Dear Weekend Jolter,
Consider this a friendly reminder that we don’t actually have to nominate Donald Trump.
At this stage, it is difficult to foresee any other outcome from the voting that begins Monday in Iowa. For most of the cycle, the polling has looked like somebody gamed out a race between Jesus on one side and TSA staff on the other. Wednesday’s debate was a missed opportunity by Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley to actually ding the front-runner, rather than spoon out niche oppo and peddle a microsite. Nationally, Trump still leads by so much that the rest of the field save one could consolidate behind, and direct all their support to, a single challenger and it wouldn’t matter.
That’s if nothing changes, and the Republican race stays on autopilot cruising toward a convention sponsored by My Pillow. But, as our pre-Iowa editorial notes, “nothing is settled until Republicans actually caucus and vote.” GOP voters have a choice, still, and — dare we say — should consider a different one:
[Voters] would be well advised to opt for one of the alternatives who are far and away better on the merits, more likely to win in November, and, if elected, more likely to deliver — free from the wild drama of a second Trump term — conservative results.
. . . It’s true that his fulminations on social media are crude and ridiculous, but this isn’t the fundamental problem. Because he couldn’t bear to admit that he’d lost to Joe Biden in 2020 (after trailing him in every national poll), Trump insisted he’d won and did everything he could to overturn the result, including trying to bully his vice president into violating his oath and preventing and delaying the counting of the electoral vote. When a mob, fervently believing Trump’s lies, fought its way into the U.S. Capitol to try to end the count, Trump did little or nothing to try to stop it.
These were infamous presidential acts and represented serious offenses against our constitutional order. Nothing can justify them, and it’s wrong to simply pretend that they didn’t happen. It’s impossible to imagine Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley, whatever their other flaws, engaging in such grotesquely selfish behavior injurious to our republic. On this basis alone, both are vastly preferable to Trump.
“It’s not too late,” our editorial says, to pick an alternative and “forge a better path for the party and for the country.”
This is the moment when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come might show the Republican Party a grim future with Trump officially at the helm once more. If he wins, any policy-level improvements over the current president, as NR’s editorial notes, would come packaged with the other known knowns about the man: the personal vendettas, the erratic behavior, the trouble attracting talent, the contempt for inconvenient rules, etc. The midterms would be brutal. And who’s up for party lieutenants tending another four-year bonfire of dignity? On Sunday, Elise Stefanik, an unquestionably talented politician who played a key role in the recent ouster of mealy-mouthed university presidents, applied those talents to pretending that the real tragedy from January 6 was the taking of “hostages” by the federal government, echoing Trump. Vivek Ramaswamy pandered in similar fashion. Before the elections begin, otherwise mainstream Republicans already are doing what Chris Christie (employing some revisionism) says he did in 2016 and resigning themselves to backing the presumably winning horse.
But: “Sometimes there are surprises, right?” Rich Lowry asks (hopefully). He notes the last two winners in GOP races were trailing in final Iowa polling. Trump’s lead is, let’s face it, too big for any rival to close by Monday, but one can’t rule out the possibility that Trump finishes worse than expected, Haley or DeSantis beats the polls, Christie’s praiseworthy decision to drop out gives one of them — most likely Haley — a shot in New Hampshire, and the dynamics in the race start to change even a little, with 49 states to go. Henry Olsen entertains the possibility here that the consensus view of this contest could yet be shaken. These alternative scenarios may not be likely . . . but neither are they impossible. Iowa’s severe winter blast is another X factor.
This all said, no matter what happens on Monday and beyond, you should keep your dial set to National Review’s coverage. Jim Geraghty made a swing through snow-pummeled Iowa this past week, and Audrey Fahlberg is there now, working hard to get you, our readers, the latest (she and Brittany Bernstein report here on the hurdles Haley still faces in winning over Christie supporters). Starting Monday, you can visit our new election page for live results, interactive maps, and coverage from the primary contests.
Is the notion of a real race so crazy?
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The Trump editorial, again, is here: Republican Voters Can — and Should — Rethink Nominating Trump
About that budget deal: Congress Punts on Spending
On the defense secretary’s disappearance (before news broke on the reason for it): Lloyd Austin Going AWOL Was Not Normal
ARTICLES
Rich Lowry: What Democrats Will Never Do to Defend Democracy
Dan McLaughlin: Democrats Aren’t Going to Replace Joe Biden
Kayla Bartsch: Hunter Biden Crashes Contempt Hearing, Storms Out after Heated Confrontation with GOP Lawmakers
Ian Kingsbury: ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ Is Increasingly Being Recognized as Unscientific
Becket Adams: The Claudine Gay Coverage Is Pure Calvinball
Andrew Stuttaford: Remembering the Nameless
Zach Kessel: Wikipedia’s Arabic-Language Site Spreads Anti-Israel Propaganda
Noah Rothman: The Protesters Don’t Want to Be Popular
David Zimmermann: National Park Service Retracts Plan to Remove William Penn Statue from Philadelphia Park
Madeleine Kearns: Lives Ruined, Reputations Destroyed: Britain’s Shocking Post Office Scandal
Madeleine Kearns: Scotland Considers Utterly Deranged ‘Conversion Therapy’ Legislation
Haley Strack: Maryland School District Amassed Exorbitant Legal Fees Defending Mandatory LGBTQ Curriculum
Luther Ray Abel: Suicides Are the Cost of Doing Business for an Overstretched U.S. Navy
Brittany Bernstein: Harvard Students Sue University over Failure to Address ‘Severe and Pervasive’ Antisemitic Harassment on Campus
CAPITAL MATTERS
For the latest in her Forgotten Book series, Amity Shlaes turns to a fascinating piece of history, when America’s federal government experimented with a collective farm and predictable results ensued: Casa Utopia: The Tale of an American Collective Farm
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
A new celebrity portrait just dropped, and Brian Allen is there for the viewing: A Great Oprah Portrait and Protests in Stained Glass
Armond White points out the problems with May December’s approach: Todd Haynes’s Sex-Offender Story Hour
IF YOUR RESOLUTIONS INCLUDED READING MORE NR . . . THIS WILL HELP
Speaking of the 2024 race, Rich Lowry pinpoints what President Biden could do — but won’t — to show he’s serious about his defending-democracy rhetoric:
If Joe Biden were, as a matter of the principle, devoted to defending democracy at all costs, obviously the first thing he would do would be to step aside for some younger, more capable, less radioactive Democrat with a much better chance of beating Trump.
Biden taking this step would be a politically electric moment, underlying how seriously he takes Trump’s challenge to the republic and perhaps proving to some skeptics that his rhetoric about defending democracy is more than simply rhetoric.
Biden made much in his hackneyed speech — it probably could have been written by a precocious eighth grader in an AP government class — of a painting in the U.S. Capitol of George Washington resigning his commission.
Biden correctly calls it a sublime act, because Washington, who could have been tempted to leverage his position after the Revolution for personal and political gain, gives up power in the service of his ideals instead.
Biden makes the contrast between the statesmanship depicted in the painting and January 6, which is fair enough.
It probably doesn’t even occur to him, though, that if a supremely talented military and political leader in his prime could step aside for the good of the whole, it should be much easier for a hack politician who is increasingly rickety and unpopular to make a selfless sacrifice for his party and, as he sees it, his country.
Madeleine Kearns has a report on a government scandal, and its TV dramatization, that makes blood boil. The details are as infuriating as they are astonishing:
A new TV dramatization in the U.K., Mr Bates vs The Post Office, tells the true story of accounting shortfalls experienced by employees of the British government–owned Post Office. . . . In Britain, the Post Office operates as a franchise with individual branch managers or “sub-postmasters.” From 1999 to 2015, around 4,000 branch managers were accused of mishandling company finances. During this time, 900 were prosecuted and 700 convicted on criminal charges such as fraud and theft, 236 were jailed, and many more were left in financial and personal ruin as reputations, marriages, and lives were destroyed.
The Post Office claimed that its IT software, Horizon, developed by Japan’s Fujitsu and first implemented in 1999 under prime minister Tony Blair, was reliable and that the shortfalls were explained by malfeasance. The truth emerged only slowly.
In 2009, Computer Weekly published an investigative report into the computer issues based on the testimony of seven postmasters. According to its report, the Post Office instructed the staff in its call center “to tell callers they were the only ones experiencing problems” and “lied to journalists, politicians and anybody else who questioned the robustness of the Horizon system.” Those who publicly criticized the IT system were threatened with legal action or bought off in nondisclosure agreements.
That is, until a group of 555 postmasters under the campaign Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) found strength in numbers. In 2019, JFSA won a High Court case, Bates v Post Office. The judge, Justice Fraser, expressed “very grave concerns,” finding that “bugs, errors and defects in the Horizon system caused discrepancies in postmasters’ branch accounts” . . .
To give an idea of the damages, consider the stories of some of those caught up in the scandal. Individuals such as Lee Castleton, who the Guardian reports was “made bankrupt by the Post Office after a two-year legal battle.” Castleton had purchased a post office in England in 2003 but “within a year the computer system showed a £25,000 shortfall, despite him calling the Post Office’s helpline 91 times as he suspected the problem was with the Horizon IT system.” Or take Seema Misra, who “was sentenced to 15 months in prison for theft and locked up on her son’s 10th birthday while eight weeks pregnant.” It took Misra eleven years of expensive litigation to be acquitted.
Money can be repaid, and defendants acquitted, but nothing can restore the time and peace lost by those falsely accused. Years of distress cannot be undone. Some, like Martin Griffiths, are already dead. Griffiths was a married father of two who spent his entire life’s savings trying to balance a £57,000 shortfall but was sacked anyway. His mental health deteriorated, and he threw himself in front of a bus.
Ian Kingsbury, with Do No Harm, flags new studies that challenge the claims of American medical associations about “gender-affirming care”:
American medical associations are doubling down on their support of so-called gender-affirming care for children even as lawsuits mount and European countries reverse course. America’s public reckoning with the harms inflicted on kids by pediatric gender medicine ticks closer by the day, and indeed several studies published in recent weeks bring the tragic and profound risks into sharper focus.
A study headed by Finnish researcher Riittakerttu Kaltiala examines the psychiatric needs of gender-dysphoric individuals in Finland. The researchers observe that the dysphoric population was substantially more likely than age-matched peers to have received specialist-level psychiatric contact before their first visit to a gender clinic. Worryingly, mental-health needs intensify after they begin the process of medical transition. Whereas 15 percent of patients who underwent gender-reassignment interventions had received psychiatric treatment before visiting a gender clinic, 53 percent had psychiatric contact after their first visit.
“Experts” profess certainty that “gender-affirming care” alleviates mental-health distress. They arrive at this conclusion through deeply flawed studies that rely on patient self-reports of mental health. But other clinical indicators suggest that medical transition in fact exacerbates mental-health distress. A 2021 study found that prescriptions for psychotropic medications increased after kids initiated medical transition. A 2011 study from Sweden meanwhile found that those who underwent sex-reassignment surgery had an appreciably lower life expectancy than the general population, in part due to an increased incidence of suicide.
Lower life expectancy among those who medically transition is also likely attributable to the regimen of cross-sex hormones that transitioners take. Previous research has documented that cross-sex hormone therapy is associated with increased risk of heart disease and obesity. A new study published by University of California, Davis, researchers also hints at greater cancer risk. Specifically, the researchers observe that natal male veterans who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria and/or prescribed estrogen or estradiol have almost double the incidence of thyroid cancer compared with other male veterans. The researchers note that “estrogen probably has a role in the pathogenesis of thyroid cancer,” a good indication that the higher incidence is not simply correlational or coincidental but a direct result of hormone therapy.
Luther Ray Abel unpacks the problem of Navy suicides:
Jacob Slocum killed himself in an engineering space while the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) was laid up in a prolonged maintenance period. He was one of three “successfully” suicidal sailors — as is the way with suicides, there were no doubt more who failed. Similarly, the USS George Washington had a rash of up to ten suicides in ten months during its five-year availability in Newport News, Va.
There’s nothing novel about Slocum’s death other than the name. When ships go to the yard, sailors kill themselves. The brass know it, the senior enlisted exacerbate it, and the junior enlisted bear it. While suicides during a yard period (by which I mean any extended repair cycle) are the most horrific outcome, there are a host of lesser, endemic miseries that could be avoided if the Navy either accepted that the yards are unfit for habitation — especially for carriers, whose residencies can run up to five years — and budget the crew quarters and work day accordingly. Otherwise, get sailors out of there and over to some ships that could use them. Two things here are true: The Navy cannot halt its operations for fear of suicides — it has responsibilities larger than any individual — but also, there are ways for the Navy to augment operations that may very well reduce suicides by sending sailors to commands that offer purpose. . . .
All of this is said with love for the sea service and her sailors. Save the Navy from itself, Congress, and set aside money for rehabilitating shipyard capacity (relieving pressures) and expanding permanent housing and facilities in Newport News and Washington — those yards are hellholes. As for ships, the Navy preaches redundancy aboard while Congress hasn’t seen fit to grant the same to the fleet. The Constellation-class frigates show promise. Let’s see more of them — the destroyers and their crews are begging you.
The fleet needs ships, the ships need sailors, and the sailors need help. For the love of God, get it to them.
Shout-Outs
Jarrett Stepman, at the Daily Signal: Carjackings in DC Doubled to a Staggering 959 in 2023
Dan Hannan, at the Washington Examiner: The beginning of the end of identity politics
David Leonhardt, at the New York Times: The Misguided War on the SAT
CODA
For a change, I’m going full indie to close out the note today. Beirut is not a band I know a great deal about, but I have to admit that every time I put on The Flying Club Cup, I listen all the way through. “Nantes” gets its hooks in you. The whole album is charming, and completely unique. Hope you enjoy.
Have a great weekend, and thanks for reading.