Stop Trump’s Slush-Fund Boondoggle

National Review Online

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

 

Donald Trump has dropped his $10 billion damages lawsuit against the IRS. What he’s doing instead may be even worse.

 

Back in October, we editorialized against the unseemly spectacle of Trump’s pursuing administrative claims for $230 million in damages against the Justice Department for alleged abuses of his civil rights in its investigations. Even if the claims were valid when he made them, before becoming president, we argued, it is wrong for presidents — to whom DOJ necessarily answers — to direct that agency to pay them money.

 

In January, Trump filed a federal lawsuit against the IRS seeking $10 billion in damages for leaks of his tax returns in 2017–18. The violation of Trump’s rights in this case is real (the leaks were widely publicized, and the leaker was sent to prison), although the requested damages were clearly inflated. The case drew an Obama-appointed judge who questioned whether the suit was so collusive that it didn’t represent an adversarial “case or controversy” giving rise to federal court jurisdiction. She chose liberal lawyers as court-appointed amici to advise her on dismissing it. Trump got the message and abandoned the case on Monday, two days before his response was due.

 

But Trump isn’t done. Immediately on the heels of the dismissal of the IRS suit, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that, as part of a deal to settle that case, DOJ is creating an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” of $1.776 billion. This is reportedly designed to establish “a systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare” under Joe Biden, potentially including defendants in January 6 prosecutions. Blanche’s letter explains that the obviously symbolic $1.776 billion figure “does not represent the value of any claim by Plaintiffs, but rather is based on the projected valuation of future claimants’ claims.” Tellingly, the new fund is designed to expire “no later than December 1, 2028,” so all the money will be dispensed by the current administration.

 

This is, de facto, a new government program not authorized by Congress, under the fictional pretense of settling lawsuits that have not been proven in court. The fact that (as Blanche recites) such things have been done in the past by Democrats makes this worse, rather than better. Hard-to-supervise slush funds aimed at financing well-connected political allies are exactly the sort of thing a populist presidency is supposed to end.

 

It also represents a favored tactic of the left: gain control of an institution, “apologize” for what its former leaders did, and use the apology as an excuse to loot the Treasury to pay “reparations.” That’s no more justifiable when the right does it.

 

This may be legal, in the sense that Congress created and funds a permanent Judgment Fund for settling lawsuits against the United States, rather than requiring such settlements to gain case-by-case legislative approval, as was true in the early republic. But there is also nothing in the Constitution that requires Congress to passively let this sort of thing happen.

Why Does Donald Trump Refuse to Defend America?

By Tom Nichols

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

 

Some of Donald Trump’s favorite world leaders have been scoundrels, bullies, and dictators. He keeps a picture of himself with the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin on the wall of the White House. He claims to have fallen “in love” with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. He publicly supported Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has been chased from power, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who is now under house arrest for the next two decades. He just returned from China and gushed about how the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, is a “great leader” whom he’s honored to have as “a friend.”

 

The China summit also showed, yet again, that such men can both intimidate and flatter Trump into taking their side, even against the United States.

 

Trump’s own FBI calls China’s recent cyberattacks and influence operations against U.S. government agencies, businesses, and academic institutions “a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.” But when asked whether he had discussed these attacks with Xi, the president not only waved the question away but seemed almost eager to absolve China as a nation no better or worse than America: “I did. And he talked about attacks that we did in China. You know, what they do, we do too. It’s, like, the spying; they’re talking about, Oh, the spying. I said, ‘Well, we do it too.’”

 

When pressed for a clarification, Trump went on: “I’m talking about spying. The question was asked of me yesterday, I guess, ‘What about the fact that China is spying in the United States?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s one of those things because we spy like hell on them too.’”

 

Trump was then asked about concerns that China was inserting code in crucial systems that control various parts of American infrastructure, such as energy, communications, and water. “You don’t know that,” he answered. “I’d like to see it, but it’s very possible that they do. And we’re doing things to them. I told them, ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about, and you are doing stuff to us that we probably do know about.’ We do plenty. It’s a double-edged sword.”

 

Instead of saying that these cyberattacks were real threats and that the country’s national-security professionals were working to stop them, the president of the United States gave an answer that just as easily could have come from a Chinese official: Secret code in your power grid? You don’t know that. We’d like to see the proof. But you Americans do plenty of things to us that we probably don’t even know about.

 

This would be less startling if Trump had always been soft on China, but for years, he has preened as a China hawk. During his first two presidential campaigns, he pounded China as an existential threat to the U.S. economy, a rogue power stealing America’s intellectual property and sending its graduate students to the United States to infiltrate our universities. “China’s theft of American technology, intellectual property, and research,” read a White House statement in 2020, “threatens the safety, security, and economy of the United States.”

 

Trump, after getting a private talking-to from Xi, now wants to know why any of this is a big deal. After all, everyone does it. (Perhaps I take this somewhat personally because I was a federal employee when China hacked the Office of Personnel Management in 2015, and all of my personal data, including my security-clearance forms, are now likely sitting in a computer in Beijing.)

 

This isn’t the first time that Trump has cowered rather than admit a dictatorship is trying to harm the United States. Shortly after Trump took office in early 2017, the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly pressed the president about his professed respect for Putin. “He’s a killer,” O’Reilly protested. Trump nodded a bit and then said: “There’s a lot of killers. We got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

 

Trump would top this appalling moral equivalence a year later at a summit with Putin in Helsinki. A hangdog Trump stood next to Putin and affirmed that he, as the president of the United States, took the word of a Russian dictator over the conclusions presented to him by loyal Americans that Russia tried to meddle in the 2016 elections, a well-substantiated charge that Trump has always hated because it implies that he won the presidency only with foreign help. “I have great confidence in my intelligence people,” he said, “but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”

 

Putin, for his part, smiled approvingly, and understandably so: Trump was singing lyrics Putin could easily have written. The American president made these remarks after meeting with the Russian president privately, a risky move that he repeated when he met with Xi privately in Beijing. (Aides can keep records, and even intervene if discussions go off the rails, which is why presidents and other top officials usually try to avoid meetings without them.) Likewise, when Putin came to Alaska at Trump’s invitation last summer, the presidents again met privately, and Trump again emerged parroting the Russian leader’s talking points.

 

This kind of behavior goes beyond mere apple-polishing. Almost any time Trump talks to a foreign strongman, he seems both charmed and intimidated, and ends up defending his autocratic friend rather than his country. These dictators appear to bring out a kind of neediness in Trump: In China, Xi took him on a tour of a private garden, and like a swooning teenager on a date in a nice restaurant, Trump asked whether the Chinese leader ever took other foreign guests to the same place.

 

The people around Trump support these equivocations because anyone who opposes Trump’s ideas in the White House will be shown the door; any Republican who speaks up in Congress will be primaried out of their seat. Trump, in his second term, will not change. He will never take a robust stand against America’s top-line enemies: He saves that kind of rancor for our allies. When he does take aim at hostile regimes, he chooses lesser powers such as Iran, whose leaders he does not know and whose military is no direct threat to the United States.

 

We do not know what Trump said to Xi behind closed doors. More important, we will likely never know what was said to him. But whatever it was, both Xi and Putin clearly know how to press the American president into taking their side, including making excuses for espionage against the United States and endangering American friends in Taiwan and Ukraine.

 

The president’s supporters defend this sort of fawning over dictators from time to time, saying that Trump is just making deals and playing multidimensional chess. But nearly a decade of this kind of embarrassing behavior suggests that Trump’s constant equivocations do not reflect strategy or realism. They are instead evidence of his lack of a moral compass—and his meekness in the presence of powerful autocrats.

Conscience Kills

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, May 18, 2026

 

I come to bury Bill Cassidy, not to praise him.

 

The two-term incumbent finished third in this weekend’s Republican Senate primary in Louisiana, missing the runoff. In 2014 and 2020 he was elected to his seat by double-digit margins, in the first case bumping off longtime Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu. On Saturday, against two lesser-known right-wingers, he couldn’t muster 25 percent.

 

Not since 2017 had a sitting senator standing for election failed to advance past a primary.

 

Cassidy famously voted to convict Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial, and our retribution-obsessed president never forgot it. As late as Saturday afternoon, with Louisiana Republicans already at the polls, Trump felt obliged to ding Cassidy as a “sleazebag” and a “terrible guy” in a screed on Truth Social.

 

The commentariat was of one mind afterward in pronouncing the cause of political death. The senator’s fate “shows the price of dissent in Trump’s Republican Party,” NBC News concluded. “The lesson: Do not cross Trump,” independent analyst Chris Cillizza agreed.

 

That is not the lesson of Bill Cassidy’s defeat.

 

Lots of Republicans have “crossed” Trump since 2016 and lived to tell the tale. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz opposed him in that year’s Republican presidential primary, at times criticizing him in bitterly personal terms. Cruz couldn’t even bring himself to endorse the party’s new nominee in his speech at that year’s GOP convention. “Vote your conscience,” he urged conservatives contemplating their choice in November.

 

Ten years later, Trump is talking up Cruz for a Supreme Court vacancy and touting Rubio, his secretary of state, as a potential successor to lead the party.

 

Rubio’s chief rival as heir apparent also crossed the president in the past. J.D. Vance was an outspoken Never Trumper back in the day, you may recall, having once gone as far as to wonder whether Trump might prove to be “America’s Hitler.” All of that was public knowledge in 2024. The president made Vance his running mate anyway.

 

Few Republicans have crossed him as sharply as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did when DeSantis jumped into the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Defeat in that race would have cost Trump not just his hegemony over the American right but potentially his freedom, given the federal criminal cases pending against him. One might assume that the president bears DeSantis a ferocious grudge for his impertinence.

 

Nope. The two had lunch together in Miami last month and reportedly discussed a position in the administration. “Trump likes him,” a source told Axios.

 

I could go on and on. How about Lindsey Graham and the president throwing wild rhetorical roundhouses at each other in 2016, then a clearly shaken Graham declaring “count me out, enough is enough” on the evening of January 6, 2021—yet still maintaining his status as a top-tier Trump crony to this day? He turned up on Meet the Press this weekend to opine on Cassidy’s defeat, in fact, gloating over his own superior survival skills.

 

Or how about Mitt Romney lambasting Trump in a speech in the thick of the 2016 primary, calling him a “phony” and a “fraud,” and the new president-elect responding nine months later by interviewing Romney to be his secretary of state?

 

“Do not cross Trump” is not the lesson of Bill Cassidy’s political demise. But there are lessons.

 

Minor lessons.

 

Lesson one: Do not side with political enemies who are treating Trump “unfairly,” especially as a matter of conscience.

 

There are doubtless anodyne factors that help explain why the president has forgiven people like Rubio and DeSantis yet couldn’t forgive Cassidy. Watching vanquished opponents come crawling to him tickles his ego, I’m sure. And, importantly, all of the Republicans I mentioned earlier (save Romney) plainly worked hard to cultivate relationships with him after they’d crossed him.

 

Trump has a childlike habit of viewing anyone who treats him cordially as a “friend,” including Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, and if you’re not a postliberal’s friend you’re his enemy. Bill Cassidy didn’t try very hard to build the sort of sycophantic “yes, master” personal rapport with Trump following his impeachment vote that might have reestablished him as a friend.

 

But even if he had, I doubt it would have worked.

 

That’s because Trump does seem to hold special grudges against Republicans who take sides against him in, ahem, Democratic “witch hunts.” He never forgave Jeff Sessions for recusing himself in the Justice Department’s Russiagate probe, which made Robert Mueller’s investigation possible. He never forgave Liz Cheney for linking arms with the left to punish him for his plot to overturn the “rigged” election of 2020. And he never forgave Mike Pence for declining to stop the counting of electoral votes on January 6, deeming it preferable to run instead in 2024 with a guy who thought he might be “America’s Hitler.”

 

When Trump feels cornered, he expects all Republicans to rally to his aid unthinkingly against those who cornered him. To prioritize what your own conscience tells you is right over his political survival is to fail the supreme loyalty test, an unforgivable betrayal. That’s what Cassidy did in voting to convict him at his impeachment trial after the insurrection.

 

Lesson two: If you insist on ignoring lesson one, go all-in.

 

Failing that supreme loyalty test for conscientious reasons is a deeply admirable thing to do. It amounts to political martyrdom: Rather than behave immorally to preserve your career, you opt to behave virtuously and accept professional death as the consequence. That’s what Pence and Cheney did, and it’s why every non-chud in America respects them.

 

Bill Cassidy behaved virtuously when he voted to convict—but couldn’t make peace with the political death sentence it earned him. He sought clemency from the president for his betrayal. And rather than earn that clemency by becoming a slobbering ass-kisser like Graham, damaging only himself in the process, he chose to make amends by all but singlehandedly clearing the way for the most influential anti-vaccine kook on earth to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

 

A gastroenterologist who’s treated hepatitis patients, Cassidy knows firsthand how much needless human misery can be avoided by vaccination. His vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was transparently a ploy to try to win back Trump’s favor by lending scientific credibility to the least fit Cabinet nomination in the history of the country, knowing that another Senate primary in Louisiana was on the horizon.

 

No one has done more damage to the United States in order to make Donald Trump happy than Bill Cassidy did by voting to confirm Kennedy. It’s an infamous dereliction of duty and will be remembered as such.

 

I repeat what I said when I wrote about it last year, borrowing what Churchill told Neville Chamberlain after Munich: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” Bill Cassidy chose dishonor, handing over American public health to witch doctors, in hopes that doing so might spare him a primary war. He got war anyway. He lost, and he deserved to.

 

Let others learn from his foolishness: If you choose political martyrdom at Trump’s hands, own it. Make the most of it by continuing to follow your conscience, knowing that your prognosis is terminal regardless. It’s the height of stupidity to cast a difficult vote that secures your legacy as a statesman, as Cassidy did after January 6, and then undertake to destroy that legacy by behaving disgracefully for expedient reasons, as he did with Kennedy. Liz Cheney understood that. Somehow the brilliant doctor did not.

 

Die on your feet, not on your knees.

 

Lesson three: Don’t be brave only after it’s “safe” to do so.

 

“When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to. But you don’t pout,” Cassidy told supporters during his concession speech on Saturday night. “You don’t whine. You don’t claim the election was stolen.”

 

It was clear to all to whom he was alluding. “Insults only bother me if they come from somebody of character and integrity,” he went on to say, mentioning no one in particular. “I find that people of character and integrity don’t spend their time attacking people on the internet.” Then this, from the physician who voted to put RFK Jr. in charge of Americans’ access to vaccines: “Leaders should think through the consequences of their actions.”

 

To listen to him after the votes were in, you might assume that he had scrupulously distanced himself on the campaign trail from the pouting, whining black hole of character and integrity in the White House. Not so. He ran ads trumpeting his vote for Trump’s tax cuts, emphasizing that he “worked with” the president to pass them and showing photos of the two side by side.

 

He even called it “ridiculous” for his primary opponents to question his loyalty to Trump. “It’s being said by people who don’t have anything else to campaign on,” Cassidy told NOTUS of the allegation last year. “The president has eight Cabinet secretaries that he would not have if I had not voted for them and got them through. When the secretary of defense was [confirmed] … I was the 50th vote.”

 

Given all of that, who was his concession-speech candor supposed to impress, surfacing as it did only after he no longer had anything to lose by telling the truth about Trump?

 

I suppose I prefer pugnacity to the alternative, as professing his undying devotion to the president even in defeat would have been Lindsey Graham-tier pathetic. But suddenly being brave after it becomes “safe” to do so is destined to alienate everyone. To Trump supporters, watching Cassidy vent at the president as soon as the race ended must have felt like proof that the phonies of the GOP establishment really do secretly despise their hero and, by extension, them.

 

Whereas, to Trump critics, Cassidy at last mustering the nerve to speak out once the axe had fallen confirmed suspicions about the loathsome selfish cowardice of Beltway Republicans. Only after their careerist aspirations run aground, conveniently, do they tend to rediscover the civic spirit that’s supposed to animate them as public servants.

 

Whichever side you’re on with respect to Cassidy, you’re more cynical about politics today than you were a few days ago. That’s not true of Republicans like Cheney and Romney, who didn’t proceed to talk out of both sides of their mouth about the president once they realized what a civic menace he was.

 

The major lesson.

 

But wait, you say. Cassidy wasn’t brave only when it was “safe” to be brave. He voted to convict Trump. That was brave!

 

True—although I strongly suspect the senator didn’t understand just how brave he was being when he cast that vote. If there’s a tragic element to his primary defeat, it’s that he may have assumed that the rank-and-file of his party are much more virtuous than they really are.

 

Remember the posture of his impeachment vote. Cassidy was less than two months into a new six-year term. Trump’s approval, although still sturdy with Republicans, had plummeted among Americans after the insurrection. The Biden Justice Department was gearing up to pursue the now-former president on criminal charges related to the “stop the steal” plot.

 

The senator from Louisiana had good reason to believe the Trump era was over.

 

Sure, Republican voters would be angry at him for voting to convict—for a while. But they had six years to get over it before he’d face them again in a primary. By 2026, Trump might be in prison. Even if he wasn’t, it’s a cinch that the GOP would have moved on by then and found a new leader, eroding the base’s resentment of Cassidy for his impeachment vote.

 

That the right might nominate Trump again in 2024, after a failed coup plot, simply did not occur to him, I would guess.

 

All of which is to say that I don’t think Bill Cassidy was naive about Trump’s wrath when he voted the way he did after January 6. The president is little more than a gelatinous blob of grudges and grievances, and the senator doubtless knew it. What Cassidy was naive about was his faith that Republican voters could not possibly be so morally wretched that they would still be worshiping that blob five years later, still seeking revenge on the senator in 2026 for having cast what was obviously a brave, correct, and honorable vote.

 

He didn’t grasp at the time how rotten his own constituency was or foresee how much more rotten it would become. He did the right thing, unambiguously—and it made him anathema to the American right. In Donald Trump’s party, conscience kills. That’s the real lesson of the Cassidy disaster.

 

And the senator tried to learn it, albeit too late. The easiest way to understand his vote to confirm Kennedy is as a formal repudiation of his own conscience: Between betraying his profession as a doctor and cynically aligning himself with a president whom he believed committed high crimes during his first term, few Republican lawmakers have strained as hard to prioritize partisan loyalty over conscientiousness as Cassidy has over the past year.

 

Having failed the supreme loyalty test five years ago, though, he couldn’t un-fail it. In a postliberal party like the GOP, you don’t lose a primary for disappointing the base on policy; ideological orthodoxy is whatever Trump declares it to be from one moment to the next, after all. You lose it for trying to punish an authoritarian demagogue for a coup plot that would have ended the American experiment had it succeeded. Cassidy chose the Constitution over Trump. He would never be forgiven for it.

 

There is no hope for America as long as the right remains what it’s become. Bill Cassidy didn’t know that in 2021. He knows now.

Primary Colors: Trump’s Revenge Week

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

 

Over the weekend, the State of Louisiana emphasized its fundamentally antisocial, suspiciously Francophile nature by holding its primary election on a Saturday, instead of the Tuesdays other more civilized states use. But Louisiana could have held its primary this year during Mardi Gras or Easter Sunday and it wouldn’t have saved Senator Bill Cassidy, who was bounced out of his seat in a blowout primary loss to two Trump-affiliated candidates.

 

Cassidy — a marked man among MAGA stalwarts since 2020 — was already expected to lose, but his failure to even make the runoff is a final humiliation in this deepest red of states. Finishing with a miserable 24.8 percent of the vote to Trump-endorsed Julia Letlow’s 45 percent and former administration official John Fleming’s 28.3 percent, his rejection was overdetermined: Governor Jeff Landry manipulated to close this year’s formerly open primary race to registered Republicans only, leaving Cassidy uniquely vulnerable in a state filled with ancestral Democrats who vote GOP nationally.

 

To Cassidy’s credit, he took his defeat in stoic fashion. “When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to. But you don’t pout. You don’t whine. You don’t claim that an election was stolen from you.” Everybody knew what he was referring to, the real reason he was retired by his constituents on Saturday night: Cassidy was one of three remaining Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection in 2020. (The other two are Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski — who is going to have a deeply troubled reelection campaign in 2028 unless she retires — and Susan Collins, whom even Trump isn’t stupid enough to try to push out of office in Maine.)

 

Perhaps the most notable thing about Cassidy’s loss is how both sides of our current ongoing political war were happy to kick him in the rear on his way out the door. MAGA voters hate him because of his “disloyalty” to Trump, but mostly because they are eager to focus their present frustrations outward rather than admit they’ve irrevocably wedded themselves to the cause of them. Progressives hold him in contempt as the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. (Cassidy was a medical doctor before coming to D.C. and expressed extreme skepticism about RFK’s anti-vaccination stance — but ultimately voted to confirm.) I’ve talked to a surprising number of these people, who argue “he was already dead politically the moment Trump got reelected in 2024; he should have voted his conscience.” Apparently, Cassidy himself wasn’t as certain of that assessment as they were.

 

But now he is.

 

Thomas Massie Awaits Judgment

 

And Trump’s private war continues. So today we will learn the outcome of the Kentucky primary, where longtime Representative Thomas Massie currently sits as incumbent in the ultra-MAGA fourth district, awaiting judgment night. Massie is a notorious crank of the Ron and Rand Paul school, a man who famously once described his appeal to his constituents as being “the craziest son of a bitch in the race.” (He is an MIT-educated former engineer who lives off the electrical grid in a house he built for himself — personally, by hand.)

 

Now that he has enraged Trump — by voting against his economic agenda, by loudly opposing the war in Iran and aid to Israel, but most of all by collaborating with Democrats to force the release of the so-called Epstein files — he is under siege, running against Trump’s pet candidate Ed Gallrein in a district torn between its familiarity with Massie and its love of Trump.

 

A sickening amount of money has already been spent — big-money donations directed by Trump to Gallrein, small-donor dollars to Massie. At $32 million invested between both sides, it has now officially become the single most expensive primary race in American history — which only becomes more astoundingly ridiculous when you realize that it has all gone into a completely safe and nonessential seat. Trump has directed an unbelievable flood of money toward satisfying his impulse to squash his internal opponents, and not because he believes himself to be building a disciplined movement, but rather out of sheer pique: Millions upon millions that would otherwise have gone to campaigning in November have been flushed before May is over, on prosecuting his personal grudge against Massie.

 

For that reason alone — the bloody-minded pettiness of it all, the fanatical waste of crucial and finite resources — the mainstream media rather transparently are rooting for Massie to edge this race out. (Massie is no angel himself; it’s amusing to read outlets like the New York Times try to present him as a noble iconoclast as opposed to a bug-eyed libertarian lunatic — which is how he would be treated in any other context by the Times.) Trump has thrown everything he has at Massie, and if it doesn’t work? Every political reporter in America is eager to write the story about how Trump’s grip on the Republican Party is beginning to slip.

 

But I don’t think they are going to get to write that story, at least not tonight.

 

Graham Platner Is a Fancy-Boy Fraud on Top of Everything Else

 

With all the ongoing carnage in the various Republican primaries (John Cornyn’s turn comes next week), it’s easy to lose sight of the madness also engulfing the Democrats, albeit slightly more peacefully. When Maine Governor Janet Mills announced at the end of April that she was dropping out of the Senate race against Susan Collins in favor of her upstart Democratic challenger Graham Platner, I had nothing to add that I hadn’t written already. (I declared the primary race over a week before Mills’s announcement, after all — this was merely the official proof.)

 

There is no need to rehearse the most obvious issues with Platner’s candidacy — if you’ve heard his name at all, it is no doubt because he (up until a few months ago) proudly sported an enormous Nazi tattoo across his chest. (Platner farcically claims he had no idea that the totenkopf he wore on his flesh was also worn by the SS, which was a bridge too far for even his former campaign manager, who flatly accused him of lying.) Matters weren’t helped when he later approvingly retweeted an honest-to-goodness neo-Nazi, suggesting if nothing else that an X algorithm that personally adapts to a reader’s demonstrated interests knew enough to feed him pleasingly antisemitic content.

 

No matter for progressives; Graham Platner may be a neo-Nazi-curious rat cosplaying as a decent human being, but he is going to be the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine after June, as the left attempts to unseat the remarkably resilient Susan Collins. And why? Because national Democrats were willing to overlook all that “kill the Jews” stuff (“he doesn’t mean it!”) for Platner’s authenticity. Here was a vigorous real American, not some boring, dried-out career politician: a bulked-up combat veteran, a rough-hewn blue-collar oysterman, a hard-luck “normal dude” speaking truth to power in a tough economy.

 

Alas, he’s none of that: It’s pure imposture from an upper-middle-class brat being handled by political consultants, pretty much. It turns out that Platner is instead a much more familiar type: a spoiled trust-fund kid living a downwardly mobile lifestyle at the expense of his parents. Yes, the New York Times did a little digging into the life story that Platner is retailing on the campaign trail — hardscrabble oysterman trying to grind out a living in Trump’s America — and found out that, in reality, Platner has been almost completely propped up and supported by his wealthy and hyper-educated parents:

 

As he campaigns across Maine and raises his profile in the national news media, Mr. Platner frequently cites his financial circumstances as a central credential for office.

 

“I’m a working-class guy that lives a working-class life,” he told a local Maine television station. “There’s an authenticity there that most other politicians just can’t provide because it’s inauthentic for them.”

 

Recently, as he wooed voters at an American Legion hall in the small town of Sabattus, Mr. Platner repeated what has become a routine campaign line: “I’ve never been close to money and power.”

 

As it turns out, Platner was born into family money and has soaked himself in it so deeply that he is now edging ever closer to power. The oyster farm that Platner theoretically runs? It has exactly one main client: Graham Platner’s mother, who buys his haul out of family obligation. The working-class presentation he gives? Platner is a private-school whelp whose parents helped buy his house for him and have been supporting him throughout his life. Platner recently lied outright in a campaign video: “Susan Collins, you voted to send me to Iraq” — a tough attack to defend, were it not for the fact that Platner volunteered in 2004, long after we had declared war, and that years ago, before he was a candidate, Platner gave a far darker (and truthful) account of why he went: “I wanted to have an adventure and kill some people . . . and managed both.” (Platner was so traumatized by his tour he returned as a private mercenary to Afghanistan in 2018.)

 

There is a chance that none of these falsehoods and exaggerations will matter. I’ve seen enough campaigns — heck, I’ve seen Donald Trump — so I no longer entertain any delusions that moral shame can decide a campaign in 2026. Progressives enthusiastically bought their ticket with Platner, and now they’re going to take the ride, wherever it leads.

Poland Is About to Upgrade to the F-35 Fighter Jet

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

 

32nd Tactical Air Base in Łask, Poland — This is a big week for this air base in central Poland, as “very soon” the first Lockheed Martin F-35A fighter jets — touted as “the most advanced fighter jets in the world” — are expected to arrive.

 

Up until now, this base, a critical hub for NATO’s eastern flank, was home to sixteen F-16 Fighting Falcons. While the F-16 was designed in the 1970s, today’s models are nothing to sneeze at. The F-16 has a top speed of Mach 2, it’s considered one of the most agile dogfighters ever built, and it can carry weapons at eleven different “hardpoints.”

 

One of the few drawbacks is that those weapons or extra fuel tanks on the hardpoints make the F-16 easier for enemy radar systems to spot. The F-35 is actually slightly slower, with a top speed of Mach 1.6 — that’s still 1,200 miles per hour — but the F-35’s much more advanced avionics and sensors spot the enemy much faster. As a result, the F-35 doesn’t actually need to do as much dogfighting; it wins the fight before the enemy fighter craft can even get the F-35 within the range of its weapons. The F-35 is also stealthy — a very low radar cross-section thanks to its airframe shape, internal weapons bays, and radar-absorbent materials — making it far harder to detect and track.

 

The new F-35s are so stealthy that the Polish Air Force actually changed its logo from its traditional red and white checkerboard to a light and dark grey one.

 

Over at War on the Rocks, Army Major General (ret.) John G. Ferrari and Dillon Prochnicki of the American Enterprise Institute evaluate the F-35’s performance in combat over Iran and conclude that it is “a masterpiece built for the wrong war.”:

 

The F-35 Lightning II has performed brilliantly in the Iran war. Stealth aircraft penetrated defended airspace, suppressed and destroyed air defenses, struck missile infrastructure, and enabled follow-on operations by legacy platforms such as heavy bombers. The jet’s sensor fusion gave commanders an integrated picture of the battlefield that proved as decisive as the weapons themselves. The F-35 demonstrated exactly what it was built to do: penetrate contested airspace, use its sensors to find and track targets inside an integrated air defense system, share that information across the force, and deliver precision strikes against high-value targets. None of that is in dispute.

 

Ferrari and Prochnicki’s objections focus primarily on how the F-35 would fare in a war against China, and question whether the F-35s are too expensive and take too long to build.

 

You don’t hear as much talk about the Russian Air Force’s MiG-29s these days. This is partially because, thanks to the Ukrainians, there are fewer MiG-29s around than there used to be, and partially because of the ascending era of drone warfare. (In March, Ukraine outpaced Russia in in the number of deep strikes against enemy territory. They appear to be doing it entirely with drones; if the Ukrainians have run any manned aircraft combat operations in Russian airspace, they’ve kept it very quiet.)

 

At the 32nd Tactical Air Base, I asked one Polish Air Force pilot, Lieutenant Colonel David Kij, to compare the difference between flying an F-16 to flying an F-35 in terms of cars. He told me that flying an F-16 is like driving a Lamborghini from three decades ago, while flying an F-35 is like driving a Lamborghini from today — both state-of-the-art for their respective time periods, but the modern one is, literally, a generation ahead. He said that if you know how to fly an F-16, then you’re not starting from zero in learning how to fly an F-35, but the jets are significantly different and require years of updated training.

 

A Polish F-16 Fighting Falcon in a hangar at the 32nd Tactical Air Base in Łask, Poland. (Photo courtesy of the author)

 Most of the pilots at this air base have one-word English call signs; one of the pilots joked, “We work with other nations, we don’t want it to be impossible to pronounce.” They asked us not to identify the call signs of the Polish pilots, but some of them were odd, and Kij told us, “If he did stupid things during training, he gets a stupid call sign.”

 

Yesterday’s edition of this newsletter mentioned how in September, Russia “accidentally” flew 19 drones into Polish airspace. Jets from this air base, as well as other NATO countries, scrambled to intercept the Russian incursion. At least three and maybe a fourth drone were shot down, and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk invoked NATO’s Article Four, which basically calls a NATO meeting for consultations.

 

Krzysztof Duda, the commander of the 32nd Tactical Air Base in Łask and an F-16 pilot, said that the September incursion was “very fruitful, with many lessons learned from that.” I asked if he could elaborate, and he said that most of the information regarding those learned lessons was “sensitive,” but that the experience was definitely influencing the Polish Air Force’s acquisitions.

 

Since 2012, the 32nd Tactical Air Base has been a permanent home to a U.S. Air Force aviation detachment. U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Peter Namyslowski — born in America to Polish immigrant parents — told us that the base is often used for “Dissimilar Aircraft Combat Training,” and that the presence of the F-35s would offer “a new buffet table of options” for that training, including the remaining Polish MiG-29s. (Poland recently agreed to trade nine of its aging MiG-29s to the Ukrainians in exchange for some unspecified access to Ukrainian drone technology.)

 

The logo of the U.S. Air Force’s 52nd Operations Group, Detachment 1. The slogan at the bottom says “Razem Silniejsi,” meaning, “Stronger Together.” (Photo courtesy of the author)

 Back in 2020, the Polish Defense Ministry signed a contract worth $4.6 billion under which the country will acquire 32 F-35 jets.

 

“The foreign military sales portfolio is incredible,” Namyslowski told us. “F-16s and C-130s were something that we talked about 15, 16 years ago; now we’re talking about F-35s, Abrams tanks, Apache helicopters, Blackhawks, Patriot batteries. The list is unending; the appetite is insatiable. What does that mean for us? It goes to the discussion of fair burden sharing. And I think Poland is leading the way in taking that on, and is an incredible partner in that respect.”

 

According to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Poland’s total volume of arms imports in 2021-2025 was 852 percent higher than in the previous five-year period. Forty-four percent of those imported weapon purchases were from manufacturers in the United States. All told, since 2022, Poland has purchased $60 billion in U.S. weapons, according to Paweł Zalewski, the secretary of state within Poland’s Ministry of Defense.

 

In light of all this . . . why would the Trump administration screw over Poland with a last-minute cancellation of a rotation of troops, a move that even congressional Republicans find baffling and infuriating, and that apparently even Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and acting Army Chief of Staff General Christopher LaNeve can’t explain?

Rashida Tlaib’s Nakba Denial

By Seth Mandel

Monday, May 18, 2026

 

Every year around this time, Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib introduces a resolution mourning the failure of the combined Arab armies to ethnically cleanse Israel of Jews.

 

The term “nakba” was initially coined by Arab intellectuals after the Israeli War of Independence to give a title to the Arabs’ defeat at the hands of the Jews. Over time, it has been changed to mean the “catastrophe” of the flight of some Arab Palestinians, eviction of others, and internal displacement of still others in 1948 and 1949.

 

This evolution of the term followed the embrace by Palestinian Arab nationalists of a strategy of coopting Jewish suffering, first and foremost the Holocaust. The belief was, and is, that by mimicking the Jews, their maximalist cause will gain legitimacy. (Their minimalist cause doesn’t need any such shenanigans to gain legitimacy, for if they wanted their own state alongside Israel they could have it. But their greater cause of kicking out all the Jews is much less sympathetic.)

 

But the nakba’s newer definition was intentionally elastic, and now it has come to mean: Israel bad.

 

As is always the case, an ideology that puts Israel’s harm first puts Palestinian welfare lower on the list, if it makes the list at all. And thus we have this year’s nakba resolution, a bizarre document that undercuts supposed “pro-Palestinian” advocacy.

 

First of all, the choice of Nakba Day itself is revealing: May 15, the day the Arab armies invaded the state of Israel to try to drive the Jews out of their homeland. May 15 is a commemoration of a declaration of total war against the Jews. This attempted war of annihilation cost the Arab Palestinians dearly. It was catastrophic, you might say.

 

In reintroducing her annual Israel bad resolution, Tlaib repeats a common talking point: “The Nakba did not end in 1948, but continues to this day.” This, of course, diminishes the intended gravity of the nakba; no one claims, by comparison, that the Holocaust continues to this day, even if there is violent anti-Semitism in Germany.

 

The nakba certainly does continue to this day if we use its original meaning. The attempt to annihilate the Jews in their homeland has never let up.

 

But we have a growing list of grievances attached to each year’s nakba resolution, too. That list now includes Lebanon, which gives the game away. Just as “War Criminal Netanyahu and his cabinet” threatened the Hamas terrorists of Gaza, Tlaib claims, so too are they “extending these same threats towards southern Lebanon.”

 

Some Palestinians fled to southern Lebanon, but it is worth pointing out that the crimes committed against them were and are committed by the state. Palestinians have been expelled from Lebanon, but the ones that remained are also subject to discriminatory treatment. Tlaib claims Israel is bombing Palestinian refugee camps. The only reason there would still be anything called a “refugee camp”—even if this moniker is false—is that Palestinian Arabs weren’t granted citizenship by the Lebanese. They are also kept out of certain professions and have other restrictions on their freedom.

 

Israel would like this is to be rectified. The Arabs would not.

 

As for what’s actually happening in Lebanon, the current war is between Israel and Iran’s occupation forces, Hezbollah. It is that vicious terrorist organization that controls southern Lebanon on behalf of a foreign Persian capital. Israel is trying to dislodge Hezbollah and help the state regain its Arab sovereignty.

 

That Tlaib would side with the Iranian satrapy over the native Lebanese and the Lebanese-born children of Palestinians is not too surprising. That she includes an Israeli defensive war against Iranian troops as part of the “Palestinian nakba” is hugely important context for her gripes against Israel.

 

Tlaib pays lip service to the Palestinian cause, but let’s review what she has revealed about her own worldview: The nakba, to Tlaib, is not some massive collection of crimes against humanity but in fact an ongoing expression of what she perceives as bias against Palestinians combined with Arab collective military defeats at the hands of the IDF. Moreover, it has almost nothing to do with the wellbeing of Palestinians.

 

The nakba, as Tlaib makes crystal clear, is the survival of the Jewish state. She regards any particular suffering by Palestinians as tangential and overstated. Were she anyone else, she’d call this “nakba denial.” It is a profound and unintentional admission of her true motives.

The Real ‘Flight 93’ Election

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

 

We all know the famous “Flight 93” essay from the 2016 election, arguing that the stakes in the contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were existential.

 

It was definitely better that Trump won in 2016, but Mike Anton’s argument was overwrought. His contention that a Clinton win would cement Democratic electoral dominance forever, such that Republicans needed to charge the cockpit or die, was implausible at the time, and seems more so in retrospect.

 

If Hillary had won in 2016, in all likelihood she would have been gone in 2020, washed away by the pandemic just like Trump was.

 

We had a real-world test case of a bad Democratic politician winning the presidency in recent years — the Biden presidency didn’t result in the end of the republic, just an ineffectual single term.

 

Anton put a lot of weight on immigration policy. It’s hard to imagine how Hillary’s policy could have been worse than Joe Biden’s. He created a de facto open border, and the consequence wasn’t the destruction of America or of the GOP, but a public backlash that helped return Donald Trump to the White House.

 

This time, though, really might be different.

 

Democrats are now seriously contemplating measures that wouldn’t have occurred to Hillary Clinton circa 2016.

 

Endorsing some version of Court-packing, or “Court reform,” as Democrats insist on calling it, is becoming orthodoxy among mainstream Democrats.

 

A couple of weeks ago, James Carville said that Democrats should pack the Court and add the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states in 2028 if they get unified control of Washington.

 

Now, Carville is just a political pundit, although a prominent one who has been a relative moderate in the Democratic context. But the immediate past Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, who has some chance of winning the 2028 nomination, associated herself with the same ideas the other day. She added abolishing the Electoral College to the list.

 

If all these were to become consensus Democratic agenda items in 2028, they would constitute one of the most radical political platforms of a major political party in American history, perhaps the most radical.

 

Court-packing alone would be a seismic, system-changing event. Likewise, abolishing the Electoral College, which has been foundational to our presidential elections from the beginning.

 

The common theme of all of this would be guaranteeing outcomes — four new progressive justices, four new Democratic senators — in blatant power grabs undermining the legitimacy of the institutions in question. The Court and the U.S. Senate would never be the same, and that would be the point.

 

The effect on our politics would be toxic.

 

What would a world look like where a substantial portion of the country thinks the Supreme Court is a sham, and not because the Court is issuing opinions it doesn’t like, but because the Court has actually been fashioned to produce a predetermined ideological result through a grotesque end run around the rules?

 

Democrats will say Republicans have already done this, even though the GOP operated within standard procedures to forge the current conservative majority.

 

Did Republicans play hardball? Sure. But their influence on the composition of the Court depended on winning presidential and Senate elections and taking advantage of fortuitous timing to confirm justices the way they’ve always been confirmed.

 

Manufacturing new seats out of nothing, or forcing the retirements of conservative justices by fiat, would be a blatant rigging of the Court.

 

If a portion of the country thinks that it no longer needs to abide by the Court’s decisions, that obviously creates the predicate for serious civil strife. The same is true if the Congress is no longer seen as legitimate after it is packed with newly minted Democratic senators.

 

Democrats feel justified in embracing any means to match and exceed Trump’s comprehensive aggressiveness. Trump’s provocations — the lawfare, the executive overreach, the wars without congressional authorization, the gerrymandering — all have ample precedent among prior Democratic presidents. Democrats, of course, don’t see it that way, and they fear and loathe Donald Trump more than they have any other Republican president.

 

In reaction, should they sweep in 2028, they may try to push the American constitutional order past an event horizon from which it will never return. In other words, twelve years after we were told to charge the cockpit or die, the stakes for our system really could be existential.