Squeak

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

Do you hear that? Skitter. Scuffle. Scurry ... splash!

 

The rodential squeaking started off sounding like the occasional whine of a rusty gate hinge. Pretty soon, it is going to sound like Indiana Jones in the catacombs underneath Venice. As the SS Trump founders and careens, it is impossible to miss the sound of rat bellies hitting the water, with the rats snug in their little rat life-preservers and praying for a ratty little lifeboat to come along and pick them up.

 

And you know what that means: It is time to strafe the lifeboats.

 

How bad are things for Donald Trump? His overall approval rating is down to 38 percent, according to the New York Times poll, a reminder that half of any population has below-average intelligence and that 38 percent evidently couldn’t beat a chicken at tic-tac-toe.

 

Trump’s numbers are even lower, hovering right around zero, among people who spent the 1980s more or less in drag or providing the music Milli Vanilli (RIP) lip-synched to. I can see how Bret Michaels might have got sucked into Trump’s orbit—given the soft transvestitism of his old band, Poison, he’s basically a kind of a rock ’n’ roll de-transitioner, and he now is down to no more than a little J.D. Vance-style smokey eyeliner. And that is to say nothing of the wreckage of that great Bavarian burlesque act, Milli Vanilli—was there ever another pop act that was quite as Trumpy, i.e., mired in fraud? You can see those sad sacks signing up for the Trump show—or probably any show that comes with a paycheck. But C+C Music Factory said, “Hmmm ... no,” and even Morris Day has no time for Trump. As the cretin in chief himself might tweet, “SAD!”

 

Celebrity-wise, Trump is down to his hardcore groupies: Kid Rock, a 55-year-old white rapper who cannot figure out which is the front end of a fedora, and Lee Greenwood, a guy older than Joe Biden (really!) who is known for one treacly anthem so deeply impregnated with artificial sweetener that it’ll probably give listeners cancer through their hearing aids.

 

Trump’s circle of sycophants had floated the notion that action stars such as Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham might attend the cage fight being staged Sunday on the White House lawn, but they are not coming: The stars of the Fast and Furious franchise all wash their hair that night, I suppose. The Trump gang should have asked Terry Crews, who did, after all, portray the patron saint of Trumpism, “five-time Smackdown champion, porn superstar, and president of the United States, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho,” in Mike Judge’s prophetic Idiocracy. Terry Crews is the rare sort of guy who could take a night off from America’s Got Talent, attend a Trump event, and very possibly raise the average IQ at both venues.

 

Even congressional Republicans are making squeaky little verminous noises vaguely suggestive of independence.

 

It is not much, to be sure: A few Republicans have very politely suggested that the president should not be permitted to loot the fisc to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay off cronies who got themselves into trouble by helping him try to stage a coup d’état in 2021—but Republican senators under the leadership of John Thune, who miraculously manages to stand upright despite the absence of a spine, killed the effort to put anything down on paper in a way that would matter.

 

A few Republicans have suggested that the acting director of national intelligence should maybe not be Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, whose silver spoon apparently was filled with lead paint chips. He’s a poster boy for nepotism who somehow managed to get kicked off the board of a company his grandfather founded as soon as the old man assumed room temperature and yet somehow is also not as obviously incompetent as the most recent DNI, conspiracy kook Tulsi Gabbard. He’s another trust-fund henchman, a type Trump attracts like flies to whatever fecal euphemism you think works best in this context.

 

A whole seven Republicans cast votes to block funding for Trump’s batty ballroom project, but not enough to make any difference. House Republicans helped to pass a bill to sanction a few oligarchs in the circle of Vladimir Putin and fund aid for Ukraine, a country that inconveniently refuses to keel over and die as Donald Trump and J.D. Vance cheer on the Russians who are murdering and raping their way across the country. (The measure now heads to the Senate, where Thune has been content to let similar measures die.) Four Republicans in the House voted for a measure that would constrain Trump’s efforts to continue waging his illegally initiated and incompetently executed war in Iran.

 

To repeat: It is not much. Not very much at all.

 

It is not enough to make a substantive difference, of course. To the considerable extent that President Trump has taken it upon himself to usurp congressional authority in matters ranging from war-making to the allocation of money, Congress has relatively little power to rein him in by means of statute or oversight. If Congress wants to stop the corruption, the illegal war, the trade anarchy, the massacres at sea, and the rest of it, then Congress can—and should—do what Congress has failed to do twice in Trump’s sorry career, which is to use the power of impeachment to remove him from office and to bar him from serving in any other office. Of course, Republicans will give no thought to doing that—it is, after all, the right thing, the patriotic thing, and the honorable thing.

 

It is not likely that this will be enough to make a political difference, either. Most of the frogginess we have seen from Republicans has come from dead men walking, such as Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn, who bent themselves into positions beyond the flexibility of Yogi Coudoux and accepted degradations beyond the imaginings of the Marquis de Sade when they calculated that hugging Trump close would keep their political careers alive. Mike Pence, who was Trump’s most fervid and po-faced apologist for years until by means of some bizarre moral parthenogenesis he produced a conscience at the very moment Trump’s star seemed to be setting in 2021, is out there trying to rally Republicans to the banner of Reaganism when what he should really do, if he had an ounce of self-respect, is don ashes and sackcloth, or maybe set himself on fire on the National Mall like one of those Vietnamese monks protesting the Ngô Đình Diệm regime way back when, while those of us who were willing to pay the price to be on the right side of this question from the beginning (and it was not inexpensive) roast a few s’mores over the hot embers of his smoldering sanctimony.

 

Which is basically what we should be doing to the Republican Party as a whole, because the Republican Party is still going to be what it is—dangerous and depraved—even when Trump has left the scene. Republicans from Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Mike Johnson to their media cheerleaders, allies, and apologists should go down with the Trump ship—and, if necessary, they should be made to go down with it. The Republican Party has, in this past decade and some, shown itself to be willing to embrace anything, to tolerate anything, and to justify anything, no matter how fundamentally opposed to the values and virtues Republicans once claimed to cherish and champion, no matter how grotesque or unpatriotic or un-Christian, as long as it helps them stay in office—not even in power, which would be an almost understandable thing, but simply in office, sinecure-ensconced castrati who offer nothing to Congress and who cling to their seats only for the sake of their modest salaries and some staff and an air-conditioned place to hang out on Capitol Hill between Fox News hits.

 

In anno Domini 2026, there simply is no honorable way to be associated with the Republican Party. The notion of trusting anybody running for office under its banner—much less actively supporting any such person—is out of the question for the foreseeable future, at least as far as I am concerned. It is less a political party or a movement than it is an infestation, and there will be no return to normal politics possible until we have it out, which begins—and cannot proceed without—a full and forthright reckoning with the 2021 attempt to overthrow the government of the United States by nullifying the results of the 2020 election. A politician—or a party—who cannot simply tell the truth about that episode cannot be trusted with power.

 

So, rat-paddle away from the ship as fast as your little rat paws will carry you, Republicans. But the water is cold, and the sea is dark and vast.

 

Words About Words

 

One of the things that many readers of journalism (in print or online) do not know—or do not have reason to think about—is that different parts of a package typically are written by different people. Reporters and columnists do not write their own headlines. (As they will feel obliged to inform you, from time to time.) What is known as “display copy,” meaning headlines, subheads, decks, photo captions, etc., typically are written by someone other than the name on the byline, often by multiple people. Some of those people are writers and editors, and some of them are not: One of the reasons captions tend to be bad is that photographers often write them, and editors do not have the good sense to scrap what was written by the photographer, who might not be a photographer at all if he knew how to write.

 

So, for example, you’ll have things such as this Entertainment Weekly item about Val Kilmer, in which the deck reads:

 

Adam Marcus directed Val Kilmer, who died in 2025, in the 2008 action thriller

 

While another bit of display copy reads:

 

Conspiracy director Adam Marcus slammed Val Kilmer, who died in 2005, as the “worst human being I’ve ever known” in a social media post.

 

Time does fly, but 2005 is not 2025. (The item has since been corrected.)

 

All mistakes are embarrassing, of course, but mistakes in headlines and other kinds of display copy loom a little larger in the public conversation than those in the body copy, which is, of course, the meticulously groomed and carefully edited work of a reporter or columnist or another kind of writer. (Do I need to explain the tone of voice there? I don’t think I do.) In this, there is a confluence of artificial intelligence and organic stupidity: Many people fail to read past the headlines, and many automated systems for organizing and locating digital content in effect assign extra weight to content in certain contexts, which is why AI summaries of the reporting on any given subject often read more like bad headlines than good reporting. Nature of the beast and all that.

 

In a sense, we do not know very much about the past. About the Roman republic and empire, for example, what do we really know? We have a very, very small sampling of what the Romans wrote and said, without much context or any good way of evaluating how accurate or relevant most of it is, we have a similarly small and similarly unreliable sampling of what was said and written about them by others, and we have some durable things that were left behind. You’d be surprised by how little we really know about the Anglo-Saxon forebears to Britain and how much of that information comes from a tiny handful of church documents and tax records.

 

I sometimes wonder whether we really know all that much more about the present. In my own occupation, mainly writing about politics and public controversies, it is remarkable how little relatively well-read people understand about the political ideas and beliefs not only of those who disagree with them but also of those who agree with them. Most of us understand very little about how important institutions work, not only as a matter of formal procedure but also as a matter of institutional sociology. This is one of the reasons conspiracy thinking is so popular and so easy to fall into—and why it is the default position of so many people who would tell you that they are too smart to fall for a conspiracy theory.

 

This is getting worse, of course, partly for technological reasons (social media enables the spread of misinformation) but to an even greater part, I think, for moral reasons, with the waning of the ethos of active and responsible citizenship and the continued ascent of politics-as-entertainment. I am continually shocked by the number of young people I encounter—educated young people, people who can do calculus, engineers, and such—whose ordinary conversation contains a tremendous amount of uncritically accepted falsehoods or genuinely insane conspiracy stuff, along with a pronounced inability to maintain categorical boundaries. (By maintaining categorical boundaries, I mean being able to keep straight related but different sets, e.g., Arab and Muslim, something that has come up repeatedly in the past few months in the context of the Iran war and having to explain to reasonably smart people that Iranians mostly are not Arabs.) I suspect that this has something to do with asking people to pay attention to too many different things at once. I do not think the world was entirely better off when members of the lettered aristocracy of the 18^th century were all reading the same two dozen novels every year and had a lot in common to talk about at dinner parties, but I do think there is something to T.S. Eliot’s belief that his students might have been better off if they had read fewer books but had read the same books.

 

Knowledge is, ultimately, something that is held in common. There is no other way to keep it. When it is gone, it is gone, and what we have are fragments and errors.

 

In Other Wordiness ...

 

For a second there, I was not sure whether to write continually or continuously. Continuous means uninterrupted, as in the 3,000-year continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel. Continual means repeated, as in my continual conflation of “lay” with “lie,” which some of you were kind enough to point out in an earlier piece.

 

And Furthermore ...

 

Poor Bret Michaels was caught in my crosshairs today. For the record: I like Poison. And Poison’s guitarist, C.C. DeVille, is, in my view, terribly underrated. The band’s pop sensibility kept him from going full shredder at the apex of his fame, and I don’t suppose his hair-band image did his reputation a lot of good among nerds who were trying to figure out how to play Steve Vai compositions (which, good luck with that), but there are few hard rock guitarists of his era who produced music that is more fun to play. A halfway competent guitarist (and I am only halfway competent) can pretty much master the solo from “Talk Dirty to Me” in an afternoon, and it is really enjoyable to let that rip. Music in the 1980s was a bit more fun, and a bit less self-serious, than what came after in the lugubrious grunge years and in our own too-heavy times.

 

In Closing

 

I do not much care for terminological policing—you know what I mean: “We shouldn’t call it ‘capitalism’; we should call it ‘economic freedom.’” Or: “We shouldn’t say ‘abortion rights,’ we should say ‘reproductive freedom.’” Or: “We shouldn’t call it the ‘estate tax’; we should call it the ‘death tax.’” Etc.

 

But let me put in a word here for anti-liberalism as an alternative to illiberalism and to postliberalism. Illiberal does not describe a set of ideas, really. It describes an instinct, a tendency that is too broad to be useful as a political descriptor.

 

Postliberalism sounds to my ear like a suggestion that the people who champion the associated worldview have moved on from liberalism to something else. But they have not. They are very much stuck on liberalism, and how much they hate it. I know: I have read most of their dopey books, and there is no there there beyond objections to liberalism, which in practice mainly means objections to free enterprise and official social toleration. The so-called post-liberals are not, in my reading, very much or very consistently in favor of anything at all, their position being almost an entirely negative one.

 

And there is much to dislike about the combination of capitalism with general social toleration: You end up with a lot of porn and reality television, for one thing, but you also end up with a society that overvalues economic arrangements that are oriented toward profit-seeking and that has a hard time distinguishing between the police power (“You must not do that!”) and discernment (“You should not do that”) as though libertarian legal arrangements necessitated libertarianism in taste and judgement. Not only is it the case that a libertarian legal environment does not require a generally libertarian social ethos, it may also be the case that procedural libertarianism ultimately is incompatible with the most liberal kind of live-and-let-live outlook.

 

Which is to say, I think Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek would have written very good laws for a nation of Puritans and others living in a Puritan-inflected culture of restraint, moderation, and self-control, but maybe not for the kind of people who rally to the banner of Donald Trump, Graham Platner, et al. It is not mere coincidence that the United States and Europe have turned away from the idea of political freedom when personal libertinism is at what may very well be the apex. The anti-liberals are of course trying to pull on the wrong lever, but that is to be expected.

The Perverse Genocide Charge

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, June 09, 2026

 

Israel’s haters surely enjoy the perversity of accusing the Jewish state of the same enormity that contributed to its creation.

 

The spirit of Buchenwald lives on, we are supposed to believe, in the Israeli military operation in Gaza.

 

It’s nearly mandatory for progressive Democrats to denounce Israel for its alleged genocide, while Tucker Carlson and Hasan Piker — radical influencers on the right and left, respectively — say that the moral offense is the same as the Holocaust, even if the scale is less extensive.

 

Israel’s haters surely enjoy the perversity of accusing the Jewish state of the same enormity that contributed to its creation, of comparing the Jews to heinous murderers of Jews.

 

The charge is a grotesque libel. If Israel wanted to kill everyone in Gaza, it could do it easily. What we have witnessed in the Hamas-controlled territory is not a genocide — the deliberate destruction of a people — but an urban battle.

 

Warfare in urban environments is almost always highly destructive. When the Iraqi army retook Mosul from ISIS in 2016–2017 with our air support, tens of thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed, along with an estimated 80 percent of the Old City.

 

Vietnam gave us the famous (perhaps apocryphal) line, “We had to destroy the city in order to save it.” The city in question was Ben Tre, infiltrated by the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive in 1968. We used air strikes, helicopter gunships, artillery, and ground troops to extricate the communist forces, and the Mekong Delta town suffered extensive damage, even though the fighting only lasted days.

 

The old imperial capital of Hue suffered the same fate, but on a larger scale. Communist forces took most of the city and dug in, requiring street-to-street combat over a period of months to take it back. About half the city was damaged or destroyed.

 

The lesson is that cities never fare well when they are the locus of combat, whether Seoul or Pyongyang during the Korean War, Manila or Stalingrad during World War II, Vicksburg or Charleston during the Civil War.

 

Civilians inevitably suffer and die. This is true of even the most honored military operations. The Allied invasion of Normandy killed 20,000 French civilians as cities such as Rouen and Le Havre were pulverized by our bombardment.

 

Why would anyone expect Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth, to be different? Hamas spent years and massive resources tunneling and fortifying, making Gaza into a bristling armed camp difficult to subdue.

 

Sure enough, it has taken a grinding, years-long campaign to substantially reduce Hamas.

 

Israel’s detractors profess to detect “genocidal intent” in harsh things that Israeli officials have said about Gaza, but these statements have typically been aimed at Hamas.

 

If Israel wanted to commit genocide against the Gazans, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu wouldn’t have sought to accommodate Hamas for years, in the hopes that a major war could be avoided.

 

The October 7 attack exposed this as a grievous misjudgment. It’s hard to believe that any society, having experienced the unspeakable crimes visited on its people that day, would have concluded, “Well, we can’t do anything in response — even recover our hostages — because combat in Gaza will be too destructive.”

 

Hamas intertwined its military infrastructure with civilian facilities, and made military use of hospitals, mosques, and schools. Its fighters posed as medical personnel and journalists. Everything was geared to making it as difficult as possible to target Hamas without collateral damage, creating the predicate for denouncing Israel for war crimes.

 

As military expert John Spencer points out, Israel takes steps to avoid civilian harm: “It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets, and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level.”

 

None of this matters, though. The ultimate perversity is that it is Hamas that has genocidal intent against the Jews. Yet, it is the war against this cruel terror group that is being used to associate the Jewish state with one of history’s worst crimes.

Israel Isn’t the Problem, Mr. President

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, June 09, 2026

 

The press, both in America and abroad, would like nothing more than to blame Israel for the Trump administration’s failure to negotiate a durable political settlement to the war with the Islamic Republic of Iran. For some inexplicable reason, the Trump administration is ill-advisedly contributing to their cause.

 

In impromptu remarks to reporters on the tarmac yesterday, Donald Trump admonished Netanyahu concerning Israel’s continued prosecution of its conflict with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. “It has to stop,” the president said. “We want to get it finished.” That was probably a more diplomatic version of the irritation Trump admitted to expressing with his Israeli counterpart over Netanyahu’s commitment to degrading Hezbollah’s capacity to strike Israeli territory.

 

Trump’s remarks dovetail with those of his vice president. “We have a lot of shared interests, but we also have some situations where our interests diverge,” JD Vance said of Israel in a Monday night interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters. He insisted that the United States is still, ever and always, this close to a “long-term settlement” with Iran. “Now, Israel may like that; they may not like that,” Vance added. “But fundamentally, we think this is in the best interest of the United States of America.”

 

Trump and Vance are falling into a familiar trap — one predicated on popular misconceptions that are nevertheless cherished by an audience that is eager for any criticism of Israeli foreign policy.

 

The first problem with Trump’s outlook is his apparent receptivity to the notion that Israeli aggression in Southern Lebanon is all that stands between him and the peace he seeks. It’s not.

 

Trump may have forgotten that Hezbollah joined the war (at Iran’s behest) that the president started in February. The ongoing combat in Lebanon is an extension of both that war and the October 7 massacre (which Hezbollah supported).

 

In years past, Iran maintained a posture of plausible deniability toward its terrorist proxies such as Hezbollah. The West would exhort the Islamic Republic to rein in its terror network, and Tehran would insist it could not control or even deter that terrorist group from executing its attack.

 

Iran abandoned that posture under the extreme duress of Operation Epic Fury. It now positions itself as a vocal champion for its devastated network of Islamist proxies. That is leverage over Iran that Trump could exploit, if he were so inclined. But he’s not.

 

Vance’s outlook is even more discouraging. Not only is the vice president seeking precisely the sort of “daylight” between the U.S. and Israeli positions over which Barack Obama obsessed, but he has demonstrated a thumbless grasp of Obama’s nuclear deal and the criticisms of it.

 

In Vance’s conversation with Watters, the vice president sought to highlight the contrast between Trump’s approach to negotiations with Iran and Obama’s. “The number one thing that went wrong with the Obama deal, Jesse, is there was not a proper inspections regime to ensure that the Iranians could never build a nuclear weapon,” he said. “And that’s one of the big differences between what happened then and what the President of the United States would get to, assuming we’re ultimately able to make a deal.”

 

Vance is right that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’s (JCPOA) lax verification regime — a dispensation that the Iranians routinely exploited when Obama’s deal was a live proposition — was one of the biggest objections to Obama’s nuclear deal. But there were plenty of other problems with the JCPOA.

 

Its critics attacked it for flooding the regime’s coffers with cash — funds that the Islamic Republic used to prop up the Islamist terrorists in Iran’s orbit who are soaked with American blood.

 

The Obama-era deal sidestepped ballistic missiles entirely. Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified Iran’s missile capabilities as this war’s foremost casus bellum. After all, he observed, the “shield” of conventional ballistic missiles that Iran was developing would have raised the cost of military action against Iranian nuclear sites past the point that the West could painlessly absorb.

 

But perhaps the biggest issue with the JCPOA was the fact that it tacitly sanctioned an Iranian nuclear breakout. The Iran deal compelled the Islamic Republic only to mothball the cascading centrifuges it used to enrich uranium, not dismantle them. It asked Iran only to redesignate its nuclear research facilities as civilian rather than military infrastructure. Even if Trump had not withdrawn from the JCPOA, it would have sunset in 2025 — leaving all that infrastructure in place while allowing, under the terms of the deal, the development of advanced uranium enrichment capabilities.

 

Essentially, the Obama deal greenlit an Iranian fissionable device so long as the Iranians debuted it outside the agreement’s ten-year window.

 

At the foundational level, the problem the Trump administration is encountering is the same problem that Obama and Joe Biden encountered: The Islamic Republic wants a nuclear bomb, and the regime is prepared to sacrifice almost everything in that pursuit.

 

The Israelis have every reason to object to a bad deal. Indeed, the Trump administration should be grateful to a nation that Trump once called a “model ally” for attempting to save this White House from its own seemingly capitulatory instincts.

 

These days, precisely no one seems to need any inducement to think and speak the worst of Israel. But the Trump administration should not contribute to the paranoia overtaking the globe. Israel isn’t the president’s problem here. Iran is.

Why Graham Platner’s Supporters Don’t Care

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

In 2012, Republicans were convinced they had nominated the better man in Mitt Romney.

 

Among other vindicated positions, Romney contended, “Russia is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe,” an assertion that Barack Obama dismissed with a scoffing, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” The New York Times editorial board sneered, “His comments display either a shocking lack of knowledge about international affairs or just craven politics.”

 

But to hear Democrats tell it that year, the Republicans had nominated the devil. A Democratic activist group ran television commercials charging that Romney had given his workers cancer, a glaring lie. Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed that Romney had not paid any taxes for ten years. This, too, was a blatant lie; when later confronted about it, Reid smiled and gloated, “Romney didn’t win, did he?” The Obama campaign claimed that Romney had committed a felony and lied on his filings with the Federal Elections Commission; when that accusation proved baseless, Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter responded, “He’s not going to get an apology,” and accused Romney of “whining.” New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote about Romney telling the story of putting a dog in a crate on the roof of the family station wagon more than 100 times.

 

Every political consultant focuses on winning the race they’re working on this year; few if any contemplate the longer-term ramifications of their actions.

 

Republicans learned a hard lesson that year: that nominating the better man did not mean he would win the election. And if the electorate could be so easily persuaded by false accusations, nominating a more ethical man with a better character didn’t matter much.

 

Heading into the 2016 presidential election, many Republicans concluded that if any person they nominated was going to be painted as the devil, they might as well nominate a man with the reputation of a devil and as ruthless as the devil and get all the advantages of nominating a devil. And the GOP, the country, and the world have been living with the consequences of that decision ever since.

 

In 2024, Democrats were convinced they had nominated — er, had selected for them — the better candidate. They were convinced Kamala Harris was smarter, wiser, and more experienced. What’s more, she was “joy.” She was “brat.” No less a world-renowned moral authority than Taylor Swift had endorsed her. As Democrats often told the country, it was the prosecutor against the felon. In the minds of those on the political left, Trump had long-since morally disqualified himself with his performance in his first term, his refusal to accept his defeat in 2020, his incendiary remarks leading up to the January 6 riot, and the multiple criminal investigations of him.

 

And Kamala Harris not only didn’t win the presidential race, she lost the popular vote and all seven key swing states.

 

It was the Democrats’ turn to learn that nominating the seemingly “better” person meant little — particularly if the country was deeply dissatisfied with the Democratic incumbent, and the better person said “not a thing comes to mind” when asked what she wanted to do differently than the incumbent.

 

This helps explain why today, so many Democrats are dismissing Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo, his sexting other women, his account on Kik, and allegations of his abusing past girlfriends as mere “minutiae,” not worth a moment’s thought.

 

Keep in mind, the desire to support him despite his baggage and scandals is not merely a Maine phenomenon; it is thoroughly a national phenomenon. Of the nearly $12 million that Platner’s campaign had raised as of the end of March, just $500,000 was from residents of Maine.

 

The updated numbers are likely to show additional national surges; Platner’s campaign said that after the candidate admitted to sexting other women, “Fundraising was 17 percent higher than the previous four-day period, and that small-dollar donations jumped 27 percent compared with the week prior.” His campaign said he raised $200,000 in the 24 hours since the New York Times article alleging physical abuse of his girlfriends, “a quarter of it from first-time donors.”

 

There are people in this world who believed that Platner was not worth financially supporting until they heard about him grabbing a young woman by the shoulders hard enough to leave marks.

 

But Democratic donors are human beings, just like Republicans, and thus perhaps we should not be surprised. Over the past eleven years, the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party has concluded that all the allegations of past wrongdoing by Donald Trump are overblown, false accusations, or immaterial.

 

The cheating on his wife, the six business bankruptcies, the “grab them by the” you-know-what comment, the sneering at John McCain’s experience as a prisoner of war, accepting a plane from the Qataris, the praise for dictators, the ferocious attacks on allies, the threat to militarily annex Greenland, the quoting of Benito Mussolini, the gleeful social media posts after a famous critic got murdered — you name it, the average Trump fan can come up with an excuse for it, or insist it doesn’t really matter.

 

Donald Trump’s life is a moral Chernobyl, and yet there are people — Americans who think of themselves as Christians! — who see him as morally difficult to distinguish from Jesus. I am going to choose to believe that when Pastor Mark Burns and a group of religious leaders dedicated a 22-foot golden statue to President Donald Trump at the Trump National Doral Miami golf club, and then used its creation to sell a meme coin called $PATRIOT, they did so as an elaborate troll. Then again, they did not include a giant golden calf, nor Mooby.

 

From the beginning, some Trump supporters have taken great pleasure in the sense that the president outrages “all the right people.” You see, if you don’t like everything that Trump is doing or that he’s ever done, you must be either a crazy leftie, or some sort of RINO squish and an effete wimp. (Everybody who wants to do the wrong thing can always find a way to convince themselves that it is the necessary thing, and that their willingness to break a moral code, rule, or law is just evidence of their courage and determination.)

 

In the minds of many Democrats today, it is Platner who outrages “all the right people.” If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance the “right people” are you and me, people who think a potential senator shouldn’t have a Nazi tattoo, shouldn’t describe himself as a communist*, shouldn’t physically assault his girlfriends, and shouldn’t be sharing half-naked pictures of himself in a towel on Kik — the app that is a “predator’s paradise.”

 

New York University professor Scott Galloway insisted during a podcast appearance last week, “The obsession with personal purity has become a luxury belief.” When Galloway isn’t shaping young minds at NYU, he’s working at the American Institute for Boys and Men, which aims “to inform policy and public dialogue with non-partisan research so that boys and men from all backgrounds can lead healthy, happy, and meaningful lives.”

 

Say, does anyone think it might be a problem for a guy who wants to help boys and young men “lead healthy, happy, and meaningful lives” to make the public argument that objecting to allegations of abusing partners and having a Nazi tattoo represents a “luxury belief” and “an obsession with personal purity”?

 

Forget Al Franken; somewhere Eric Swalwell must be kicking the cat in frustration. Just weeks ago, Swalwell’s history of predatory womanizing with interns made him unacceptable in California’s gubernatorial race, while elected Democrats in Congress are still lining up and helping with Platner’s fundraising.

 

A few weeks ago, Texas Republicans could have picked the allegedly boring, establishment, scandal-free incumbent John Cornyn to be their nominee, and rest assured that Cornyn would cruise to reelection against James Talarico. Instead, they deliberately chose Ken Paxton, who leaves a trail of slime everywhere he goes — infidelity, mortgage fraud, abuse of office, bribery, frivolous lawsuits — you name it, Paxton’s been credibly accused of it. Lots of Senate candidates say they’re committed to serving the community, but Paxton can boast he’s proven it through his court-ordered 100 hours of community service.

 

At some point, we must start wondering if primary electorates prefer candidates with lots of scandals and sordid histories. From a profile of Platner in NOTUS from April:

 

But far from dooming his campaign, all these controversies seem to have simply played into Platner’s brand as a regular person — someone outside the usual political system. Back in November, Platner supporter Jacob Makoujy, then 27 — whom I spoke to before Platner’s campaign event in Biddeford — told me he appreciated the way the candidate had not dodged questions about the revelations but took accountability. “It feels like I can see my own growth, myself, in him,” Makoujy said. “I’ve gotten older and been like, ‘Wow, that was kind of stupid of me.’”

 

Andy O’Brien, a former Democratic member of the Maine Legislature and the current communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO, heard similar sentiments while canvassing door-to-door for Platner in his personal capacity. “People brought up the tattoo,” he told me. “But only to say, ‘Oh yeah, he got this tattoo. I’ve got stupid tattoos, too.’”

 

Apparently, there’s nothing worse in this world than being squeaky-clean, boring, and “too perfect.” A common lament among men who think of themselves as upstanding and ethical is that “women like bad boys.” So do many electorates.

 

We now have the bases and the leaders of both parties arguing that ethics are for suckers. Good character is a weakness. Past bad decisions are evidence of “authenticity” and “relatability.” There is apparently a widespread belief that it takes a thoroughly shady SOB to get things done.

 

I have found in my life that every time you trust a person with bad character — with no evidence of genuine repentance — to not screw things up this one time . . . they screw it up again. There are people in this world who have good character and middling or limited competence, but much more often, character and competence intertwine. Good character is often a reflection of recognizing the longer-term consequences of our actions; bad character is often tied to impulsivity, self-centeredness, an inability to delay gratification, and an erroneous belief that one is so much smarter than everyone else that you can easily con them and get away with it.

 

But apparently, a lot of voters simply don’t want to learn that lesson.

 

*Under federal law, a member of the Communist Party cannot be admitted to the United States, never mind become a U.S. citizen. Why would we want someone like that in the U.S. Senate?

And Now What?: Northern Ireland Edition

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, June 09, 2026

 

The BBC reports that:

 

A man believed to be Sudanese has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a “brutal” knife attack in Belfast, police have said.

 

The man, in his 30s, remains in custody after the incident in north Belfast at about 22:30 BST on Monday.

 

Video circulating online shows a number of people, including one wielding a hurling stick, confronting the apparent attacker until the police arrived.

 

A man injured in the attack, aged in his 40s, is in hospital where his condition is described as serious.

 

Later in the story, the BBC notes that:

 

Northern Ireland’s Justice Minister, Naomi Long, condemned the attack and said “there is no place for this kind of horrific violence in our community”.

 

What does this mean? I’m not picking on Naomi Long, or on Northern Ireland. A lot of American politicians talk like this, too. What I’m asking is: why? What, precisely, does Long think she’s conveying? Against whom is she arguing? The comedian John Cleese once pointed out that, for some reason, flight attendants tend to emphasize the word “will” when informing the passengers that “the plane will soon be landing.” “The plane will soon be landing,” they say, as if prepared for the passengers, in unison, to shout back, “oh no it won’t!” So it is with politicians’ responses to terrorist attacks. Presumably, nobody thinks that Naomi Long is in favor of public beheadings. Nor is the desirability of public beheadings a live topic in Northern Ireland. So what — or who — is her audience? “There is no place for this kind of horrific violence in our community” is, within this context, completely meaningless. It was stipulated, tacitly, before anyone said a word.

 

What matters is what comes next. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said, that he will have “absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence like this on our streets.” That’s good. But, again, what does he mean? As far as I can see, there are three options. The first option is that Britain intends to rework its immigration process so that Sudanese would-be beheaders find it harder to get in. The second is that Britain does not intend to do that, but that it intends to increase the use of the police to deal with would-be beheadings if and when they happen. The third is that Britons ought to consider would-be beheadings an inevitability in an interconnected world, and to accept that the government’s only role is punishing their perpetrators after the fact. One can construct a case for all of these options, but, in order to do so, one has to say more than that one has “absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence.” Outside of the psych ward, that is a given. The material question is what, specifically, do you intend to do now?

 

In Naomi Long’s case, what came next was this:

 

“I don’t think its helpful, for people to seize on this as yet another weapon, in the war that they wage on issues around immigration, I do not think it is healthy and I do not think it is fair.”

 

But that, too, doesn’t mean anything because it lacks a substantive argument. Why isn’t it “helpful”? What does “seize” mean? Why is complaining about a Sudanese immigrant trying to behead someone in the street equivalent to wielding a “weapon” in “war”? What are the “issues around immigration,” and why, if this isn’t indicative of anything bigger, were the words “yet another” used? Why isn’t it “healthy” or “fair” to inquire about this, or even to be angry? Sometimes, the answer to these questions is that we need to wait for the details. But that doesn’t apply here, because, as Long and Starmer have already conceded, “there is no place for this kind of horrific violence in our community” and the government will have “absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence like this on our streets,” and, as such, there can be no extenuating circumstances that render the attack acceptable.

 

What Long and her friends really seem to mean is that the people of Northern Ireland ought to consider this an act of “horrific violence,” but then ask no further questions about how it happened. Look through the responses and you will glean a list of acceptable discussion points. On the Allowed List are the horror of the incident, the bravery of the citizens who intervened, the lamentable existence of knives on the British archipelago, and the kind demeanor of the police and medical services. On the Not Allowed List is why a Sudanese lunatic was in Northern Ireland in the first place, attempting to behead someone on the street. There may, somehow, be a good answer to that inquiry, but it won’t be satisfying to anyone in the community if it is accompanied  by a broad injunction to shut up.

Calling the Shots

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

If you believe our secretary of state, which I do not, America lost control of events in Iran before the first bombs fell on February 28.

 

Remember that? Days after the war began, Marco Rubio claimed that the United States had joined Israel’s opening strike in a spirit of what we might call “preemptive self-defense.” The Israelis intended to attack whether the Trump administration approved or not, Rubio suggested; the White House believed the Iranians would respond by targeting U.S. assets in the region, dragging us into the war.

 

So the president decided not to wait. Better that our country participate in Israel’s initial raid and maximize the damage done to the enemy, Rubio reasoned, than give Iran a free shot at American troops before we enter the fight.

 

I’ve never believed that story. It reeks of a pretext invented to obscure a more embarrassing truth, which is that the president thought Iran’s regime would collapse after a day or two of bombing and prostrate itself before him, as Venezuela’s did. Donald Trump wasn’t dragged into war by Benjamin Netanyahu. He went willingly because his grandiosity convinced him he would be the man who finally plucked the Khomeinist thorn from America’s side.

 

Trump was in control of events when the fighting started. But not anymore.

 

Early yesterday, Hezbollah fired missiles at northern Israel. Netanyahu retaliated with an airstrike (which the U.S. didn’t approve) on one of the group’s command centers in a suburb of Beirut. Iran has insisted all along that its ceasefire with the U.S. also covers its foreign proxies, so it deemed Israel’s reprisal against Hezbollah a violation and responded by firing missiles of its own at the Jewish state.

 

That caused the president to spring into action—to try to prevent the Israelis from hitting back.

 

Trump was so frantic to avert further escalation, in fact, that he babbled about it to Axios reporter Barak Ravid before even speaking to Netanyahu.

 

“I am going to call Bibi right now and tell him not to retaliate. Each of them had their fun. Israel had its strike, and Iran had its strike. We don’t need another one,” Trump said.

 

…

 

“The Iranian strikes didn’t hurt anybody,” Trump tells Axios. “Hopefully Israel is not going to retaliate. If Bibi strikes them back, it’s just gonna keep going like the last 47 years—or the last 3,000 years.”

 

Trump added: “We are very close to a final deal with Iran. It is going to be a good deal. I don’t want it to blow up because of what is happening now.”

 

Ravid filed an update after the two leaders spoke. A senior U.S. official assured him that Netanyahu had “pseudo agreed” to stand down for now, adding, “I don’t think anything is imminent in terms of an Israeli strike.” The Associated Press also quoted a senior U.S. official as saying that Trump “got Bibi to hold off for the time being.”

 

The president himself boasted of his influence over the Israelis in a separate interview with the Financial Times. When asked what would happen if his ally objected to the terms of a U.S. peace deal with Iran, he assured the paper that they’ll have no choice but to accept. “I call the shots,” he told reporter Edward Luce. “I call all the shots. [Netanyahu] doesn’t call the shots.”

 

A few hours later, Israel bombed Iran.

 

“The U.S. didn’t agree or support these strikes,” a U.S. official later whimpered to Axios. Trump was reduced in the aftermath to one of his now-habitual “all is well, a deal is coming” posts on Truth Social to try to calm investors before markets opened. That deal, incidentally, was supposedly being finalized and its terms were set to be “announced shortly” … on May 23.

 

Iran and Israel agreed this morning to stop shooting but that pact is, and will remain, one new Hezbollah provocation away from disintegrating.

 

The United States is no longer calling the shots in the war. Why?

 

Goals.

 

It’s because, of the three combatants in this conflict, the United States is the only one whose priority is to end it as soon as possible—and the other two know it. Go figure that a party that’s spoiling to withdraw might have trouble dictating events to two that share an incentive to fight on for at least a bit longer.

 

The White House’s goal at this point is straightforward: save face. Convince Iran to agree to a peace deal that stabilizes oil markets and includes enough nuclear concessions that it can be credibly spun as better than the nuclear bargain Barack Obama made with Tehran in 2015.

 

Trump needs a way to answer critics who’ll say that the war did nothing to make America better off and may have made it worse off. He’s vulnerable to the first criticism if a peace accord replicates what Obama managed to achieve without bombs and embargoes. He’s vulnerable to the second if oil shipping in the Strait of Hormuz remains subject to Iranian extortion, as Iran insists it will.

 

But if he can get those two concessions, he’s out. Plainly, he would love to be done with this foolish war and pivot to Cuba, another of his grandiose fantasies about plucking a longtime thorn in America’s side and one with a much lower degree of difficulty than the current one.

 

Israel’s goal is different. It doesn’t much care about helping Trump save face; what it wants is to continue to degrade Iran and its proxies in anticipation of the “new” Middle East that the war is creating.

 

That Middle East will be one in which the United States is much less active than it’s been over the past 35 years. Neither American party is likely to support the Jewish state militarily going forward, with Democrats having grown hostile to Israel and the post-Trump postliberal GOP likely to trend further toward isolationism in response to this war’s costs.

 

That Middle East will also be one in which Iran has gained stature, having repelled a U.S. military regime-change effort and demonstrated its ability to apply a death grip to global energy markets in the process.

 

This may, in other words, be the last chance Israel will have for many years to cripple the Iranian terror state before it gains strength and uses its new leverage to weaken Sunni resistance to its hegemony in the region. If Trump can’t bring the Iranians to heel at the bargaining table, and he probably can’t, why shouldn’t Israel continue to take military measures against an existential threat?

 

Iran’s goal in the war also requires keeping the conflict active, at least in the short term. That goal is to humiliate the United States and its president by demonstrating that America is no longer “calling the shots” in the war or in the region writ large.

 

That strategy has a shelf life, I assume, as eventually America’s naval blockade of Iran’s own oil exports will create meaningful hardship for the regime. But until then, holding out on a deal with Trump and deputizing Hezbollah to harass Israel serves numerous purposes for the Khomeinists. It shows Sunni rivals that Tehran’s will in war is indomitable. It gives anti-war (and anti-Trump) sentiment in the United States time to grow, and fruitfully so. It weakens U.S. alliances around the world by demonstrating that America’s military may not be as effective against mutual enemies as they’ve assumed.

 

And it pits America against Israel by pitting Trump’s desire to end the war against Netanyahu’s desire to win it. Even by the standards of this kakistocracy, it’s preposterous that the president was on the phone yesterday with a reporter pleading Iran’s case publicly (“The Iranian strikes didn't hurt anybody”) in his desperation to stop Netanyahu from retaliating against a missile attack. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump is so eager to keep the Iranians at the table that he’s told aides he won’t resume the war unless they kill more American troops—and even then, he’ll only “consider” it.

 

By stringing Trump along with promises of peace, the regime has turned him into a sort of spokesman on its behalf against further Israeli strikes. Which is another reason for it to delay for as long as possible before agreeing to terms, of course: If the president is already this needy about finding a way out, imagine what sort of concessions he might be willing to make in another month or two.

 

Iran’s goal in the endgame stage of the war is to show the world and its neighbors in particular that it now controls events in the Strait of Hormuz and the region at least as much as the mighty United States does. If that’s not a strategic victory in the making, what is?

 

Trump’s awareness of Iran’s success probably explains the doth-protest-too-much defensiveness of what he told the Financial Times when asked whether Israel would accept the peace deal he brokers. They’ll do what I tell them is the sort of boorish brag you’d expect from a dominance-obsessed megalomaniac panicked that the other combatants in a major conflict to which he is a party have stopped listening to him.

 

I’m not sure it’s true, either.

 

Reasserting control.

 

There isn’t much left that he can do to reassert control over Iran. Hawks would say we’re one more spectacular bombing run away from forcing the Iranians to cry uncle, but I get the sense that people like Pete Hegseth have been telling Trump that since day one. The president no longer seems to believe it, and for once I agree with him.

 

Sending troops to seize the uranium buried at Iranian enrichment sites or territory along the coast of the strait would count as reasserting control, but the risk-reward ratio is poor. Either mission would stand a fair chance of failing and would almost certainly get Americans killed, further poisoning opinion against the president and the war. Last week Trump told reporters that he hasn’t tried to grab the uranium because “I didn’t feel like being like Jimmy Carter,” alluding to the Operation Eagle Claw fiasco. Here again, his instincts are uncharacteristically sound.

 

Waiting out the regime until the embargo bites is his least bad option, which explains why he’s begun leaning so hard on Israel to maintain the ceasefire. Unlike with the Iranians, he does have leverage over Netanyahu. So he’s using it.

 

But how much leverage, really? If he makes a bad bargain with Iran to end the conflict and the Israelis opt to resume the fight unilaterally, how much control would Trump plausibly be able to exert over the Jewish state to compel it to stand down?

 

Would it be more or less than the degree of control he had over Ukraine when he tried and failed to compel it to make a bad peace deal with Russia?

 

The Ukrainians chose to fight on despite the president’s famous admonition to Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office last year that “you don’t have the cards” to win. The newly elected GOP government set about making that assessment come true, slashing military aid to Kyiv by 99 percent in 2025 relative to the year before. The goal, obviously, was to erode Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and leave it with no choice but to make painful concessions toward peace.

 

Instead, the Ukrainians revolutionized drone warfare, developed their own long-range missiles, and are at present pushing Russia’s economy to the breaking point. Zelensky did have some cards to play, it turned out, and he’s played them more aggressively and effectively since he was forced to stop relying so heavily on Washington for help. Wouldn’t the same happen to Israel if it also defied the president by carrying on with a war he opposed?

 

Maybe not. Ukraine had many friends in Europe who were willing to help pick up the slack after America cut weapons to Kyiv. Israel has only one friend, as Trump reportedly reminded Netanyahu recently, and so the United States isn’t so easily replaced as a patron.

 

A sustained Israeli conflict with Iran would also damage the global economy more severely than Russia’s war with Ukraine has, assuming the Iranians closed the strait again to create international pressure on Netanyahu to back off. That would also give Trump a reason to pressure Israel more intensely than he pressured Ukraine.

 

But the Israelis have something that the Ukrainians don’t—namely, a devout base of support within the president’s party that’s been cultivated for generations, and which for some amounts to a religious obligation.

 

It is very hard to imagine Donald Trump crossing that base by threatening to sabotage an Israeli war against Iran by cutting off American weapons to Jerusalem the way he did to Kyiv. Even in a country and a party that’s grown cooler to the Jewish state over time, there are millions of right-wing hawks who would treat pulling the plug on U.S. aid to Israel during a death match with the Khomeinists as something close to treason.

 

Look no further than the outcry last month among normally quiescent loyalists when news leaked that the president was poised to make major financial concessions to Iran in a peace deal. There are precious few red lines in politics that will cause the Republican pipsqueaks in Congress to speak up against Trump for crossing them, especially in a matter as fraught as war, but weakness toward Iran is one. I can’t imagine how they’d react to weakness toward Iran coupled with a “betrayal” of Israel.

 

Trump would be squeamish about punishing Jerusalem for defying him even if congressional Republicans indulged him in it, I think. He’s boasted about being “the best president in the history of Israel” and enjoying 99 percent approval there, which isn’t true but nods at the reality that he’s more popular in the Jewish state than he is nearly anywhere else. I don’t think he has it in him to kiss off one of the few nations on Earth where he’s celebrated rather than vilified, particularly when doing so would benefit an enemy he loathes. Trump’s Russophilia explains why he’s never much cared whether Russian savages lay waste to Ukraine, but he’s an Iran-hater from way back.

 

Besides, if peace is his goal, cutting weapons to the Israelis would be counterproductive. There is no scenario in which reducing the Jewish state’s ability to deter its revanchist enemies will lead to less war in the Middle East rather than more, especially with respect to a regime like Iran’s that’s keen to reestablish its prestige by flexing muscle. Keeping U.S. weapons going to Israel would likely shorten, not lengthen, a sustained war with Iran—just like keeping U.S. weapons going to Ukraine might have forced Russia to the bargaining table by now.

 

All of which is to say that, in addition to losing control over the Iranians, the president also has less leverage over Jerusalem than he might like to think. Insofar as Netanyahu still feels obliged to follow his lead, I’m sure it has less to do with showing the sort of fealty or gratitude that Trump expects and more to do with not wanting to give right-wing isolationists further grounds to agitate against Israel within the Republican Party. Having already lost the American left, the Israelis can’t afford to lose the American right, and the surest way to do that is to make clear that you’re no longer following His Majesty’s commands.

 

So Netanyahu will go on obeying Trump whenever he can, right up until the moment when doing so becomes strategically indefensible, as it did yesterday. The president gets to call the shots for Israel as long as those shots aren’t doing real damage—but once they start to do so, as they might in a final U.S.-Iran peace accord, all bets are off. Stay tuned.

Payback for Gavin Newsom’s Fiscal Folly

By Will Swaim

Tuesday, June 09, 2026

 

Beset on all sides by regulators, highest-in-the-nation taxes, environmentalists, identitarians, and a political establishment committed to class war, California business owners may want to send thanks and a muffin basket to Representative Vince Fong.

 

Fong, a Bakersfield, Calif., Republican, has introduced HR 8892, the Creating Accountability in Loan Repayment Act. CAL Repayment (you get the acronymic joke) would require states with outstanding federal unemployment-insurance debt to use future flexible federal aid to repay those loans before spending the money elsewhere.

 

At present, California is the only member of that club — which is why some Capitol Hill insiders call Fong’s bill the Gavin Newsom Reform Act.

 

Governor Newsom borrowed $20 billion in May 2020, making him the first governor to tap a Covid-era federal loan program designed to backstop losses on state unemployment insurance funds. By October of that year, 22 other governors also had received loans. But after New York Governor Kathy Hochul crafted a grand bargain to repay her state’s loan last summer, Newsom found himself the program’s only deadbeat.

 

Then came Fong.

 

“What was intended to be a lifeline for unemployed workers during the pandemic has now left California with more than $18 billion in unpaid federal unemployment insurance debt,” Fong said in announcing his bill.

 

What really ticks off Fong is that Newsom’s profligacy — his dishonesty — has injured millions of innocent others. That’s because a federal law requires employers in delinquent states to repay their states’ loans through a surcharge on federal payroll taxes. In 2022, that surcharge on California businesses was $21 per employee. The law automatically raises that surcharge by $21 per year until the debt is repaid. However painful to those businesses, the slow, reptilian squeeze of the federal surcharges doesn’t even keep pace with interest on the principal loan amount. With interest, that original $20 billion federal obligation will grow to about $23 billion by December 31. By then, the surcharge will be $105 per employee.

 

Everyone loses. Billions of dollars that might have gone toward wages, bonuses, capital investments, or the bottom line have flowed instead to the federal government. Fong’s CAL Repayment Act would end the madness.

 

Newsom has studiously avoided the subject. Last month, he declared that he had balanced his final state budget, “proof,” he told the press, “that fiscal discipline and progressive values go hand in hand.”

 

In fact, the “balance” was achieved by record-setting tax revenue from Silicon Valley firms. On the spending side, when it came to repaying the federal loan, Newsom admitted that he had done nothing — but he wants you to know that, man, is he concerned.

 

“It’s gotta be addressed. It’s real,” Newsom said. “It’s incredibly important. I don’t want to leave the next governor without those considerations.”

 

Sure he doesn’t.

 

***

 

Fong’s Newsom Reform Act is only half of the story, of course. Before he defaulted on his federal unemployment insurance loan, Newsom had already presided over the loss of as much as $55 billion to domestic fraudsters and international crime gangs.

 

A bit of background: For years, the state auditor had warned that California’s unemployment system was vulnerable to fraud. But Newsom and his appointed labor secretary, Julie Su, determined that toughening identity-verification processes would (as Su put it) uniquely harm “marginalized communities.” So, when billions of federal dollars hit California’s unemployment insurance fund, the hackers went wild. In the cyber smash-and-grab that followed, they hoovered billions of dollars out of state unemployment offices. Inmates in California prisons each grabbed thousands of dollars from the relative comfort of prison library computers. Government-aligned Russian and Chinese crime gangs did the really heavy lifting, making off with billions more.

 

In 2021, at the height of the scandal, President Joe Biden plucked Su from Sacramento and flew her into the No. 2 spot at the U.S. Department of Labor. In that role, she used her authority in an attempt to forgive California’s federal loan. Like Su, then–California Attorney General Xavier Becerra also ignored the auditor’s warning that Russian and Chinese hackers were probing the unemployment fund.

 

But there’s a literary quality to California politics, an ideological monoculture in which nothing succeeds like failure. Today, Su is deputy mayor in New York City’s Mamdani administration, joyfully pursuing the grim class-war policies she has championed since her days as a nonprofit attorney in Southern California. Becerra has leapt from nowhere to become the Democratic Party’s leading candidate for governor of California. And Newsom, of course, long ago turned his attention to a run for the White House.

 

Newsom, Su, and Becerra leave behind millions of California business owners, workers, and others. Few among those millions will know Vince Fong’s name, much less his bill. He is everything that progressives ought to admire: The son of Chinese immigrants in the state’s conservative Central Valley, he once struggled with a severe stutter. He attended UCLA and Princeton and then launched an improbable political journey that took him from former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s district director to state assembly member and ultimately to McCarthy’s own seat in the U.S. House.

 

In truth, Newsom could have repaid the outstanding loan that animated Fong’s legislative efforts at any time.

 

Tax revenue has nearly doubled since he took office in 2019; Newsom has spent much of the increased yield chasing utopian schemes — a high-speed rail system that will likely become a kind of Roman ruin before it’s ever built, the extension of Medicaid coverage to illegal immigrants, billions of untraceable dollars that flowed into nonprofits that were supposed to (but did not) end the shame of homelessness, a massive increase in public employment. His best opportunity to repay the loan came early. In May 2021, confronting a September recall, Newsom somehow found $12 billion for an Oprah-like handout, a “Golden State Stimulus” paid directly to “middle-class” Californians.

 

“Hey, everybody, it’s Governor Gavin Newsom,” he said in a video announcing his plan. “I’m incredibly proud of California’s economic recovery — close to an $80 billion operating surplus that’s afforded us an opportunity to do something no other state in U.S. history has ever done, and that’s provide over $12 billion of tax rebates. . . . Look out for checks either in your mailbox or directly in your account. The Golden State stimulus is on its way!”

 

Leaving the unexploded bomb for the next guy is the Newsom brand.