No Passes

By Abe Greenwald

 Monday, August 17, 2026

 

There are still many people on the right who get mad when one of their own calls out Donald Trump for anything. It’s not that the diehard Trump supporters continue to believe that he can do no wrong. Everyone has finally been disabused of that notion. Rather, it’s that they can’t imagine why someone on the right wouldn’t simply be thankful for the good he’s done and shut up about the rest.  

 

I know this firsthand: Whenever I criticize Trump, readers fire off emails and social media messages reminding me that he secured the border, rolled back woke initiatives, cracked down on campus anti-Semitism, and took action against the Iranian regime. Just imagine, they usually add, where we’d be if Kamala Harris had won.   

 

Yeah, I get it. You really don’t need to remind me. I remain grateful for the same achievements. But if you think that means Trump deserves a pass for his excesses and outright failures, don’t be surprised when those achievements start to break down. Standing up to the regime in Iran, for example, is laudable only if you intend to defeat it. According to a report in today’s Wall Street Journal, Iranian leaders have used Trump’s misbegotten cease-fire to extensively rebuild, rearm, and reorganize for a larger, deadlier war against the U.S.—a showdown that they want. To cite another example, the tragic theatrics of ICE seem to have diminished the public’s sense of vigilance around immigration, illegals, and border enforcement. Gallup reports that Americans are once again immigration squishes.

 

Sometimes it seems as if Trump has a need to risk or gamble away his wins. There’s no sense in the right encouraging him to blow it all. If you shudder to think of what the country would look like under a Harris administration, don’t summon one.  

 

But there’s a more important reason to hold Trump accountable for his mistakes. We know what it looks like when politicians get a pass on their most egregious transgressions, when their constituents so appreciate having their pet concerns addressed that they’ll let everything else slide. It looks like the left.

 

In Democratic circles, you can be a sociopath, a Communist, a Nazi, an Islamist, or any combination of these. A candidate or politician can do his best to turn the country into an unrecognizable dystopia, and his supporters won’t say a word against him so long as he vows to take on Donald Trump.   

 

But if you’re so grateful for Trump’s accomplishments that you want to give him a pass on his many errors, you can’t honestly be stunned by liberals’ failure to address the dangerous extremism on their side. In fact, you’re contributing to the kind of politics that you simultaneously consider to be a national emergency. No, Trump isn’t the right-wing equivalent of Abdul El-Sayed or Zohran Mamdani. But there are figures waiting in the wings who just might be. Which means that this would be an especially bad time to adopt the left’s penchant for selective accountability.

 

And now, I’ll wait for the emails.

‘Woke One’ Wasn’t Just Crazy — It Was Destructive

By Becket Adams

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

 

We’re living through a real-life attempt to erase the recent past.

 

“Woke One was crazy,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) laughed recently during an appearance on ABC News, approvingly quoting a New York City councilman. “Woke One was crazy. Okay, that’s a truth,” ABC’s Jonathan Karl replied. The anchor then asked whether the left had gone too far during “Woke One,” including with its calls to “defund the police.”

 

This is where Ocasio-Cortez — and many within her ideological cohort, whether it’s writers at Vanity Fair or the New Republic, or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or even failed Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong — want you to accept their version of events over your own memory.

 

“I think that during this time and during, especially during Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton window,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.”

 

She added, “I think that when we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down, right? And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that, you know, during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

 

Total nonsense.

 

She’s simply trying to rewrite the record, and it’s as dishonest as it’s brazen. It’s also glaringly obvious what this is: a cleanup effort by someone with aspirations for higher office.

 

Her attempt to blame the “woke” era on pandemic hysteria collides with a simple fact: Anyone who is old enough to argue about this lived through 2020 — and 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. We remember the pandemic craziness as a continuation of a broader craziness that was already well underway. The term “cancel culture” appeared widely in mainstream media around 2018; “woke” itself gained popular prominence in the early 2010s.

 

Also, “Woke One” was far worse than cabin-fever rhetoric. It was often direct action with real, tangible consequences.

 

As early as 2014, before the pandemic hit the U.S., “Woke One” was JavaScript co-creator Brendan Eich being forced out as CEO of Mozilla after only eleven days because of a $1,000 donation he had made in 2011 to California’s Proposition 8.

 

It was watching a male beat the bricks off a woman in a women’s division and being dared to say you found anything untoward or cruel about it.

 

It was campus lectures across the country being canceled or abruptly ended by the threat or reality of violence from radicalized college students.

 

It was the British government’s agreeing to house male sex offenders who identify as female with actual female prison inmates. It was the insistence that “drag shows” have always been a normalized and beloved part of the everyday American tableau, and that “drag shows” for children were a beautiful and positive development. It was the fanatic promotion of sex-reassignment surgery and procedures for children and teens.

 

It was the entire news media apparatus agreeing that the hand gesture for “okay” is a secret white-supremacist signal, ensnaring bystanders from West Point cadets to firemen in allegations that they were covert racists.

 

It was the effort to cancel Laura Ingalls Wilder and Mark Twain.

 

Then came the pandemic, and “Woke One” was now the effort to cancel Mozart and Flannery O’Connor while removing, dismantling, or toppling monuments to Theodore Roosevelt, the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, and Christopher Columbus.

 

It was the Smithsonian Institution listing as “aspects and assumptions” of “whiteness and white culture” in the United States: rugged individualism, respect for authority, politeness, punctuality, competitiveness, the nuclear family, objectivity, the scientific method, self-reliance, and hope.

 

It was Amazon abruptly removing Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment while continuing to sell Mein Kampf. It was Puffin Books scrubbing supposedly problematic words such as “fat” and “ugly” from Roald Dahl’s children’s books, often inserting gentler substitutes of its own choosing. Puffin also replaced terms such as “mothers and fathers” with gender-neutral terms, including “parents” or “families.”

 

It was the Washington Post publishing an opinion piece characterizing as racist the effort to end school closures. The Chicago Teachers Union would also claim, “The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”

 

“Woke One” also included the moment during the 2020 Minneapolis riots when a career criminal set fire to a building with a father of five still trapped inside, killing him. The Biden Justice Department handed down a mere ten-year sentence, well below the federal guidelines of 17–20 years. In its sentencing memo, prosecutors cited as justification for the leniency Martin Luther King Jr.’s line that “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

 

It was all of it, before and after Covid-19.

 

It was “microaggressions,” “cultural appropriation,” parades of activists in Handmaid’s Tale costumes, the heckler’s veto, actual violence, “pussy hats,” and mass censorship across major social media networks. Then it was the fast-tracking of obviously unqualified and dangerously incompetent people into positions of real power and authority, often with devastating consequences. It was the “toxic masculinity” of men’s razors, transgender beer, and Land O’ Lakes removing the Native American mascot from its branding (they kept the land, though). It was taking a knee during the national anthem, “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots, looting, “social justice” financial scams, and being told that you were the problem if you didn’t embrace sex clown story hour for children.

 

It was also Ocasio-Cortez condemning the inclusion of Saint Damien of Molokai as one of two figures representing Hawaii in the National Statuary Hall Collection. “This is what patriarchy and white supremacy culture looks like!” she raged in a 2020 video. Saint Damien was a Belgian missionary who died caring for a Hawaiian leper colony, serving the neediest even as his body fell apart to leprosy.

 

“Woke One” was not just Covid-19 hysteria. It was not just rhetoric about making the world a better place. For roughly a decade, beginning in the mid-2010s and slowing only with President Donald Trump’s reelection, liberals and progressives gorged on identitarian excess, making victims of anyone who didn’t share their cravings. Across popular culture, politics, academia, and corporate America, they demanded 100 percent participation in their identitarian gluttony. Anything short of absolute compliance brought swift personal or professional ruin.

 

Lives were ruined, businesses destroyed, industries cowed, sectarian violence applauded, iconoclasm encouraged, excellence denigrated, rioting cheered, looting rationalized, history erased; “social justice” charlatans, junk scientists, and race-hustlers elevated; free expression censored, dissent punished, art and the human experience cheapened, the bodies of sad and confused teenagers experimented upon, intense racial animus incited, and, in certain cases, people were killed.

 

A political faction in this country was given carte blanche to enforce its revolutionary vision on every aspect of modern life, and it did so with ruthless devotion, capturing every major industry and social institution along the way, and with zero regard for the chaos, destruction, and lasting damage it caused.

 

It was an era of godless puritanism; except we know it better as the “woke” era. It was not long ago. It was every bit as bad as you remember. And its champions would prefer you forget the worst parts and the role they played — not from any sense of shame or guilt, naturally, but because the culture has shifted and your remembering might threaten their proximity to power.

 

What — you don’t think they’re actually sorry for what they did, do you?

What Trump Officials Mean by “Never”

By Jonathan Chait

Monday, August 17, 2026

 

Attorney General Todd Blanche has made abundantly clear that he will not act independently of President Trump’s desires. So yesterday, NBC’s Kristen Welker posed an obvious question to Blanche on Meet the Press: “If the president asks you to do something that you feel crosses an ethical or legal line, would you do it?” Blanche replied confidently, “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.”

 

This particular formulation—never has, never will—has become a new mantra for the administration. Last month, in response to reports that Trump had personally gained $2 billion in the previous year, the White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said, “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged—or will ever engage—in conflicts of interest.” When ProPublica reported in December that Trump had personally used the same mortgage-application fraud that he has called an imprisonable offense for various political targets, a White House spokesperson said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”

 

This is an epistemic frontier of impunity that can be understood only in the context of Trump’s disregard for legal or normative guardrails against his abuses of power.

 

In some circumstances, to state that you never have and never will do something bad might be unremarkable, and perhaps reassuring. But when the category of behavior is something you engage in constantly and with little disguise, the effect is quite different, akin to a company accountant solemnly promising that he would never dip into the kitty as he boards a helicopter to his private island.

 

To begin with, we know that giving an improper order to the attorney general is something Trump would do, because he has more or less done it. Last year, for instance, in a social-media post that was intended as a private message for her but was mistakenly posted on Truth Social, he pressured then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge several people that Trump wished to punish for political reasons. Blanche has personal experience with Trump’s obsessive habit of demanding federal investigations of his enemies, having been asked to bring new charges against David Hearn for his alleged defacement of the Reflecting Pool, even after the Justice Department conceded in a court filing that it had no evidence that Hearn had done such a thing, and that the damage to the floor lining had been caused by faulty installation.

 

Likewise, Trump’s conflicts of interest are of the most flagrant variety. Since the 1970s, previous occupants of his office have placed their investments in blind trusts. Jimmy Carter gave up control of his peanut farm to avoid the appearance of even the subtlest pro-peanut bias creeping into his decision making. Yet Trump has controlled a business empire and made numerous decisions that benefited it directly.

 

The same holds true for the assertion that he has never violated the law. Trump’s first brush with fame occurred in a lawbreaking context—he and his father were charged with excluding Black tenants from their apartments. They settled with the Justice Department without admitting wrongdoing but also agreed to abide by the Fair Housing Act. Trump was also convicted of falsifying business records in New York in 2024 and escaped more criminal charges (for stealing classified material, storing boxes of it in his home, and refusing to return it while lying to federal officials about it) through delaying tactics and questionable decisions by a sympathetic judge he’d appointed.

 

The power of the “never has, never will” defense lies in its brazenness. The administration is not attempting to defend the specifics of any particular acts. Instead, it broadly declares that all of its actions are outside the realm of plausible scrutiny.

 

During the first Trump term, the president pushed against or sought to flout long-standing norms. His first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation because he was a potential subject of it, a standard application of traditional ethics for which the president has never forgiven him. Another attorney general, William Barr, begged Trump not to publicly direct his work for fear that doing so would taint the process. Trump scaled back some of his business activity, taking comparatively small profits (for instance, foreign countries could book blocks of rooms in his hotels).

 

During his second term, he has abandoned all restraint. He won’t bother trying to argue that the Justice Department is not a personal weapon of vengeance or that his business interests do not overlap with his public conduct. Instead, his appointees declare that such behavior will continue and is perfectly legal.

 

Just as Trump took the term fake news, which originally described deliberately falsified stories on social media, and applied it to news outlets that attempt to report objectively, his administration now casts his own unethical conduct as being ethical. Any Trump demand upon the justice system is, by definition, proper. Any Trump business activity is, by definition, not a conflict of interest. Any action Trump takes is, by definition, legal. This latter doctrine is one Trump arrived at early in his presidency, when he wrote on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

 

Blanche is saying, as clearly as he can, that this administration deems the very concept of Trump doing something unethical to be self-evidently absurd. When he says that Trump never has and never will make an immoral demand, he is actually telling us that he himself never has and never will resist such a demand.

Bad Romance

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, August 17, 2026

 

There are four horsemen one encounters in trying to write 2,500 words about American politics every weekday. One is despair. The second is fatigue. The third is anxiety around finding a topic. The fourth is getting ahead of oneself.

 

The last is the least common but shows up more often than I’d like. For instance, imagine writing a newsletter about Republicans losing their image as “the party of strength” two days before the president publishes this unwitting proof of your thesis:

 

Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises! While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!” Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

 

See? See? What did I tell you?

 

There. Seven words down, 2,493 to go.

 

Fortunately, there’s more to say about the latest “love” letter from the president to his former beau than repeating the points in Friday’s column. So let’s pick up where that piece left off with this question: Realistically, what more could the United States do at this point to signal that it won’t, or can’t, defend the Far East from Chinese and North Korean aggression?

 

Pivot from Asia.

 

To begin with, the crisis in U.S. munitions stockpiles caused by the Iran war is now an open secret, part of the calculus in Beijing and Pyongyang. Our Asian allies saw it coming from a mile away, too.

 

As far back as late March, a month after the conflict began, they were watching the escalation in the Persian Gulf “with dread.” The Pentagon had already been forced at that point to redeploy Patriot missiles and a state-of-the-art THAAD air-defense system from South Korea to the Middle East. Less than five months later, 80 percent of the total U.S. inventory of THAAD interceptors and half the inventory of Patriots is gone. And won’t be replenished anytime soon.

 

Other American assets are also leaving the region. The Associated Press reported Saturday that the USS George Washington—the only U.S. carrier still operating in the Pacific—is headed to the Gulf to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln before conditions aboard the latter deteriorate further. China will use America’s local absence in its “narrative to demonstrate to the Philippines, to Japan, to Indonesia and others that … China is the bigger power and the U.S. is not able to guarantee their security anymore,” one defense analyst told the AP.

 

All of that follows months of signaling by the White House that it now regards China as a “peer power” whom it prefers to accommodate rather than confront. “Constructive strategic stability” is the administration’s diplo-jargon for that posture, the New York Times noted in June: “The new catchphrase signals to agencies in both nations, and to other powers, that the United States and China—the world’s two largest economies and most powerful militaries—are looking to work together or limit hostilities, notably on trade and Taiwan.” The president himself made the pitch on camera, in slobbering terms, when he visited Beijing in May.

 

One might wonder whether postliberals’ bellicosity toward China circa 2016 was always a ruse meant to create a pretext to reduce U.S. military commitments around the world, with no intention of ever “pivoting to Asia” to contain a fellow illiberal regime. But then, I’ve gotten ahead of myself on that topic too.

 

If Trump still cared about deterring China or North Korea, he’d refrain from needlessly antagonizing U.S. allies in the Far East. After all, the more evidence there is of a rift between the U.S. and regional powers, raising doubt about America’s willingness to defend them, the more Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un might be tempted to try their luck militarily. That’s what hawks call “provocative weakness,” and the president engages in it regularly—usually toward Europe but sometimes further afield, as a no doubt very alarmed South Korean government is realizing this morning.

 

The cherry on this very unappetizing sundae is that North Korea hasn’t been behaving in an “unthreatening and respectful” way lately, as Trump falsely claimed. If anything, the regime has been more belligerent than it was over most of the last 73 years, “gaining battlefield expertise with drones and modern warfare by deploying troops to support Russia’s war in Ukraine.” Kim has spent the eight years since his last summit with Trump building out his nuclear arsenal in hopes of extorting the U.S. for new diplomatic concessions, including sanctions relief. The president reportedly tried to send him a letter sometime earlier this year to reopen communications—and Kim refused to accept it.

 

A few days ago the North Koreans fired several ballistic missiles to protest the upcoming joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea. Our tough-guy leader’s response was to hurriedly scale back the operation, badmouth Seoul, and praise Kim disingenuously for his commitment to peace. That’s not so much “provocative weakness” as it is out-and-out appeasement of a rogue state, and it reportedly left the Pentagon “taken aback.”

 

Why did Trump do it?

 

It’s personal.

 

I see three possibilities, from least to most likely. The first is necessity.

 

The Wall Street Journal published an alarming story yesterday about Iran’s increasingly hardline leadership plotting to “widen the war and raise the costs for the U.S.” rather than wait to respond to the next round of American attacks. Escalation could include “sabotaging Internet cables in the Persian Gulf, creating political unrest in countries with Shia communities such as Kuwait and Bahrain, and potentially even ground operations in Kuwait.” One Israeli source told the paper that the Iranians are bringing damaged missile bases back online more quickly than expected as well.

 

Meanwhile, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine has reportedly urged the White House to find an “off-ramp” from the war, and Trump is doing his best to comply, opting for a “low-key” blockade of Iranian ports instead of renewed bombing. He appears to understand, and to accept, that further military escalation isn’t in America’s interest. But as the saying goes: In war, the enemy gets a vote.

 

If the president fears that the conflict in Iran is about to get very hot, he may be anticipating having to redeploy U.S. assets in the Far East to the Persian Gulf en masse. And if that’s going to happen, it’s probably better strategically to frame that redeployment as a matter of choice rather than a matter of necessity. We *could* help defend South Korea from a North Korean invasion while waging war on Iran, you see. Mighty America still retains a two-front capability! We simply *choose* not to do so because we’re mad at the South Koreans for whatever reason.

 

On this theory, Trump scaling back the military exercises is part of a larger spin operation to try to obscure the decline in U.S. military power by reframing retreat as a matter of dopey “America First” preferences. And the president is eager to hide that decline for obvious policy (and narcissistic) reasons. But even so, it all seems too clever by half. He’s been grousing about the alliance with South Korea for a decade, and he’s shown zero capacity for strategic foresight with respect to Iran. Why shouldn’t we take his post about this week’s joint military exercise at face value?

 

He’s probably sincerely miffed that the South Koreans didn’t want to get involved with his dumb Gulf war and is keen to punish them for it, whatever the consequences for American hegemony might be. Simple as that.

 

The second possibility is more probable: Rapprochement with North Korea has become another weird idée fixe in which Trump is emotionally invested for legacy reasons. Maybe Kim or his deputies quietly made it known to the White House that going ahead with the military exercises as scheduled would extinguish any chance of a third summit before he leaves office, and the president, unable to bear the thought, scrambled to satisfy them.

 

Usually his obsessions are vanity projects, like the White House ballroom or Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, or involve restoring random vestiges of how America did things during the glory days of his youth. His interest in face-to-face diplomacy with Kim is a bit of both. It’s a vanity project insofar as Trump plainly relished becoming the first U.S. president to meet with a leader of North Korea, another feather in his cap as a peacemaker of supposedly singular stature. And it’s a vestige of how America did things in his youth: If Richard Nixon could make history by going to China to make nice with communists, why can’t Donald Trump make history by going to the DMZ for a tête-à-tête between zaftig autocrats?

 

The special enchantment he feels for North Korean diplomacy, I suspect, is that it’s personal. Other presidents avoided personal diplomacy with Pyongyang because they didn’t want to lend American prestige to an abhorrent regime; Kim cleverly turned that around by playing to Trump’s thirst for monarchical prestige by insisting on leader-to-leader talks. The implication was that only the grandeur of a figure as exalted as the president himself could convince North Korea to set aside its long, implacable hostility to the United States.

 

The core of Trump’s narcissism, as he once famously said, is that “I alone can fix it.” Kim affirmed his belief by suggesting that Trump alone can fix the U.S.-North Korea relationship.

 

Nothing South Korea can say or do for the United States will ever make the president feel as special. To the postliberal mind, which divides the world between “friends” and “enemies” and perceives no distinction between the ruler’s personal interests and the interests of the state, maintaining a personal relationship with Pyongyang obviously takes precedence over maintaining a diplomatic one with Seoul. The fact that one nation is a belligerent third-world Stalinist abyss and the other a prosperous liberal democracy means less than nothing.

 

And so the military exercises were scaled back. Call it a favor for a friend.

 

Nutty even for him.

 

I’m leaning toward the third possibility, though. Maybe the snafu with South Korea is evidence of Trump descending further into the “YOLO phase” of lame-duckery.

 

He’s an 80-year-old strongman who’s been humiliated by his failure to break Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz. He knows what his polling looks like, even if he’s reportedly “in denial” about it and distracting himself with fun hobbies like picking out wallpaper for his ballroom and slapping new tariffs on Canada. He also has some dim intimation, one assumes, that his presidency will not be remembered as a golden age of American prestige overseas.

 

My theory about the YOLO phase is that the less Trump has to lose by behaving destructively to cope with his diminishment, the more destructively he’ll behave. And as a Democratic wave in November becomes more likely and the end of his presidency inches closer, he has less to lose every day.

 

Tom Nichols sees evidence of that sort of cope in the president’s turnabout on military exercises with Seoul. “He is seeking to assuage the psychic injury of his loss in Iran—including the American public learning of the shameful conditions to which he has subjected U.S. forces—by kicking America’s allies, the nations he can punish without fear that they will kick him back,” Nichols wrote at The Atlantic.

 

If the only way Trump can reclaim a sense of dominance is to let U.S. allies be menaced by Russia and China until they beg for his favor, he’ll do so. That’s what the YOLO phase is all about.

 

There’s a different kind of cope in which he seems to be indulging more lately, though. It’s hard to measure these things, as the president has been riffing inanely in public appearances for 10 years, but his trial balloons increasingly seem to be falling into the nutty-even-for-him column.

 

On Friday, the president told an audience that he intends to claim the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. territory after Iran is defeated. His fans would say that he was joking, but he’s talked before in interviews about America becoming “the guardian of the strait” and being “reimbursed” for it by other nations. It was just last month that he announced a (later retracted) plan to extort tankers transiting Hormuz for 20 percent of the value of their cargo, never mind that the White House has said for months that international waterways should be open to all.

 

One of the biggest news stories in the country right now is sailors aboard the Abraham Lincoln struggling after spending nine straight months at sea. Meanwhile, the president is fantasizing about seizing a channel halfway around the world that would require a permanent naval presence in the Gulf to secure it. His grasp on the limits of his own power is slipping.

 

Another odd ad lib: On the other side of the strait sits the nation of Oman, an American ally that’s been intermediating between the U.S. and Iran to try to find a solution to the impasse. The Iranians want Oman to join its scheme to charge “fees” on ships passing through Hormuz while Washington naturally opposes the idea. This morning Trump was asked about the dilemma on Fox News and tactfully replied, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the s—t out of them.”

 

Laying aside the fact that that would amount to the president starting a second war without congressional approval (if Richard Nixon could bomb Cambodia, why can’t Donald Trump bomb Oman?), attacking a Gulf ally would be supreme proof to America’s other partners that it’s time to look elsewhere for global leadership. It’s not a coincidence that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan signed a mutual defense agreement last week “to diversify their security and defense partnerships,” as one European official delicately put it to the Washington Post. Only a fool would rely on a declining superpower led by an erratic madman.

 

Queeg-like.

 

The most unnerving Trump “ad libs” recently have nothing to do with bombastic threats involving Iran, though.

 

Last week the White House ordered the Navy to get rid of its modern electromagnetic system for propelling jets off the decks of aircraft carriers and revert to the antiquated steam-powered system of decades ago, never mind the consequences for the Pentagon’s budget or for military readiness. The Post reported Sunday that the overhaul might not end there: The president also wants the command tower on the Navy’s Ford-class aircraft carriers moved from the rear of each ship toward the front.

 

The cost would be “significant” and would affect the vessels’ weight and buoyancy, according to experts. So why bother? Quote: “Trump’s preference, current and former officials said, is for the new aircraft carriers to look more like those that were in service during World War II.”

 

As I said earlier, there’s nothing new about the president hatching an idiotic belief that America should go back to doing things a certain way simply because that’s how America did it during his youth. But there’s a distinctly Captain Queeg-like quality to him ruminating about the minutiae of carrier aesthetics—for the stupidest possible reason—at a moment when the United States can’t even field a carrier in China’s backyard. That’s the sound of a man who’s no longer engaged with the duties of command in a meaningful way and has retreated into childish fantasy.

 

I thought the YOLO phase would be dangerous because it would leave him less inhibited about following his authoritarian impulses. What if it ends up being dangerous in a different way, when his already-threadbare tether to reality frays completely?

 

That’s too desperate a thought to end on (the first horseman is always near) so I’ll leave you with this happier one, from a Twitter user who looked on the bright side of the president’s fascination with figures like Kim, Xi, and Vladimir Putin: “I’m really glad President Obama rid the world of Osama bin Laden before Donald Trump had the chance to befriend him.” Thanks, Obama.

Capitalism, as Told by Its Enemies

By Phillip W. Magness & Caleb Petitt

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

 

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is widely known as a reputable and accessible compendium of articles on complex scholarly subjects, offered free of charge to the public since 1995. Think of it as Wikipedia for philosophy, but with authors who are known experts in their subjects and peer review to maintain quality control.

 

That quality control broke down last week when the SEP published a new entry for “capitalism,” its first-ever foray into the subject. The concept of “capitalism” is an admittedly complex topic, and one might reasonably expect that an encyclopedia article on it would include not only its theoretical underpinnings dating back to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, but also its critics such as Karl Marx.

 

Instead of attempting some semblance of balance, the new SEP entry author Chiara Cordelli, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, used this platform to air her own personal grievances with capitalism as an economic system. The resulting product gives scant attention to proponents of free-market economics. By contrast, Cordelli’s article is loaded with content from the Marxist or socialist far left. Space devoted to critics of capitalism far outpaces even basic descriptions of the economic concept, and proponents of capitalism are reduced to shallow parodies.

 

In an era when academia is under fire for a well-documented leftward ideological shift as well as declining standards of scholarly rigor, the publication of an encyclopedia entry with a pronounced anti-capitalism skew only confirms the public’s declining trust in our university system. Rather than serving as a curator and disseminator of knowledge, higher education has become an institutional home for a single specific brand of ideological activism.

 

Improper emphasis.

 

The new “capitalism” encyclopedia entry illustrates how higher education’s leftward ideological ecosystem erodes basic quality checks on published research. In an attempt to quantify just how critical of capitalism the author was, we researched the political perspectives of each of the 169 authors cited in the entry’s bibliography and recommended readings list. The results showed an overwhelming anti-capitalist skew: Over half of the sources listed in the capitalism entry’s bibliography were overtly hostile or critical of capitalism, and just 8 percent were supportive.

 

As a point of comparison, we repeated this exercise for the SEP’s “socialism” article (first published in 2018 and updated in 2024) to see how it compares against Cordelli’s new entry. The difference was striking. Of the 160 authors cited in the socialism article, only two were overtly critical of socialism and nearly two-thirds were supportive.

 

The ideological imbalance of both entries became even more apparent when we dug deeper into the philosophical perspectives that are given airtime in Cordelli’s article. Of the 93 cited authors we were able to sort into specific ideological camps, Marxist perspectives—such as orthodox Marxism, critical theory, and analytical Marxism—far outnumbered any other group. In addition to the Marxists, Cordelli’s entry gives ample space to a stream of non-Marxian socialist and anti-capitalist thinkers such as the sociological historian Karl Polanyi, the far-left economist Thomas Piketty, and self-citations to Cordelli’s own writings in the “democratic socialist” tradition.

 

Compare that to Cordelli’s citations of free-market classical liberal authors in the tradition of Adam Smith—just four are mentioned. Adjacent thinkers from libertarian or pro-capitalist traditions, such as Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand, add only a handful of additional references.

 

Cordelli’s prose functions as an anti-capitalist advocacy piece rather than a neutral and descriptive encyclopedia entry. It breaks with the normal format of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in which a concept or a philosopher’s work is usually described in its component parts to give a better view of the whole. While other entries usually offer space for debate and criticisms of the author or subject, they seldom comprise the majority of their verbiage.

 

Cordelli’s barrage of critiques against capitalism is almost twice as long as her description of capitalism’s supporters. Marxist accounts of capitalism account for three times the combined word count of Cordelli’s descriptions of market capitalism and institutionalist theories of capitalism. The author was clearly more concerned with highlighting every minute facet of anti-capitalist academic writing imaginable than with helping readers understand what the concept means, or the reasons that people defend it.

 

The resulting product is even more egregious when one considers the track records of these competing perspectives. Whatever criticisms may be offered of capitalism, its underlying economic theories have coincided with an unparalleled rise in prosperity and well-being between the late 18^th century and today, often known as the Great Enrichment. By comparison, the Marxist perspectives that dominate Cordelli’s work carry the ignominious baggage of mass atrocity and economic ruin in the 20^th century, though the phrase “Soviet Union” never appears in her entry. Neither do any of its catastrophic copycat regimes, from Maoist China to recent socialist experiments in Venezuela. Economists of any non-Marxian or socialist stripe are relegated to a minimal presence, and where their ideas are discussed at all, a socialist or anti-capitalist critic is almost always brought in at the end and given the last word.

 

The bizarre result is something akin to an encyclopedia entry about “astronomy” in which the majority of consulted sources are astrologers, and furthermore their horoscope readings are privileged over the empirical calculations of actual scientists who study star movements.

 

Factual errors.

 

The imbalanced ideological emphasis of the entry should be readily apparent to a neutral reader, but anyone familiar with the study of capitalism or economics would also notice how Cordelli warps the details of her subject matter to fit an ideological agenda.

 

Almost all the sources used to defend free markets are given superficial treatment, and even those superficial references tend to be wrong. She gives short shrift to economist Friedrich Hayek's work, yet manages to misrepresent those positions that she does discuss, such as when she depicts him as a theorist of equilibrium instead of as a theorist of coordination and information, which are distinct and often contradictory approaches. Hayek’s work focuses on how prices act as signals of changes in the relative scarcity of goods over time and coordinate how people respond to changes in supply and demand. General equilibrium theory deals with statics (like optimizing resource allocation or production decisions with a starting set of resources, preferences, and production capabilities), and Hayek’s work deals with dynamic changes over time. They are very different approaches to understanding how prices function and could not easily be confused by someone who understands economics.

 

In an illustrative thread on X, Ben Golub, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, identified a number of other basic factual errors in the entry, such as the author’s claim that Hayek and Milton Friedman believed that, for capitalism to exist, “there must be complete, private, and unregulated markets for all ‘factors of production,’ including capital and labor,” despite both making allowances for regulation and market rules. Cordelli also conflated two different papers, published decades apart, by Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase and even misrepresented details of Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen’s position on Marx. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History is a defense of Marx’s theory of historical materialism, not an exploitation-based critique of capitalism, which is what Cordelli cited him for.

 

Cordelli also opens the first section of her entry with Marx's definition of capitalism and makes reference to the “labor theory of value” without acknowledging that this concept has been considered obsolete by mainstream economists since the 1870s. Yet Cordelli proceeds as if Marx’s economic theories remain intact, ultimately devoting some 800 words spread across two different sections of the entry to exegesis on “surplus value.” That’s more verbiage on a single debunked Marxian concept than she provides to the entirety of Friedman’s work. This is a philosophical equivalent of treating geocentrism or flat-earth theory as valid and useful ideas.

 

What the entry could have been.

 

A more balanced entry on capitalism for the SEP could have offered a constructive assessment of this subject, its history, and the contemporary state of scholarship around it. Such an entry could still have room for critics in the Marxist and many other socialist traditions, but they would not have the disproportionate dominance found in Cordelli’s piece. Instead, a better entry might include serious engagement with the Scottish Enlightenment precursors to the emergence of market capitalism in the late 18^th century, with references to David Hume’s work on trade and currency, as well as something more than superficial references to Adam Smith.

 

It might also discuss how the ideas we call “capitalism” came to supplant an older mercantilist economic order that used government policies to steer an economy for nationalistic objectives. It might also discuss the period of both political and philosophical contestation between the “capitalist” and “Marxian communist” worlds following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and culminating in the collapse of the latter in 1991. It could discuss in greater depth the theoretical contributions of institutionalist economists like Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson, and Douglass North in the mid-20^th century around the theory of a market economy. It might mention Deirdre McCloskey’s work on the Great Enrichment as a positive argument for what we colloquially refer to as capitalism. And it might explore the tensions between these and other theorists of market capitalism. As it stands, this rich and complex academic literature receives nary a mention beyond a few passing citations.

 

Since capitalism is fundamentally an economic concept, one could reasonably expect to see mainstream economic voices discussed, and competently so, by someone versed in economic theory. There would be a clear description of how profits work both as signals of demand and incentives for entrepreneurship, how competition between firms disciplines market actors, how market prices make economic calculation possible by signaling the relative scarcity of goods in a common denominator, and how government policies contribute to the creation of monopolies. Marxist and socialist critiques of capitalism from the far left would also be balanced with mainstream economic critiques of socialism. Early in the 20^th century, there was famously a debate among economists over whether socialist central planners were capable of engaging in economic calculation. The economists who argued against the possibility of socialist calculation ultimately won the debate—though one would not know this from reading Cordelli’s entry.

 

Welfarist arguments for capitalism would not be confined to a single paragraph, and would describe in detail how free-market capitalism has been responsible for lifting the world out of poverty. The way that capitalism incentivizes entrepreneurship, and the role entrepreneurs play in arbitrage and the creation of new goods and services, would play a more important role than the entry’s single paragraph on Joseph Schumpeter, the first economist to make entrepreneurship central to the understanding of economic development and change.

 

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s unwillingness to select an author for the entry on capitalism who could provide a charitable or even neutral assessment of the concept is ultimately unscholarly. In the 20^th century, socialism resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, and capitalism and free markets were the critical factors for lifting billions out of poverty, and yet it is socialism that received the positive encyclopedia entry and capitalism that garnered the hate. Such imbalances could only emerge from an academic environment in which an ideological echo chamber supplants rigorous peer review, and the fashionable socialist perspectives of the professoriate lead it to mistake bad caricatures of a market economy for descriptive fact.

Donald Trump’s ‘Pivot from Asia’

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

 

On Sunday, the president abruptly ordered his secretary of defense to “substantially reduce” the U.S. commitment to a forthcoming joint exercise with South Korea’s armed forces. But Trump did not provide the public with much of a rationale for his maneuver.

 

In a social media post, he said he was “not happy” with America’s legacy commitments to these exercises in which he has had no input. Additionally, he said he has a “very good relationship” with North Korean despot Kim Jong-un and, presumably, didn’t want to upset that applecart.

 

But there was another matter “somewhat unrelated (?)” — yes, the president threw a question mark in there — of the Republic of Korea’s refusal to “join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The following day, Trump let everyone know that South Korea’s failure to support the U.S. mission in and around Iran was, in fact, the heart of the issue.

 

The United States has “39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong Un, your next-door neighbor, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran?” Trump complained. He recalled telling his South Korean counterpart, Lee Jae Myung, “Well, why are we involved in helping you?”

 

He tore into South Korea for failing, as have many NATO allies, to more actively support clearing measures in the Strait of Hormuz. “They get 50 percent of their oil, and they don’t want to get involved,” he pondered. “Why are we doing it?” And he fumed over a Biden-era maneuver that withdrew a fee Seoul was expected to pay for the privilege of hosting U.S. forces on its soil. “We would have been getting paid a lot more, but we can’t go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they’re not there to help us,” Trump explained. “So, all I want is fairness.”

 

But Trump isn’t too sour over the whole thing, it seems. During that exchange with reporters, the president mused wryly that North Korea’s communist dictator is enjoying the schism he’s engineering with the South Koreans. He even posted a silly meme on his social media feed playing up his bonds of friendship with the DPRK’s despot. At least the president is having fun.

 

Yet this outburst, in combination with Trump’s threat to bomb Oman if it continues to toy with Iran’s ploy to toll maritime traffic in the strait, lent credence to the New York Times’ summation of the whole affair: “Trump lashes out.”

 

The president risks being accused of a double standard. After all, he’s attempting to drum up support for a campaign designed to prevent nuclear proliferation even as he cozies up to a notorious nuclear proliferator. At the very least, none of this is especially “low key.”

 

The political press was swift to question the logic behind the president’s attack on Seoul. South Korea’s “defense establishment was deeply rattled” by the presidential slight, the Times reported. And it comes as North Korea has become more hostile in recent years. Its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine — first through the provision of weapons, munitions, and materiel and, later, with the deployment of a full-scale expeditionary force — is, according to Lee, “a rehearsal for an aggressive war.”

 

Congressional Democrats gave reporters plenty of florid quotes to illustrate the scale of Trump’s folly. The president is punishing South Korea “for no reason beyond Trump’s ego,” said Senator Jack Reed. “Our ability to help defend our ally against the North Koreans is because our forces are well trained and able to coordinate with the South Koreans,” Senator Mark Kelly agreed. “Hollowing out these joint exercises is shortsighted and a mistake.”

 

Partisans though they are, these Democrats echo the concerns of the Western defense community. Combined with the president’s decision to leave the Western Pacific without a deployed U.S. aircraft carrier group (the USS George Washington has been tasked with relieving the long-deployed USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East), some fear a breakdown of deterrence in the far East. “Anyone that says this whole package of steps is a net positive for deterrence is deluded,” said one George W. Bush-era State Department official. “We’ve gone from a stillborn ‘pivot to Asia’ to a reverse pivot from Asia.”

 

That’s a real concern inside South Korea, where, it must be said, politics happens, too. It was a point of contention inside South Korea and with its neighbors, like China, when the government in Seoul accepted the deployment of THAAD anti-missile batteries on its soil. Likewise, it was a scandal when Seoul was essentially told that those batteries would be relocated to the Middle East. Still, the South Korean government has deferred to Washington, and it continues to express hope of resolving the impasse with Donald Trump on mutually agreeable terms.

 

But what could those be?

 

“At first glance, South Korea appears to have a robust navy that could conduct expeditionary operations,” regional defense expert Ju Hyung Kim wrote in April. But Seoul likely cannot deploy its naval assets — its destroyers, in particular — without weakening deterrence on the Korean Peninsula. “Seoul could continuously maintain a single destroyer deployment without seriously impacting the regional posture,” he added. “Additional ships can be sent in exigencies for a limited period of time — yet it is unsustainable without drawing down the forces necessary for homeland deterrence.”

 

Those material considerations must compete for space in the heads of South Korea’s policymakers with the South Korean public’s distaste for the kinds of commitments Trump is demanding of them. In early spring, one public opinion poll found that over 60 percent of South Koreans oppose deploying naval assets to the Strait of Hormuz.

 

Back in May, South Korean Reform Party leader Lee Jun-seok proposed an innovative solution to the conundrum. “Rather than diverting limited naval assets from the Indo-Pacific, Seoul can provide scalable, defensive capabilities designed to protect commercial shipping from asymmetric threats alongside logistics, maintenance, and industrial support,” he wrote for War on the Rocks:

 

This contribution could prioritize defensive hardware, including capabilities such as advanced surface-to-air missiles and directed-energy systems. For instance, the Cheongung-II (M-SAM) system has demonstrated ongoing success and near-perfect interception rates in recent Middle Eastern deployments. Additionally, the Block-I laser system offers a high success rate for a revolutionary cost of approximately $1.50 per shot, providing a sustainable counter to the low-cost asymmetric drone threats that currently force partners to expend million-dollar interceptors. Just as South Korea has emerged as the arsenal of Europe by becoming NATO’s second-largest weapons supplier, it is well positioned to extend that role to maritime security in the Middle East. In doing so, South Korea can strengthen the operational capacity of partners already present in the region.

 

It seems the South Korean government had no stomach for this option. Even if it did, it’s unclear it would satisfy the president. But the Blue House is eager to appease Trump. Shortly after the president set his sights on the Republic of Korea, Seoul revealed that it was “closely discussing with the United States practical and military contribution options” for the Strait of Hormuz.

 

That phrase, “military contribution,” raised eyebrows among South Korea-watchers. But the language does not depart dramatically from the South Korean government’s statements back in May, after Iran attacked a Republic of Korea-flagged cargo vessel. Back then, Seoul said it would “review its position” on the strait. It didn’t.

 

Perhaps the president’s bullying will shake something loose in Seoul. And if it does, maybe the other U.S. allies to whom Trump has put the screws — Japan, France, and the U.K., in particular — will follow suit. “It will work out,” Trump said of the presently unnavigable impasse in the strait. “It always works out.” Maybe it will. But it would be wise to avoid the temptation to attribute strategic thought to the president’s impulses.

 

He does, indeed, seem to be lashing out.

 

ADDENDUM: According to Reuters, Donald Trump’s job approval rating is approaching its lowest point in nearly ten years.

 

“Just 33% of respondents in the four-day survey said they approved of Trump’s performance in the White House, while 64% disapproved,” its dispatch reads. He “has now tied the lowest level of his prior term reached in December 2017.”

 

It’s been a rough summer for the president, and Trump is fast running out of time to repair his image in advance of the midterm elections. Historically, the midterm electorate’s vote will reflect how they feel about the president, so the GOP’s political class is bracing for a rough landing in November. But the party might take some solace in the fact that some of the president’s acolytes fare better than he does in polling.

 

At least, that’s the vibe in Utah, as Deseret News reported. There, Trump’s job approval rating is sagging, but both of his most visible lieutenants — Marco Rubio and JD Vance — are above water. The results suggest that some voters can still draw distinctions between Trump and his fellow Republicans.

 

Given the direction in which the polls are headed, though, Republicans are going to have to hope that voters everywhere are as generous as Utah’s. That’s a big bet.

 

 

Kushner Legitimizes Hamas

By Elliott Abrams

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

 

News stories reporting on Jared Kushner’s current trip to the Middle East have focused on whether the various plans for Gaza will move forward. The New York Times headline, for example, said the trip was an “effort to break logjam in Gaza.” The Washington Post’s headline said Kushner is “aiming to salvage Gaza deal.”

 

These stories and many others focused on details: what was in the original 15-point plan for Gaza, what compromises are possible, or how a step-by-step path forward might work.

 

Far less attention was paid to what may be the most significant fact about Kushner’s trip: He met with the head of Hamas, Khalil al-Hayya.

 

Al-Hayya was a founding member of Hamas in 1987 and is known as a hard-liner, favoring “armed struggle” over negotiations and seeking the closest possible relations with Iran and Hezbollah. Al-Hayya’s lack of concern about improving life in Gaza is very clear. The New York Times quotes him as saying in November 2023, soon after the Hamas massacres of October 7:

 

Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such. Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table. This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers. It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.

 

That Kushner met with this terrorist leader does not so much run the risk of legitimizing Hamas as guarantee it. What political leader or diplomat, what foreign minister or special envoy, visiting the region henceforth will want to skip such a meeting? Al-Hayya’s problem will be that his dance card is too full of requests.

 

Kushner can of course defend the meeting by saying it was the only, or the very best, way forward to peace. But legitimizing and therefore strengthening terrorist groups is never the path to peace. Kushner could have delegated the meeting to a lower-ranking official. Or he could have made some tough demands up front and said al-Hayya would have to earn a meeting with the American representative (and the president’s son-in-law). The excuses for the meeting are simple to imagine, but none are persuasive. Al-Hayya is an old-timer and a survivor as a Hamas leader and is in that sense up to his neck in blood. He will not give Kushner concessions he would otherwise refuse, and he will never abandon Hamas’s goal of destroying Israel nor its commitment to violence to get there. He has already won the negotiation, because the real news is not the details of what was agreed (and is so unlikely to be carried out anyway); it is the fact of the meeting.

 

In April and in June President Trump sent his vice president to meet with Iranian representatives, in Pakistan and Switzerland. Nothing positive came of either meeting, despite Vance’s mentions of “great progress” and the possibility of a “new leaf.” It seems no lesson was learned, and the Kushner meeting with Hamas went forward. It is a far worse case than the Iran meetings, because for those meetings there were precedents (think of the many negotiations under Obama), and Iran is a country and a U.N. member state.

 

Would a refusal to meet with the leader of Hamas be standing on ceremony, or refusing to see reality? On the contrary it would be acknowledging the reality that Hamas is a murderous terror organization that has committed bestial massacres — and then celebrated them. The sad truth is that the Kushner meeting is a real victory for Hamas, which will use it to demand a larger role as a diplomatic and political presence in the Middle East. This is exactly what the United States should be against and should be preventing, not encouraging.

 

In June, the Jerusalem Post reported that a French delegation had held a “top secret” meeting with Hamas officials and that this meeting was “the first reported meeting of Hamas leaders with European officials since the October 7 massacre.” Those days are over, thanks to Kushner. Count on seeing many more such meetings now, all with plenty of publicity, and all resulting in the increasing legitimization of the murderers of October 7.