Dear Weekend Jolter,
So, to recap:
President Trump and his board are ready to keep shuttered and possibly demolish the Kennedy Center in a fight that’s essentially over whether he can affix his name to it. The original, rejected title groaned under the weight of three definite articles.
He tried banning several news outlets from the White House, prompting a lawsuit, a court order, and a blackout from the presidential TV pool.
He entertained visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping by showing him the portrait he commissioned of his predecessor’s “autopen.”
He’s continuing to pursue an oddly Parisian D.C. arch that he says would host lots of drones, “plus Snipers,” and be “a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch.” Nothing like it in the world, he says. You’re telling us.
Oh, and his eldest son reportedly had his wedding party partly paid for by a Russian oligarch, prompting Republican Senator John Curtis to seek a committee investigation. Good luck. (He does so “entirely in vain,” Jeff Blehar writes. FWIW, Trump says his son is “paying [the money] back.”)
“Trump TV” is now streaming, in other news.
Amid perhaps weightier debates over AI and the rise of the socialist left and great-power competition as well as competition with two-bit, yet intractable, Middle Eastern regimes and terror gangs, it’s easy, if not entirely upright, to treat White House shenanigans as background noise from time to time.
But I’m sure many of you are thoroughly staggered, still, by the first family’s conduct, even after years of exposure to it. “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy,” Jon Lovitz’s Michael Dukakis famously said in a long-ago SNL sketch. Set aside that he was referring to good ol’ anodyne George H. W. Bush. Nothing quite captures the emotion of political exasperation, bordering on helplessness, like that late-night gripe. It is relatable.
On paper, Trump isn’t exactly . . . winning. The Iran war drags on, and on. He’s 20 points underwater in his overall approval rating, on a good day. As Dan McLaughlin tracks, it’s not looking very good for Republicans in the Senate and gubernatorial races either.
But that’s kind of the issue. Even with such dreadful conduct from the White House, Republicans are hitched to its starring occupant. Jim Geraghty notes that GOP candidates are increasingly trying to distance themselves from the president and especially the war: “It’s as if someone flipped a switch.” But September is mighty late to repent.
The just-concluded “midterm convention,” which some GOP pols sat out, was a Trump-fest. As Charles Hilu reported from the scene, “attendees wore credentials with photos of the president dancing, and organizers at the American Airlines Center, home of the NHL’s Dallas Stars and NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, replaced team photos hanging in the arena with pictures of moments from Trump’s political career.” The president urged candidates to “pretend that I’m on the ballot,” and the Republican National Committee is warning office seekers not to run from him.
GOP prospects remain gloomy, not despite Trump, and phantom dividends won’t help. That sound you hear is the thumping. But Trump remains outwardly unaffected, even unbothered, by the turmoil he’s caused. These days, he goes not abroad, but into the District of Columbia, in search of monsters to destroy.
We’re losing to this guy. Here’s Andy McCarthy, from last weekend, asking where Congress is on the Kennedy Center and discussing the upsides of such episodes for otherwise unelectable (or so we tell ourselves in the quiet hours) socialists:
Republicans used to defend Congress’s prerogatives. Today’s Republicans are cowed by Trump, so they either hide under their desks or sing along with his rants during these increasingly frequent tantrums. This emboldens Trump to engage in still more narcissistic malfeasance by which the public, in ever larger majorities, is repulsed. Democrats, despite the lunacy of their socialist base, gain credibility with voters by stridently condemning these unpopular actions — as Trump persists in helping his opponents by making the public debate all about him, not them.
The midterms are shaping up as a trouncing that Republicans will richly deserve. And when the impeachment proceedings start next year, the president will have himself to blame.
To borrow another cultural shibboleth from that golden era of television: Serenity now.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The sales pitch and the reality are not the same in Virginia’s ballot question campaign: No on Virginia Amendment 1
Good first steps: Trump Strikes Blow Against Gender Experiments on Minors
Was the reputational damage worth it? Trump’s Costly Greenland Play
ARTICLES
Charles Hilu: The World’s Largest Data Center Comes to a Struggling Ohio Town
Noah Rothman: True Crime, False Witness
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Insist on Jimmy Lai’s Release
Dan McLaughlin: How the Gubernatorial Races Are Breaking
Charles C. W. Cooke: What Nikole Hannah-Jones Doesn’t Say
Brittany Bernstein: How NYC Public Schools Failed Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Daughter
Seth Cropsey: The Growing Houthi Threat Presents an Opportunity
Christian Schneider: Who Needs the FCC?
Robert Pondiscio & Nick Gibb: What America Can Learn from England’s Education Revolution
Jim Geraghty: The Democrats’ 2026 Midterm Freak Show
Daniel Foster: Just Don’t Make Terminators
Spencer A. Klavan: Nobody Knows the Future
Yuval Levin: DOGE and the Doomers
Noah C. Gould: Americans Are Still ‘Bowling Alone’
Becket Adams: ‘Woke’ Is Not Dead
CAPITAL MATTERS
Joel Kotkin, on the demographic crisis: The Politics of Depopulation
The law of unintended consequences is undefeated. John Berlau & Luigi Bilibio supply the latest evidence: From Munitions Shortage to Ebola, Dodd–Frank Minerals Measure Makes Things Worse
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen visits a time capsule of a town, to see “Hopper House”: Walking in Edward Hopper’s Footsteps
Woof. Armond White pans the Pitt flick: Heart of the Movie-Star Beast
READY, STEADY, EXCERPTS
Brittany Bernstein takes a closer look at the viral Nikole Hannah-Jones essay on New York’s shoddy schools, and at the culprits the author declined to name:
Nikole Hannah-Jones admitted in a recent essay for the New York Times magazine that she had erred in sending her daughter to a struggling New York City public school in the name of social justice. The essay reveals both an admirable degree of self-introspection on Hannah-Jones’s part and a remarkable lack of curiosity about why, exactly, Public School 307 provided her daughter with such a poor education.
Hannah-Jones was unsparing in detailing all of the symptoms associated with New York City’s lackluster public education system — poor test scores, chaos in the lunchroom, massive gaps in grade-level knowledge — but her ideological blinders limited her to one diagnosis: underfunding, driven by racism.
“Nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts,” Hannah-Jones writes, citing a 2019 analysis by EdBuild as evidence. . . .
The study she cites is not only seven years out of date, but also excludes federal funds. Including federal funding, schools serving low-income and non-white communities receive more money per student, not less.
PS 307 actually spends a whopping $52,000 per student each year — more than three times the national average of $16,526. The school also benefits from a smaller-than-average student-to-teacher ratio of 9 to 1, and teachers make more than $100,000 a year on average.
Meanwhile, at nearby Community Roots Charter, which is also in front of a public housing project, more than 80 percent of students are proficient in math and reading — despite the school spending less than half of what PS 307 does ($26,000 per student), according to the Manhattan Institute. . . .
In New York, high teacher salaries, staff compensation, and pension costs — negotiated by powerful teachers’ unions — drive up costs, as do a high cost of living and heavy spending on special education.
The teachers’ unions, which are not mentioned a single time in Hannah-Jones’s essay, have simultaneously levied their power to weaken educational accountability measures. The state once required student achievement measures, including grades from state tests, as part of its Annual Professional Performance Review system. But a 2019 law removed the requirement that state tests be used in teacher and principal evaluations and made the choice of assessment subject to collective bargaining. In 2024, the New York State United Teachers union (NYSUT) backed legislation to de-link teacher evaluations from student performance measures like test scores and required evaluation systems to be collectively bargained. The legislation, which passed via unanimous vote in both the state assembly and the state senate, further eliminated an expedited disciplinary procedure for teachers who repeatedly received “ineffective” ratings.
Daniel Foster takes a crack at a “philosophical guide” for avoiding AI doom:
To adapt what Robin Williams said to Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, the latest and greatest from Anthropic or OpenAI can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Michelangelo — because it read everything ever written about him, billions of times, and that text imprinted adjustments to billions of relationships between its tokens — but it has never smelled the inside of the Sistine Chapel. . . .
Despite all its fearsome means, it gets its ends, in every single instance, from people who want to write emails, fix their dishwasher, and kill Russian infantrymen. To the extent AI helps such people do such things, it does so by being fed prompts that map the relevant causal relations into purely formal symbolic structures. To cite a more ancient philosopher who nevertheless got at a similar truth, the AIs are all in Plato’s cave, running statistics over the shadows we project onto the wall.
This means that the fears about AI killing us all are still fears, at the metaphysical level, about what human beings will ask AI to do. The so-called alignment problem, bandied about by the tech moguls trying to scare us into helping them capture market share, is thus definitively not a problem about the potential malevolence of AI, not a problem about its ill will, since AIs don’t have wills ill or otherwise. . . .
Solving the alignment problem, or more simply regulating AI, thus involves addressing Dreyfus’s critique from three different angles.
The first — and at least theoretically, the easiest — is to not hook AIs up to embodied capabilities that can transform their misguided manipulations of formal symbols into global calamities in the physical world. Don’t give them the nuclear launch keys. Don’t make Terminators.
Charles Hilu, relatedly, puts faces to the data center debate, reporting from an Ohio town slated to host the world’s largest such AI facility:
Tim Neal has seen his southern Ohio town of 2,000 change dramatically over his 73 years.
Neal watched the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a uranium enrichment facility here, reach its height during the Cold War and then be decommissioned in 2001. Workers there are currently finishing cleanup of the site, and the area, which is already lacking employment opportunities, was set to lose thousands of jobs upon the completion of their task.
But now, Neal is set to see his hometown transform once again thanks to the construction of a massive industrial facility that will help power an economic boom with significant national security implications. SB Energy, a subsidiary of Japanese investment company SoftBank, will build the world’s largest AI data center on the grounds of the former enrichment plant. Neal and his neighbors who were gathered for an afternoon drink at The Grove, a local watering hole, are optimistic about the potential for economic revitalization — but they harbor the same concerns that have made data centers massively unpopular among Americans across the country.
“They’re real noisy, and if they don’t have a closed water loop, they use a lot of water, and, irregardless, they use a lot of electric,” he told National Review. So long as the center has its own power source and doesn’t expand beyond the government-owned confines of the old plant, it won’t bother him too much. “If they come outside that ground, that’s going to be bad,” he said.
National and state-level polling reveals a deep unease among Americans about data center proliferation; respondents report concern about noise, water and power usage, and pollution. That unease has made data centers and the AI boom they’ll power a significant issue in the upcoming midterms. Roughly 70 percent of Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their area, and politicians on both sides of the aisle have seized on the backlash, producing regulations or moratoria on the building of such facilities. The issue’s salience has only grown in the face of concerns over potential out-of-control AI models.
As the former home of a massive industrial plant — and the future home of the world’s largest data center — Piketon and its residents offer a window into how the issue of data center construction is playing out across the country.
The Department of Energy announced the project earlier this year, and SB Energy projects that it will provide 35,000 construction jobs and 2,500 operations jobs. The construction jobs alone make up more than the population of the county in which Piketon resides, and such opportunities are sorely needed in the area. Pike County has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in Ohio, and the latest census data show that 19 percent of its residents live in poverty.
CODA
How about some sturdy, concept-album ’70s prog? Thankfully, we have Genesis for that.
Thanks for tuning in.