carville approach, play “possum,” wait for the Trump administration to destroy its standing with the public, and swoop in; or visibly tack toward the center while backing away from the unpopular stances that helped cost the party the election.
The latter strategies have their takers. Chuck Schumer’s willingness to cooperate with Republicans on the recently passed spending bill embodied the lie-low approach. Gavin Newsom, attempting the rebrand, conspicuously moved toward the conservative position on trans athletes; Pete Buttigieg last month adjusted his political settings to run a script that mocked diversity trainings as “like something out of Portlandia.”
But it’s no surprise that Door No. 1 is the most attractive option to Washington’s camera-hungry, upwardly mobile progressive class.
Following up the theatrics on display during President Trump’s address to Congress, Democrats are fulminating over Schumer and others’ decision to go along with the spending bill last week to prevent a shutdown. “The temptation to abandon prudence in favor of scenery-chewing pugnacity seems irresistible,” Noah Rothman writes. So white-hot is the anger that Schumer rescheduled a book tour, citing security concerns amid the CR backlash.
Jim Geraghty clarifies that “Democrats are raging at Schumer because he’s got a weak hand, not because he played the hand he was dealt particularly badly.” But rage is currency, and the Democrat with wads of it — the one helping channel the anger and increasingly mentioned as, at a minimum, a future Schumer challenger — is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This week, she started hitting the road for rallies with Bernie Sanders. “As Democrats scramble to find an authentic and effective messenger for the second Trump administration, there is a growing desire to elevate Ocasio-Cortez, 35, within the party in some way,” NBC News reports, citing interviews with lawmakers, aides, and strategists. It’s not just insiders. A CNN poll that was otherwise dreadful for Democrats showed the New York representative leading on the question of who best reflects the “core values” of the party. The question was open-ended, and the top tier was tight; Kamala Harris and Sanders, close behind, took silver and bronze.
Democrats, Rich Lowry writes, are still nursing the “hangover of their dogged, dishonest support for a comprehensively failed presidency, joined to an irrational commitment to outlandish positions on cultural issues.” Elevating AOC (or Harris, or Sanders) would be the ultimate hair of the dog. As Rich notes, “She’s a cartoonish version of the Democratic Party that the GOP hopes to run against.”
There’s yet time for another figure to fill the void. But with no consensus on the way forward and factions battling for supremacy, the party looks to be putting off, still, the kind of autopsy that Republicans underwent after 2012. “One of the biggest problems for Democrats is that . . . they’re not really able to have a serious postmortem about what went wrong electorally . . . because the grassroots will go insane,” Audrey Fahlberg explained at this week’s NRI Ideas Summit. As Charles C. W. Cooke pointed out, another problem is that Democrats are enduring a drought of generational talent:
Without an Obama or a Clinton or a JFK to attract attention, the mediocrities run rampant. At a push, an army can tolerate an Elizabeth Warren or a Brian Schatz or a David Hogg, but it cannot put them atop the general’s horse without inspiring disarray, defeat, and embarrassment in the face of its peers.
Until that changes, the party will appear directionless because it is. Perhaps Ocasio-Cortez or one of her compatriots will seize the reins, claiming to best represent the ethos of righteous indignation. But Dan McLaughlin cautions that “anger is not an argument.” That same CNN poll showed Democrats are more unpopular than ever. Some of this is driven by a base that evidently wants to see more AOC-style boxing, but also by moderates and independents.
Four years (or two, with the midterms) is not a lot of time for Democrats to choose a path that, somehow, leads to their earning support from both those camps. Ironically, their survival still depends on Trump, and his impressive capacity to squander goodwill. Dan, with the last words:
With Biden gone, the underlying tensions within the party need to be, if not resolved, at least renegotiated. . . .
The good news [for Democrats is] that Trump’s coalition is unwieldy and unstable even before you get to the fact that it is led with all of the erratic tendencies of Trump. Democrats seem unlikely to fix what ails them. But in 2026 and 2028, they could still easily find — thanks to Trump — that they don’t have to.
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Before serving up the rest of the links: Did you catch this week’s NRI Ideas Summit, either in person or on the live stream? We had a great crowd, in a great venue, with incredible guest speakers from Brian Kemp to Ron DeSantis to Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the full complement of NR’s talent pool, and you can read up on just some of the highlights here and here.
Relatedly, we’ve also gone live with a special page devoted to Buckley’s life and legacy, in honor of his 100th birthday. Have a look around.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
“The administration’s case for deportations here is righteous, and if handled properly, it is popular. But our constitutional system should not be its casualty.” On the week’s major court fight: An Unwelcome Fight Over Obeying Court Orders
It will take Congress: Kill the Education Department — with Legislation
USAGM entities can still do much good: Fix VOA, Don’t Kill It
Restraint didn’t work: Trump Is Right to Target the Houthis
ARTICLES
Audrey Fahlberg: This Time Around, Trump’s Team Is ‘Doing What He Says’
Audrey Fahlberg: DeSantis Talks Up Wife Casey as Potential Successor as Florida First Lady Teases Governor Run
Charles C. W. Cooke: Blow the Houthis Out of the Water
Brittany Bernstein: Democrats Have a Change of Heart on the ‘Jim Crow Filibuster’
Dan McLaughlin: How Can Shakespeare Be ‘Decolonized’ When He Was Never Colonial to Start With?
Noah Rothman: MAGA’s Crisis of Confidence in America
Young Kim: We Must Restore the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Not Eliminate It
Michael Brendan Dougherty: History Ended Five Years Ago
Andrew McCarthy: Why Trump Doesn’t Want Judicial Review of His Deportation of Venezuelans
Jimmy Quinn: The Most Important China Book of the Decade
Rich Lowry: Trump Is Right to Emphasize Shipbuilding
James Lynch: Trump Administration Promotes Hunter Biden Whistleblowers After IRS Retaliation
CAPITAL MATTERS
Steve Hanke & Guy Petcho discuss the bright spots and the storm clouds in Argentina’s economic recovery: Milei Isn’t Out of the Woods Yet
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White on The Alto Knights: Schizo De Niro
The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services are all on the chopping block. Brian Allen looks closely at the funding, and makes use of the word “flapdoodle”: Thoughts on Federal Arts Money After President Autopen
A ROUND OF EXCERPTS, ON THE HOUSE
Audrey Fahlberg reports on one of the core differences between Trump’s first and second terms:
Many Trump 1.0 White House officials came in with the moral imperative to serve as a check on Trump, believing they could steer the ship in the right direction despite their own personal misgivings about his character and policy aims. For some administration officials, that meant taking papers off the president’s desk and leaking to the press. For others, that meant resigning from their posts in protest.
In 2016, “there was a good group of people around the president, a good core group, but a lot of people had, I would say, potentially different views on how things should be executed, right? And they were trying to get things done the way they thought the president wanted,” [lobbyist and former Trump campaign official David] Urban says. In other words, the first administration was staffed with people who were trying to “interpret” Trump’s rhetoric and policy goals.
The second Trump White House understands the assignment, Urban says: “Donald Trump doesn’t need an interpreter.” From tariff policy to national security, this Trump White House is letting Trump be Trump.
“This time,” he says, “they’re just doing what he says.”
The loyalty didn’t emerge out of thin air. The president’s transition team implemented an intense White House vetting process and worked hard to staff the administration with aides who would not subvert the president’s agenda. The president’s running mate and eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., were involved in that effort, telling reporters in the fall that they were hellbent on sniffing out the “snakes” who they believed hindered the Trump agenda during the first go-round.
Naturally Trump, who has long complained about hiring “disloyal people” during his first term, made the final call on all high-profile picks.
“There was turnover within his first administration. This time around, he clearly is picking people that he’s had longer relationships with,” longtime Trump pollster John McLaughlin tells National Review in an interview. “There’s more recognition of who’s really out to achieve the goals of what the president said his movement is about, rather than people who are about themselves.”
Many current staffers inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue worked on the 2024 campaign and have been through depositions, investigations, and searing media criticism along the way, sticking it out through the aftermath of the Capitol riot and a flurry of criminal indictments that would have sunk any other candidate.
“A lot of the core nucleus were with the president all the way through some horribly difficult times, when everyone said he would never get back here. And so, this is a pretty epic core, it’s a pretty battle-hardened group,” James Blair, assistant to the president and a deputy White House chief of staff, told National Review in a wide-ranging interview last month.
Congresswoman Young Kim makes an appeal to reform — not eliminate — the U.S. Agency for Global Media:
China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran received welcome news over the weekend when the Trump administration issued an executive order for the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) “to be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”
Reforms at the USAGM are necessary, but entirely gutting the agency silences the voices of freedom-loving people around the world that have been oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party, Kim Jong-un, the Kremlin, the ayatollahs, and other repressive regimes dating back to the mid-20th century.
Ending the Agency for Global Media is not the answer. We must restore the USAGM to its intended purpose: a soft-power tool that promotes America’s national security interests.
As the administration works to rein in federal spending, eyeing reform within the USAGM is understandable, as certain agency platforms have strayed away from their core mission of supporting freedom and democracy abroad. For example, why was Voice of America advising staff members to avoid calling Hamas “terrorists” after the October 7 attack on Israel, discussing “white privilege,” or posting biased political views?
This also comes at a time when Americans’ trust in media is at a record low, with a recent Gallup survey revealing that just 31 percent of Americans exhibit “a great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in our own media’s ability to report the news fairly.
There has long been bipartisan appetite for USAGM reform. In 2013, then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted that the agency’s broadcasting was “practically defunct in terms of its capacity to be able to tell a message around the world.”
We cannot forget the original purpose of these programs: to promote freedom and America’s national security interests. Today’s threats are not confined to land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. We are in an information war. If the truth is not broadcast around the world, we are losing, and propaganda and disinformation by our adversaries fill the void.
USAGM platforms have uncovered human-rights abuses by authoritarian regimes. For example, Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service broke the news that CCP authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region were persecuting Uyghurs in “reeducation camps.” RFA’s Uyghur Service is the only Uyghur-language news outlet that is independent of the CCP’s influence. RFA also revealed the horrors happening inside North Korean gulags or detention camps.
Let’s shake things up. Dan McLaughlin takes dead aim at a preposterous push to “decolonize” Shakespeare’s birthplace:
Now, leave aside the general insanity and asymmetry of the whole woke worldview and its various hydra-headed ideologies of “decolonization,” Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), critical race theory (CRT), and the rest. Leave aside also the fundamental betrayal of an organization — literally, a trust — that is turning against the very person and cause to which it owes its entire existence and purpose. Let’s just focus on the idea that it is necessary to “decolonize” William Shakespeare. I start with one very important question:
Are you people idiots?
Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616. It is believed that most of his most famous plays were written and first performed roughly in the period between 1595 and 1606. Look at a map of the British Empire in 1606. It’s not a very big map. England ruled virtually nothing outside of its own islands. Indeed, we say England because what is now the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was not even founded until the union of England and Scotland in 1707, nearly a century after Shakespeare’s death. England was still in the midst of taking full control of Ireland. I’m pretty sure the “decolonizers” aren’t trying to add the perspectives of the Scots or the Irish.
England did not then rule any of India, which was under the control of the Mughal Empire, rulers of a fifth of the world’s people. Only in 1604 did England escape a draining war against the massive Spanish Empire, which had launched the Armada to conquer England in 1588, when Shakespeare was 24. The Battle of Lepanto, when the forces of Europe began to break the Ottoman Empire’s control of the Mediterranean, was fought during his lifetime; the siege of Vienna, which finally turned back the threat of Muslim conquest of the European heartland, was fought 67 years after his death. The East India Company was founded only in 1600, one of a series of joint stock companies that aimed to expand English overseas trade; the first of these to be royally chartered, in 1555, was The Mysterie and Companie of the Merchant Adventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Islands and Places Unknown, commonly known as the Muscovy Company, which sought to open Russia to trade. The first permanent English colony in the Western Hemisphere, at Jamestown, Va., was settled in 1607. The first slaves were not introduced there until 1619, three years after Shakespeare died, and racial chattel slavery did not become institutionalized until the 1660s. Up until the 1640s, there were more European slaves arriving in North Africa than African slaves arriving in the Americas, and far more British slaves held in Africa than African slaves held in British colonies. The Royal African Company, which was granted a monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade, was not founded until 1660. . . .
There was nothing colonialist about Shakespeare. He comes to us as, if anything, the last representative of pre-colonial England, closer in time and outlook to the High Middle Ages than to our own day. He didn’t read English novels because (unless one counts the Canterbury Tales) none had been written yet. He did not advance the voice of a hegemonic culture; he gave a voice to an island that had thus far made little enough cultural mark in the arts upon the capitals of the continent.
CODA
What you’ve read to this point was mere prelude to what truly matters: Steven Wilson came out with a new album last week. It is, in his words, a “two-track conceptual epic where I take the listener on a Kubrickian journey into the darkness of outer space, seeing humanity for what it really is — tiny, insignificant, dwarfed by cosmic distances involving billions of years.”
Roll with it. As with much of his work, especially the last few years, the album is immersive, the songs composed of textures as much as they are of emotive solos and melodic scaffolding. The Overview should be heard front to back, but for a sample, this song (part of a longer one) is a treat.
Enjoy, and thanks for reading.