How to Squander Good Will

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, September 18, 2026

 

One of the downsides of our celebrity-dominated culture is that our policy conversations often are so easily misdirected by spectacularly uninformed people such as rappers and the president of the United States of America.

 

Rational ignorance is a real thing, and most of us are entirely uninformed about most things. For example, I could not pick Macklemore out of a police lineup or tell you the name of a single one of his songs, but everybody has to have a Macklemore opinion this week after he was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour following an outbreak of imbecilic “Free Palestine!” baloney.

 

I do not have any definite views about Macklemore, and, though I am not proud of the fact, my view of the Palestinian situation is barely more developed: Like a dead owl, I don’t give a hoot.

 

I know that’s awful. There are children and innocents caught up in that mess, and it is unfair to write them all off because of the brutality of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, etc. But—just between us—that is more or less what I do. I used to try to care about the legitimate grievances of the Palestinians, but I stopped after the Sbarro bombing, which many Americans have forgotten because it happened right before 9/11. It was a horrible scene. A soldier who witnessed the aftermath reported: “The worst thing I saw, which I think will haunt me all my life, is a baby that was sitting in a stroller outside a shop and was dead. After the explosion, the baby’s mother came out of the store and started screaming hysterically.” Other children were blown through windows by the force of the bomb.

 

No doubt the Palestinians had—and have—legitimate complaints. What they have forfeited is any real moral right to have anybody care very much about that fact. Leaders are, in theory, responsible for their people; at a certain point, peoples also are responsible for their leaders. The terrorist leadership of the Palestinian quasi-statelet has not been imposed on a resistant Palestinian population at the point of a bayonet. It is difficult to think of the Palestinian leadership as legitimate, but it is, horribly enough, evidently representative.

 

The attack on the children at the pizza shop in downtown Jerusalem was carried out by Palestinian Islamic Jihad and by Hamas, a terrorist organization that the Palestinians were content to make their government in Gaza. Hamas would later stage the spectacular atrocities of October 7, 2023, butchering, raping, kidnapping, and torturing innocent people, many of them women and children, whose crime was being the Jewish citizens of a Jewish community. If I had had any residual interest in the Palestinians’ complaints, it would have evaporated at that time, but it already was long gone. I still follow the news, and I hear and read a great deal of settler this, checkpoint that, Zionist blah blah blah, and I … just don’t care about the Palestinians. Maybe one of these days they will get their act together but, as far as I am concerned, they need to be a generation away from their last bombing of a pizza shop before I am much interested in their supposed national aspirations.

 

I have long felt much the same way about the Irish Republican Army and the Irish republican cause. I remember walking through Heathrow Airport in the 1990s and hearing a young American woman asking why there were no trash cans. “Because if we had bins, we would have bombs in our bins,” came the curt answer from her British interlocutor. Of course, the Irish have been put-upon since forever, but they entrusted their cause to a gang of bloodthirsty savages and ordinary criminals, and the murderous campaign of terror directed at the United Kingdom by Irish republicans is something that should neither be forgotten nor easily forgiven.

 

Yes, the Ulster unionists were an unlovely bunch, too, but there’s no both-sides-ing away, e.g., the Omagh bombing, the victims of which included a dozen teens and children, a pregnant mother and her unborn twins, and many more. You don’t get to do that and enjoy my sympathy, and no amount of romantic Celtic twilight horsepucky is going to change that. Arabs, Irish, whomever—at a certain point, it’s just got to be: Screw you and your cause. There’s an effectively limited supply of sympathetic attention in the world, and the Palestinians and the Irish republicans have overdrawn their accounts. Terrorists who intentionally murder and torture children go to the bottom of my give-a-damn list, as do the people associated with them. Unfair? Maybe. But you can’t bring home every stray geopolitical puppy.

 

But, you know: I’m not a rapper.

 

Donald Trump, who is the president of these United States of America and an utter moron, decided to weigh in, off-the-cuff, in favor of the IRA’s project—which is to say, he endorsed dismantling the United Kingdom, our nation’s most important ally. “May as well happen now,” he said of disuniting the United Kingdom, of which what we now call Northern Ireland has been a part for two and a quarter centuries. On the same trip, Trump announced the suspension of tariffs on Irish whiskey, and he did so for the same reason he proposed ripping apart the United Kingdom—because he is a g-ddamned idiot who needs to hear applause every four minutes or else he starts to forget that he exists.

 

Macklemore has opinions about the Palestinians. Trump has opinions about the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. As noted, I do not know much about Macklemore. But, of the two men, at least one is a confirmed moron—and it is the guy with nuclear weapons.

Laying Bare the Media’s Manufactured Campaign Against Israel

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

Everybody knows that Israel is covered unfairly by the international press. But can this atrocious bias be quantified?

 

It turns out it can, according to a new study by Jeremy Musighi.

 

The study, called Center of Attention, uses something called the GDELT Project’s Global Knowledge Graph (GKG), an open global news index in 65 languages going back to 2015. The study tracks the location and subject of a story and assesses its relative positivity or negativity. There are additional interesting indicators, such as what kind of sources are quoted. In the end, the sampling includes nearly 15 million articles.

 

Altogether it paints a clear picture of the nature of the world’s obsession with the one Jewish state.

 

In counting mentions of a particular country, that country’s home-based publications are excluded—this is a study of how the rest of the world covers Israel and other states. Likewise, foreign-based outlets that primarily cover Israel-related topics are also excluded.

 

The study looked at the past 10 years. In nine of those 10 years, Israel was the most-talked-about subject. The exception was 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine.

 

A truly fascinating year is 2019, when there was no conflict in Israel and thus no built-in newsworthiness advantage. According to the study, “1 of every 112 international articles was primarily about Israel (0.89%).” During times of conflict, Israel can attract more than triple the attention of the nearest competitor.

 

Where does that news glut come from, primarily? In quiet years like 2019, the focus on Israel is held steady by outlets in Muslim-majority states more than in Western states, though the latter still contribute a quarter of all the stories.

 

That is perhaps to be expected. But when there is conflict involving Israel, the majority shifts to Western outlets. In peacetime (such as it is), the Muslim world ensures Israel’s negative coverage continues. When a conflict breaks out, which is often, everyone else jumps in with their own negative coverage.

 

The study contains a couple of interesting nuggets. For example, in 2024, BBC News mentioned Israel in 6 percent of airtime, accounting for a mention every 17 minutes.

 

And although Israel’s share of airtime will naturally increase at moments of major conflict outbreaks, the Jewish state still accrued outsize attention. At each country’s peak, Israel still consumed news agencies’ attention at a far higher pace. October 7, 2023, was Israel’s measured peak, up against the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the evacuation from Kabul in 2021, and other notable conflicts.

 

There is an opportunity cost to the world’s Israel-obsession. And that opportunity cost—what could have been covered instead but wasn’t—produces perhaps the saddest and most damning statistic in the entire study: “Tigray — the deadliest war of the decade — never reached 0.03% of airtime on any day, so a ‘% of peak’ curve for it would be percent of nothing; that absence is the finding.” The deadliest war of the decade and one that included an ostentatious genocidal campaign doesn’t rate. By contrast, “Israel after Oct 7 held above 1% of all cable airtime on 344 of the next 365 days, averaged 5.65% for the full year … and at one year was [still] rising.”

 

In print media specifically, “Israel’s floor … is a level other small countries touch only in the worst week of their history.”

 

Restricting the study to only Western outlets in order to test the tone of the reporting produces more grim results. In 2019, when there was no conflict in Israel, the Jewish state was covered about as negatively as Russia and North Korea. In 2024, a war year, the tone of Western coverage of Israel was 78% negative. That is, Israel was covered more negatively than Russia, Iran or Syria in the Western press. Arab and Muslim media therefore aren’t the cause of Israel’s press negativity; “the West’s own register is the darkest part of the composite.”

 

Musighi then compares the level of news coverage Israel receives with Wikipedia searches, just to get a sense of whether the media’s fascination with the Jewish state is matched by the general public’s. After all, Wikipedia can tell us how often people choose to read about Israel. The answer: The media’s obsession with Israel is notably more intense than the public’s.

 

That is the global media’s herd mentality on display, as well as the disconnect between the elites and the public. We see this also when looking at specific events that spur large amounts of media coverage. For example: International organizations produce a lot of garbage dressed up as “reports” on Israel, yet each time they release one, the media covers it like it’s the moon landing.

 

The study is a valuable look at the inner workings of the media’s manufactured obsession with Israel and the consequences—chief among them, I’d suggest, is the amount of preventable deaths that might have been saved by some of the world’s attention and resources. When the media have Jews on the brain, everybody suffers.

The Double Standard Comes Home

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

 

We often talk about the double standard that Israel’s devoted critics apply to the Jewish state. They seek to indict the country for a whole range of phenomena that they ignore everywhere else in the world. From receiving American aid, to defending its people, right on down to simply existing—if Israel does it, it’s called into question.

 

One of the ways in which the world has changed since October 7 is that Jews around the globe are now increasingly held to this double standard as well.

 

It’s long been the case that an anti-Semite can describe Israel as uniquely bloodthirsty or as America’s hidden master and claim to be voicing only the “mildest criticism” of the Jewish state. Today, you can also speak of Zionists as baby-killers and genocidaires and get a mostly receptive hearing. You can indulge in anti-Semitic caricatures of all sorts, and it won’t make many waves outside of the Jewish community.

 

When other minorities are blatantly offended, media broadly condemns the offense. When Jews are offended, the same media opts for “Some Jews consider this offensive.” If a public figure dons blackface, he’s through. If he makes himself up with a prosthetic hook nose, beard, and black hat (as the singer Macklemore has done on stage), he’s just having some innocent fun.

 

We’ve seen that when Israel is attacked, there’s a great rush to blame Israel and defend its attackers. The murderers, rapists, mutilators, and kidnappers of Hamas are, according to Hasan Piker, “a thousand times better than Israel.” Should American Jews be attacked? That too, Piker said more recently, would be the victims’ fault for “putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel.”

 

Then there’s the Jewish response. When Israel takes the fight to its enemies, it’s accused of every war crime in the book, including genocide. When Jews of the Diaspora fight back against Jew-haters, it’s called hysteria, oversensitivity, special pleading, and cited as evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to police public opinion (as in the case of Macklemore being cut loose from the current tour he was on).

 

All of this is a kind of historical boomerang. Not that long ago, the late Abe Foxman and others would describe Israel as “the Jew among the nations.” The idea being that other countries treat Israel the way gentile populations treated the Jews. This was, and is, true: With few exceptions, world leaders and international bodies subject the Jewish state to uniquely excessive scrutiny, unjustified criticism, and blatant double standards. But while the modern State of Israel became the chief target for anti-Semites around the world, the Jews of the West (most clearly in the U.S.) were treated much better than the Jewish state.

 

That is, until October 7, 2023. Since then, you might say, the Jew has become the Israel among the people.

 

Israel is the Jews, and the Jews are Israel. This was always the case, no matter what things may have looked like in a given historical era. Now that it’s become clear to all, Diaspora Jews would do well to act like the Israel among the people. Be kind, brilliant, proud, and brave. Fight back with everything you have, even knowing that you’ll be condemned for saving your own life.

Monsters Welcome

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

Here’s something to think about: While European countries are slapping sanctions on Israel, they’re ramping up engagement (including on trade) with the Taliban. After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, of course, the Taliban reimposed all sorts of horrors, including the legalization of violence against females and the vicious punishment of religious heretics. 

 

But Europe is too upset with the democratic State of Israel to care about any of that. 

 

I wrote about this very issue a year ago. Since then, Europe’s outreach to the Taliban has increased considerably. In June, Taliban officials met with EU leaders in Brussels for talks about sending Afghan asylum-seekers back home. This was the first time a formal EU delegation met with Afghanistan’s leaders since 2021. The Taliban came out of it boasting that normal consular relations with the EU are coming next. 

 

Officials from the UK and other individual Western countries now routinely fly to Qatar to meet with Taliban representatives. The Afghan Consulate General in Bonn, Germany, is under Taliban control. And an official appointed by the Taliban serves as the first secretary at the Afghan Embassy in Oslo.

 

The trend toward normalizing relations with the Taliban stretches well beyond Europe. India recently waived sanctions on the Taliban foreign minister so he could travel to New Delhi for talks, and the country is reassessing sanctions on Afghanistan altogether.

 

Less surprising, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others haven’t hesitated to engage with the brutal regime. It’s not at all uncharacteristic of Iran to have sent its foreign minister to Afghanistan last year. Nor is it shocking that Russia is the only country in the world to officially recognize the Taliban.

 

This is what the world looks like when America gives up on doing good beyond its borders. There came a point when the U.S. lost interest in pressuring authoritarian regimes as a matter of morality. And if America wasn’t going to hold the line, you could be sure that no other country would. Everyone is now free to wheel and deal with monsters should the opportunity arise.  

 

Today, easing up on the Taliban is a no-brainer for a West that’s lost its moral true north. Donald Trump’s favorite foreign leader, after all, is a former al-Qaeda soldier. And in the U.S., we’ve got an al-Qaeda-linked candidate running for Congress in New Jersey. 

 

The Taliban’s growing good fortune is also directly tied to the West’s growing accommodation with Israel’s jihadist enemies. Once Hamas terrorists earned the admiration of all those twisted Western minds, the die was cast.

 

You can’t, on the one hand, support a repressive terrorist regime that wages a bloody war on a democratic state and, on the other, condemn a different repressive terrorist regime that wages war within its own borders. You can’t grant Hamas an imaginary state while refusing to recognize the actual state ruled by the Taliban. When you choose barbarism over civilization, you’re not merely switching teams. You’re backing one historical force over another. More and more, European leaders are siding with those who want to rewind history altogether.

‘They Do What We Do’

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

Do populists want to lose elections?

 

I mean, the president sure seems to. But what about everyone else? In their heart of hearts, do they secretly prefer the comfort of minority status to the responsibilities of power?

 

That question has been kicked around among egghead pundits intermittently for 10 years, and I still haven’t settled on an answer. The case for “no” is obvious: In 2020, populists so dreaded losing power that they attempted a coup to try to hold on to it. A few of them even tried to hang the vice president when he wouldn’t go along.

 

Does that sound like a group that’s chill about losing elections?

 

But the case for “yes” is pretty easy too. The joy of populism is getting to rage self-righteously against the fecklessness and corruption of the ruling elite. Becoming the ruling elite yourself and having to govern takes all the fun out of it.

 

See, e.g., Dan Bongino, who was made second in command of the world’s most powerful law enforcement agency and peaced out after less than a year to return to podcasting. One job let him spin up right-wingers about a government cover-up involving Jeffrey Epstein, the other obliged him to debunk it. Bongino chose fun (and lucre).

 

I’d conservatively estimate that 80 percent of the reason Donald Trump has spent the last decade wheezing about the “deep state” is that it resolves the paradox that his electoral success has created. How can he be the duly elected president, the head of government, a dictator within his own party—and still also a smol bean populist outsider challenging a corrupt establishment?

 

Simple. The “deep state” is the real establishment, supposedly. Trump remains part of the blameless minority even as he goes about grabbing power remorselessly.

 

Whether populists prefer to lose is back on my mind because of leftist provocateur Hasan Piker. Piker is known for belching up hot takes on his livestreams about, among other things, America having deserved 9/11 and American Jews inviting violence against themselves by supporting Israel. The Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, progressive Abdul El-Sayed, found his perspective valuable enough to have appeared with him several times at events this year.

 

He’s been paying for it ever since. With the general election approaching and polls in Michigan surprisingly tight, one might think Piker would want to do his friend Abdul a solid by lying low—or at least declining interview requests—until November.

 

Nope. He sat down with Axios this week and was asked whether he believes the United States is “worse” than al-Qaeda. The question was obvious bait, and Piker bit hard:

 

Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes. We have caused tremendous terror all around the world. I think that that is not only terror that we are waging on regular civilians in nations in the periphery, but it’s also having consequences on ourselves. It’s having dramatic consequences on the home front. One clear example of this is what we did in Minab [Iran], right? There’s no distinction between blowing up a school, triple-tapping it with Tomahawk missiles—if you’re killing 140 schoolgirls, that is an act of terror. This doesn’t mean that all Americans are terrorists, but the reality of the matter is we have to create an environment of accountability to ensure things like that never happen again.

 

That answer is the political equivalent of a flaming bag of dog s--t left on El-Sayed’s doorstep. The candidate hurriedly disavowed his pal’s position (never mind that it sounds a lot like El-Sayed’s own position circa 2021) in a comment to Axios, even giving him the “Hasan who?” treatment: “I do not agree with this statement, nor do I give much weight to the statements made by a social media streamer.” He must be wondering the same thing I am: Does Piker want him to lose this election?

 

I don’t think so. “Pikerism is the future of the left!” is obviously a better headline for Hasan than “Pikerism is electoral poison,” and the former is possible only if El-Sayed wins while the latter is inevitable if he loses. Drawing moral equivalencies between America and its enemies isn’t a case of Piker trying to sabotage his friend’s campaign.

 

It’s a case of postliberals doing what postliberals do.

 

Denigrating America.

 

The president himself does it routinely.

 

He was asked this week about China providing satellite imagery to Iran to help the regime target U.S. bases in the Middle East, which would help explain how shockingly successful the Iranians have been at striking American assets. For a blowhard like Trump who’s obsessed with strength and got elected in 2016 as a China hawk, here was a golden opportunity to demonstrate toughness by warning the Chinese to back off.

 

Instead, he rhetorically shrugged. “They do what we do,” he said of China supplying military intelligence to an ally against a common enemy. Which is ironic, given that America’s allies in the Far East have never been less confident that the United States will be doing anything in the future to help them against Beijing.

 

The president has drawn even starker moral equivalencies when confronted about Vladimir Putin’s habit of murdering people who make trouble for him. When Bill O’Reilly called Putin a “killer” during an interview in 2017, Trump replied, “There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers. … You think our country is so innocent?” There isn’t much daylight between that answer and Piker’s musings on the United States and al-Qaeda.

 

It’s weird in some ways that a nationalist like Trump would resort to progressive-style sophistry about who the real bad guys are. For one thing, his movement is jingoist and chauvinist to the core; that America is great and good (at least when the right is in charge), not a nation of cutthroat “killers,” is normally an article of MAGA faith.

 

Stranger still, the president doesn’t typically measure whether an adversary’s conduct is acceptable by whether the United States engages in the same conduct. On the contrary, the point of “might makes right” as a worldview is to establish a double standard in which America gets to do things—like, say, forming alliances with Europe—that it won’t tolerate from less powerful countries. “It’s okay for China to help Iran kill Americans because we might someday help the Taiwanese kill them” is a glaring departure from that worldview.

 

Why are postliberals as far afield as Trump and Piker prone to answering questions about enemy atrocities with variations of “you think our country is so innocent”? I think it has less to do with wanting to denigrate America than with trying to move public opinion toward postliberalism by inviting Americans to reconsider their moral prejudices against illiberal entities abroad.

 

Don’t get me wrong, it has something to do with wanting to denigrate America. To listen to Trump on the campaign trail in 2016 and 2024 was to hear that the land of the free and home of the brave had become a squalid anarchic hellhole on the brink of social collapse. To listen to Piker is to learn that America is an avatar of extraordinarily wicked belligerence, midwife to a “genocide” by Israelis in Gaza and potentially beyond.

 

At the risk of engaging in tautology: Postliberalism is a revolution against liberalism, and revolutions can’t succeed absent popular contempt for the governing regime. Convince Americans that the civic order to which they’ve traditionally pledged allegiance has crumbled into abject immorality—worse than al-Qaeda, full of “killers,” no more civilized than Putin’s Russia—and you’ve created political space for radical change.

 

Safe for illiberalism.

 

Most of the game being played by Trump and Piker, though, has to do with challenging Americans’ traditional hatred of illiberalism by challenging their suppositions about what makes “the bad guys” bad.

 

When the president handwaves away Russia’s persecution of dissidents and China’s military support for Iran, he does so because he admires those regimes and wants the U.S. to grow closer to them. It suits his “spheres of influence” approach to the world, in which the great powers collude to menace their respective “spheres.” (Might makes right!) And of course it suits his autocratic tendencies: Trump plainly wishes he could deal with his domestic enemies the way Xi Jinping does.

 

An America in which the public has been conditioned to regard illiberal governments as no less moral than our own is an America unlikely to make a fuss as the U.S. government slips further into postliberalism. We’re already so much like Russia and China, you see; what does it matter if we’re a little bit more?

 

Piker doesn’t want a government that resembles al-Qaeda, I’ll safely assume, but he does seem to want an American administration that’s neutral at worst between Israel and its jihadist enemies and an American public that treats Israeli military action as no more morally justified than Islamic terrorism.

 

How can he achieve that? By encouraging Americans to use the death toll in the war on terror as a yardstick for measuring which side has been more “terrorist.” (What he meant by “pound for pound” in his comment to Axios, I have no idea.) The question of who killed more? conveniently elides other factors people normally consider in weighing the morality of war: What are the two sides’ goals? Are they targeting civilians intentionally? Are they trying to mitigate harm? But that’s the point. Since powerhouse militaries like America’s and Israel’s will almost always outkill their enemies, they’re destined to be the bad guys in any conflict according to Piker’s math.

 

The death toll a government inflicts in executing its policies certainly is something to consider in weighing the justness of its cause. The wrinkle is that Piker has carved out big, big exceptions to that for foreign regimes that he’s more enthusiastic about. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson noted this morning, Piker is a Mao Zedong admirer who fangirled out during a trip to China upon being gifted a copy of the late chairman’s Little Red Book. Somehow, the man with the biggest body count of the 20^th century is seemingly exempt from his who killed more? moral calculus while America and Israel are not.

 

We all make moral allowances for political causes with which we sympathize. And to give Piker his due, he’s right to demand “accountability” for the U.S. bombing of the Iranian school in Minab at the start of the war. Last month, ProPublica revealed that one of Pete Hegseth’s many initiatives to make the U.S. military less squeamish about killing people was to gut a program aimed at protecting civilians during combat. Had it remained fully staffed, the attack on the school might not have happened. Putting a war crimes apologist in charge of the Pentagon does bolster the case for moral equivalence between America and its enemies.

 

But the fact that we all make allowances for causes we support doesn’t excuse moral perversion in choosing which causes to support. I understand the argument that Israel has gone too far in trying to avenge the slaughtered dead of October 7, turning its campaign to destroy Hamas into a campaign to level Gaza. But I don’t understand how that argument can be made in good faith while waving around the Little Red Book (“The Great Leap Forward had good intentions!”), just like I don’t understand how it can be made in good faith by turd-polishers of Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine like Tucker Carlson.

 

Intentions matter. Body counts matter, too. Postliberals make no pretense of moral consistency in caring about either.

 

Relativism.

 

Then again, why would they?

 

I’ve written many times that Trumpism is less a political movement than a revolution against traditional liberal political morality. From a piece on the president’s nascent slush fund for loyalist criminals: “For most of my life, the scourge of conservatism—in particular its Christian adherents—was moral relativism. Trump is moral relativism personified. Whether an action is right or wrong, good or evil, depends entirely on whether one benefits from it or not.”

 

There’s no inconsistency in Piker feeling incandescently outraged at Israel and giddy about Mao, just as there’s no inconsistency in Trump being angrier at Canada for wanting to join the European Union than he is at China for helping Iran to kill Americans. Consistency has nothing to do with anything. Under postliberalism, morality is a tool to advance one’s interests.

 

If you’re committed ideologically to left-wing postliberalism, there’s no contradiction in having a no-limits body count for communist rule in China while abhorring a “genocide” perpetrated by “Western settler colonialists” in the Middle East. And if you’re committed ideologically to right-wing postliberalism, there’s no contradiction in feeling more indignant about a liberal alliance in your “sphere of influence” than Xi targeting U.S. air bases or Putin murdering Ukrainians.

 

It’s all relative. They do what we do—and if anything, we’re worse: The muddier American postliberals can make the moral waters, the less of a political drag on their agenda voters’ moral impulses promise to be. America has spent most of the last 10 years being governed by a party in which that cynical attitude prevails, with predictable consequences. I’m not sure what happens if it ends up prevailing in both.

A Scorned Trump Gathers Bulldozers for the Kennedy Center

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

Fall nears. The trade wars continue to rage. The Iran war drags ever onward. The midterms are coming. And what is Donald Trump doing to drag the country out of the several, concentrically deepening holes he has dug for America, the Republican Party, and himself?

 

The answer, of course, is: preparing to demolish the Kennedy Center, rather than let anyone else have it.

 

I touched on this already in the Carnival of Fools this week. It ill behooves a man to rave on at length with his bug-eyed Cassandra-like predictions, but I’ll call my shot now: Washington’s official federal performing arts venue will not make it to the end of Trump’s term. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s certainly what the president wants everyone to think. He’s signaling his next move so openly at this point that he might as well be using semaphore flags.

 

To recap: Trump has long betrayed a quietly deep obsession with the world of the theater arts — which he no doubt associates with the New York of his youth. He is, famously, equally as obsessed with Kennedy family glamour — why, he even found his own collectible Kennedy to add to the administration! — and desperately wants to associate his own (decidedly grubbier) name with a national martyr.

 

Therefore, it was perhaps inevitable that he would take a heavy hand with the Kennedy Center — the federally owned and directed performing arts venue for the nation’s capital, named for the slain president in 1964, prior to opening. It was one of the shiniest baubles in (what he regards as) his personal presidential treasury to play with and admire.

 

Nobody expected him to try to slap his name on it, however. Nobody expected him to be that crude or lawless. The building is named by statute; renaming it anything else is not optional, unless approved by Congress. Trump doesn’t care: His openly stated philosophy is to put his own name (or Trump-like “stamp”) onto everything he possibly can while still president. “Nobody else will,” he says, correctly.

 

So he installed his faithful myrmidons on the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, who “voted” to rename it after him. Bookings immediately vanished — no artist in America with any profile would ever recover from ratifying such an imperial ego-grab with their presence — and when the courts ordered him to remove his name, he instead erected a scaffolding to permanently prevent the world from seeing the title of the venue without his name on it.

 

With money running low, he followed through on Tuesday with his threat to shut the whole thing down. I approved, if for no other reason than that sheer pragmatism dictated it: There was no point in keeping the Kennedy Center open so long as he remains in office. But, of course, Trump can’t be allowed to lose like that; even more to the point, the next president (whoever he or she is) can’t be allowed to win by default. So now he might demolish the building entirely. He’s refreshingly open about how selfishly narcissistic his motives are, too. From a quote he gave directly to ABC News:

 

I’m the one capable of fixing it, and then have to subsidize it for years to come because you will lose with the Kennedy Center — they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars sometimes, hundreds of millions — this is before I got involved. So for the Trump administration, for me, to get involved and to take that on long-term, and to carry it, or to raise money to carry it, I think that the Trump administration should certainly have recognition. Because frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close, it’ll end up being ripped down.

 

His message is clear: The Kennedy Center might belong to the nation, but for now it belongs to me. And if I can’t put my name on it, I’ll simply tear it down . . . and you can’t stop me. (To emphasize the point, Trump was later photographed — quite intentionally, one imagines — on Air Force One, being presented with various plans for emergency demolition of the Kennedy Center.)

 

First, note the sheer proprietary spirit with which Trump speaks of the Kennedy Center, as if it’s some property he developed. Listen to how he lies so effortlessly, pretending that refurbishing it would be his long-term commitment, something he would be footing the bill for out of his own pocket. Trump wouldn’t be paying a dime, obviously. (At best, Trump could elect to spend some of his donor money on it, but in any event the federal government will ultimately pay for the upkeep of its own building, as required by statute; it’s yet another repulsive bit of fraudulence that he knows he will never be called on.) And he remains in denial as to why the center has lost money (not “hundreds of millions,” which is absurd): because of his own intervention.

 

But second, understand the repulsiveness (and quasi-blackmail) of Trump simply threatening to tear the entire building down if he can’t get his name onto it. Nobody likes the kid who cries and threatens to take his toys home if people don’t bow to his demands. But people really hate the kid who cries and threatens to take your toys home.

 

People sometimes ask me why, with all the potential distractions and scandals this administration regularly provides, I’ve spent so much time writing about Trump’s impossible desires to forever associate himself with the prestige of Washington, D.C. Most of all, I find this entire sordid affair to be a wonderfully emblematic miniature, summarizing Trump’s imperial arrogance in all its spectacular pettiness.

 

I predict that Trump goes through with the demolition — probably after the midterms, when he truly has nothing left to play for — and even if he doesn’t, the mere act of publicly threatening it says volumes anyway. This miserable sideshow has become a powerful symbol of Trump on Tilt during his second term, ready to destroy a building if the courts won’t bow to him and fixated on the matter to the exclusion of vastly more important issues. The extremes this man will go to not to admit there is something he just cannot do have begun to surprise even me.

We’re Not as Dumb as You Think

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

There’s a certain type of political observer whose low esteem for his fellow Americans’ character and intelligence is matched only by his high regard for his own talents and temperament. That’s the sort, overrepresented on social media, who assumed that the savage masses would fall to their knees in gratitude to Donald Trump over his promise to provide several hundred million of them with $5,000 checks — that is, so long as they vote Republican in November. That same archetype seemed perfectly befuddled by the public’s rejection of Trump’s proposed kickback.

 

The latest Reuters/Ipsos survey found that 63 percent of Americans — “including four in 10 Republicans and nine in 10 Democrats” — disapprove of the president’s $5,000 pledge. With that, social media lit up with a cynical assessment of the American people, albeit in a rhetorical framework designed to disparage Trump more than the voting public. The refrain was endlessly reprised: Trump is so unpopular that he’s turned the American people against free money!

 

Trump may be the target, but this line of attack does collateral damage to voters.

 

I’m not surprised by the public’s rejection of this exercise in political payola. As I told CNN’s Abby Phillip on September 10, Trump’s proposal wasn’t just awful policy — it was bad politics:

 

 

For the better part of a decade, Americans have had to live with the consequences of “free money.” And they can connect the dots.

 

As early as October 2021, as voters felt the pain of the pandemic’s supply chain disruptions, coupled with the government’s efforts to stimulate demand while artificially suppressing commercial and social activity, pollsters found that voters understood that a government check came with strings attached. The bipartisan polling team of Joel Benenson and Neil Newhouse found that voters, including over seven in ten independents, agreed with the following expression of elementary logic: “People will continue to pay more money on everyday expenses unless the government becomes more fiscally responsible.”

 

In other words, voters understood that profligacy in Washington contributes to inflation and, therefore, reduces their own purchasing power. The following year, Americans for Prosperity sponsored a survey that confirmed Benenson and Newhouse’s suspicions. Just shy of three-fourths of respondents said government spending is a “major cause” of high prices and that “continued high levels of government spending in Washington would cause prices to keep rising.”

 

The voting public hasn’t suddenly forgotten the painful economic lessons that bitter experience drilled into them during the Biden years. It’s the height of condescension to suggest that voters would compartmentalize all they’ve learned about inflationary pressures merely because Trump dangled a shiny lure in front of their faces. And yet, so many succumbed to that patronizing temptation.

 

If the president were surrounded by folks with a little more faith in voters’ intelligence, he might not have insulted them with the promise of a greasy payoff. He should find himself a few people who don’t hold their fellow Americans in contempt. That might make the next two years a little easier on this White House, the GOP, and whomever Republican voters pass the party’s baton to in 2028.