The Founders Never Conceived of a President Like Trump

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, May 20, 2026

 

In 1788, Virginia convened a convention to debate the ratification of the new U.S. Constitution, promulgated in Philadelphia the year before.

 

The pardon power proved to be a sticking point for some delegates. George Mason, the primary author of Virginia’s own constitution, was among those worried that the unchecked ability to unilaterally pardon criminality could lead to abuses of power. What if the president “may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself”?

 

James Madison acknowledged that this would be a serious abuse, but argued there was a remedy.

 

“There is one security in this case to which gentlemen may not have adverted,” Madison said, “if the president be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; [and] they can remove him if found guilty.”

 

This episode has gathered fresh attention in the wake of the January 6 riots, and the impeachment trial it ignited. President Trump was impeached but not convicted.

 

That was a mistake in my opinion. But I’m not here to relitigate it. I want to be forward-looking.

 

The British statesman Edmund Burke famously argued that one of the “fundamental rules” of a decent society was that “no man should be judge in his own cause.”

 

For the Founders, this insight informed the logic of the entire constitutional project. Burke’s observation was so universally agreed upon it often came up—sometimes without attribution— in debates at the Constitutional and ratifying conventions.

 

Madison invokes the idea in Federalist 10, in the context of faction and the need to have separation of powers. “No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.”

 

Alexander Hamilton cites it in Federalist 80 as the reason why federal courts should adjudicate disagreements between states—it was assumed that state judges might be biased toward their own side of the dispute.

 

This idea lurks behind all of Congress’ powers and responsibilities, including advice and consent, the sole authority to tax and spend, the power to declare war, and, of course, impeachment. Presidents are not arbitrary rulers. They are stewards, with defined and limited powers.

 

On Monday, President Trump settled a $10 billion lawsuit brought by himself. In his first term, Trump’s tax returns were illegally leaked. When Trump returned to the presidency, he filed suit against the Internal Revenue Service. So, as a constitutional matter, Trump is suing the executive branch he runs for a crime committed by the IRS back when he ran it in his first term.

 

Realizing that the courts might find this too cute to countenance, the Justice Department and IRS—both, again, run by Trump—compromised by creating a $1,776,000,000 fund (that “1776” before all the zeros is a play on the country’s 250^th birthday) that Trump will control. Its primary function would be to compensate the January 6 rioters, all of whom he has already pardoned.

 

 On Tuesday, the DOJ announced that Trump, his family and business will be functionally exempt from IRS audits or prosecutions from any past tax returns, literally placing him above the law.

 

The president recently said that if China invades Taiwan, he alone will determine whether the U.S. will defend Taiwan. “Me. I’m the only person,” who decides. Last summer, Trump told The Atlantic that the difference between his first term and his second was that he didn’t have anyone in his administration to hinder him. This time, “I run the country and the world.” Congress and the courts don’t enter into it.

 

After Trump unilaterally replaced at gunpoint the president of Venezuela with a pliant satrap, without the approval of Congress, the New York Times asked if there were any limits on his will: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

 

I began with a discussion of the pardon power and impeachment for a reason. Contrary to thousands of hours of impeachment legal punditry going back to the Nixon administration, a president doesn’t have to commit a crime to be impeached. As Hamilton writes in Federalist 65, impeachment involves “the misconduct of public men” and “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” Impeachments are “POLITICAL” (Hamilton’s all-caps) because they injure “society itself.”

 

It may, in fact, be legal for the president to be the judge in his own cause and create a taxpayer-financed slush fund for him to reward cronies and henchmen on a whim. It is already clear that presidents can launch wars without Congress or the courts unduly getting in the way. But I struggle to think of hypothetical scenarios that would be more likely to arouse in Madison and his contemporaries the—now misplaced—reassurance that impeachment was an available remedy.

Climate Change Apocalypticism Was a Fashion, Not a Cause

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 20, 2026

 

What killed the climate alarmism that was once common currency on the Democratic left? Instrumental political utility, and the diminishing returns that Democratic politicians were generating by preaching apocalypticism to the converted.

 

At least, that is the lament of Syracuse University professor Matthew Huber in his widely read, mid-May New York Times op-ed.

 

“For the past several months, Democratic elites have been debating how much to talk about climate change, if at all,” he wrote, “in part because these new candidates have narrowed their focus to energy affordability to win back the working class.”

 

The tacit admission in that acknowledgment is that the activists’ go-to remedies for the ills of climate change are policies that limit the public’s access to goods and services by making them costlier. At a time when “affordability” is the problem, climate alarmism is just one of many expendable luxuries.

 

The shift in Democratic messaging, Huber added, feels like “the end of an era.” For nearly 20 years, progressive activists and their representatives advocated a “New Deal–like investment program” designed to eliminate America’s contributions to atmospheric heat-trapping emissions. Only recently, though, have those activists and politicians noticed the extent of the voters’ apathy toward the allegedly existential imperative to cool the planet. “Instead of building a broad coalition necessary to enact something like a Green New Deal, climate change has become yet another issue fueling polarization,” he concluded.

 

Ah, the Green New Deal. Remember that? It’s easy to forget how central that suite of policy proposals was to the progressive project. Indeed, its one-time promoters probably hope you have forgotten.

 

As Semafor’s David Weigel reported in March, climate-focused activist networks such as the Sunrise Movement have abandoned the cause that was once their raison d’être. But because the progressive soul craves a salvific mission, that organization has evolved. It now caters to the progressive fringes who have replaced anxiety over climate with anxiety over Israel and the pernicious influence of Americans who support the Jewish state and its defensive military priorities.

 

The movement’s rapid adaptation says as much about the progressive left’s paranoia over the Jews in Israel as well as the Diaspora (the “toxic” lobbying outfit AIPAC, which the left seeks to anathematize as a foreign influence operation, is managed and funded by Americans) as it does their bygone climate hysteria.

 

But even though the Green New Deal’s loudest champions have quietly shelved their impossible dreams, it’s worth reminding them that they once insisted that their agenda was of such importance that our very lives depended on advancing it.

 

That legislative package’s chief proponent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, deserves the most credit for fleshing out what her chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, admitted was about far more than just climate change. Indeed, “it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” he conceded. Rather, “we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” He wasn’t kidding.

 

The Green New Deal’s ambitious ten-year plan called for the shuttering of each and every fossil-fuel power plant in the country. It sought to overhaul the nation’s electricity grid, eliminate all greenhouse-gas emissions produced by transportation, upgrade “every residential and industrial building,” reduce America’s industrial agricultural capacity to “local scale,” and fund a vast global mission aimed at encouraging the rest of the world to do the same.

 

That herculean endeavor was just the beginning. The millions of Americans displaced by this effort to reengineer the American economy would need job-placement programs, job training, and a universal basic income to support them in their fallow years. That was in the legislation, too. So were “free” college programs designed to make earning a degree a “debt-free” proposition. So was the nationalization of the American health insurance industry, which would take the form of forcing every American onto Medicare’s already unsustainable rolls.

 

Independent analyses of the Green New Deal pegged its ten-year cost at somewhere between $32 and $93 trillion in 2019 dollars. That astronomical price tag was supposed to be funded by wildly confiscatory marginal tax rates “as high as 60 or 70 percent,” AOC mused, “on your 10 millionth dollar.”  The only problem with her math was that, at the time, only about 16,000 Americans reported that much taxable income. If enacted, her tax scheme would generate just $720 billion over a decade, well shy of her target, and heedless of the taxable economic activity that $720 billion would no longer fund.

 

Fiduciary prudence like that was scoffed at — a mark of, if not counterrevolutionary thinking, certainly a lack of imagination. “The question isn’t how will we pay for it,” read a supremely embarrassing pro–Green New Deal FAQ that AOC’s office released (and, subsequently, disowned), “but what will we do with our new shared prosperity.”

 

Just as easy to forget is how warmly the Green New Deal was received not just by progressive activists but by the Democratic Party’s establishment. For the party’s presidential aspirants in 2019, climate apocalypticism was little more than table stakes.

 

Out of the blue, Democratic senators who “hadn’t made climate change central to their political careers,” as Axios observed, raced to co-sponsor a version of AOC’s proposal. “I support a Green New Deal,” said Kamala Harris. Elizabeth Warren backed “the idea of a Green New Deal to ambitiously tackle our climate crisis.” Amy Klobuchar, also a co-sponsor, endorsed the “aspirational” elements of the legislation, if not the specifics. Climate change “threatens the way of life for our kids and grandkids,” Cory Booker said, and it must be met with a commitment akin to “the original New Deal.” Other candidates, including Pete Buttigieg and Tulsi Gabbard, supported the concept of a whole-of-society approach to combating climate change’s effects.

 

And that made sense to the left at a time when the United Nations warned that the planet had just twelve years left to avert a global ecological cataclysm. But the speed with which the Democratic activist class has discarded what they themselves once regarded as nigh religious truth is enough to make you wonder: Did they ever really mean it?

 

Were they merely misguided but sincere advocates for revolutionary reforms that they believed were equal to the scale of the problem they saw? Or was it always just a cynical voter-mobilization strategy that has lost its utility and has since been supplanted by another, more fashionable paranoia?

 

I think we have our answer.

The Science Has Spoken Against Climate Alarmism

National Review Online

Wednesday, May 20, 2026

 

‘The science” should not be a thing. Science is not dogma, but a voyage of endless intellectual exploration in which blind alleys are part of the process. Some scientific facts may be “settled,” but that’s a difficult determination when we are discussing projections far into the future.

 

And so we come to Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. This was the gloomiest of the four main scenarios prepared for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2014. Each “pathway” described what was thought would happen if greenhouse gases reached a certain concentration in the atmosphere. If RCP8.5 was followed, the “likely” increase in mean global surface temperature by 2100 would have been 2.6-4.8°C, with a mean of 3.7 °C, a large-scale increase.

 

RCP8.5 — and its roughly analogous but supposedly more sophisticated successor model, known as SSP5-8.5 — was always intended as an extreme scenario, but alarmist advocates and journalists often portrayed it as a baseline. Now, these trajectories have been found to have become “implausible” by the committee responsible for setting out the scenarios for the next IPCC assessment.

 

President Trump reacted to the news with glee: “GOOD RIDDANCE! After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”

 

The truth is more complicated. The authors of the paper in which the scenarios were dismissed as “implausible” attributed the downgrade to “trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends,” an explanation that can be seen as a justification of current climate policy rather than a rejection of it.

 

On the face of it, that’s fair enough. RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 have long been described as outliers by more responsible voices in the climate debate, but, wonders AEI’s Roger Pielke, how plausible were they in the first place? In 1994, the IPCC had stated that a scenario must be “a coherent, internally consistent, and plausible description of a possible future state of the world.” That definition has since been repeated on various occasions, but did RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 meet its standards? For example, their assumptions included a dramatic, implausible increase in coal’s role as a primary energy source. This appears ludicrous when compared with coal’s weakening share in the early 2010s and, despite coal’s persistence, still does. Similarly, although predictions about the size of the global population have bounced about, the assumption in RCP8.5 that there would be 12 billion of us in 2100 looked very unlikely.

 

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with a forecast — one among many — being found not to measure up. The problem is that for years the forecasts contained within RCP8.5 were described, not as outliers, but as “business as usual,” the planet’s inevitable destination if humanity didn’t adopt a radical course correction. The phrase has long been a staple of alarmist argot, used to portray anything like the energy status quo as a danger and moral abomination. Try as hard as one might, who can forget Greta Thunberg’s “how dare you” at the U.N.? The full sentence read as follows:

 

How dare you say this can be solved with just business as usual and some technical solutions?

 

And Thunberg was only one of a vast horde of activists, rent-seekers, academics, journalists, and politicians who seized on an out-of-date and flawed hypothetical to pursue an extreme climate agenda. If the downgrading of RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 changes that, we will be delighted, but we suspect that we will be disappointed. Apocalyptic climate scenarios are too useful to the left to be abandoned easily — whether what they call “the science” supports them or not.

A Time for Choosin’, Texas

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, May 20, 2026

 

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas is no Sam Houston. But—at the risk of giving a hostage to Fate—it appears that his political career is likely to end the way Houston’s did: He is not a big enough lunatic for Texas, a state that loves its drama, and Texans are poised to send him into an involuntary retirement.

 

Sam Houston, who had been the first and third president of the Republic of Texas and later served as Texas’ seventh governor, has a very complicated history on the issue of slavery: He owned slaves himself and supported Southern slavery, but he also opposed the expansion of slavery into the Western territories and was a committed Unionist. Texans would later come to revere Houston—you can see a 67-foot-tall statue of him between one Buc-ee’s and the next on I-45 in Huntsville—but they reviled him 1861, when he was removed from office after refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the newly formed Confederate States of America. Houston was, on the question of secession, on the right side—and my fellow Texans, being Texans, hated him for it.

 

Evidently, Cornyn is not crazy enough for the White House, either: Donald Trump has just endorsed his primary runoff opponent, Texas’s clownish and scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton.

 

Sen. Cornyn has a great big bucket where his principles should be, and, thus equipped, he has been a committed and generally effective water carrier for the Republican Party for many years. All he needed was to see an “R” next to someone’s name: He carried water for Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania when that is what party interests required, and then he carried water for Specter’s Republican opponent after Specter defected to the Democrats. Sen. Cornyn carried water for so-called establishment Republicans when they opposed Donald Trump in 2016 and then carried—and contentedly carries—water for Trump now that Trump has become the establishment.

 

(The fact that the story contains names such as “Specter” and “Trump” sometimes makes it sound as if Cornyn’s political biography were being written by Ian Fleming.)

 

Donald Trump routinely denounces his critics as “disloyal to the Republican Party” (his verbatim description of Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky libertarian who has sometimes chided Trump over his weakness for profligate spending), but Trump is, in all things, first and foremost a liar, and he does not give a fig about party loyalty: Trump cares about loyalty to Trump, and the more cynical reader here might reasonably substitute “subservience” or “servility” or “slavish boot-licking” for “loyalty.” Far from being a party man, Trump has made a point of defeating Republicans who are inconvenient to him, whether they be obscure Indiana state legislators who declined to follow Texas’ gerrymandering example or state-level election officials who declined to participate in his 2020-2021 attempt at a coup d’état.

 

Texans have a whole thing about drawing a line in the sand. Sen. Cornyn’s problem is that Texans seem to prefer a man who is on the wrong side of the line to a man who is on both sides of it.

 

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who is poised to unseat Cornyn in a primary runoff next week, is the perfect specimen of a Trump-era Republican—a grotesque amalgam of personal, financial, political, and sexual corruption—who provides the definitive answer to a question that had been on many minds: Exactly how big of a putz does a Republican have to be to get himself impeached by Republicans in Texas? (The estranged wife who divorced Paxton on grounds of adultery—the adultery that helped to get him impeached—is a state senator who, bless her heart, declined to vote in favor of convicting the husband who betrayed her, sitting out his impeachment proceedings—and I suppose only Shaggy has the answer to that mystery.) Paxton is a buffoon and an incompetent and absolutely devoted to Donald Trump, another buffoon and incompetent.

 

And Texans—enough of them—seem to love him for it.

 

Texas goes through these phases from time to time. Imagine a rich, middle-aged car salesman who ditches his wife and starts dating a 21-year-old stripper with a meth problem, and then imagine that guy is a state—that’s Texas, Anno Domini 2026. With a slowing economy, rising prices, and the slow but steady creep of problems very similar to those facing other states—housing, infrastructure, etc.—Texas has some real issues facing it. It also has some imaginary issues facing it, such as the supposed takeover of … the Dallas suburbs … by Islamist radicals. Texas Republicans, having not very much useful to say about the real issues, currently are focused on the imaginary ones.

 

Politically speaking, that is still working for Texas Republicans. For now.

 

Conservatives have been working to save the Republican Party—in Texas and elsewhere—from itself. Perhaps it is time to give up that project. Like the car salesman with the meth-head paramour, the heart wants what it wants.

 

And if Selena Gomez isn’t your kind of sage, there’s always Livy: Eventus stultorum magister est.

Donald Trump Bets on Ken Paxton for the Senate

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

 

The news speaks for itself. There’s not much to add except to briefly explain the inevitable: Donald Trump has finally unveiled his endorsement in the Texas Senate race, choosing state Attorney General Ken Paxton over incumbent Senator John Cornyn. The runoff is next Tuesday, and Paxton — already more likely than Cornyn to consolidate Wesley Hunt’s remaining protest vote from the first round — has been running narrowly ahead in most polls. Now he has extra help from Trump, who has decided to ditch a loyal Republican senator in favor of the notoriously ethically compromised Paxton.

 

This is in service to a familiar strategy of Trump’s, as revealed over the years. He knows which way the wind is blowing in the primary base — that curious psychological dynamic whereby his die-hard believers cleave ever closer to him even as (and perhaps precisely because) those not fully onside grow further perplexed and disgusted — and he’s positioning himself downwind of the gust, so he can claim that he summoned it.

 

The Texas primary is a curious outlier in Trump’s rampage through the state parties during 2026: This was not an easy “pariah incumbent” vs. “chosen challenger” situation, as with Bill Cassidy or Thomas Massie. Trump could have remained silent on this race — both candidates have been strong supporters of the president, although Paxton’s fans will claim otherwise — but he never stays quiet when he has an opportunity to claim credit for victory. And if Trump is desperate for anything at this moment in his flailing administration, it is an opportunity to feel like a victor once again.

 

I lamented this morning that Trump has commanded the GOP and its donor class to waste unprecedented (literally) amounts of money in 2026 primary races to ensure that his personal picks win and his enemies are defeated. If Paxton wins the primary — as I always expected him to, and as I now consider inevitable — get ready for the Texas Senate race to become the most stupendously expensive money pit in modern electoral history, as the GOP will be forced to furiously play defense and the Democrats spot a once-in-a-generation opportunity to steal a seat.

 

 

The Best ‘Chilling Effect’ Yet

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 20, 2026

 

Before his resounding primary loss on Tuesday night, outgoing Representative Thomas Massie lent credence to the notion that foreign interests and American fifth columnists beholden to them contributed to what his allies called a “billionaire plot” to oust him from Congress.

 

Indeed, the opposition to Massie pumped millions of dollars into his race, among them “pro-Israel groups like the United Democracy Project and Trump allies like MAGA KY,” according to NOTUS. But these are Americans engaging in protected political speech. When I last checked, a self-described “libertarian Republican” would typically not object to, say, the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. Rather, what Massie and his fans were attempting to launder into the discourse was the implied claim that his deep-pocketed adversaries were beholden more to Israel’s interests than America’s.

 

“There’s going to be a chilling effect as a result of this race,” said one despondent Massie supporter, State Representative Steven Doan, following the representative’s loss. By that, it’s likely that he and his supporters meant the extent to which Donald Trump’s iron grip on his party will discourage Republicans from defying the president or offering reasonable criticisms of his conduct. That’s a fair and rational consideration. But if there is a “chilling effect” here, it will also be one that reinforces the desirable stigma around antisemitic agitation.

 

“I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent to concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv,” the embittered representative said of his victorious Republican opponent on his way out the door. That’s just the sort of remark that might be chilled by Massie’s district’s overwhelming repudiation.

 

The representative’s penchant for posting memes to social media in which he contends that America’s support for Israel’s defensive operations against Hamas (fewer than two months after the October 7 massacre), alleging that the federal legislature had traded in “American patriotism” for its antithesis, “Zionism,” could also experience a “chilling effect.”

 

Similarly, public figures might have second thoughts if they find themselves tempted to take beaming photos alongside antisemitic activists wearing apparel featuring the slogan “American Reich” and adorned with a fascism-inflected reimagining of the presidential seal.

 

There is the “chilling” of protected but unpopular speech by governmental entities, and then there are valuable normative taboos that are enforced only by virtue of the number of people who silently observe them. Those who think that personal expression can and, perhaps, should take any form have trouble distinguishing between the two.

 

Representative Doan is right to fret the extent to which the president’s grip on his party will reinforce the GOP’s pro-Trump omertà. But that’s only one element of the discourse that the voters of Kentucky’s fourth district consigned to the freezer. And some things are better served cold.

The Axe Finally Falls upon Thomas Massie

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

 

Thomas Massie is gone, and in the end it wasn’t even terribly close. As of this writing, he has lost his race for renomination to Trump-backed Ed Gallrein by a nearly ten-point margin, 54.4–45.6 percent. Those in the media who wished to write a story about how a beloved local politician held on against the Trumpist onslaught will need to revert to a much more predictable lede tomorrow morning: Within the party itself, Trump reigns supreme.

 

And although my many libertarian friends have found nice things to say about Massie over the years, I will miss him significantly less. Many of my colleagues are convinced he is a barely veiled antisemite; I merely think him crazy, and have grown tired of crazy people in Congress. What Massie called “principle” ended up expressing itself in little more than mindless oppositionalism. Massie famously said that he was initially mistaken about his voters; he thought they wanted libertarian “Tea Party” economics, but realized soon they wanted him to be the “craziest son of a bitch in the race.”

 

But you can’t out-crazy Donald Trump in a one-on-one matchup. (Unless you’re a mullah.) For the last several weeks, I watched as the mainstream media sought to portray this race as a jump ball. It certainly was fiercely contested — $32 million has now been flushed down the toilet to fight out the results of one safe-seat primary — but I never thought Massie would survive direct presidential intervention, especially not after having genuinely enraged many of his own constituents by conspiring with Democrats to force a release of the so-called “Epstein files.” It was one step too far, one too many spanners tossed into the works.

 

Don’t weep too hard for Thomas Massie. He has long promised that, if he ever lost, he would be happy to idle away his days on his hand-built home on his secluded estate, appreciating the beauties of life off the grid and away from the hugger-mugger of it all, and now he will get his chance. Instead, weep for the tens of millions of dollars squandered in internecine warfare, and all to prove a point nobody disputes: Even amidst his national political ruin — November is now shaping up to be a butchering of World War I–level proportions — Donald Trump still commands the loyalty of his troops.