Americans Deserve Answers From Hegseth

By William H. McRaven

Thursday, June 25, 2026

 

In September 1862, General George B. McClellan, the general in chief of the Union Army, had just repelled the Confederate advance under Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Antietam. But, as Lee’s battered army retreated across the Potomac River, McClellan failed to pursue him—leaving Lee’s army mostly intact. Abraham Lincoln relieved McClellan that November for his failure to be aggressive on the battlefield. The president addressed this firing with members of his Cabinet, and made his rationale known in letters and telegrams to key leaders in Congress.

 

In 1951, after failing to follow direct orders from President Harry Truman and publicly criticizing the administration’s China policy, General Douglas MacArthur was relieved of his command and forced to retire. On April 11, 1951, Truman issued a public statement explaining exactly why he had fired MacArthur.

 

In June 2008, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, with the approval of President George W. Bush, fired both the secretary of the Air Force, Michael Wynne, and the chief of staff of the Air Force, General Michael Mosely, for their failure to properly oversee the Air Force’s nuclear mission. On June 5, 2008, Gates held a press conference to explain his decision.

 

Every president and secretary of defense has the right and, moreover, the responsibility to remove officers who are failing to meet the high standards expected of senior leaders. But when crucial decisions regarding the professionalism, effectiveness, or morale of the military are made, the people and their duly elected representatives have a right to know why these decisions were made.

 

In recent months, President Trump, upon advice from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, has relieved or forced the retirement of some of the finest officers that have ever served this nation. I have personally worked with most of them in combat. I can tell you from experience that Generals C. Q. Brown, Randy George, Jim Mingus, J. P. McGee, Dave Hodne, Jim Slife, and Joe Berger and Admirals Lisa Franchetti and Jamie Sands were war fighters through and through. And this week, in an egregious decision, the president forced General Chris Donahue to step down from his position in command of U.S. Army Europe. Donahue is without question one of the most brilliant officers I know. He is strategically focused, tactically aggressive, personally courageous, exceptionally thoughtful in his planning and execution, and compassionate with his troops. He has the respect of every man and woman who ever served with him—and you can put me at the top of that list.

 

What is particularly concerning about these firings is the effect the dismissals will have on the officer ranks. Throughout my time as a senior officer, I never hesitated to provide my best military advice to the secretary or the president even when that advice ran contrary to their stated position. Never once did I fear that by providing my advice I would be fired or asked to retire early. Not only was it my obligation to be forthcoming, but it was also the expectation of those leaders that I would be brutally candid. Hopefully, that level of honest engagement kept the secretary and the president from making poor military decisions. However, these recent firings raise a real risk that senior officers will be overly cautious about providing their best advice and, therefore, that the chance for military miscalculation will grow dramatically.

 

If Secretary Hegseth is trying to “revive the warrior ethos and restore trust in our military,” as he has said, then the unplanned departure of these senior leaders will do just the opposite and may leave the president and the secretary without the experienced voices they need to make the best military decisions. Members of Congress should demand answers. The American people should demand answers. The future of our national security depends on it.

The World Cup Is Putting American Abundance on Display

By Scott Lincicome

Thursday, June 25, 2026

 

As briefly mentioned in my last column, World Cup tourists’ repeated astonishment with everyday American abundance has become a viral sensation—and in a very good way. Seemingly not a day goes by without some happy foreign soccer fan raving on social media or to the press about quintessentially “American” things—free drink refills, bottomless chips and salsa, ginormous sports stadiums, fancy cars, big houses, ranch dressing, frigid air conditioning, shiny hospitals, etc.—that we consider relatively mundane features of daily life in the United States. (Buc-ee’s, Costco, and Texas Roadhouse have been particularly big hits, and for good reason.)

 

These viral posts have delighted American onlookers and captured endless media commentary on how the foreigners’ innocent—and often hilarious—observations have helped unite a divided U.S. and remind us locals of just how good we have it. In an era of endless grousing about the U.S. economy—reflected in various surveys of American “sentiment” and sometimes even justified—the ongoing episode has been a welcome, optimistic change of pace and a loud, folk-libertarian reminder that a nation’s capital, policies, and political class are most definitely not the same as its communities and citizens.

 

The scenes have also raised several noteworthy economic policy points—some good, some ominous—that deserve more attention.

 

Yes, we have it pretty darn good.

 

For starters, the amazement of relatively wealthy foreigners—you don’t take weeks off touring America if you’re dirt poor—at relatively middle-class American environments is real-world evidence of our nation’s immense everyday wealth.

 

The timing couldn’t be better (and, no, I’m not talking about the A/C-less heatwave in Europe).

 

As The Economist just documented, earlier this year Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and several other elite economists got into a heated (and very wonky) online debate about whether Americans’ living standards really were zooming ahead of those of our European counterparts.  The main point of contention was how to measure individuals’ purchasing power in both places, with one approach showing an increasing wealth gap and the other (Krugman’s) a relatively steady one. You can see the difference in the chart below: Using a constant “purchasing power parity” adjustment shows France’s GDP per capita—a standard way to measure individual wealth—to be declining versus that of the U.S., while using a “current PPP” adjustment shows little long term change, and thus a different wealth narrative.

 

 

As someone who loves both visiting foreign countries and returning home to my American creature comforts, I freely admit my biases in this debate. But both sides do raise some legitimate issues about how we should measure living standards across countries, as well as what should be measured. Overall, the debate has been delightfully intense and catty—at least for nerds like me.

 

Yet, as The Economist points out, both sides also seem to agree on a few things: First, Europe is growing more slowly than America, thanks in large part to the economic dynamism and tech-fueled productivity here. Second, even Krugman’s pro-Europe data (see chart above)—along with many other sources—show Americans to have higher average wages and more disposable income (yes, even after accounting for out-of-pocket healthcare costs) than the average European in most places (yes, there are exceptions), due to our superior labor productivity and their leisure choices. Third, and most importantly, both sides want to support their reading of the data with an “eye test”—i.e., visiting each place and just looking around—that the economists believe will confirm their own American/European wealth story.

 

Hilariously enough, thousands of European World Cup tourists—along with ones from Japan and other countries, too—have performed just that test, mere days after the economists proposed it. And the result is an absolute rout for Team America:

 

 

 

There are many reasons for the foreigners’ astonishment. (A big one, in my opinion, is that these folks are seeing parts of Real America, especially in the Sun Belt and Midwest, that foreign tourists rarely visit, yet—as we’ve discussed here repeatedly—allow not-rich Americans to live very comfortable lives.) And, to be sure, not all the astonishment is genuine.

 

But a lot of it obviously is, and at its root lies the Great American Prosperity Machine. Deal with it, haters.

 

Capitalist ‘charity’ is still good.

 

Another fascinating and wholesome part of the foreigners’ U.S. experience has been the outpouring of support they’ve received from both normie Americans—workers, neighbors, random passersby, etc.—and a wide range of American celebrities and companies. Most notable in this regard has been German soccer (fußball) fan Freddy, whose daily adventures in Middle America have earned him a giant online following and a Forrest Gump-like amount of in-kind support from pro sports teams, hotels, airlines, and a smattering of famous athletes, entertainers, and politicians (including at least one sitting governor who volunteered to help Freddy attend Germany’s game in Toronto after a flight cancellation). Freddy’s experience is unique, but only in terms of its magnitude: A wide range of U.S. businesses, municipalities, and influencers have rolled out the red carpet for these happy foreign visitors, greatly adding to the entire feel-good experience.

 

Unsurprisingly, this support has led dismissive cynics to explain that, actually, a lot of it is just a selfish attempt to boost sales, brands, and online engagement instead of genuine generosity and kindness. Some of those allegations are clearly false, but the correct ones are hardly worth complaining about. Instead, they evoke yet another lesson from Adam Smith:

 

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

 

Scholars (ahem) often apply this quote to explain that “selfish” market transactions among free people are not only mutually beneficial but also can have broader social benefits and generate the wealth individuals need to perform charity (which Americans do a lot of, by the way). But Smith’s famous line also often applies to many “charitable” acts by corporations and celebrities: While maybe not motivated by pure altruism, these efforts are often a strategic effort to drive long-term profitability by improving brand reputation, attracting customers and workers, and generating more sales.

 

There’s little reason to view such motivation as unseemly. First, the act still makes people better off in some way (and often entertains and encourages onlookers, too), so who cares whether it was done for “benevolent” or “selfish” reasons? “Dinner,” in Smith’s terms, still gets served. Second, it’s usually impossible to say why these “charitable” people and firms decided to help Freddy (and any others in need)—and it’s usually a combination of both sympathy and self-interest/promotion. On the latter motivation, see point 1 and Smith above. On the former, check out his other book.

 

Tourism as a massive U.S. services export (and source of ‘soft power’).

 

Admittedly, the World Cup visitor story isn’t all wine and roses, and there are—as noted—some less-optimistic policy lessons buried in here, too. For one thing, all these visitors are a stark reminder of the economic and geopolitical value of foreign tourism—and its recent, policy-driven decline here in America.

 

As we discussed last year, one of the more interesting and unfortunate results of Trump’s tariff wars, deportations, and related overseas antagonism (threatening to invade Greenland, calling Canada the “51^st state,” etc.) has been foreigners’ independent retaliation against U.S. goods and services. And tourism—a U.S. services export—has been the trend’s most conspicuous victim. According to a May 2026 Congressional Research Service report, in fact, international visits were down in 10 of 12 months last year, with the only increases coming before Trump took office (January) and due to an abnormally late Easter (April):

 

 

This drop, in turn, hurt lots of American businesses and likely reduced U.S. economic growth last year by billions of dollars:

 

According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, in 2023, travel and tourism (both domestic and international) accounted for approximately 3% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), a nonprofit organization that advocates for and researches global tourism, international visitor spending in the United States was approximately $176 billion in 2025, a 4.6% decrease from 2024. WTTC further noted that GDP for the travel and tourism sector increased 4.1% globally in 2025 from 2024 but grew 0.9% for the United States.

 

On the bright side, CRS goes on to note that the World Cup could boost foreign visits and GDP growth in 2026, and—judging from the packed bars/restaurants and sky-high prices for match tickets, airline fares, and hotel rooms—you can easily see why. Even with a few embarrassing visa-related snafus, the monthlong event has been going pretty smoothly so far and is forecast to attract almost 1.25 million international visitors, each expected to spend more than $5,000 (nearly twice the typical international tourist). None of that erases the roughly $12.5 billion in lost international visitor spending that WTTC projected for 2025, but it’s still a welcome rebound—especially for the smaller American businesses that depend heavily on foreign tourist spending each year.

 

The scenes of international comity surrounding the World Cup in 2026 are also a vivid, real-time reminder of how U.S. tourism is a market-based source of America’s “soft power,” improving the United States’ image abroad and advancing U.S. geopolitical objectives without spending taxpayer dollars (or doing stuff far worse than just that). Scholars call this the “contact hypothesis,” i.e., the notion that person-to-person encounters can affect overseas perceptions of a country in ways that no government messaging campaign or foreign aid package can match. World Cup visitors’ ecstatic consumption of everyday Americana is soft power in (mostly) organic form, with our culture, hospitality, and abundance doing the diplomatic work that American government officials can’t (or won’t) do.

 

To be clear, the goodwill America earns from Waffle House, Bass Pro Shops, Fenway Park—and the Americans who live and work near these and other iconic spots—doesn't automatically translate into durable shifts in foreign acceptance of U.S. policy. But at a time when America’s global image has taken a few (ahem) hits, having a million-plus foreigners document their travels and return home as amateur American ambassadors is a welcome development, reminding people everywhere that the words of one guy in the Oval Office don’t represent a 350 million-person country.

 

The only question is whether the foreign tourism boost—and good vibes—can continue after the World Cup ends. The answer, unfortunately, will probably not be in Costco’s hands.

 

Seeing the linkages between trade and peace.

 

Relatedly, all these good vibes are a nice reminder of one of the ways that trade—in this case both foreign tourism and global sports entertainment—can help encourage peace. As I documented in a 2020 paper, a wide body of research finds that heightened foreign trade can meaningfully reduce (but not eliminate) the chances of armed international conflict through several channels:

 

First, by making countries more commercially interdependent, trade encourages these nations to avoid war or other large-scale armed conflicts (which could impose substantial economic losses). Second, trade and commercial bargaining are more cost-effective than war as a means of resolving disputes with, or obtaining resources from, another country. Third, trade increases material prosperity (e.g., goods, services, investment, ideas) and promotes mutual tolerance and understanding. And fourth, free trade can limit the political power of domestic constituencies that may benefit from increased conflict.

 

Recent studies reinforce these conclusions. One finds a strong causal “peace dividend” from trade generally, i.e., that a doubling of bilateral trade reduces the probability of militarized conflict by roughly 30 percent. Elsewhere, a recent survey of almost 2,000 Japanese firms finds they routinely pushed for diplomatic solutions to supply-chain disruptions involving allies and adversaries alike—new support for the concept of “commercial peace,” i.e., that global businesses have powerful incentives to oppose wars that might harm their facilities (or, you know, kill their customers).

 

Regardless of the driver, however, the outcome is clear: While global economic integration can’t eliminate armed conflicts, policies that liberalize trade can make peace among nations more likely—especially when compared to the isolationist, antagonistic alternative the U.S. government is pursuing today.

 

In their modest but viral way, the million-plus foreigners now cheering in American bars are making a similar point.

Crazy Begets Crazy in New York City

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

 

In 1993, President Bill Clinton appeared before a joint session of Congress to deliver a high-stakes address on healthcare. When he got to the podium, he discovered that the wrong speech—an old State of the Union address—had been loaded into the teleprompter. For seven minutes he half-winged, half-read from a print copy.

 

For his aides, that was a long seven minutes. A young, extremely dismayed George Stephanopoulos muttered to Mike Feldman, an Al Gore aide, “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened.”

 

“I dunno,” Feldman replied, “the Holocaust was pretty bad.”

 

That’s sort of how I feel about the reaction among many of my friends to yesterday’s election results in New York City.

 

It’s really bad. But as with all bad things, you have to ask, “Compared to what?”

 

Several Democratic Socialist candidates—one or two who might have replied to Feldman, “No, this is worse”—won their congressional primaries, which means it’s all but assured they will win in the general election, because that’s how New York works.

 

The worst of them is Darializa Avila Chevalier. She is a 32-year-old doctoral student in sociology. I assume she’s going to be ABD for a while (that’s “all but dissertation” for those of you who may not have known as many students-for-life as I have). Avila Chevalier is the kind of caricature-made-flesh that Fox News producers, GOP consultants, and right-wing Leninists dream about. I really don’t mean that as an insult to the producers, consultants, and Leninists, because they have every right to crow. She’s not a strawman. You can quote her directly without fear of being accurately accused of exaggeration. The things she’s said or endorsed on social media would fit perfectly in a Trump rally speech (and spare me the “retweets don’t equal endorsement” retort).

 

She is for abolishing all prisons, eliminating the police, erasing the border, legalizing prostitution, controlling prices to deal with inflation, and nationalizing vast swaths of the economy, including seizing property from landlords. When repeatedly pressed on the question of whether murderers—lawfully convicted by a jury of their peers—should be sent to jail, she refused to say anything approaching “yes.” Instead, she lamented how prison traumatizes murderers and denies them an opportunity to “reflect” on the harm they caused to their community, which is why she would like to see the murderers returned to that community. You know, to better reflect on stuff.

 

Of course, she hates Israel with blinding passion (she thinks Bernie Sanders is too Zionist), believing it has no right to exist. When Hamas launched its pogrom of rape and murder, she was one of those people who immediately attended that pro-Hamas rally the next day—while the raping and murdering had not yet abated. But she also thinks America is a “f—ing disgrace.”

 

She may be a wonderful friend and colleague, a terrific cook, and if she has dogs or cats, they may love her dearly. But if we can judge politicians by their publicly stated views—and if we can’t, what are we doing here?—I think she’s a horrible person.

 

I can go in a dozen different directions from here. For starters, she’s a perfect example of how weak parties are ruining our political system, and doing profound damage to our country. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) hate a lot of people and groups, but you know who they hate the most? Mainstream Democrats. The DSA is in spirit, if not fact, the successor organ to the Progressive Party of the 1940s.

 

For those of you unfamiliar with this history—and why wouldn’t you be, given that it’s not widely taught in schools—the Progressive Party, led by former FDR Vice President Henry Wallace, was a Trojan horse full of Communists, Soviet spies, fellow travelers, and useful idiots. This isn’t an exaggeration. No less a figure than I.F. Stone wrote in 1950 that “the Communists have been the dominant influence in the Progressive Party ... If it had not been for the Communists, there would have been no Progressive Party.” John Abt, the Progressives’ chief lawyer, was a member of Alger Hiss’ cell. Lee Pressman, who headed the platform committee, was a Communist. Wallace’s speechwriter, Charles Kramer, was exposed by the Venona papers as an active Soviet spy. Even Rexford Tugwell—arguably the most left-wing member of FDR’s brain trust—eventually felt the need to leave the Progressive party because it was simply a Communist front.

 

In 1947, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and other liberal leaders recognized the threat posed by the emerging Progressive Party and its sympathizers and helped to organize Americans for Democratic Action. The group’s primary concern was bolstering American liberalism’s resolve to oppose the Soviet threat. But there was a more practical concern as well: The whackjobs were a threat to the Democratic Party. Henry Wallace was probably more of a useful idiot than a knowing Communist agent, but the result was the same. He lent credibility to Communists—both on and off the Soviet payroll.

 

The threat was different than the threat posed by the DSA. The Progressive Party was a real third party. It posed an electoral threat as much as an ideological one. But because the Democratic Party was a real party back then, it could draw bright lines and pick real fights with its enemies—and they were enemies—to their left.

 

Today, the Democratic Party lets DSA candidates run as Democrats, even though the DSA is ideologically committed to a hostile takeover of the party. The DSA isn’t a formal party; it calls itself “a political and activist organization, not a party.” What it is is a fifth column within the Democratic Party. There is no sensible, informed Democrat who thinks these people are good for their party. I mean, sure, they will feed the alligator one limb at a time in exchange for their turnout efforts, but no grown up believes open socialism, open borders, and closed prisons is a good message for a national party—or good policy.

 

Every Republican in the country is going to run against Zohran Mamdani, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and the other Jacobins and wreckers of the DSA. But the Democrats, much like the Republicans, have been powerless to shape and control their candidate selection, messaging, or donor dollars for so long, they can’t even imagine how they might start acting like a real party.

 

This matters for countless reasons. For starters it’s bad for civic health to tell people impossible and idiotic things are possible and smart. I don’t think any of these barista socialists has the skill, power, legal knowhow, or constitutional ability to pull off a fraction of what they claim to want. But they can still do enormous damage by trying. You can’t cure COVID by injecting bleach into the patient, but you can really hurt the patient by trying all the same. And you can’t fund a city budget by confiscating wealth from rich people who, by definition, have the resources to vote with their feet.

 

This is one of the reasons I am less worried about all the socialism talk these days. In America, when people don’t like the economy or their place in it, they say they want an alternative to the status quo. The status quo gets called “capitalism” and people are told that the alternative is “socialism.” Socialism in theory will always be very popular with some fraction of the public, socialism in practice rarely ends up being popular because it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t provide what people want from it. At least not in scale. Lots of people like their retail socialism—rent control (if they have a rent-controlled apartment), entitlements, etc.

 

Also, the people who really want socialism in practice—the actual ideologues—aren’t the people the politicians and political journalists assume they are. The avowed socialists claim they are fighting for black and brown people and other minorities. But they disproportionately rely on the votes of the more affluent and aggrieved, status-class anxiety suffering white people. The barista socialists with master’s degrees are the shock troops here. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary because young white progressives flocked to her. The same holds for Avila Chevalier, who lost the poorer and darker-skinned slice of the Bronx by some 30 points. She lost the black and Hispanic precincts, but cleaned up among young, higher income, whiter and college educated voters. The idea that minority and working class voters are the reserve army of a socialist proletariat is a lie agreed upon by white progressives, mainstream reporters, and a lot of Republicans. Democrats and journalists are terrified of being called racist or dismissive of minority concerns, but the people hurling those accusations are peddling that myth to claim a constituency they don’t have.

 

One last point about why all of this matters. As I keep saying, you can’t have just one sane party. You need two sane parties. The crazier or more extreme one party is, the more permission the other party has to be crazy and extreme. The only way to prove your party isn’t crazy is to police the crazies on your own side. Period. Strong parties can do that. Cowardly, anemic parties-in-name-only can’t or won’t.

 

In my career, there have been times when I would have rejoiced along with the Fox producers and GOP consultants at the stupidity of the Democrats in this election. So much column fodder! But when I heard the news yesterday I was deeply saddened, not so much for the potential damage to the country, or to New York City. I was crestfallen for two reasons. The first is because of what this says about the plight of Jews in America, the Democratic Party, and my hometown. But the more relevant reason here is simply this: The Democratic Party just gave a massive in-kind donation to the GOP and its crazies. Because a lot of voters may be disgusted with the GOP—and they should be—but if you convince them that the alternative is these gargoyles, they’ll continue to vote for what they see as the marginally less insane party.

 

Yesterday’s results weren’t the worst thing ever. But man, they were bad enough.

The Hostile Takeover of the Democratic Party That Everyone but the Democrats Saw Coming

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 25, 2026

 

The first time I ever heard of Zohran Mamdani was in early February 2025.

 

Donald Trump had just taken the oath of office for the second time. Democrats were still emerging from the malaise induced by 2024’s myriad debacles for their party. Internally, they fretted over their institutional sclerosis, concluding with some reluctance that their gerontological establishment must be sidelined even as none of its septuagenarian and octogenarian leaders were eager to volunteer for the ice floe.

 

Into this milieu stepped Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist who openly sought the support of other democratic socialists in what was then a long-shot bid to take New York City. His first ad was revealing.

 

The spot featured a young couple cringing into their phones as they watched Chuck Schumer try and fail to project enthusiasm. “God damn Democrats,” said one of Schumer’s youthful critics. “I’ve never been prouder not to be one.” She did like Zohran, though. “He’s running on freezing the rent, union-built housing, city-run groceries, universal child care, free buses,” our heroine, “Harmonia,” confessed. Her boyfriend was easily persuaded to back Zohran, but she explained the practical step they’d need to take: “This is the Democratic primary, so if we want to vote for Zohran where it really counts, we have to change our party affiliation.”

 

Neither of the ad’s protagonists identified themselves as members of the Democratic Socialists of America, but it was also made clear that they were not “truly independent.” Indeed, they were enlisting themselves in a crusade to capture the party from without, and they made no secret about their intentions. That project is well underway today.

 

The time for former DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison — or any other Democratic institutionalist, for that matter — to defend the party from outside forces that “hate the Democratic Party” was then. And with its successes in this year’s primary elections, the DSA has grown bold enough that its operatives are no longer being coy about their aims:

 

 

The DSA’s elected officials are, according to the NYC-DSA’s co-chair Gustavo Gordillo, Schrödinger’s Democrats. “When they’re in the legislature, they’re part of the Democratic Party caucus,” he said. But outside that setting, Democratic Socialists want little to do with the Democratic Party as it is currently constituted.

 

The DSA doesn’t “agree” with “the way the Democratic Party establishment organizes or runs its party apparatus,” Gordillo added. What’s more, to the extent that the Democratic Party draws its funding from well-heeled donors, it has a conflict of interest that prevents it from advocating socialist policies. Therefore, the DSA’s focus is on moving “independents” into positions of power within Democratic ranks.

 

So the DSA doesn’t like how the Democratic Party is organized or run. DSA leaders don’t like how it raises funds, and they dislike the policies it advocates. They don’t even seem to have much respect for registered Democrats, establishmentarian or otherwise, and are therefore invested in overhauling the party’s demographic makeup — transforming it from what it is today into something entirely different.

 

Certainly, with this usurpatory agenda laid bare, there is now some belated grumbling in Democratic ranks. “Centrist Democrats, normie Democrats, need to realize we’re the insurgents, and they’re the new establishment,” one center-left organizer told Politico.

 

Matt Bennett, “co-founder of the moderate think tank Third Way,” agrees. “It is vital that Democrats do not mistake the radicalism of a very small electorate in very blue places with the desire of the larger Democratic Party to move sharply to the left,” he warned.

 

An intrepid few have gone further than that. “I’m not in that f***ing  political party,” spat the longtime Democratic strategist James Carville. He said accurately of the DSA that “these people are not Democrats,” and “there’s just some s*** I can’t be in the same tent with.”

 

But these are rare expressions of dissent. By contrast, Democrats in elected office are making accommodations with the socialists on the rise within their ranks. Perhaps, after Democrats sacrificed their credibility in the all-out effort to drag Joe Biden into a second term, the party’s leaders were deprived of any argument in their favor. But the time to make that argument was in February 2025. That moment is gone.

Populism and Popularism

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, June 25, 2026

 

“Popularism” is a clumsy bit of political jargon that caught on with Democratic wonks a few years ago to express an idea so intuitive as to be axiomatic. Namely, a party in a democracy will have more success if it focuses on stuff that voters, y’know, like.

 

Stick to policies that are popular and you’re more likely to win the popularity contest in November. Who knew?

 

Actually, a lot of people seem not to know. “Popularism” came into vogue among liberals as a rejoinder to progressives who believe “defund the police,” “borders are racist,” and “trans women are women” should be the ideological backbone of leftism. Voters won’t vote for policies they hate is not the sort of contentious claim that should spark fierce intraparty debate, one might think. And yet.

 

I’m skeptical of popularism. Only a little—as I say, it’s self-evidently true that popular agendas fare better at the polls. But it’s less compelling in an era of intense negative polarization, when tribal hatred of the other party tends to drive votes. And it isn’t absolute: Sometimes the party in power will deliberately pursue an agenda it knows isn’t popular because it believes fervently in the merits of that agenda.

 

Ask the scores of swing-district House Democrats who voted to enact Obamacare in 2010, fully aware that they were probably signing their political death warrants by doing so.

 

“Popularism” is distinct from populism, a program of redistributing wealth and political power from elites to average joes, but it’s probably the case that populists are more likely to be popularists than the standard-issue Beltway technocrat is. If your whole shtick is catering to the blue-collar majority, it figures that you’ll be keen to deliver what that majority actually desires. The swampy elites are out of touch; only tribunes of The People know, and care, what The People want.

 

That’s how the president got reelected in 2024. “I won on the border, and I won on groceries,” he said afterward, using the latter term as a byword for the cost of living. Per that year’s exit polling, he finished 9 points ahead of Kamala Harris on the issue of which candidate would better handle immigration and 7 points ahead on which would better handle the economy. Among Americans who said Biden-era inflation had caused them moderate hardship, Trump won by 6 points; among those who said it had caused them severe hardship, he won by … 53.

 

Cheaper goods, tighter borders, and a promised end to foolish Middle Eastern wars: That agenda was populist and popularist, and it prevailed. Which makes the spectacle that played out on Wednesday in Congress and the White House almost—almost—literally unbelievable.

 

A guy who got elected on populism and popularism has given up on both.

 

Housing crisis.

 

What happened yesterday shouldn’t have felt as surprising as it did. After all, the second Trump administration has been an extended exercise in betraying the two Ps.

 

It started with tariffs, the last thing a president bent on bringing down the cost of living for the working man should have pursued. Americans hated them. Last summer brought the One Big Beautiful Bill, which scaled back Medicaid for the poor while scaling annual deficits way, way up. Americans weren’t thrilled with that either. Then came Iran, one of those foolish Middle Eastern wars that Trump’s victory was supposed to prevent, and gas prices soared. Guess how Americans feel about that.

 

The only populist priority on which he has followed through is immigration enforcement. And thanks to the way immigration authorities have handled that, it no longer qualifies as popularist.

 

Yesterday was an easy opportunity for the president to get back onside with voters before November. The House and Senate just passed a housing reform bill by uncharacteristically lopsided margins, a testament to how broad the consensus is among voters that home-buying has grown too expensive. Congress’ compromise package aims to boost the supply of housing by, among other things, cutting red tape and barring institutional investors from buying single-family homes. Populist and popularist.

 

And a rare win for the majority party on affordability, an issue that threatens to crush it at the polls.

 

Trump was scheduled to sign the bill at noon on Wednesday in the Capitol. White House spokesmen hyped the achievement in the hours before the ceremony. Then, at around 10:30 a.m. ET, he posted this: “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency.”

 

I don’t know where to begin.

 

Let’s start, I guess, with the fact that it’s been explained to the president many times by John Thune and others that Senate Republicans don’t have the votes to pass the SAVE America Act, an election reform bill. To do so, they’d need to eliminate the filibuster. They’re not going to eliminate the filibuster. As always, Trump has decided that the solution to a dilemma is to simply apply more coercive pressure to those defying him—even if, in this case, that means holding hostage the most commendable populist initiative of his second term.

 

Americans want cheaper housing, he wants the SAVE America Act. He didn’t debate for a second whose desire should take precedence, I’m sure.

 

Still, there might be more to his Trumper tantrum over the housing bill than rank spite at not getting his way on election reform. For all his pretensions to being an avatar of “the forgotten man,” the president remains a Manhattan real estate developer at heart. And real estate developers have been conditioned by their trade to want property to grow more expensive, not less.

 

Just ask him. “I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes,” Trump admitted in January. Later, in March, the Great Populist assured House Speaker Mike Johnson that “no one gives a s—t about housing,” according to four sources who spoke to Punchbowl News. Some of the president’s infamous quotes about the cost of living have been taken out of context to make him sound more callous (some, not all), but his attitude toward high housing prices is what it is. He doesn’t care. At best.

 

The potential electoral consequences for his party don’t seem to be keeping him up at night either. “Does the president care?” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman wondered yesterday about the GOP’s affordability problem after the housing bill went unsigned. “He’s not behaving like somebody who cares. Maybe he will start to at some point, but he is not right now.” I doubt it: An old guy who’s entered the “YOLO phase” of life is unlikely to revert to worrying about what other people—that is, 150 million American voters—think of him.

 

All told, in Trump we have a president who got elected on populism and popularism yet has functionally renounced both in less than two years in office. He plainly isn’t prioritizing the welfare of the working man and he also plainly no longer worries about making the average voter happy, at least when doing so would conflict with his own whims. Even his decision to strike a terrible deal with Iran for the sake of bringing down gas prices was framed less as a matter of helping Americans than of protecting his own legacy.

 

Which brings us back to the SAVE America Act.

 

Democracy, postliberal-style.

 

The fascinating thing about yesterday’s episode was what it revealed about Trump’s view of democracy.

 

According to popularism, the very best thing you can do for yourself and your party in a democracy is to sign crowd-pleasing legislation. Presidents don’t often get the chance anymore; modern America is typically too embittered by partisanship to create consensus around a major bill. For the governing majority to get a splashy victory on an issue as salient as housing is the political equivalent of hitting a jackpot.

 

Seizing the opportunity with both hands would be a no-brainer to any popularist. If the name of the game is winning elections and wielding power, that’s how you win.

 

To which the Trumpist might casually reply: A surer way to win is to restrict who gets to vote.

 

Popularism is hard work. The filibuster makes passing legislation difficult; rigid ideological dogmatism within one’s base limits party leaders’ ability to pander to a national majority; even if they make a determined effort, it’s anyone’s guess whether swing voters will notice, let alone care. Trump is obviously wrong when he claims that “no one gives a s—t” about housing, but if he means that voters won’t care enough about it in November to overlook their many other complaints with his administration, he might be right. Doing popular stuff here and there while in office is no guarantee of electoral success.

 

So if the name of the game is winning elections, why not address the problem more directly via the SAVE America Act? Bar states from using mail-in ballots, knowing how Democratic voters tend to favor them. Create a new procedural hurdle to vote by requiring proof of U.S. citizenship, no doubt expecting that the extra paperwork burden will discourage downscale voters who are angry about inflation from casting a ballot.

 

A wise man once said that “liberalism cares about process, postliberalism cares only about results.” Popularists are liberals. They believe in democracy, so they seek to maximize their chances of winning according to democratic rules and norms. Postliberals aren’t so constrained. If they can maximize their chances by changing or challenging those rules to arrive at their desired outcome, as Trump attempted to do in 2020 and will soon do again, they’ll happily proceed.

 

Blocking a bill that would make housing cheaper to create leverage for a bill that would make voting harder is Trumpism in its purest state. Given a choice between marginally improving its electoral chances by doing something good for the “forgotten man” and maximizing its chances by screwing him over, it will prioritize its autocratic power lust every time.

 

Yesterday wasn’t the only recent illustration either. The White House’s latest bright idea to meddle in this fall’s elections is to withhold 20 percent of Homeland Security funding from states that refuse to implement certain voting reforms that the president is demanding. (Once again, “more coercion” is always Trump’s answer.) Those funds help pay for things like counterterrorism and disaster preparedness. If he has to boost your risk of dying in some calamity to feed his “rigged election” fantasies, that’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make.

 

No authoritarian movement can be truly populist or popularist. Yet, in a strange way, Trump’s obsession with the integrity of the midterms does reflect a sort of popularism.

 

Popularism without democracy.

 

He’s done lots of popular stuff in his first 16 months in office to improve the GOP’s chances of winning, he’d tell you, never mind what the “fake news” polls say about public opinion. Yet the cheating Democrats are going to bring 50 million illegal immigrants out to vote to beat him.

 

Popularism doesn’t work unless elections are fair, right? Well, all he’s doing is making sure that they are. Unrig the midterms and you’ll see how wildly popular his policies are.

 

This is a paradox in Trump’s character. On the one hand, the postliberal strongman in him cares nothing about public approval relative to his own selfish interests. On the other hand, the narcissist in him desperately needs to believe he’s popular. Democracy matters to him not a bit but he yearns for evidence that everyone thinks he’s the greatest.

 

This is why it’s always been hard to tell (and is getting harder in his senescence) whether his paranoia about elections is a knowing lie told by a dissembling megalomaniac to discredit a threat to his power or a sincerely held delusion by a fragile egomaniac to reassure himself that the people love him. If you see him mostly as a strongman, you think it’s the first. If you see him mostly as a narcissist, you think it’s the second.

 

The paradox isn’t limited to elections. Yesterday the president informed reporters that he’s planning to investigate oil companies because gas prices remain elevated despite his big, beautiful capitulation to get Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “We should be, in my opinion, at $2.25 right now at the pump,” he mused. Later, in a Truth Social post, he flatly accused the companies of gouging.

 

There are many explanations besides gouging for why oil hasn’t returned to its prewar prices, beginning with the risk premium created by the possibility of hostilities resuming with Iran. If you told me that Trump knows that and dishonestly stooped to Elizabeth Warren-esque demagoguery about corporate greed to shift blame for high gas prices away from himself, I would believe it.

 

But if you told me that he’d earnestly convinced himself that the liberal cabal that runs Exxon is trying to screw him in November by artificially inflating prices, I’d believe that too. “The wish is father to the thought”: There’s probably never been a purer exemplar of that adage in American public life than Donald J. Trump.

 

It’s no coincidence that someone who yearns to be loved by millions yet feels unbound by accountability to them would behave more like a king than a public servant. It’s also no coincidence that someone who perceives no special legitimacy in democracy and who craves adulation to a degree unusual even for politicians would be more willing to tamper with election rules to produce a result that proves how adored he is.

 

And it’s no coincidence that popularism and populism would both fall out of favor with that someone once he was foolishly elevated to the presidency. The incentive mechanism on which popularism depends—leaders who do popular things get rewarded with votes—doesn’t work with a leader who can’t cope psychologically with the reality that the things he does aren’t popular. And the ideological assumption on which populism depends—that the average joe has particular wants and needs that aren’t being met—doesn’t work with a leader who assumes their wants and needs are defined by him.

 

Enjoy “Stop the Steal 2.0” this fall, American voters. You earned it.

Supreme Court Drives a Stake Through Hawaii’s ‘Vampire Rule’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, June 25, 2026

 

In a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court has struck down Hawaii’s “vampire rule” as a violation of the Second and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. This was the right result, and, once again, it is a disgrace that the decision was not unanimous.

 

At stake was a Hawaiian statute, Act 52, that inverted the usual presumption that governs public access to generally accessible private property, but only where firearms are concerned. Prior to the passage of Act 52, Hawaiians who were able to obtain carry permits (which, before Bruen, was effectively impossible) were allowed to enter any generally accessible private space while carrying a firearm — unless the property owner explicitly signaled otherwise. After Act 52, Hawaiians with carry permits were allowed to enter any generally accessible private space while carrying a firearm only if the property had signaled that it was acceptable. (Gothic lore holds that vampires must be explicitly invited to enter one’s home before they may cross the threshold. Hence: “vampire rule.”)

 

As the Court correctly noted, this change — which was made directly after Bruen, and which shifted only the rules governing firearms, and no others besides — was explicitly designed to impede “the ability of law-abiding citizens to exercise the right Bruen recognized as they go about their daily lives.” That being so, it fell.

 

Writing for the majority, Justice Alito recorded that:

 

At common law, opening up private property to the general public implies a “license to all persons to enter,” meaning that “no person is a trespasser by merely entering therein” unless the property owner has given “due notice” that such a person is banned.

 

“Hawaii’s shift from the common-law rule,” Alito concluded, “unquestionably imposes a new and significant burden on the exercise of the right recognized in Bruen.”

 

During briefs and at oral argument, Hawaii offered up three main defenses of its law. The first defense was that it has historically had much stricter firearms laws than much of the rest of the United States. Alito dealt with that one quickly:

 

As the plurality explained in McDonald, the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States. 561 U. S., at 784–785. It cannot give way to “the spirit of Aloha” in Hawaii, contra, State v. Wilson, 154 Haw. 8, 27, 543 P. 3d 440, 459 (2024), any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald).

 

Aloha, “spirit of Aloha.”

 

The second defense was that this wasn’t a Second Amendment case at all, but a property rights issue. This idea was picked up by Justice Jackson, who wrote in her dissent that the majority’s

 

bid to invoke the Constitution stumbles out of the gate—at step one of this Court’s Bruen test. There is no constitutional right to enter private property without the owner’s permission, let alone with a firearm.

 

But, as Justice Barrett responded in her concurrence, this cannot be true, given that the presumptive rule in question was passed by the government:

 

It is irrelevant, for purposes of the Amendment’s plain text, that a property owner has the right to exclude anyone who wishes to enter her property with firearms. No one doubts that all property owners in Hawaii could bar the carry of arms on their respective premises, if they wanted to. But the Second Amendment does not apply to private parties. It does apply to the States. See U. S. Const., Amdt. 14, §1. And when a State enacts a property law that regulates arms-bearing conduct, that law implicates the Second Amendment.

 

(Barrett also asked the obvious question: If a state passed a law presumptively barring the wearing of a hijab on generally accessible private property, absent the owner’s explicit instructions to the contrary, would anyone seriously contend that that was purely a civil matter?)

 

The third defense — and, really, the only conceptually serious one — was that there are enough similar laws in America’s historical record to render Hawaii’s law acceptable under Bruen. But this, too, collapses once one digs into the details. The examples of supposedly comparable laws that Hawaii raised were:

 

1.      That many of the original states had anti-poaching laws that governed the carrying of firearms onto private property;

 

2.      That at the end of the 19th century, Oregon had a law barring the carrying of firearms onto “enclosed premises”;

 

3.      That — yes, this was really offered up — Louisiana’s postbellum Black Code existed.

 

Justice Kagan, who conspicuously declined to join Justice Jackson’s typically overwrought and overconfident dissent, took up the poaching laws in her own dissent, contending that:

 

That the old laws had a special (though by no means exclusive) concern with poaching does not matter. “The regulatory challenges posed by firearms today are not always the same as those that preoccupied” earlier generations. New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U. S. 1, 27 (2022). The key question is whether the challenged regulation is “consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.” United States v. Rahimi, 602 U. S. 680, 692 (2024) (emphasis added). Here, the challenged law is consistent with those principles because it reflects, as the old laws did, the perceived “abuses, damages and inconveniences” that can be caused by persons carrying guns “on other people’s lands.”

 

This is a straightforward and comprehensible argument. But, quite obviously, it does not pass muster. That the poaching laws had a “special concern” is the whole ballgame.

 

As Justice Barrett observed:

 

Rather than identifying a specific threat to public peace and safety, Hawaii admits that it enacted the rule because many of its citizens oppose the public carry of guns. In other words, Hawaii is responding to the general danger associated with the presence of firearms, not to any specific, heightened risk of their misuse.

 

Under our constitutional system — as well as every relevant precedent — only one of these regulatory approaches is permissible. If it were otherwise, governments would enjoy carte blanche to ban guns everywhere. It is true, for example, that, since the revolutionary era, governments have banned firearms from polling places. But it does not follow from this that if the government can do that, it can do anything it likes.

 

What the existence of the anti-poaching laws shows is that governments may pass narrowly tailored laws to address particular problems, not that the government may selectively invert common law standards in retaliation against the enforcement of the Bill of Rights.

 

As for the Black Code argument, I can still scarcely believe that Hawaii — or Hawaii’s lawyer, Neal Katyal — brought them up. As Justice Alito pointedly remarked:

 

The statute Hawaii cites was part of Louisiana’s Black Code, and it provided a tool for disarming blacks and thus leaving them defenseless against attacks. See 125 F. 4th, at 1239 (VanDyke, J., dissenting from denial of reh’g en banc). As we laid out in McDonald, the right to keep and bear arms was crucially important for vulnerable blacks during this period. See 561 U. S., at 757, 771, 776–779; id., at 843– 846 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). And this was well-understood by the Republicans in Congress who were responsible for drafting, approving, and securing the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Republican Party Platforms of 1856 and 1860 called for protection of the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. Unless we put history entirely out of our minds, Hawaii’s claim that this tainted artifact illuminates the original understanding of the right to keep and bear arms cannot be taken seriously.

 

Indeed. “Well, your honor, we used to have a bunch of Jim Crow laws that crushed Reconstruction” is, sadly, true. But it is not an argument against the 14th Amendment or the rights that it applies against the states. How impotent and how peculiar progressive jurisprudence has become.

Thomas Jefferson’s True Masterpiece

By Daniel J. Flynn

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

The primary author of the Declaration of Independence, whose 250th anniversary we celebrate next weekend, wrote one book. Like the Declaration, Notes on the State of Virginia remains a document worth reading. Unlike the Declaration, few read Thomas Jefferson’s masterpiece.

 

Perhaps the early chapters that extol the abundance of marble on the James River and present a chart that details an average August rainfall of 9.153 inches turn off readers before they reach the exhilarating parts. Alternatively, Thomas Jefferson accumulated about 10,000 books in his lifetime; not even a majority of Americans now report reading a book annually. A third possibility owes to the “milk-was-a-bad-choice,” bearded Ron Burgundy stretch endured as of late by Jefferson. Indeed, the early 2020s weren’t kind to our third president.

 

In 2020, Portland denizens, with much imported help, toppled a Thomas Jefferson statue. The following year, in a more orderly fashion befitting bureaucrats, New York removed a seven-foot statue of Thomas Jefferson from city hall. In Maplewood, N. J., Madison, Wis., and Waukegan, Ill., districts replaced Jefferson’s name on schools with the names of various African Americans. The implication, of course, relies on a growing popular prejudice that Jefferson stood not for liberation but oppression.

 

A read of Notes on the State of Virginia cures this prejudice popular among people ostensibly committed to curing prejudice. It’s true that he falls into small-mindedness here and there. But for the most part, the reader comes away from it marveling that a man who lived 250 years ago could be so educated, cosmopolitan, and, yes, wise — a word not always associated with Jefferson. His ideas, though not always his actions, transcended his age.

 

The chapter on manners morphs by the third sentence into one on slavery, whose “unhappy influence on the manners of our people” owes to the example of the master’s “unremitting despotism” and the slave’s “degrading submissions.”

 

He laments, “Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do.”

 

Jefferson worries of slavery unleashing God’s wrath. If liberty were a gift from God, as the Declaration had explained, then we flirt with the Lord’s vengeance by taking it away. He points to the revolution that then occurred around him as a catalyst for change.

 

He writes, “The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.”

 

In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson comes across, in so many ways, as pleasing to the progressives who vilify him. He presents a full-throated defense of Native Americans, whom he theorizes as descendants of Asia, against caricatures of them as subhuman. “It is civilization alone,” he informs, “which replaces women in their enjoyment of their natural equality.” One section even offers, for progressives with more interpretive elasticity, what reads practically as an ode to Al Gore in its discussion of the “change in our climate.”

 

In other pages, Jefferson dons a red MAGA hat. A country that offers freedom and rights undoubtedly will attract migrants from cultures different from our own. He warns that America may not so much assimilate foreigners as itself assimilate to their foreign ways. “Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom?” he asks. “If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of a half million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here.”

 

He calls “the maintenance of the poor” a mere “matter of charity” and not the purview of government. He supports a basic system of public education that, after three years, required tuition for all but “the best geniuses,” who “will be raked from the rubbish annually” for scholarship. “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for,” he writes in endorsement of checks, balances, and separation of powers.

 

Throughout, Jefferson shows a partiality toward freedom. He expresses this on no subject more memorably and eloquently than on the one subject toward which posterity casts him as indifferent: religion. “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” he wrote. “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

 

In a few lines, Jefferson anticipated Frédéric Bastiat, Rose Wilder Lane, and scores of other libertarian thinkers. The Jefferson of Notes on the State of Virginia believes not in an indifferent god but in an indifferent state.

 

There seems something in Notes on the State of Virginia for thinkers of nearly every political persuasion to admire. But Americans at the Semiquincentennial do not admire Jefferson — at least as unanimously as we once did. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing still produces nickels and $2 bills, and no sandblasters threaten Mount Rushmore. But even one of the third president’s descendants wrote in the New York Times in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 death that the federal government should destroy the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

 

A passage in Notes on the State of Virginia gives hope, albeit partial hope. “Ignorance is preferable to error,” Jefferson writes, “and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.” Presumably Jefferson’s descendent knows quite a bit about his ancestor, making cases like his beyond redemption. But, in an America in which most people read fewer than a book a year, one safely chalks up much of the anti-Jefferson clamor to ignorance rather than error. It can be undone, and America’s 250th anniversary seems a good time to start, and the shelf with Notes on the State of Virginia sitting on it is a good place for the antidote to default anti-Jefferson ignorance.