Dirty Water

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, August 04, 2026

 

It’s Mystery Week at Boiling Frogs. Yesterday we considered the curious case of Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, who had nothing to lose by doing the right thing yet refused to do it.

 

Today we take up the even more curious case of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, who had lots to lose by doing the right thing—yet chose to do it.

 

Pirro reportedly blindsided the president late Friday afternoon when she withdrew her indictment of David Hearn, the man charged earlier this summer with felony vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The pool’s renovation has been a passion project for Donald Trump and therefore a matter of personal prestige, so when chunks of the “repairs” began floating to the surface in June, someone had to be blamed.

 

And it sure wasn’t going to be him or the crony he hired as a contractor.

 

The indictments of Hearn and three others (on misdemeanor charges) solved that problem. The renovation wasn’t botched, you see; it was left-wing saboteurs, as usual, who had connived to make the president look bad.

 

Pirro’s motion on Friday blew up that narrative, admitting that incompetent repairs plausibly explained the presence of debris in the pool according to information provided by the Department of the Interior. That triggered a dayslong presidential crashout replete with an angry Truth Social post, a phone call between Trump and Pirro that allegedly “wasn’t pretty,” and an ominous visit by the U.S. attorney to the Oval Office on Monday afternoon.

 

Shortly before she arrived, the president derided her to a roomful of reporters. “I was disappointed with Jeanine Pirro!” he complained. “Really disappointed with Jeanne Pirro! She folded like an umbrella! And people get away with things, and it’s a disgrace!”

 

“Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department, and I guess she choked,” he said at another point. “I don’t know what the hell happened.” She hasn’t been fired as I write this on Tuesday, but sources told CNN yesterday that it’s “highly likely she’s removed from her job.”

 

For once, I agree with Trump: I don’t know what the hell happened here either.

 

Jeanine Pirro isn’t any random toady. Like Pete Hegseth, she was plucked from the purgatory of Fox News infotainment and handed immense power on the assumption that she would do whatever her longtime friend, the president, asked of her. She was a propagandist’s propagandist in her previous job, remember, using her Fox show to platform some of the most defamatory lies told about alleged cheating in the 2020 presidential election. Trump had every reason to believe that the next time he began peddling some self-serving fiction, like sabotage of his beautiful reflecting pool, his new U.S. attorney in D.C. would be the last person to undercut him.

 

But she did undercut him—in a highly visible controversy in which he’s heavily invested, no less. That seemed about as probable as Hegseth refusing a presidential order to commit war crimes, an all but unthinkable development. Yet here we are.

 

What the hell happened?

 

An ethical non-dilemma.

 

The difference between Hegseth and Pirro is easily explained, you might say. He’s a political appointee who answers to Trump, whereas she, as a prosecutor, serves two masters. She works for the president, sure, but she’s also an officer of the court bound by a professional code of conduct.

 

She couldn’t ethically prosecute Hearn unless she believed in good faith that she could convict him. Once evidence of the botched renovation emerged, that belief disappeared and so the indictment had to disappear with it. Simple as that.

 

To which I would respond: Do you hear yourself right now?

 

If Jeanine Pirro were a stickler about personal ethics, she wouldn’t have spent the winter of 2020-21 seeding conspiracy theories to support a coup plot. And if she were a stickler about legal ethics, she wouldn’t have sought to indict six Democratic members of Congress who pissed off Trump and Hegseth by reminding service members—accurately—that they shouldn’t obey illegal orders.

 

The president appointed her because he believed, and had good reason to believe, that her sense of ethics was weaker than her sense of loyalty to him. That’s why her withdrawing the Hearn indictment felt like a firing offense: Doing the right thing when Trump wanted her to do the wrong thing contradicted the entire premise of putting her in the job.

 

“But if she had proceeded with a baseless case, she might have been sanctioned, disciplined, or disbarred,” one might say to that. Would she? Even if she had disclosed the exculpatory information from the Interior Department to Hearn’s lawyers, as she was constitutionally obliged to do, and left the indictment intact?

 

Had she done that, I assume Hearn would have moved quickly to dismiss the charges and the court would have granted his motion, a perfect ending from Pirro’s standpoint. The right outcome would have been reached, but instead of failing Trump’s loyalty test by withdrawing the indictment, she could have told the president she gave it the ol’ college try. It was those damned liberal judges, not her, who had sided with the “vandals.”

 

I’ll defer to those on the Dispatch staff who are better lawyers than I am (which is every lawyer on the Dispatch staff), but my guess is that Pirro wouldn’t have been disciplined simply for proceeding with a pitifully weak case. The embarrassment of having her indictment tossed likely would have been deemed sufficient.

 

But let’s say I’m wrong about that and she did end up being sanctioned professionally for refusing to withdraw an obviously dubious indictment. So what? Why would she care?

 

Pirro doesn’t need to practice law. She’s 75 years old and, until recently, hadn’t worked as a prosecutor since 2005. Her career pivoted long ago from legal work to the lucrative niche of “television personality,” and later to the very lucrative niche of “right-wing television personality” during the Trump era. In an industry like that, suffering some type of “martyrdom” for defending the president’s corrupt prerogatives too vehemently is a golden ticket.

 

The libs disbarred Jeanine Pirro because she wouldn’t back off the “vandals” who defaced Mr. Trump’s reflecting pool would have been a killer hook for her inevitable return to Fox News. It would have made her a hotter, more highly paid commodity on the right-wing vaudeville circuit than she ever was before, and assuredly more than any other manner of exit from the U.S. attorney’s office would have.

 

So why did she choose the ignominy of ethical behavior over the glory of unethical “martyrdom”? I think it’s because she misunderstood how Trump Cabinet members are expected to proceed when reality contradicts a presidential narrative.

 

Choosing reality.

 

Reading about the Pirro saga this morning, I thought of “Sharpiegate.”

 

Remember that? In September 2019, the president tweeted that Hurricane Dorian was inbound and warned several Southern states to prepare for impact, including Alabama. That surprised locals, who had been told that the storm would miss them. The Birmingham office of the National Weather Service was soon flooded with anxious phone calls and online requests for information, so it tweeted out a clarification: Alabama wouldn’t be affected.

 

But Trump wouldn’t relent. Rather than admit error, he continued to claim for days that Dorian would reach the state, culminating in one of the most embarrassing incidents of either of his presidential terms. Addressing reporters in the Oval Office, he waved around a National Weather Service map of the hurricane’s projected path that showed it stopping short of Alabama … with an extra line hand-drawn with black marker that extended the path to that state. (Hence “Sharpiegate.”)

 

When the president says one thing and reality says something else, it’s the duty of all loyal subordinates to defend his version. And that’s what Trump’s subordinates did in Sharpiegate: Before long, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was reportedly threatening to fire top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency that oversees the National Weather Service, for undermining the boss.

 

Sharpiegate was a low-stakes Three Stooges-tier illustration of the authoritarian mind at work. But all of the same elements present in that episode later conspired to produce the near-coup of the “Stop the Steal” period following the 2020 election. Trump had failed in some way that embarrassed him; unable to cope with the embarrassment, he constructed a storyline in which he hadn’t failed at all and became emotionally invested in it; after convincing himself that his version of events was true, he expected all of his allies to adopt it; any deputy who refused was deemed to have failed a supreme loyalty test and terminated.

 

He failed to win the election and to properly identify Hurricane Dorian’s path. In both cases, he concocted an alternate reality in which no such failure happened. And when authorities inside his own administration contradicted him—then-Attorney General Bill Barr in one instance, federal meteorologists in the other—the betrayal was so wounding that heads had to roll.

 

That pattern is repeating in the matter of the reflecting pool. Trump screwed up the renovations, a special humiliation for a former developer. Rather than give his political enemies the satisfaction of conceding that, he latched onto the possibility that saboteurs had caused the damage and, to all appearances, talked himself into believing it. Ever the loyal ally, Jeanine Pirro backed him to the hilt, filing numerous indictments alleging vandalism.

 

And then, last Friday, to his astonishment, she suddenly turned into Bill Barr.

 

I think Pirro assumed that once the information from the Department of the Interior about a botched renovation emerged, Trump would be forced to accept it and would blame that department for the failure of the vandalism prosecutions. That’s why she went to such lengths to identify Interior as the source of the exculpatory material in her motion to withdraw Hearn’s indictment. Doug Burgum’s agency blew this case, Mr. President, not my office.

 

And I understand her instinct. In a movement like Trump’s, the race to scapegoat others before you’re scapegoated is relentless.

 

But that’s not how the president approaches failure, as I’ve explained. When information emerges that contradicts a narrative that’s important to him—even when it comes from within his own administration—a loyal ally is expected to continue to side with his version of events, not to admit what really happened while blaming someone else in the Cabinet for it. Burgum himself understands this perfectly. If Trump says it’s vandalism, it’s vandalism.

 

Pirro was given a choice between what’s actually true and what her boss wants to believe is true, and she thought she could get away with choosing the former if she could prove that some other Trump official revealed the painful truth here. She chose reality. I’m amazed she still has a job.

 

Truth and consequences.

 

On the spectrum of self-serving Trump fantasies that threaten the American experiment, with Sharpiegate at one pole and “Stop the Steal” at the other, I’d place the reflecting pool fiasco somewhere in the middle.

 

There are some Three Stooges aspects to it. Watching a sycophant as foul as Pirro be un-personed after doing the right thing for once is amusing, a lesson to all Trumpers that the only loyalty test that matters is the next one. And if it was pathetic to see the president get spun up about a minor error in a hurricane announcement seven years ago, it’s doubly pathetic to see him invest so much mental energy in a pool now.

 

Maggie Haberman, who’s covered him intently for years for the New York Times, guesstimated recently that 70 percent of his mind is presently occupied by his various renovations around Washington. It’s a legacy thing, she alleged—a way for him to leave an indelible physical mark on America that his critics won’t (easily) be able to erase once he’s gone. When you can’t subdue Iran or reduce the cost of living, you can at least pretty up the Lincoln Memorial.

 

No wonder, then, that the specter of vandalism at the pool has taken root so deeply in his psyche. If he’s now banking on improvements to the landscape as his path to immortality, the thought of saboteurs breaking off pieces of the pool’s new liner will be mortifying in a way that, say, terrorists free-firing at oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz isn’t.

 

But this episode isn’t all laughs either.

 

Yesterday Pirro’s office quietly dismissed the misdemeanor vandalism charges that were pending against three other people arrested near the reflecting pool—but too late to prevent lasting damage. A lawyer for Justin Carreno, one of the suspects, told CBS News that Carreno lost his job as a government contractor after his arrest and had to move out of his home because he couldn’t make rent after being fired.

 

The Justice Department “literally fabricated a crime,” the lawyer alleged, calling his client’s ordeal “the epitome of the politicization of the criminal justice system.” The good news, I suppose, is that Trump’s new “anti-weaponization” slush fund is alive and well thanks to Cornyn and Tillis, so maybe Carreno can squeeze a few million dollars out of that for his trouble. If I were him, I’d already be scouting around for some less fascist country to relocate to after receiving my check.

 

But the bad news is that, if the president had his way, Carreno would still be caught in the legal snare that’s already ruined his life. And there’s no doubt—zero—that if Pirro and Todd Blanche came to Trump and said, “We believe these people are innocent of vandalism, but we also think we can convict them,” he would have told them to proceed. If others have to suffer for the sake of sparing him from personal embarrassment, he’s fine with that. That’s what January 6 was all about.

 

As it is, in the same way that Sharpiegate presaged “Stop the Steal,” we’re left to wonder which much more horrific national trauma this reflecting-pool debacle will be seen in hindsight to have anticipated. Tick tock.

The Reflecting Pool Is Now a Serious Scandal

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 04, 2026

 

Granular observers can probably distinguish between the left’s objections to this Trump construction project and that. But the layperson — i.e., the majority of any national electorate — probably can’t.

 

The average American knows that Trump’s critics have a lot of problems with his many works. There’s the Rose Garden slab, the ballroom, the proposed victory arch, the gaudy golden statuary, and so on. The average voter probably filed the left’s complaints with the reflecting pool into a voluminous, undifferentiated folder full of things people hate about Trump. That’s also where it would have stayed if the president had an ounce of self-control.

 

If he did, the legitimate but not so salient criticisms of Trump’s no-bid contracting process, the pool’s sudden algae bloom, and its general aesthetic deficiencies would have remained the exclusive province of febrile Jim Acosta YouTube clips. Now, however, the Reflecting Pool has become a serious political scandal.

 

It’s “difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt,” read a statement from the office of U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro. In fact, the president’s critics were right all along: the pool wasn’t a victim of sabotage but, rather, a “botched installation.”

 

Now they tell us! Too late, however, to prevent innocent people from being prosecuted. Last week, Pirro’s office revealed that it was dropping federal criminal charges against four individuals, only the most famous of whom was a former Olympic canoeist, who were charged without sufficient evidence of a federal crime. They were charged for vandalizing the pool because the president wanted to see someone catch a charge. The average American voter takes notice of that. After all, one could be a victim of those circumstances as easily as anyone else.

 

Perhaps most Americans looked askance at how the Trump administration twisted itself into knots to put James Comey and Letitia James in the dock. If they even took notice of the U.S. attorney who resigned rather than bring politically motivated charges into a courtroom, or of how those cases fell apart after Trump found himself a more pliant attorney, they might have also compartmentalized it all.

 

Sure, that was egregious, the average voter might concede. But James and Comey were in the game. They took their shots at the president, and he took his. But this isn’t anything like that. The four individuals who caught a charge based on the allegation that there was not just significant vandalism but any vandalism of the Reflecting Pool were civilians. They were not players in our political pageant. In all likelihood, their offense was their being in the wrong place at the wrong time — and just when the president needed a scapegoat to spare himself the humiliation of having to admit that his critics were right.

 

Existential dread tends to focus the mind. The average voter might not identify with Comey or James, or with their mutual contempt for proceduralism and, arguably, prosecutorial propriety. By contrast, they are likely to see at least shades of themselves in the nameless pawns whom the federal government viewed as expendable losses in Trump’s failed face-saving maneuver. There but for the grace of God, and all that.

 

This isn’t just a political scandal. It’s a genuine controversy in which elementary good governance hangs in the balance. All and only so that Trump wouldn’t have to admit that the paint really was peeling.

The Anti-Semitic Hounding of Dana Nessel Should Be a Five-Alarm Fire

By Seth Mandel

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

One common response to anti-Semitism is to ask the person exhibiting hatred toward Jews to look at the situation from the perspective of the Jewish target, which might make them more sympathetic toward their victim. But Jews could also learn much from doing the reverse and looking through the anti-Semite’s eyes.

 

Not because anti-Semites have legitimate grievances and not because a Jew should feel responsible for someone’s Jew-hatred. Rather, it would be beneficial to many Jews to understand that we make far more distinctions among and between ourselves than our haters do.

 

Let’s take just one random example of the seemingly endless running list of anti-Semitic acts of note.

 

In the old Jewish quarter of Cordoba, Spain, there is a statue of Maimonides, the 12th-century sage Rabbi Moses ben Maimon. Maimonides was a philosopher, a trained physician, and one of the most important authorities of Jewish law. This weekend, the Maimonides statue was spray-painted with a swastika.

 

How different is this from, say, the anti-Semitic trend of superimposing a swastika over the Star of David on a homemade sign? And how different from those is someone putting a swastika over the Star of David on an Israeli flag?

 

To the anti-Semite, this question is ridiculous: There is no conceptual difference. And on this, the anti-Semite is correct.

 

At elite universities, are Jewish students hiding just their Israeli flags or are they also tucking their Star of David pendants into their shirts?

 

Again, a ridiculous question.

 

It is not treated as ridiculous to those enabling the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism in politics and entertainment and the media, where the anti-Semite’s handiwork is parsed for any excuse to exonerate his intentions.

 

And it is too often treated as a legitimate distinction by American Jews, who are shocked by the anti-Semitism in formerly friendly spaces but feel obliged to let the world know that, first of all, the Israeli government doesn’t represent them.

 

No one who paints swastikas on Jews cares about what the Israeli government does or does not believe.

 

Which brings me to a story that ought to be a five-alarm fire but somehow isn’t.

 

A few days ago, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish, held an anti-Semitism roundtable. In the course of that discussion, Nessel revealed her plans to avoid attending the state Democratic Party’s convention, which begins at the end of the month. Nessel said:

 

I don’t feel safe going. I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying. And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.

 

A top state Jewish Democrat doesn’t feel safe at her party’s convention. Michigan is a very important state, both in Senate elections this year and in presidential years. And the convention is where candidates are finalized.

 

Some background. Nessel, as attorney general, filed charges against several pro-Hamas activists at the University of Michigan for on-campus lawbreaking and getting violent with police who were trying to clear a major fire hazard created by demonstrators. Rep. Rashida Tlaib led a public campaign accusing Nessel of bias toward her fellow Jews. The McCarthyite campaign eventually succeeded in pressuring Nessel to drop the charges after progressives had turned the case into a circus and a referendum on Nessel’s Jewishness.

 

It was among the most un-American spectacles imaginable, and it presaged what happened at the Michigan Democratic endorsement convention in April, when anti-Semitic hecklers and a heavily progressive-activist crowd taunted and shouted down Jewish candidates and those deemed too friendly to Jewish causes.

 

Anybody watching progressive activism over the past couple of years knew exactly what the goal of this display was: to bully Jewish Democratic politicians out of the party’s public gatherings. And now it seems to have worked.

 

The candidate riding this wave of anti-Semitism is Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed, who talks almost exclusively about Jewish money on the trail and who campaigns with anti-Semitic figures.

 

Nessel is not alone in her discomfort in organized Democratic Party settings, and even those who plan to attend the convention believe that Nessel’s status as an elected official and a target of anti-Semitic harassment might affect their own calculations were they in her shoes. JTA got the following comment from Halie Soifer, head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America:

 

She’s not alone. We’ve heard from other Jewish Democrats who attended the Democratic Party convention earlier this year in Michigan, and there was a sense of discomfort amid what felt like a pro-Palestinian protest [that] may have even blurred the line for some into antisemitic sentiment — and it’s really concerning.

 

This line of thinking has to stop. Nessel isn’t afraid of “pro-Palestinian protests.” She’s being targeted for harassment because she’s Jewish. That’s it—that’s all that’s happening here. She isn’t showing up to Palestinian events and then getting nervous and leaving. She’s being hounded by anti-Semites. And that’s the distinction that actually matters.

Biden’s $7 Billion Taliban Weapons Tab Is Still Coming Due

By Michaell Baumgartner

Wednesday, August 05, 2026

 

Nearly five years after President Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, American-funded military equipment left behind is making terrorists more lethal across the border in Pakistan.

 

I recently traveled to Islamabad to meet with military boss Field Marshal Asim Munir to discuss the conflicts raging across the region, including more than 1,000 terrorist attacks in Pakistan last year — it’s now more affected by terrorism than any other country in the world is. Joining me on the trip was Representative Ryan Zinke. Neither of us approached the trip with illusions about the challenges of the region. Zinke is a former Navy SEAL Commander. I previously worked as an embedded adviser on an Afghan-government counternarcotics team in Helmand Province and occasionally lectured in the Afghanistan-Pakistan program at the U.S. National Defense University.

 

Field Marshal Munir predicted that Pakistan’s fighting with both terrorists and the Taliban government in Kabul is likely to grow. Last February, a suicide bomber attacked a mosque in Islamabad, killing 31 and wounding more than 200. A few weeks later, Pakistan responded by bombing Kabul in an attack that killed nearly 300. The Field Marshal also made clear his frustration that Pakistani counterterrorism forces are confronting the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) — fighters equipped with American-origin night-vision devices and sophisticated sniper weapons left over from the chaotic Biden pull-out.

 

Congressman Zinke and I both sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Task Force. The FMS process is mired in red tape that can make partner nations wait years to acquire U.S. weapons systems they’ve already paid for. The consequences are visible in Pakistan: China provided 81 percent of Pakistan’s major arms imports between 2020 and 2024. When America cannot deliver, we drive potential partners toward Russia and China, while weakening our industrial base. During our meetings in Islamabad in July, Munir noted a bitter asymmetry — that he has been unable to purchase U.S. attack helicopters to defend against terrorist forces using U.S. weapons to attack his troops and police.

 

This is not simply an allegation from Islamabad. United Nations monitors have reported that the TTP possesses NATO-caliber weapons obtained in Afghanistan and that its access to night-vision equipment has increased the lethality of attacks on Pakistani border posts.

 

The equipment is part of the dangerous military inheritance of the Afghan collapse. According to the Department of Defense inspector general, $7.12 billion in American-funded military equipment remained in the former Afghan government’s inventory when it fell in 2021. This was principally materiel previously transferred to Afghan security forces; departing American troops removed or destroyed nearly all the major systems they used directly.

 

More than 316,000 weapons, including specialized sniper rifles, remained in Afghanistan, along with approximately 42,000 pieces of specialized equipment, including night-vision, surveillance, biometric, and positioning devices.  The Afghan air force had roughly 40 American-funded UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, and the Taliban captured and returned several to service. Those aircraft are not being used in the terrorist attacks now confronting Pakistan, but their presence illustrates the extraordinary scale of the military arsenal that the Taliban now control. The condition and precise disposition of this arsenal remain uncertain, but there is now mounting evidence that some of the equipment captured after the collapse has migrated into terrorist hands.

 

During America’s war, the Afghan Taliban exploited sanctuaries in Pakistan to attack Afghanistan. Today, the conflict has partly reversed direction: The TTP operates from sanctuaries in Afghanistan and mounts increasingly lethal attacks inside Pakistan.

 

The TTP and Afghan Taliban are distinct but closely connected organizations. Their relationship operates through the Pashtun belt straddling a permeable border, where tribal, familial, and commercial ties long predate the modern frontier.

 

President Trump’s strong rapport with Munir — they met in person twice last year and speak frequently — creates an opening to broaden cooperation. The United States should negotiate a tailored counterterrorism and security-assistance framework, with Pakistan focused on mutually defined threats, particularly the TTP and ISIS-K. Washington should streamline access to carefully selected night-fighting equipment, intelligence and surveillance support, counter-drone systems, and border-monitoring capabilities. Such cooperation must be mission-specific, rigorously vetted, and subject to strong end-use monitoring. It should be conditioned on measurable Pakistani counterterrorism cooperation and structured to prevent diversion or misuse. It should also be limited to capabilities that do not materially alter the conventional military balance with India.

 

Congress must also confront the underlying equipment problem. The No Equipment Left Behind Act of 2026, for example, would require the Pentagon to prepare for the possibility that a partner government receiving American equipment could collapse, so a debacle like Biden’s Taliban weapons bonanza doesn’t happen again.

 

A more capable TTP threatens more than Pakistan. It strengthens a regional terrorist network in which the TTP, al-Qaeda, ISIS-K, and other groups maintain overlapping networks, compete for recruits, and exploit many of the same ungoverned spaces. Instability along the Afghan-Pakistani border also carries obvious dangers in a nuclear-armed country. Counterterrorism should be the beginning of renewed engagement with Pakistan, not its outer limit.

 

Pakistan’s 250 million people make it the fifth-most populous country in the world. Its relatively young population — about 60 percent of Pakistanis are younger than 30 — means that it will probably grow in economic importance. It’s also home to immense mineral wealth; a high-end estimate of $8 trillion of copper, gold, and critical technology minerals lie in Pakistan’s mountains. In September of last year, the U.S. and Pakistan announced a $500 million mining agreement, the first of its kind between the two nations, although actual production is still likely years away. By comparison, China is already actively mining in Pakistan but doing little value-add processing in the country as it prefers to ship bulk material straight back home. The challenge is that much of the mineral wealth downstream is located in the same border regions undergoing regular terrorist attacks by Baloch militants. So far, there is no evidence that left-behind American-origin weapons have been used in attacks on mineral projects, but this region borders Afghanistan, and if those weapons spread more widely, they could make an already dangerous operating environment even harder to secure.

 

The question is whether Pakistan can establish enough security and stability for American companies to invest, mine, and process minerals there. Surging demand for copper in an increasingly electrified world and critical minerals needed for the AI supercomputing race make Pakistan enticing. Biden’s $7 billion blunder leaving weapons to the Taliban certainly complicates any decision to invest in the region.

 

The central lesson is not just about cleaning up the past administration’s mess. It is that security is a necessary prerequisite of economic engagement. Terrorists may kill people and damage buildings, but their real target is the stability of society and government. America’s Pakistan policy should therefore begin with counterterrorism, but extend to the investments, trade, technology, and mineral partnerships that give both countries a stake in a growing, safe, and prosperous Pakistan.

A Whiff of Greek Tragedy

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, August 05, 2026

 

In January, the New York Times asked President Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.

 

“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

 

That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey has made Ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.

 

Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that belonged solely to supreme beings.

 

Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.

 

In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.

 

Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.

 

Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.

 

He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals?  (“TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”)

 

And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China—from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?

 

But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.

 

This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by “Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.

 

King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.

 

At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.

 

Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proven to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proven much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.

 

But the regime hasn’t—and won’t any time soon—because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, the outrage from Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies, and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight, and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.

 

If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory—giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.

 

Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”

Yes, the DSA Has a Communist Problem

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, August 04, 2026

 

Sometimes a red scare isn’t such a bad thing.

 

Over the last several weeks, President Trump has issued five-alarm-fire warnings about the Democratic Socialists of America really being communists, and his opponents have blasted him for the worst sort of McCarthyism.

 

Trump’s rhetoric has been blunderbuss and over the top, but the DSA does have a communist problem.

 

The DSA is a matryoshka doll of subversion — it is attempting to infiltrate and take over the Democratic Party (with some success), while Marxists are infiltrating and taking over the DSA (also with some success).

 

In other words, the most important movement within the Democratic Party is in the process of falling under the control of communists. Over the last few years, they have established a majority on the DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC), the governing board.

 

As recent reports in The Atlantic warning about the direction of the DSA have noted, this is not in keeping with the original vision of the organization. The late Michael Harrington was the biggest founding figure of the DSA, and he was a genuinely democratic socialist. (The need for the adjective “democratic” before “socialist” stems from the fact that so many varieties of socialism are undemocratic.)

 

A 20th-century intellectual and organizer, Harrington came to prominence with his 1962 book on poverty in the U.S., The Other America. Harrington’s policy prescriptions may have been misbegotten, but he wasn’t a hater with totalitarian tendencies or an opponent of Western civilization obsessed with destroying Israel — in fact, he was pro-Zionism.

 

Harrington and similarly battle-hardened socialists of his generation had plenty of experience watching social organizations get penetrated and destroyed by Marxists-Leninists in the process that Trotskyites called “entryism.” So they wrote a provision into the DSA’s bylaws allowing for the expulsion of anyone “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization.”

 

Now, the measure has been repealed. Pro-Harrington members of the DSA formed a group called the North Star caucus to preserve his vision; the hard leftists countered with the Red Star caucus.

 

Members of Red Star wrote a dispatch a couple of years ago lamenting how the DSA was once upon a time “an anti-communist, Labor Zionist, social democratic organization,” and calling on “all communists in the United States to join us in the democratic struggle within the DSA.” Sure, the DSA isn’t perfect, but “as communists contest for and win hegemony within the organization, we continue to move toward a revolutionary horizon.”

 

It wasn’t bluster. The orientation of the DSA has changed in recent years. As for an animating spirit, it’s “Goodbye, Michael Harrington” and “Hello, Hasan Piker,” the left-wing influencer who thinks fondly of Chairman Mao and of anti-Israel terror groups.

 

True to its new posture, the DSA refused to condemn Hamas after October 7, and the New York City chapter promoted a pro-Hamas rally immediately after the attack. In response, about two dozen longtime members of the DSA, some of them former leaders, quit the group. “It is time,” they wrote, “to find other organizational vehicles to advance an emancipatory, humane democratic socialism.” (Good luck.)

 

All this should matter. Like it or not, the DSA is no longer a fringe group with exotic concerns but a mainstream force nominating Democratic candidates across the country. Its internal politics therefore deserve intense scrutiny. Needless to say, if Republican candidates were pledging fealty to a group increasingly subject to the control of self-professed fascists, it’d be an enormous story, and they’d have to disavow their association.

 

That there isn’t such pressure on DSA candidates from the legacy media is testament to how any warning about domestic communism is discounted as groundless alarmism, and how communism — as a supposedly idealistic force — doesn’t carry the same malodor as fascism.

 

Now, the Democratic Party isn’t about to become a vehicle for communism, but the DSA — the cradle of so many new, attention-getting Democratic candidates — is well on its way.

The Ceuta Migrant Wave Was a Power Play by Morocco Against Spain

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

Most of the commentary on Ceuta that you’ll find on platforms like X reiterates the same four points.

 

·         If we hadn’t reelected Trump, this is what America would look like.

 

·         This is what you get when you elect socialists like Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

 

·         The Moroccans attempting to cross the border are overwhelmingly military-age males, so this isn’t migration, it’s an invasion.

 

·         The 1973 French novel The Camp of the Saints is more than a xenophobic tirade, it’s a prediction of our future.

 

All those arguments are true to varying degrees. Most notably, in February the Sánchez government said it would offer amnesty, expecting to legalize an estimated half million immigrants who had arrived illegally in recent years. More than 1.3 million applied for the amnesty. Under the laws of Europe’s Schengen area, if you’re a Spanish citizen, you can travel or work in 28 other countries. (Our Andrew Stuttaford, back on July 3: “This amnesty, the seventh in 40 years, will only encourage more arrivals. Needless to say, it is a mistake.”)

 

But there are also a couple of wrinkles in the rush to Ceuta that are getting overlooked, although not by John Gustavsson or Josh Treviño, both writing for National Review Online.

 

On July 20, Prime Minister Sánchez visited Algeria:

 

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in Algiers on Monday that he sought to deepen ties with Algeria, as the countries mend relations after a dispute over Western Sahara.

 

Sanchez told reporters that the visit, a first in four years, held “particular importance” for Spain, which views Algeria as “not only a neighboring country but also a strategic partner.” . . .

 

Ties between Algiers and Madrid deteriorated in 2022 when Spain backed Morocco’s sovereignty claim over Western Sahara, reversing its decades-long neutral stance on the conflict over its former colony.

 

The governments of Algeria and Morocco do not get along and have not gotten along for a long time. They both want to be the big dog in northwest Africa, and any gain by Algeria is seen as a loss for Morocco, and vice versa.  Algeria cut ties with Morocco in 2021, and the land border between those two countries has been closed since 1994.

 

There’s even an arms race:

 

Against this backdrop, the two countries began to prepare for the possibility that their dispute might evolve into armed conflict. Both sides ramped up military spending. Morocco bought Israel’s anti-drone Skylock Dome system in November and its Harop drones in December. In February 2022, it additionally acquired Barak MX, a modular Israeli-made system that can knock down both missiles and drones. Finally, in April 2023, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of eighteen U.S. HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, along with other military equipment, to Morocco.

 

Algeria rushed to keep pace with these purchases. In November 2022, the Algerian parliament approved a staggering increase in the 2023 military budget to around $23 billion, up from around $11 billion the previous year. In late 2022, local media indicated that the authorities were preparing to buy Su-57 stealth jets, SU-34 bombers and Su-30 fighters, in addition to new air defence systems, such as the S-400, from Russia. To diversify its weapons sources, Algeria turned to Türkiye to buy Anka S+ drones and to China to acquire Halcon drones, to give two examples.

 

Do tens of thousands of people spontaneously decide, all by themselves, to rush a fenced border? No, they do not.

 

From the New York Times (emphasis added):

 

Like so many others in Morocco, Mohammed Ahmidho saw on his social media feeds early Thursday that the heavily guarded border his country shared with the Spanish territory of Ceuta was open.

 

Soon enough, he joined a crowd in the tens of thousands, many of whom were astonished to see Moroccan police urge them, as he recalled, to “come to Spain.”

 

It is still unclear why so many people came to Ceuta. Many of the Moroccans who wandered around Ceuta on Friday wondered if the doors hadn’t opened because of some unknown plan by Morocco, which has been accused of using immigrant flows in the past for political pressure.

 

“I don’t know why they let us through,” said Ajoub el-Arrot, 24, who said he heard about the open border on social media. “Maybe they had some political reason. They opened the border and let everyone go by.”

 

He added, “When there are political problems, Morocco opens the doors and tells us to go.”

 

Douae Tabit, 19, who also said she heard about the unchecked crossing on social media, said it went “viral” and passed by word of mouth, attracting people from all around Morocco. Fluent in English, French and Spanish, she said she worked as a nurse and photographer and spontaneously decided to take advantage of the opportunity.

 

Moroccan police do not just randomly encourage people to cross into Spain without documentation.

 

Do you think it’s a coincidence that less than two weeks after Sánchez went to Algeria and declared that country a “strategic partner,” the Moroccan police started encouraging tens of thousands of Moroccans to attempt to cross the border into Ceuta? Me neither. Yes, Sánchez’s amnesty policies are a factor in this, but what happened here is that the Moroccan government, irked that Sánchez is trying to build a better relationship with Algeria, sent a signal to the Spanish prime minister that it can make life for him, his government, and the people of Ceuta miserable, any time it wants.

 

In the combined fiscal years 2024–2025, the U.S. government sent $112 million in foreign aid to Morocco. According to ForeignAssistance.gov, the U.S. has sent $1.4 million so far this fiscal year, although that data may be incomplete.

 

One last point: Andrew Stuttaford notices with irritation that the National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 2027, which passed the House nearly unanimously a few weeks ago, states:

 

The Committee notes that the Spanish-administered cities of Ceuta and Melilla are located in Moroccan territory and remain the subject of Morocco’s longstanding claim.

 

And:

 

The Committee supports efforts by the Secretary of State to encourage diplomatic engagement between Morocco and Spain on the future status of Ceuta and Melilla.

 

“The wording of the committee’s report has no legal status, but it was, at the very least, careless,” Andrew concludes. “Making matters worse, it didn’t pass unnoticed in either Spain or Morocco.”

 

Was someone in our government, irritated with Spain over the amount of its NATO spending, attempting to stick a thumb in the eye of the Spanish government?

 

By the way, for all the legitimate gripes about Spain and its contribution to NATO, let us observe that the Spanish government has increased its defense spending by 70 percent in the last decade; its investment of 32 percent on equipment is above the 20 percent required by NATO and actually a bit higher than the U.S. level at 29.7 percent. Spain spent $40 billion on defense in 2025; we all love the Poles, but Poland spent about $46 billion. The reason Spain’s defense spending as a share of gross domestic product seems so much lower is that Spain has a GDP just above $2 trillion, while Poland — now in the top 20 economies in the world — has a GDP of around $1 trillion.

 

The Cyberattacks That President Trump Doesn’t Want to Acknowledge

 

Considering the importance of what it does, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is surprisingly low-profile. It could use a CBS prime-time drama or two. Then again, the agency may well like it that way; like offensive lineman, you usually hear about the more obscure federal law enforcement agencies only when something goes wrong.

 

Efforts to hack into critical infrastructure are widespread: in 2024, Check Point Research documented 1,162 cyberattacks on U.S. utilities, a 75 percent year-over-year increase. Given those numbers, perhaps it’s good that we hear about CISA so rarely. But the agency regularly puts out new alerts about foreign cyber threats. (Keep in mind that “approximately 50 to 85 percent of critical infrastructure is privately owned, depending on the sector, from large corporations to small and medium-sized businesses.” So it’s up to the private company to make sure its cyber defenses are up to the task.) China and Russia may take the gold and silver in the cyber-threat Olympics, but the Iranians consistently edge out the North Koreans for the bronze.

 

In February 2024, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned six officials in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Cyber-Electronic Command for a November 2023 attack on the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, Pa.

 

CISA put out alerts regarding “malicious cyber activities conducted by advanced persistent threat cyber actors affiliated with the Iranian Government’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” or similar Iranian threats in August 2024, October 2024, and December 2024.

 

Also in 2024, President Trump’s campaign said it had been targeted by “an Iranian military intelligence unit in June sending ‘a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor.’”

 

In mid-March, the U.S. Justice Department “announced the seizure of four domains as part of an ongoing effort to disrupt hacking and transnational repression schemes conducted by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.” Later that month, “cyber criminals linked to Iran accessed FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email account.”

 

Then, on July 30, the FBI put out a new public service announcement:

 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Environmental Protection Agency are issuing this Public Service Announcement to warn critical infrastructure asset owners and operators that malicious cyber actors are conducting cyber-attacks targeting Operational Technology devices, including Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley Programmable Logic Controllers , specifically MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 series. Since July 27 2026, Water and Wastewater Sector utility companies in at least seven states have reported incidents to the FBI, and some of that activity degraded water operations.

 

Minnesota and Michigan have been identified as two of those states.

 

Now, the most recent PSAs did not specifically state that the Iranians were doing this. But we know from past attacks like the one in Aliquippa, Pa., that this is the Iranian modus operandi.

 

Anyway, here’s our president on Friday:

 

Today, I just want to mention that we heard in Minnesota there was a cyberattack and they blame it on Iran. I don’t think so. I think — I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent. There was a cyberattack of 30 water plants, and I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota. They like to say, oh, it’s Iran. Iran should be so lucky. Iran’s got bigger problems than worrying about Minnesota. This month it was announced that inflation is dropping at the fastest rate in more than six years. Walmart, Sam’s Club, Giant Eagle and others are slashing prices by hundreds of grocery stores.

 

And then later in that same appearance:

 

I don’t think — no, I think that Minnesota is behind it. You know who’s behind it, Minnesota, because they’re grossly incompetent. I think the governor’s behind it. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyberattack. I think that Minnesota ought to get its act together. It’s one of the worst-run states. JD will tell you. He found tremendous corruption in Minnesota.

 

And how about the attacks on water systems in those six other states, Mr. President? Do you think “the governor’s behind it” for all of those, too? You think Tim Walz is the criminal mastermind behind all of these cyberattacks?

 

Our critical systems are under attack, and our rambling, erratic, living-in-his-own-world president does not want to acknowledge it. If he did publicly recognize that Iran is trying to harm Americans through their water systems, the public might be rather upset by the latest cancellation of a massive military response against the Iranian regime.

 

Oh, and under this administration, CISA has gotten significantly smaller:

 

At the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the government’s top cyber defense body protecting U.S. election systems, nearly 1,000 CISA personnel — or nearly one-third of the agency’s workforce — had left or been removed from active service by mid-2025.

 

Some were terminated, while others resigned or took administrative leave. Others had contracts that were not renewed or their programs were shut down. Altogether, staffing lingered at around 2,500, down from approximately 3,400 a year earlier.

 

Hey, didn’t our president just give a big prime-time speech about how “the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes [us], like levels never thought possible, to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference”? If you’re so worried about foreign hacking and exploitation, why are you dramatically cutting the number of staff at the federal agency designed to fight foreign hacking and exploitation?

 

ADDENDUM: Out in Ohio, Republican Senator Bernie Moreno writes of his son-in law, Republican Congressman Max Miller:

 

If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives. I believe Max Miller needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake. I believe he should not be free to continue endangering others until he does.