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 The C.A.A. will be on vacation starting tomorrow. Regular posts will resume on Saturday, December 6th. 

Rage Against the Machine

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

 

I’m not a Democrat, so I’m not duty-bound to hate Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries for silly reasons like “they don’t fight.” Instead, I get to hate them for more sensible reasons, like the fact that most of their policies are bad.

 

My contempt for the “they don’t fight” school of criticism is partly a symptom of political PTSD. It’s the same thing Tea Party populists used to say about Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan circa 2015, and look how well that’s turned out for our country.

 

When you select for “fighters” in your leadership, you’ll get leaders who treat politics as performance art.

 

“They don’t fight” is also irksome in this case because it underestimates the challenge Schumer and Jeffries are facing. Their branch of government has been swallowed nearly whole by the executive, with the eager acquiescence of the majority in the House and Senate. They’re not just in the minority, as McConnell and Ryan were during the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, they’re in the minority of a branch that barely still exists. They’re playing “Congress” on hard mode.

 

And when they did recently get a rare opportunity to fight, they took it and scored a clear political victory—the first time a minority party has ever improved its political standing by instigating a shutdown. Cut ‘em some slack.

 

Above all, “they don’t fight” bothers me because it absolves American voters of the blame they deserve for the mess we’re in. Reelecting a domineering sociopath after a failed autogolpe was an act of collective madness; reelecting him and handing him majorities in both houses of Congress, guaranteeing that he’d govern with near-impunity for his first two years, may be the most reckless thing the American electorate has ever done.

 

If you’re faulting Schumer and Jeffries for not fighting, you’re letting the rotten voters of this country off the hook for having chosen to give the opposition virtually no power to restrain an aspiring autocrat. We all cope with the civic disintegration of the United States in our own way, and that’s what most of the criticism of the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate is: cope.

 

Most, but not all. As the drama between Reps. Chuy García and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez plays out in the House, I’m gaining a better sense of why so many Democrats despise their party’s leadership.

 

Rigged election.

 

García represents a deep-blue district in Illinois. Late last month he filed the paperwork to run for a fifth term in Congress but was hit soon after with bad news when his doctor advised him to quit for the sake of his health. His wife’s multiple sclerosis has also taken a turn for the worse, and the couple just adopted one of their young grandchildren, who was orphaned after García’s daughter passed away a few years ago.

 

After thinking about it, he changed his mind and announced on November 4 that he’ll retire after serving out the rest of this term. All well and good—except for the timing. The deadline for candidates to enter the race had expired just the day before and, as it turns out, that was no coincidence. Per CNN, “One day before his announcement, García’s chief of staff, Patty Garcia, who has no relation to the congressman, filed petitions with the Illinois State Board of Elections to run for the seat ahead of the 5 p.m. filing deadline that day.”

 

That’s the electoral equivalent of insider trading. García and his chief of staff were privy to inside information about his retirement; instead of announcing it immediately and giving hopefuls in his district a chance to throw their hats into the ring, they kept it quiet so that his chief of staff would be the only Democrat to beat the deadline. Essentially, the two “rigged” the coming House election by gaming the timing so that she would end up running unopposed in a primary.

 

García’s organization even quietly helped her collect signatures to qualify for the ballot.

 

It was classic scummy machine politics—and not the first example in which he’s been involved. He, too, “inherited” his House seat when the previous occupant blindsided the district by announcing his retirement and endorsing García on the same day. Yet, with one exception, none of García’s Democratic colleagues had an issue with what he and his chief of staff did.

 

The exception was Gluesenkamp Perez, who was so offended by it that she filed a privileged resolution condemning Garcia’s actions as “beneath the dignity of his office and incompatible with the United States Constitution.” In a floor speech on Monday, she made her case succinctly: “If you’re not going to run, you don’t get to choose your successor, no matter how noble the work you have done beforehand.”

 

She’s right, and a few members of her party said so. Yet when the House voted yesterday on whether to kill her resolution, the only Democrat to join her in opposition was centrist Jared Golden, who will also retire after this term. The rest of her colleagues were furious at her—her, not García—and let her hear it, with one going as far as trying to block her from speaking on the floor because she was wearing jeans.

 

Jeffries announced Tuesday morning that Democratic leaders would oppose Gluesenkamp Perez’s resolution when it returned to the floor for a vote on final passage, but his statement only proved her point. Instead of explaining why it’s supposedly fine for a House member to connive in handing his seat to an anointed successor, Jeffries resorted to argle-bargle about what a fine progressive and swell guy García is. At no point did he try to defend what the congressman did because what García did is indefensible, as everyone understands.

 

Hakeem Jeffries fights … his own members, when they dare to call foul on naked corruption within their party. My political PTSD from covering 10 years of the filthy Trumpified GOP is suddenly flaring.

 

Is there any good reason for Democrats to be Team García here instead of Team Gluesenkamp Perez?

 

Unity above all?

 

I don’t know about good reasons, but there are reasons.

 

Given Democrats’ obsession with “messaging” and “distractions,” I’m sure there’s a camp inside Jeffries’ caucus that stupidly believes the infighting risks “distracting” from Epstein Week in the House. It doesn’t. The average Barstool Sports reader has a good idea of what’s going on with the Epstein files, I suspect, but ask them about García versus Perez and they’re apt to think you’re talking about an upcoming welterweight fight.

 

Such is the public interest in Epstein that war with Venezuela might not succeed in distracting from it. Stay tuned.

 

The left being the left, there may also be some apprehension about singling out a Hispanic member for disapproval at a moment when Latino voters are peeling away in droves from the GOP and reconsidering their political options. But that’s also stupid, and not just because Gluesenkamp Perez is Hispanic herself. Latino disaffection with Trump is being driven by powerful political forces, from the high cost of living to ICE’s renegade immigration tactics. Compared to that, an inside-baseball process dispute among House Democrats won’t register with anyone who doesn’t already subscribe to Roll Call.

 

The closest thing to a “good” reason for siding with García is that Democrats are a bit … sensitive at the moment to disunity in their own ranks.

 

Progressives want Chuck Schumer’s head on a pike after the Great Shutdown Betrayal of 2025, never mind that Schumer voted against ending the standoff and reportedly convinced his members to keep it going longer than they wanted to. The base is enraged that Senate Democrats couldn’t hold together to maximize their negotiating leverage, particularly when faced with an opponent as ruthless as the president. To stand a chance against the partisan enemy, the left must prioritize unity—even if, as in García’s case, that means overlooking contemptible behavior by its own side. Annnnnnd here comes my PTSD again.

 

Gluesenkamp Perez is firing inside the tent at a moment when Democrats are desperate to have everyone firing outside of it. And by bringing her objections to the House floor rather than resolving them privately, she’s setting a precedent that might encourage future Democrats to call out each other’s unethical behavior with formal legislative action (ahem), creating a string of embarrassments for the party.

 

An effective political faction does need to maintain a degree of unity to be effective, of course. But it beggars belief to watch the opposition, led by Hakeem Jeffries, choose unity over self-policing at a moment when the ruling party’s experiment with that choice has produced the most freakishly, almost proudly corrupt administration in American history. Having watched Republicans overdose on partisan heroin daily for a full decade, Democrats are reaching for the needle.

 

The case for disapproval.

 

So the first thing to say in Gluesenkamp Perez’s defense is this: If you’re worried about which precedents are being set in Congress, consider that naming and shaming election-riggers like Chuy García might set a virtuous one by deterring future Democrats from emulating his tactics. Everyone hates corrupt machine politics (except the politicians who benefit from it), right? Well, machine corruption is slightly riskier today than it was a few days ago now that someone on the Democratic side is calling it out.

 

Gluesenkamp Perez’s gambit has another benefit. It’s a signal that Democratic officials are taking voters’ disgust at the party’s leadership seriously.

 

Democrats’ favorability sank to 34 percent in July, the lowest Gallup has ever recorded for the party. Partly that’s due to progressive disaffection (“they don’t fight”) but it also reflects the problems that drove last year’s election catastrophe. Too woke in cultural matters, too remote from cost-of-living challenges, and waaaaay too old and fragile: The case that the Democratic establishment was hopelessly “out of touch” was broad and deep. They needed a rebrand, desperately.

 

Their latest round of candidates has gotten to work on addressing that, but the fact that the party continues to be led mostly by too-old, too-familiar faces like Schumer’s makes a true rebrand difficult. And when the current despised Democratic establishment gets to choose its own successors, as happened with Chuy García and his chief of staff, a rebrand seems all but impossible. As left-wing data-cruncher David Shor noted, it’s probably not a coincidence that some of García’s most ardent defenders in this dispute were also dead-enders about Joe Biden’s supposed continued viability as a presidential candidate.

 

Enter Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, insisting that if Democrats simply must be saddled with an unpopular machine atop the party, that machine should at least not be self-perpetuating. If Jeffries is worried that a competitive election in a district as blue as García’s might have produced another officeholder in the fringy Zohran Mamdani mold, I don’t blame him—but I also won’t be surprised (well, a little surprised) if Mamdani proves as popular as, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is. The first step to solving a political image problem is actually giving voters a chance to elevate Democrats whom voters find likable, right?

 

“The left needs fresh blood” can’t mean “the left needs Chuy García to choose his replacement.”

 

There’s one more thing this episode does for Democrats, although maybe it doesn’t matter much in 2025. Gluesenkamp Perez’s stand is a small gesture at taking democracy seriously.

 

Americans don’t take democracy very seriously. If they did, we wouldn’t have the president that we do. Kamala Harris and her party worked hard last year to identify as defenders of democracy and the constitutional order, even dragging Liz Cheney out on the trail to make the civic case against Trump. That produced a Republican trifecta in charge of the federal government, with concerns about authoritarianism washed away by concerns about grocery prices like tears in the rain.

 

But Americans do have certain strong-ish opinions about democracy—specifically, they hate partisan redistricting. Our two parties are engaged in an arms race on that front at the moment, of course, forced by a prisoner’s dilemma to redistrict ruthlessly for the sake of maximizing their chances at winning the House. Voters hate the idea in principle, though, as it amounts to letting a state’s majority party pick its own voters by drawing the lines of House districts to give itself a heavy advantage.

 

Trump’s mid-decade redistricting ploy and the Democrats’ reprisals are destined to further shrink the ever-shrinking number of truly competitive House districts. According to the Cook Political Report, just 16 seats next fall will be true toss-ups, while another 18 “lean” toward one party or the other. That’s less than 8 percent of the House that’s fully in play. That’s what’ll decide whether the president gets to govern autocratically in his final two years or not.

 

It’s ridiculous, Americans know it’s ridiculous, and it’ll seem that much more absurdly ridiculous as unseating the dominant party in any given House district becomes almost impossible. Throwing a spotlight on García’s chicanery is Gluesenkamp Perez’s way of getting ahead of that backlash. Politicians shouldn’t pick the winners in elections—not via redistricting and not by gaming the filing deadline with a handpicked successor to orchestrate an outcome almost by default.

 

Bad omen.

 

And so I don’t understand why Hakeem Jeffries felt obliged to take a position on Gluesenkamp Perez’s resolution, which ended up passing this afternoon with 23 Democrats in favor.

 

If he needed to appease García’s friends in the caucus by issuing a statement vouching for his good character, fine, I guess. But for Jeffries to oppose a rebuke that’s plainly warranted is necessarily to ally himself with corruption against accountability in the name of partisanship. It’s probably the single Trumpiest thing he’s done as minority leader.

 

And it sure doesn’t bode well for Never Trumpers’ fantasies about a return to good government if Democrats regain power in 2028, replete with aggressive legislative reforms to curb the runaway powers of an imperial presidency. It’s nice to imagine the out-party resolving to “Trump-proof” the executive branch once it gets the chance to do so, but it already had the chance to do so in 2021 and 2022 and achieved … not quite nothing, but close to nothing.

 

Speaker Hakeem Jeffries is almost certainly not going to ride herd on President Gavin Newsom if he’s not willing to remain at least neutral about wrist-slapping a retiring congressman who got caught practicing “election denial of another kind,” as David Axelrod put it. If we’re lucky, he’ll be replaced before he gets a chance to take the gavel. But America is seldom lucky anymore in politics.

The Pike Place Proletariat: ‘Barista Socialism’ Is a Metaphor No More

By Noah Rothman

Monday, November 17, 2025

 

Michael Barone saw the still nascent ideological schism roiling both major political parties today coming in the spring of 2023. He foresaw the isolationist nationalism that is presently vying for primacy on the right, and he forecast a socialist rebellion that would attempt to supplant both liberalism and even progressivism on the left. The latter group he offhandedly branded the vanguard of what he called “barista socialism.”

 

It was a useful pejorative — a sobriquet with teeth that nevertheless succinctly described the cutting edge of the revolutionary political left who bear little resemblance to the proletarian avatars Marx himself believed would lead the revolution.

 

In the Marxian imagination, the tip of the socialist upheaval’s spear was dispossessed by the factory labor system. He worked long hours in dangerous conditions. She had limited access to formal education and owned none of the tools of her trade. They were cogs in a ruthless machine. Their substance depended entirely upon their employer, and the lack of competition for their labor ensured that its “surplus value” would be exploited to the fullest — at which point the expendable worker would be discarded.

 

The Marxian ideal never comported with the reality of the revolutionary socialist movement, the highest ranks of which are historically glutted with comfortable, well-educated theorists who can count on enough material security to spend their time romanticizing about revolutionary politics. In that sense, the world has been afflicted by “barista socialism” for well over a century.

 

But what was once a practical metaphor evolved into something far more literal in recent days as America’s self-described socialists and their allies mount a full-court press on behalf of the subjugated and oppressed who languish behind the counter at your local Starbucks.

 

“Starbucks workers across the country are on an Unfair Labor Practices strike, fighting for a fair contract,” New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani wrote last week. He urged his followers to boycott the ubiquitous coffee shop in support of a strike by roughly 1,000 of Starbucks’ 240,000 or so baristas — a labor action that threatens to balloon this week if the barista union’s demands are not met. “No contract,” he wrote, “no coffee.”

 

Mamdani wasn’t alone. The incoming socialist mayor of Seattle, Katie Wilson, joined striking Starbucks workers on a picket line over the weekend, where she, too, endorsed a boycott. “Baristas make Starbucks an extraordinarily wealthy company,” she insisted. Senator Bernie Sanders agreed. Any company that can afford to “pay $96 million to its CEO” can provide its workers “a living wage and decent benefits,” he wrote. “It’s ridiculous that baristas are STILL fighting for a living wage and fair labor practices,” Seattle-area Representative Pramila Jayapal inveighed.

 

With a cheering section like this, it’s no wonder the Starbucks union anticipates the “largest, longest strike” in the company’s history. Starbucks “is surviving off the dregs of its reputation,” one disgruntled worker wrote in a USA Today op-ed. The author laments that his $17-per-hour wage is insufficient to cover rent, basic necessities, and his mother’s medical expenses in pricey Chicago. And he chafes even more knowing that the company’s C-suite executives enjoy nine-figure pay packages and attend multi-million-dollar conferences to which they sojourn on private jets.

 

The displeased employee insists he and his fellow strikers only want to improve their conditions as well as the customer experience. Some employees insist they don’t get enough working hours to qualify for the company’s admittedly generous benefits — among them, a compensation package worth $30 per hour, 18 weeks paid family leave, and 100 percent tuition for a four-year college degree. They want more hours, higher pay, and more staff to reduce customer wait times. Starbucks management claims, however, that the union’s proposals would “significantly alter Starbucks’ operations,” NBC News reported, “such as giving workers the ability to shut down mobile ordering if a store has more than five orders in the queue.” So, which is it? More staff and shorter wait times, or fewer workers making better pay for doing less?

 

So far, the impasse has persisted. The small number of unionized Starbucks workers relative to the firm’s total number of employees suggests this conflict would likely go unnoticed but for the intervention of America’s youngish socialist agitators. Their fight is illustrative of the quality of the cause to which the socialist left is attracted, as well as the supposed proletarian cadres that are among the most class-conscious factions in American politics.

Trump’s Eye-Popping Postelection Windfall

By Michael Scherer & Ashley Parker

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

 

On the morning after he won a second term as president, Donald Trump placed an unexpected call to his top fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke. The night before, he’d told a ballroom of supporters in West Palm Beach, Florida, that he had held his last political rally—“Can you believe it?”—and was ready to focus on governing. But his message to O’Rourke after the break of dawn was different. “I want you to keep going,” he told her.

 

Within weeks, that message had gone out to his Republican donors, as well as to Fortune 500 companies and billionaire investors who typically avoided electoral politics. Their first opportunity was his second inauguration committee, which would eventually raise $241 million, about $90 million more than organizers needed to fund the events—and nearly four times as much as Joe Biden had raised for his own inauguration, in 2021. But that was just the beginning.

 

Trump wanted money for the sorts of political operations that many politicians support—the Republican National Committee, his own political action committee, a new dark-money nonprofit group, a super PAC run by longtime advisers. But he was also requesting money for technically apolitical nonprofit causes that offered corporations and wealthy individuals a chance to make tax-deductible contributions, including a dramatic White House renovation, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (now under his control), his presidential library, and a celebratory Army parade on his birthday. By August, Trump estimated that he had collected at least $1.5 billion since the election, more than all the money raised to support his 2024 campaign over two years, including funds raised by supportive independent super PACs. The tally is now approaching $2 billion, two people familiar with the effort—who, like others, were not authorized to speak publicly—told us.

 

Trump has kept careful track of the money coming in, regularly calling O’Rourke late at night for updates. He monitors who is giving, who is not, and the role of lobbyists who bundle donations, those familiar with his efforts told us. At times, the actual donation amount is less important to the president than the percentage of the donor’s overall assets. He thanks the most generous benefactors at swanky events at the White House and his clubs.

 

Much of the money has come from people or entities that have business before the government. Defense contractors, cryptocurrency investors, and technology companies have put in tens of millions of dollars as he has deregulated the industry or dropped enforcement proceedings. A select group of companies and executives—Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Coinbase, Palantir CEO Alex Karp—are top donors to multiple Trump projects.

 

Nothing on this scale was ever attempted by a sitting president prior to Trump. Other recent administrations have faced their own scandals over fundraising efforts. But Trump’s approach—in the extent of the donations he’s soliciting, the secrecy with which some are handled, and the frankness of the exchange of dollars for presidential favor—puts even the most ambitious prior efforts to shame. And he’s just getting started. “He hasn’t stopped,” a third person told us, “and I don’t anticipate that we will stop.”

 

***

 

Trump’s relentless fundraising has alarmed ethics watchdogs who have worked for years to reduce the role of large donations in buying access or protection from government regulation.

 

“While it is not unusual for lame duck presidents to fundraise for their Libraries, what we are seeing from President Trump in his first year of office is shockingly unprecedented,” Trevor Potter, a former Republican chair of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) who now runs the Campaign Legal Center, told us in a statement. “The president’s seemingly insatiable drive for money from corporations and billionaires seeking government favors (or merely hoping to procure protection from Trump attacks on their business interests) sends a clear signal to everyday Americans that their needs come far behind those of the ultrawealthy who are buying access and favor.”

 

Trump advisers maintain that the only reason people are giving is that they support the president’s agenda. The White House spokesperson Davis Ingle described Trump as “the most dominant figure in American politics from fundraising to the campaign trail,” and said that donors were willing to give because of the “historic progress” of his administration.

 

Others familiar with the efforts say that more transactional motivations are at play. Media and technology companies that Trump has sued have collectively made $85 million in payments to some of his pet projects in order to settle the lawsuits. These include donations made by Meta (sued for deplatforming Trump after January 6) and Paramount (the parent company of CBS News, which Trump sued) to the Trump library, and a donation from Alphabet (the parent company of YouTube, which deactivated Trump’s account after January 6) for the ballroom. The donations came at a time when those companies were also seeking regulatory favor from his government. In Paramount’s case, the incoming chair of the Federal Communications Commission said that Trump’s unsettled complaint could complicate its planned merger with another company, pressuring Paramount to pay up despite significant doubts over the case’s merits. Some companies and executives also fear unfavorable government action if they don’t give.

 

“There are people being asked to do 10-to-25-million-dollar checks for the ballroom, for the inauguration, for the presidential library,” another person familiar with the requests told us. “That spigot is never going to close, ever. This is just the cost of doing business. They will write a multimillion-dollar check to avoid the $2 billion lawsuit. It’s a business decision.”

 

Only parts of Trump’s $2 billion haul have been publicly disclosed, often in media reports or in comments by the president. Under public pressure, the White House released a list of three dozen major donors to the new ballroom, which Trump expects to cost $300 million. (The president said late last month that “more than $350 million” had been raised.) Trump’s team disclosed the $241 million in inauguration fundraising to the FEC, as required by law. Trump’s team raised about $33 million for an Army parade in Washington, D.C., and other celebrations, The Atlantic previously reported. The Kennedy Center raised $58 million last month, according to its president, Richard Grenell, after a separate Trump fundraiser for the center in June requested checks of $100,000 to $2 million.

 

***

 

Little is known about how much fundraisers have collected for the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation, which Trump’s son Eric and Trump’s son-in-law Michael Boulos established in May. Efforts by Miami Dade College to give land to the foundation for a future library site in downtown Miami have been blocked by Florida courts. The foundation has yet to report any revenue, though ABC News announced that it would pay a $15 million settlement to the future library to resolve a lawsuit by Trump against the anchor George Stephanopoulos for his false claim that Trump had been found “liable for rape,” when the jury verdict was for sexual abuse. (A New York judge said that the jury’s findings against Trump described rape “as the term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York Penal Law.”)

 

Trump is also continuing to run a presidential-scale political-money operation alongside the fundraising efforts by House and Senate leaders for the 2026 midterm elections. From the end of November 2024 to June 30, 2025, his team brought in $229 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC run by aides that is not directly controlled by Trump. During the same period, he raised an additional $63 million through Trump National Committee JFC, a small-dollar joint fundraising operation with the Republican National Committee, according to FEC records. Both groups will report their fundraising for the second half of the year at the end of January.

 

His team has also collected funds for a dark-money group, Securing American Greatness. The organization will not disclose its fundraising in 2025 until it releases its tax forms next year, and it has no legal obligation to reveal individual donors. One technology company, Qualcomm, disclosed to its shareholders a donation of $1 million to Securing American Greatness along with a gift of $1 million to the inaugural committee, suggesting the possibility that other corporations are also pairing their public donations with secret ones. Since early May, Securing American Greatness has spent nearly $18.5 million on advertising, according to independent tracking of ad spending that a political operative shared with us. The ads, which included a major spring campaign in support of Trump’s budget bill, have targeted congressional districts that are expected to be competitive in 2026, and the group also spent money to get out the vote before the off-year elections in Virginia this month that Democrats dominated.

 

Trump and his aides cast donations to his political groups or priorities as acts of patriotism, often celebrating donors at lavish dinners. About 125 donors to the ballroom project gathered with the president in the White House’s East Room on October 15. As they sat around candlelit tables decorated with white roses, Trump debuted a model for a memorial arch, inspired by the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, that he has discussed building near Arlington National Cemetery—which could soon present another opportunity to donate.

 

“We have a lot of legends in the room tonight, and that’s why we’re here, to celebrate you,” Trump told the crowd. “So many friends in the audience, and I just want to thank you all. You’re very special people. You love the country, you love the White House, and what you’ve done is very important.”

The Epstein Conspiracy in Plain Sight

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

 

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know — even if you may have committed terrible crimes.

 

That’s the Jeffrey Epstein version of the famous line about success.

 

The massive tranche of Epstein emails released by the House Oversight Committee didn’t reveal any smoking guns about Donald Trump, but it did highlight a vast conspiracy to help the disgraced financier thrive despite his guilty plea to sex charges involving a minor in 2008.

 

This conspiracy wasn’t the work of the Deep State, or Israel, or the Jews. No, it was more pedestrian and damning than that. An element of the American elite embraced Epstein as one of its own, thanks to his wealth and his connections.

 

The conservative thinker Russell Kirk once quipped about conspiracy theories concerning Dwight Eisenhower that Ike wasn’t a communist; he was a golfer. In a similar vein, Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t a Mossad agent; he was a networker.

 

The implausible populist narrative about the Epstein case is that the government — at all levels and up to today — has protected him and others who participated in his crimes because too many powerful people have too much at stake, or because it’s too dangerous to reveal Israel’s role in the scandal, or both.

 

Perhaps these interpretations will gain factual support as more is revealed, but it seems unlikely.

 

Regardless, populists have a different narrative at hand that is consistent with the known record. Namely, that some of the most privileged members of our society — at the very top of the financial, academic, political, media, and social worlds — had no standards or ethics, and embraced Epstein as a friend and consigliere.

 

Epstein knew influential people, so influential people felt that they should know him. They considered him fun, and useful — for advice, for banter, for introductions, for information, and for donations.

 

The emails suggest that Epstein missed his calling as a high-level, seamy advice columnist to the rich and powerful.

 

Want to know more about the reputation of the woman you are having an affair with? Seeking advice on how to gain political influence in Europe? Wondering how you’re handling your interactions with a potential mistress? Looking for insights about Donald Trump? Trying to survive sexual harassment allegations? Need a reference for a gastroenterologist?

 

Well, then, ask Jeffrey Epstein.

 

He emailed with former Harvard president Larry Summers, the linguist Noam Chomsky, venture capitalist Boris Nikolic, Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, Trump activist Steve Bannon, the journalist Michael Wolff, the artist Andres Serrano, the department store scion Jonathan Farkas, and former White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, among others.

 

It’s not as though Epstein was particularly insightful, but if he knew so many important people, he must know something, right?

 

As for his scrape with the law, clearly all had been forgiven and forgotten. If he was in the good graces of the social wrangler Peggy Siegal, whose job was to get bold-faced names to accept invitations, he must be okay.

 

For some of Epstein’s correspondents, it was part of his appeal that he was disreputable. Larry Summers, who leaned on Epstein for romantic advice, asked him at one point, “How is life among the lucrative and louche?”

 

Epstein’s social currency is one reason that he got off so easily the first time he was prosecuted — he hired the best, most connected defense attorneys, who outclassed and intimidated his prosecutors.

 

As for Trump, he is guilty of enjoying Epstein’s company a couple of decades ago, presumably for the same reason so many others did. But he had a falling out with Epstein long ago. Trump didn’t have anything to do with him at the time when so many others in these emails were socializing with Epstein, confiding in him, and asking him for insight on Trump.

 

That’s a disgrace, and it’s always been in plain sight.

 

In the Epstein story, it’s not so much follow the money — although that’s important and still mysterious — as follow the social network.

Conservatives Shouldn’t Be Late to the Fight over the GOP’s Post-Trump Identity

By Noah Rothman

Monday, November 17, 2025

 

Elections are clarifying things. Before Election Day, the actors on the American national stage might have had some vague sense that the president’s unrivaled political potency was waning, but they had no concrete evidence of it. Before November 4, Donald Trump was still a colossus. He remained the architect of a tectonic political realignment, and he was still the unchallenged avatar of the only movement in America capable of cobbling together a majority coalition. After November 4, the president’s stature has appreciably diminished. Those who seem to appreciate it most are those on the right who are scratching out for themselves a political identity that will help them navigate the post-Trump environment.

 

Those who have been the most entrepreneurial in their attempts to emphasize their independence from the president were those who most obsequiously glommed onto the MAGA movement. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is perhaps the most cloying of this cohort. Her strange-new-respect tour of left-wing media venues, culminating this weekend in an apology for her erstwhile “toxic politics,” is designed to secure for herself a safe seat when the music stops.

 

Some within this tribe have refashioned their MAGA-flavored conspiracism into a weapon to be wielded against Trump. The so-called “Epstein Files,” which the White House insists do not exist, have provided lawmakers like Representatives Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace the opportunity to burnish their independent bona fides.

 

There is a compelling argument that the fracas Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts ignited with his steadfast support for Tucker Carlson amid the broadcaster’s descent into monomaniacal antisemitism was only ever a proxy battle over the evolution of the Republican Party.

 

Carlson’s personal support for Vice President JD Vance as the MAGA movement’s successor is reflected in that fight, knowledgeable observers contend. That version of the party looks different from the one we have today — a party that is more overtly pro-Israel than any previous American presidency, and one that went to war against antisemitism on college campuses at the outset of Trump’s second term. It’s a project that will require audacious stewardship.

 

Those who would refute the notion that the scandal surrounding Heritage’s conduct has nothing to do with the GOP’s trajectory must contend with the response to it from prominent Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz.

 

The Texas senator has not minced words in his vociferous denunciations of Carlson and his philosophy, casting a pall on the individuals and institutions that would shield the podcaster and his ilk from deserved criticism. That is as much a righteous moral posture as it is, according to Axios, an effort to lay “the groundwork for a 2028 presidential bid.” Cruz’s position will invite a conflict with a president who has pointedly refused to distance himself from Carlson or his efforts to sow disunion within the GOP over the influence of the rootless cosmopolitans in its ranks.

 

The issue set around which those who seek to influence the Republican Party’s evolutionary trajectory after Trump will undergo many shifts in the months and years to come. Although it will take many forms, the fight to define MAGA Republicanism when Trump cedes political power will only intensify. So far, though, the Republicans who have shown the most stomach for that fight aren’t those who have the most bones to pick with Trump or his political movement.

 

From the outset of Trump’s long political career, those Republicans with the most principled and consistent objections to his ascension were conservatives.

 

It was the conservatives who objected to Trump’s big-spending populism — his insistence that America’s unfunded entitlement liabilities could expand indefinitely, his comfort with America’s unsustainable debt burden, and his desire to substitute market dynamics with a centrally planned vision of what the American economy should look like. It was conservatives who chaffed at Trump’s biblical ignorance, his apathy for the transcendent, and his habit of treating people like instruments to be used and discarded as needed. It was conservatives who rightly saw in Trump a tendency that would manifest in contempt for a constrained, republican executive branch.

 

Prudential as they are and possessed of the requisite historical perspective, conservatives are constrained by principle in ways their detractors on the right are not. They are compelled by honor and good faith to note the many conservative achievements Trump has secured over the years he has spent behind the Resolute Desk. They are bound by gratitude in ways that do not encumber Trump’s more opportunistic detractors. But that circumspection will leave them late to the fight.

 

A contest to determine the Republican Party’s future is on, and Donald Trump has so far been content to allow that fight to play out. He will intervene soon enough. In the meantime, though, the president is allowing the terms of that internal debate to be set by the factions that hope to succeed the MAGA movement. It would be a profound dereliction if conservatism properly understood was not represented in that fight.

The Man Who Held Back the Flood

By Abe Greenwald

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

 

One of the many things that’s become clear since Charlie Kirk was assassinated is that not only was he a true friend of Israel and the Jews, but he was the key figure in keeping the groypers cordoned off from the rest of the young American right. With his calm, reasoned, but passionate public refutations of groyper Jew-hatred, he was holding his finger in the dike. For this act, Jews, Christians, and Americans of all faiths owe him an incalculable debt.

 

I don’t care about the winding road he may have taken to get there. He began his public life at an extraordinarily young age. By the time of his assassination, Kirk was preserving the future of the country, steering it between the Scylla of left-wing radicalism and Charybdis of right-wing nihilism. I honestly had no idea how much good he was doing for the nation, and I wish I could have expressed my gratitude while he was alive.

 

After he was murdered, there was no young, charismatic, patriotic, Christian influencer with Kirk’s reach and moral courage to step up and do the job. In fact, the most prominent among them used his death as an opportunity to do the opposite. They smashed the barrier and cackled as they profited from the hatred that came flooding in.

 

Kirk’s friends and associates grieved over his death, swore to carry on his campaign and build on what he created—and then they took a sledgehammer to it all.

 

It’s obvious why the Jews owe Kirk so much on this score. But the role he played in protecting young, particularly male, Christians from being seduced by a poisonous worldview was no less vital. Indeed, that was his life’s mission.

 

There’s a point that Ben Shapiro often makes. If you’re following the groypers and their enablers, your life will get appreciably worse. When you take no responsibility for your own misfortunes and instead blame the Jews or America, you’re condemning yourself to a helpless, hopeless life of loserdom. A permanent basement existence of online anti-community, gaming, grievance, and porn. And the hate-peddlers are getting rich off your misery. This is your hour of despair and their golden age.

 

There are doubtless many would-be Kirks out there in our great country. As I’ve said many times, the overwhelming majority of non-Jewish Americans do not hate the Jews. But now that the dam has broken, we must be honest about the extent of the anti-Semitism flowing through the younger generations. Rod Dreher says 30 to 40 percent of Gen Z Washington staffers are somewhere in the groyper camp. Others claim that’s an overestimation. There are no official figures, but it’s a bleak situation.

 

It was little more than two months ago that Kirk was shot, and that’s all the time it took for the anti-Semitic deluge to breach the veil of civil society on the right. That itself is a testament to how much rested on his shoulders. But it’s also, ironically, reason for modest hope. In the age of online influencers, the culture can shift on a dime. It’s not hard to envision the rise of a fresh, young political talent offering the lost boys of the right a better vision of themselves and the country. That prospect is made more likely by Charlie Kirk’s having reached so many and showing them how it’s done.

Losing My Religion

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, November 17, 2025

 

My favorite detail about The Big Rift of 2025 is where the president was and what he was doing as it played out.

 

The Big Rift cracked open on Friday evening when Donald Trump excommunicated “ranting Lunatic” Marjorie Taylor Greene from his movement and called for challengers in her next House primary. Their break-up had been building for months, as Greene has grown noticeably bolder lately in challenging Trump’s policies. But the final straw appears to have been her unshakeable support for releasing the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, against the president’s wishes.

 

Trump is mad about that. Big mad. Mad enough to have observed in another post on Friday that Rep. Thomas Massie, the chief Republican sponsor of the bill to release the files, sure did remarry awfully fast after his wife’s death last year.

 

But most of his anger was reserved for Greene, whom he spent the rest of the weekend calling “Marjorie Taylor Brown” (“Green grass turns Brown when it begins to ROT!”) and whom he branded in subsequent posts as a traitor not just to her party but to her country. It was the populist equivalent of declaring jihad against an apostate.

 

And he issued these, surreally, while he was busy raising money for the RINO di tutti RINOs, Lindsey Graham.

 

“What a great day playing golf with President Trump! So much fun today at the Trump Graham Golf Classic, that will benefit the Republican cause greatly,” the senator tweeted on Saturday over a photo of himself and Trump horsing around on the links during a fundraiser. It was the president’s first in-person appearance this year at a donor event for a midterm candidate—in this case, an ultra-hawkish former John McCain crony despised by the right’s postliberal base.

 

Ten years into the MAGA era, ardent “America First-er” Marjorie Taylor Greene was deemed an enemy of the revolution on the same weekend that careerist establishmentarian Lindsey Graham was being bathed in Trump-generated cash. If you’re a populist who’s grown disaffected with the president (and there are quite a few of those lately), that’s as glaring a “from pig to man, and from man to pig” moment as you’ll ever get.

 

Normally that’s where the story would end. But this time something strange happened. Late Sunday, the newly anathematized Marjorie Taylor Greene … won.

 

“As I said on Friday night aboard Air Force One to the Fake News Media, House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on,” Trump announced on Truth Social. Despite strenuous efforts, he had failed to pressure Greene (and two other Republicans) to oppose Massie’s Epstein bill and realized that he was about to lose tomorrow’s floor vote—possibly in a landslide. So he capitulated, giving the House GOP his “permission” to vote yes to spare himself the stark embarrassment of being defied.

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene won. In fact, not only did she win on Epstein, she won an early test of political strength with the president back home. On Saturday the chairman of the Republican Party in her district rebuked Trump’s demand for a primary challenger by reiterating that Greene has the “full and unwavering support” of his organization.

 

For three reasons, The Big Rift is a big deal.

 

The decider.

 

To begin with, it’s a serious threat to the president’s previously unquestioned authority to define what is and isn’t MAGA orthodoxy.

 

Trump has invoked that authority repeatedly over the last six months to deflect criticism from his right flank. Last week, Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked him whether his support for H-1B visas for skilled immigrants contradicted MAGA dogma. “MAGA was my idea. MAGA was nobody else’s idea,” he replied. “I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else, and MAGA wants to see our country thrive.”

 

He gave a similar answer in June when The Atlantic pressed him to square his attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities with his “America First” commitment to avoiding foreign conflicts. “Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that,” the president said.

 

Trumpism has always been a moral project more so than a political one. It has its own internal moral code of ruthlessness and it demands from supporters a degree of devotion and obedience more common to religion than to politics. When Trump speaks of getting to decide what “MAGA” and “America First” mean, he’s claiming a quasi-papal prerogative to speak ex cathedra. As the founder of the faith, his pronouncements are necessarily infallible.

 

Not anymore, says Greene. The Epstein rebellion among House Republicans stands for the proposition that MAGA populism has discrete ideological content beyond the president’s whims and daily political needs and that, when those two conflict, loyalty is owed to the former, not the latter. That’s not just heretical, it’s schismatic.

 

Greene herself resorted to religious lingo in her first of three tweets responding to the president this weekend. “I don’t worship or serve Donald Trump,” she wrote, noting their disagreement over the Epstein files. “Most Americans wish he would fight this hard to help the forgotten men and women of America who are fed up with foreign wars and foreign causes, are going broke trying to feed their families, and are losing hope of ever achieving the American dream,” she added.

 

“America First” means something. That’s been the thrust of all of her criticism of him over the last few months, most notably when she broke with the GOP during the government shutdown by backing funding for Obamacare subsidies. “America First” means helping Americans struggling with insurance costs. “America First” evidently also means making sure Americans get the truth they’ve been seeking about Jeffrey Epstein—even if that makes life painful for the president.

 

Call it a populist Reformation if you like. Instead of letting a corrupt seat of authority dictate the tenets of the faith, Greene and the Epstein rebels want to devolve the power of deciding what MAGA means to the faithful. Or at least to more puritanical populists like Greene herself.

 

This is the first time in the Trump era, I believe, that the president’s supremacy as arbiter of populist orthodoxy has been successfully challenged. And success breeds success: Having just asserted themselves on Epstein, who’s to say whether emboldened populists won’t feel their oats and push back aggressively if the U.S. starts bombing Venezuela tomorrow? “Regime change is ‘America First!’” the president will bellow. Greene and her fans will answer: “Says who?”

 

I would not have guessed that Marjorie Taylor Greene, a notorious Trump-slobberer even by modern Republican standards, would lead the first meaningful right-wing rebellion against autocracy of this era.

 

A moral critique.

 

The most interesting dimension of Greene’s response to Trump was only tangentially related to Epstein. As their dispute unfolded this weekend, she ended up making a traditional moral critique of the president’s behavior, which is unheard of for a prominent figure on his populist flank.

 

On Saturday, after he had publicly un-personed her as a member of MAGA, she alerted her millions of followers that his fans had begun threatening her life, sending pizzas to her home to let her know that they have her address and phoning in a bomb threat to her business. “As a Republican, who overwhelmingly votes for President Trump‘s bills and agenda, his aggression against me which also fuels the venomous nature of his radical internet trolls (many of whom are paid), this is completely shocking to everyone,” she complained.

 

It’s not shocking to anyone. Ask Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Liz Cheney, and Mitt Romney, to name a few examples, what happens when a Republican who agrees with Trump on most policies crosses him on a matter of personal “loyalty.” Intimidation is and will always be the stock-in-trade of populism because populists believe all political problems are ultimately tests of will. Simply apply enough pressure to break the will of whatever’s standing in your way, including death threats if necessary, and the problem is solved.

 

It is very late in the game for Marjorie Taylor Greene to suddenly be waking up to this, particularly given the occasional harassment and intimidation to which she stooped in her not-very-long-ago activist days. “I would like to say humbly I’m sorry for taking part in the toxic politics,” she told CNN in an interview when asked about that on Sunday. “It’s very bad for our country, and it’s been something I’ve thought about a lot, especially since Charlie Kirk was assassinated … I’m committed, and I’ve been working on this a lot lately, to put down the knives in politics. I really just want to see people be kind to one another.”

 

I don’t believe a word of it. Her conscience was never bothered before (publicly, at least) when Trump put a Democrat or centrist Republican in MAGA’s crosshairs, which he does routinely. No one with earnest qualms about leopards eating people’s faces would wait until their own face was devoured to articulate them.

 

But the fact that she’s insincere shouldn’t blind us to the significance of her pretending otherwise.

 

In a pseudo-religious movement like Trump’s, the only moral standard to which the president will be held by his disciples is the one he’s created for the movement. If he favors foreigners over Americans by supporting H-1B visas, that’s a moral betrayal. If he gives in to some Democratic demand instead of pulling out all the stops to “fight” back ruthlessly, that too is a moral failure.

 

He’ll never be held to traditional moral standards against, say, taking bribes or corrupting the government or sexually harassing women—or riling up his fans to menace someone who’s angered him—because to do that would lead inescapably to the conclusion that he’s unfit to lead. So right-wing populists have turned a blind eye to every bit of it, not wanting to admit the truth of his critics’ indictment of his character. “I don’t like the mean tweets” is as close as they’ve gotten to admitting that he shouldn’t be president, which isn’t very close at all.

 

Until now. “When the President of the United States irresponsibly calls a Member of Congress of his own party, traitor, he is signaling what must be done to a traitor,” Greene wrote in another tweet on Sunday, correctly. Trump is behaving immorally by inciting supporters to intimidate his enemies and she isn’t afraid to say so; if populists like her are suddenly willing to hold him to traditional moral standards like that one, maybe going forward they’ll be willing to speak out against some of his many, many other moral failings that have otherwise required Republican omerta since 2015.

 

Whether she’s sincere about it or just needling him opportunistically arguably doesn’t matter, in the same way that it arguably doesn’t matter whether Nick Fuentes is an earnest neo-Nazi or a clever troll targeting an underserved audience. Fuentes emboldens his admirers to speak up by using his platform to weaken the taboo against the beliefs they share. The same might go for Marge Greene with respect to calling out the president’s lousy behavior.

 

The benefit of the doubt.

 

The most subversive thing about this episode, though, is her willingness to question Trump’s motives in resisting the release of the Epstein documents. Greene actually tiptoed up to the line in her tweets this weekend of wondering whether he might not be implicated in the matter after all.

 

“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level,” she marveled on Friday, leaving the reader to wonder why. The next day, in her tweet about being threatened by Trump’s fans, she wrote pointedly, “I now have a small understanding of the fear and pressure the women, who are victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his cabal, must feel.” The insinuation was clear: Maybe Epstein’s old buddy Donald honed his craft at intimidating enemies as part of that “cabal.”

 

That goes way beyond challenging Trump on who rightfully should decide what “America First” means. She’s calling the president’s populist credibility into question. And no wonder, as Jonathan Last notes: For once, he finds himself leading an establishment attempt to suppress the truth about a suspected conspiracy rather than leading an outsider insurgency to expose it.

 

When the pope is openly in league with Satan, the church is ripe for schism. In a populist us-and-them movement as feral as MAGA, Greene is implying that the leader no longer deserves an insuperable benefit of the doubt as to whether he’s more “us” than “them.”

 

And that matters, short-term and long-term. For one thing, it matters to how the Epstein saga will play out after tomorrow’s House vote. Lost in Trump’s call for House Republicans to release the files is the fact that he could call for the DOJ to release the files at any time. Normally his fans wouldn’t corner him by demanding that he be proactive and do so. But what happens now that he’s lost some of the benefit of the doubt?

 

What happens if Trump quietly encourages Senate Republicans to kill the House bill after it passes? That would be awkward given that he’s claiming “we have nothing to hide”; if that’s so, there’s no reason for the Senate not to pass the bill either. But let’s say they kill it at his behest, or they pass it and he vetoes the legislation. Will he get the benefit of the doubt about his good intentions from MAGA, as he’s always done before?

 

What if Trump signs the bill—and then Attorney General Pam Bondi declares that the DOJ can’t release the files on grounds that, conveniently, there’s now a criminal investigation pending into Epstein’s relationship with Democrats that the president ordered just a few days ago. (The House can have “whatever they are legally entitled to,” he said in his Truth Social post on Sunday, an important caveat.) Will populists accept that, or will they see it for what it is, a transparent attempt by Trump to create a “legitimate” pretext for continuing to suppress the files?

 

Never mind Epstein, though. What about 2026 and 2028?

 

Trump losing credibility among his base would make politics more volatile than it already is, transforming a pseudo-religious movement into something more like a traditional political movement. The president, hostile to accountability in any form, would yearn for the sense of impunity he’s enjoyed from having the right’s unconditional support since 2015 and would hunt for ways to restore it. Probably that means new us-and-them provocations designed to get Republicans to side with him tribalistically against the left.

 

I suspect he’s more likely to invoke the Insurrection Act at a moment when he fears he’s losing his base than when he’s riding high with them.

 

Meanwhile, the more he slides toward lame-duckery, the more anxious he’ll become about Democrats romping in next fall’s election and making his last two years in office miserable. His attempt to interfere in the midterms has already begun but will grow more aggressive as his political position weakens. At some point the 2020 playbook will be rolled out and Republicans will be told that another nefarious Democratic plot to steal power is afoot.

 

How will those Republicans react to a second “stop the steal” campaign led by a president who lacks the degree of credibility on the right that he had five years ago? How would the kinder, gentler Marjorie Taylor Greene react, now knowing firsthand what it’s like to be on the wrong side of the president’s wrath when the demagoguery is dialed up to 11? How would she react to Trump sending the regular military against American citizens under the Insurrection Act, for that matter? Do her misgivings about “toxic politics” include Trump’s fash-iest gambits?

 

They haven’t in the past, but do they now?

 

In time I wonder if we’ll view this episode as a momentous one for Trump’s presidency, not because it led to something incriminating being released in an Epstein document dump (Pam Bondi won’t let that happen) but because a disillusioned MAGA will probably be a less fanatic MAGA. The more reason Republicans have to look forward to a post-Trump era, the less obliged they should feel to support every corrupt thing he does to try to hold onto power.

 

Or so an optimist would say. A pessimist would say that The Big Rift will blow over the moment the Supreme Court strikes down his tariffs, sending figures like Greene into a frenzy about impeaching Amy Coney Barrett and packing the court or what not. Optimist or pessimist: Guess which one I am.

Rule by Rolex

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, November 17, 2025

 

A gold bar and a Rolex—where have I heard that story before?

 

Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey accepted bribes in the form of gold bars and received photos of watches he might fancy from his benefactors: “How about one of those?” one message read. Subtle! Rolex watches are a particularly popular currency of bribery: Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent and Russian spy, received two Rolex watches as part of his compensation for betraying his country; Soviet spy Aldrich Ames had a half a dozen Rolexes at the time of his arrest, and another corrupt CIA officer, also spying for the Russians, was instructed to wear his ill-gotten Rolex on his right wrist as a signal to his handlers; former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (whose corruption conviction was overturned) accepted a Rolex from a favor-seeking businessman; Rolex figures in corruption cases from San Francisco to Westchester County to Peru, touching everyone from heads of state to heads of soccer clubs. Other horological brands get in on the action sometimes, too: When the Saudis wanted a Twitter executive to help them track down social media critics, they gave him a Hublot, the watch you get when a big gold Rolex isn’t vulgar enough for you, and the Dalai Lama still sports the Patek that U.S. intelligence officers gave him—when he was a child, in 1943.

 

So when the Swiss wanted to bring Donald Trump around to their point of view on tariffs, they knew what to do: The head of a precious metals firm gave Trump a big gold bar (about $130,000 worth of gold) stamped “45/47” to drive home the point, while Jean-Frédéric Dufour, the CEO of Rolex, thought about giving Trump a rare collector’s piece (a titanium Rolex) but instead went with the more obvious choice of giving the president a big-ass gold Rolex desk clock to display for the benefit of visitors to his office—a kind of double bribe in that it is a bribe in and of itself while also functioning as an in-your-face advertisement for the kinds of bribes Trump likes. These gifts to Trump are not bribes in the legal sense—not yet, anyway—in that none of them has resulted in any charges or convictions, but they obviously are bribes in the moral sense.

 

And Trump loves being bribed: the airplane from the Qataris, the cryptocurrency “investments” from favor-seekers that have enriched him and his family, etc. The openness of Trump’s corruption is really quite something: He apparently is negotiating a development deal with the Saudi tyrants even as he negotiates with them in his part-time role as president of the United States. Trump’s style as a caudillo is traditional personalist stuff—treating the White House as though it were his personal property, openly using agencies such as the IRS and the Justice Department to go after his political enemies. The federal government’s posture in the Jeffrey Epstein case—investigate the president’s political enemies and pretend that Trump had nothing to do with the convicted sex offender—would be hilarious if the matter were less serious.

 

One of the things that most offends me about American political corruption is how cheap our guys are. Sen. Menendez got some help buying his lady friend a Mercedes, which sounds pretty fancy, but it was a C-Class Mercedes—the entry-level Benz. If you were a rapper driving a C-Class, other rappers would make fun of you. Here is a text message from a business operator to the Boston official accused of accepting bribes related to his firm:

 

Check did not clear. You got $2,500 last week. $5,000 this week. $500 more next week. $8,000 total.

 

And the response:

 

What time we meeting and were [sic]? We can meet on pike at rest stop if that works. Also are u giving my whole half or half of what you have? I have today off and want to do some shopping so sooner would be great.

 

The official was in charge of school bus operations for the state and had the ability to steer very lucrative contracts to friendly firms. That’s big money on the table—and, as the feds tell the story, he received less than $1 million in total bribes over the course of many years taking bribes. Given the cost of living in Massachusetts these days, that is not very much. I once saw the great Mikhail Baryshnikov perform a tribute to a “minimalist” choreographer, which consisted of the legendary ballet dancer walking around the stage like a normal person, sitting in a chair and then standing up, etc. It was disappointing, and that is how I feel about those penny-ante payments to the corrupt bus guy in Boston: One expects more. You go in with the expectation of something spectacular, and what you get is a guy hanging out at the turnpike rest stop at Natick with his hand out, anxious to go shopping for whatever eight grand buys. That isn’t even Rolex money, really—that’s not even across-the-range Seiko money.

 

If you are going to sell your soul and auction off your integrity, then at least get a good price. For Pete’s sake, the vice president’s salary is only $235,100 a year—though I suppose that whatever has corrupted J.D. Vance is not the allure of a government salary.

 

Trump is getting a good price. Or so it seems. It is a mystery, of course. I will confess to being a little bit of a Trump-wealth truther—I suspect that he is not as wealthy as he pretends to be, and it seems to me that he has proven himself an incompetent in business often enough that he is entirely capable of having lost much, all, or more than all of the considerable income he has enjoyed over the years. Lord knows Qusay and Uday are 16 flights of mental stairs down from mediocrity and entirely capable of wrecking a splendid fortune.

 

But set that aside for a second. I recently had dinner with a friend of mine who runs an important nonprofit enterprise. He spends a lot of time raising money from billionaires. We both have friends and acquaintances in that world, and we both are sometimes mystified by their motives. Why do these billionaires go to work every day? Many of them genuinely enjoy their work, of course, and it is creative in a way that is distinct from—and, to many minds, more interesting than—the kind of creative work that we writers and such do. But that doesn’t explain the whole thing, either. What my friend and I decided is that whatever it is in us that would make us entirely satisfied with the first billion dollars is also the reason we never make the first billion dollars. There is a kind of drive in such men that isn’t exactly greed, or just greed. It maybe lives in the same part of the brain where greed lives, but your typical American billionaire is no Scrooge McDuck—they give away tons of money. Yes, there may be some vanity in that, sometimes, but many of these guys quietly give away enormous sums with no display at all. It is a complicated psychological thing: I have seen men who are absolute chiselers about a $100 expense on Friday give away $100 million on Saturday. And the thing that makes them chiselers is part of the thing that makes them philanthropists. I think that it is like being really good at basketball or chess or singing—if you are really good at something, doing it feels really good.

 

That is, I suppose, the most charitable explanation for Trump’s chiseling, for his petty self-dealing and almost comically vulgar corruption. Chiseling and venality and self-promotion are the things he is good at—they are the only things he is good at. Chiseling and grasping are his air and his exercise.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

But, boy, is Trump stupid.

 

With a bit of golden encouragement from the Swiss (who are unsentimental about these things), Donald Trump has started rolling back tariffs on many goods, not only those Rolex watches but also on many common items of consumption at a less-elevated level: beef, coffee, etc. The Democrats have discovered this “new word,” as Trump put it: “affordability.” The notion that “affordability” is a “new word” is right up there in the book of Trump quotations alongside “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”

 

And so Trump has now discovered an interesting economic phenomenon: When you make something more expensive, it is more expensive.

 

Tariffs are a sales tax. Tax incidence is an interesting little obsession in economics—who actually pays a tax in real economic terms? Most of us know, instinctively, that the “employer share” of payroll taxes gets passed on to employees—this is critical: some employees—in the form of lower wages. What matters to an employer’s business income is not the employee’s take-home pay but the entire cost of keeping that employee on the books: salary, benefits, taxes, other costs. An employee that costs you $100,000 a year in salary plus $18,000 in payroll taxes and $17,000 in insurance and other expenses is an employee that costs you $135,000 a year, according to my English-major math.

 

What tax incidence really comes down to is economic power: An employer may try to pass on tax costs to the employee in the form of lower wages, but very in-demand employees also try to pass their tax costs up to the employer. If you are going to work for, say, Apple, a salary of $x working at the Cupertino campus is not the same as a salary of $x working at the Austin campus. If you are a very in-demand kind of person living in Charlotte, an employer who wants you to work in Manhattan is going to have to write a big check: A $200,000-a-year guy in Charlotte needs (according to the Bankrate calculator) almost $460,000 in Manhattan just to break even. Some employees have the power to pass expenses up, some have less power and get expenses passed down to them.

 

I have made this point over and over again with the notion that big companies just “pass it on to the customer” when there is a new tax or mandate. That is sometimes true—but, sometimes it isn’t. It is much more complicated. Some businesses in very price-sensitive markets have relatively little power to raise consumer prices (thanks, competition!) but more power to pass on costs to their employees, vendors, business partners, etc. Walmart has more leverage over companies that rely on Walmart for the majority of their sales than they do over Walmart shoppers who may have lots of other options if Walmart tries to jack prices up on them too much.

 

It is complicated—very complicated—but the guiding principle is that economic burdens get shifted from the economically powerful to the economically weak. Hence that “new word,” in Trump’s dim mind, “affordability.” If you are a billionaire looking to buy “a yacht for your yacht,” as the New York Times put it, and the builder comes back and says he is going to have to raise the price by 58 percent because of tariffs, then you have some options, such as not buying the yacht for your yacht, or putting it off for a while, or whatever other options exist out there in the yacht-for-your-yacht world. If you have hungry kids at home and the cost of a box of mac and cheese jumps from $1.39 to $2.19, what, exactly, are you going to do about that 58-percent bump up? Not feed your kids until prices come down? Burn $1 worth of gas (and $25 worth of opportunity cost) driving across town to see if you can save 80 cents? You do not have a lot of good options—and, probably, you are going to end up eating the cost.

 

If you are an $22-an-hour guy who doesn’t know that there’s another $22-an-hour job waiting for him, what are you going to do when the boss says he’s cutting back on overtime or paid breaks—or if he tells you the job now pays $20 an hour, take it or leave it? That will depend on what your next-best offer is, of course. But changing jobs is stressful and anxiety-inducing, and it usually involves significant transaction costs. How much anxiety are you going to endure—this week, this month—over a cut in overtime? How willing are you to risk going weeks or months without pay at all if you start singing Johnny Paycheck songs to the boss? (You know the one: “Take This Job and Shove It.”) Lots of variables there.

 

But what should not surprise us is that the costs of Trump’s imbecilic tariffs are going to be borne by the very people for whom affordability, that supposedly perplexing neologism, is an urgent concern. There is a lady I know who does not know what gasoline costs: “What am I going to do—not fill up my car? Not drive?” she says. “It costs what it costs.” And that is an entirely reasonable way of looking at it if gasoline is a relatively small part of your income. There’s another lady—I don’t know her, but I stood in line behind her at 7-Eleven—who is only putting $12 of gas into her car (the one she drives two kids around in) because that is what she can afford. And the lady paying for $12 worth of gas with a plastic bag full of coins is the one who is paying the tariffs.

 

“We have trillions of dollars coming in,” from the tariffs, Trump boasts. That is, like most things that come out of Trump’s mouth, not true. The actual number is something more like $200 billion a year. (It is difficult to calculate because under Trumpian ad-hocracy, the rates and specifics change day to day and hour to hour, depending on whether some Canadian regional politician you’ve never heard of hurts Trump’s feelings or some Swiss executive pushes a bar of gold across the president’s desk, because that is the insane world we Americans now live in.) Let’s call it $200 billion a year for the sake of argument. That is a lot of money and, over time, it does add up to those trillions of dollars Trump brags about, and many markets are pretty efficient when it comes to adjusting prices today in response to expected future costs. Whose trillions does Trump think are going to hit the Treasury’s cashflow? Those trillions will come disproportionately from relatively powerless American consumers, workers, and businesses.

 

Everybody understands that we compete in the marketplace as producers. But we also compete as consumers, and that is, in fact, often more relevant: Think about buying a house or a gallon of gasoline. There are lots of people who want that house, and a whole world of people who want that gallon of gasoline and the oil that went into producing it. Trump can try telling some overseas oil producer that he has to pay a tax for the privilege of selling his barrel of oil in the United States, but the producer can sell that barrel of oil in China or Canada or Switzerland about as easily. (Again, it is complicated: Jonah Goldberg likes to point out that the U.S. trade deficit with Canada is in considerable part the result of the Canadians selling discounted oil in the United States because geographic proximity and the presence of convenient pipelines makes that more economically feasible than shipping the stuff off to Singapore or wherever.) You can tax that imported oil, but American consumers probably will pay most of the tax.

 

It is no mystery: Take that $200 billion a year in new taxes that fall on relatively powerless people, take the trillions in projected future taxes falling on the same people, and there is your “affordability” crisis. Trump being Trump, he proposes to mitigate the entirely predictable effects of his idiotic policies by sending other people’s money to lower-income Americans, no doubt in the form of checks bearing Trump’s signature if not his image. That’s a particularly dumb worst-of-both-worlds outcome. Even if we assume some rigorous means-testing, Trump’s tariffs will not generate enough year-to-year revenue to even offset the cost of those $2,000 checks he wants to send to lower-income Americans. But neither will those $2,000 payments offset the costs the tariffs are imposing on those lower-income Americans, because higher prices reflect both current tariff costs and expected future tariff costs.

 

The result is exactly what you expect from a Donald Trump enterprise: incompetence resulting in chaos careering in the general direction of insolvency. It is like the whole country has been turned into one of those ghastly Atlantic City casinos Trump bankrupted.

 

And Furthermore …

 

Speaking of casinos, and insolvency, and debt, and Rolexes, I was in Las Vegas this week to speak at an event put on by Jon Ralston and the Nevada Independent, an admirable journalist and institution doing the kind of old-fashioned journalistic work that Nevada desperately needs. I went in to get a shave at the barbershop at the Cosmopolitan (ask for Frank—he did a first-rate job) and sat next to a fellow who spent the better part of an hour talking to his barber about his plan to buy a Rolex. What he wanted to know was whether the barber (who seemed to be knowledgeable about these things) knew somebody who would, as the man put it, “Let me walk with it,” i.e., take the watch and make payments on it. He thought he might like some diamonds on the dial, but not too many. And he was very specific about wanting the relevant GIA paperwork on those stones. He proposed that his payments on the Rolex could be made weekly. The fellow also apparently did a good deal of sports betting. This is, obviously, a man who is going to die broke. I am not much of a poker player, but I suspect I could take that guy.

 

But that is the American way, particularly in the Age of Trump. Among the president’s truly daft and batty ideas is his suggestion that banks should start writing 50-year mortgages in order to address housing affordability. The idea is, of course, pig-rectum stupid. Just as long-term automobile financing puts upward pressure on car prices (because buyers focus on their monthly payments rather than total expenses), even longer-term mortgages would put upward pressure on house prices. And because interest rates on loans tend to be higher the longer the duration of the loan, such mortgages would push buyers in the direction of low-equity “ownership,” with interest payments making up an even larger share of monthly housing expenses than they would under a 30-year mortgage. “Probably not an optimal approach” in the words of one Treasury official who is not obviously high on meth while simultaneously suffering from a severe concussion. Again, it may not occur to such a dimwit as Donald Trump, but the cure for high prices is not more debt. The cure for high interest rates is not increasing demand for credit. If you really wanted to lower housing prices, the thing to do (I do not recommend this, for all sorts of reasons) would be to restrict banks to writing mortgages extending no more than 10 years and to forbid such payment-lowering shenanigans as interest-only mortgages. In a similar way, the easiest way to bring down college tuition would be for the government to stop lending people money to pay college tuition. Subsidized financing always pushes prices in an upward direction for obvious reasons: Subsidizing consumption encourages demand, and higher demand means higher prices.

 

And Furtherermore …

 

Tucker Carlson helped to make J.D. Vance vice president of these United States. Tucker Carlson also has decided that his future as a media entrepreneur is best served by trafficking in antisemitism. He recently denounced Ben Shapiro, a rival media figure and a Jew, as a practitioner of “usury.” I am pro-finance and pro-credit, myself—finance is a big part of what makes modern economic innovation possible—but I will note for the record that J.D. Vance’s main job in life before becoming a full-time social-media troll on the public teat was working for Peter Thiel’s venture-capital gang—which is to say, he was a literal moneylender.

 

Words About Words

 

“This Is No Way to Rule a Country,” reads the New York Times headline over an essay by Eric Schmidt and Andrew Sorota. The essay is fine, but the headline stinks: Americans are citizens, not subjects, and we are not here to be ruled—we are, on a good day, governed, although Americans have been trending in the direction of ungovernability for, oh, I guess just about 250 years now.

 

Another Times headline and a deck: “8 Senators Break Ranks With Democrats and Advance G.O.P. Plan to End Shutdown. Two of them are retiring, and none of the others face re-election in 2026.” None faces, not “none face.” None is a contraction of “not one.”

 

From USA Today writing about the mighty Cyndi Lauper’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: “Lauper also proved her MVP status during the show’s finale, a gut-bellowing version of fellow inductee Joe Cocker’s ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ with Susan Tedeschi, Bryan Adams, Chris Robinson, Nathaniel Rateliff and Teddy Swims.” I like Joe Cocker’s version of that song, but it is not his song—it is a Beatles song.

 

Mainly, I am surprised that it has taken this long to get Cyndi Lauper into the hall of fame. What a voice. The ’80s were very much a hit-and-miss decade, but there was not much in pop music in that era better than the music of Cyndi Lauper.

 

Related: I once saw Rob Hyman of The Hooters do a small, quiet set that included a beautiful version of “Time After Time.” One of the members of the audience afterward complimented him on “his take on” that “Cyndi Lauper song.” Hyman did not explain that “Time After Time” is a song with two authors, and that he is one of them, and that he sang on Lauper’s famous version of the song, too. How many people who spend a lifetime writing songs ever write anything as good as “Time After Time”? Not very damned many. I think of that when people sneer about “one-hit wonders.” Yes, I’m sure that Flock of Seagulls would have loved to have had a bigger and more varied career, but nothing takes you back to 1982 quite like “I Ran.” Except maybe 16-percent mortgage rates.

 

(That’s how you fix inflation, by the way. Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan did it, it was hard, nobody enjoyed it, and it nearly wrecked Reagan’s presidency before he really got started, but it was the right thing to do.)

 

Relatedly related: Backing vocals are an interesting little subgenre. I remember listening to a song by the great country singer Joe Ely (one of the innumerable musical products of my hometown) and catching a distinctive plaintive tone in the backing vocals. You know that you’re a musicians’ musician when you’ve got Bruce Springsteen singing backup. And Joe Ely, before that, sang the backing vocals on the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Funny little world.

 

In Closing

 

I have always assumed that the position of the Jews of Israel would be a dangerous one for as long as I’d be around to observe it. And I have generally thought that the safety of the Jews of Europe cannot be taken for granted. But I had never thought that I would see the day when we had to worry about the safety of the Jews of the United States of America. I had thought George Washington settled the matter:

 

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

 

It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my Administration, and fervent wishes for my felicity. May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.

 

And it is to the Father of All Mercies that we must appeal again. But the Israeli position does suggest that the Jews of the Jewish state have taken Oliver Cromwell’s sage advice: “Trust in God and keep your powder dry.” We should all learn from their example.