The Great Divergence: Why America Keeps Pulling Away from Europe

By James Carter

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

Recent growth figures from the European Union’s statistical agency confirm the continent’s economic malaise. The headline touted resilience: Euro-area GDP rose by 0.4 percent, beating expectations. But Germany, France, and Italy — the eurozone’s three largest economies — barely grew. That is not prosperity. It is institutional sclerosis disguised as stability.

 

In 2008, the European Union’s GDP per capita was 76.5 percent of the United States’. By 2023, it had fallen to just 50 percent. France, which in 2000 had GDP per capita comparable to that of the 36th-wealthiest U.S. state, had fallen below Arkansas.

 

Europeans may not appreciate how far their economies have fallen relative to America. Britons dramatically underestimate the gap. Asked where the UK ranks among U.S. states in per-capita income, they guessed seventh. The reality? 51st, below Arkansas and Mississippi. More than a quarter said they were “shocked.”

 

The explanation is not that Europeans work less. The employment rate among working-age adults is nearly identical on both sides of the Atlantic: 76 percent in the European Union and 75 percent in the United States. Among employed workers, Europeans also average longer workweeks — 36 versus 34 hours in the United States. Yet America’s GDP-per-capita advantage has widened. The difference is productivity, or how much economies produce per hour worked.

 

Between 1995 and 2025, American productivity grew by 88 percent while the eurozone’s grew by just 30 percent. The divergence is accelerating: U.S. productivity in market services grew by 12.4 percent from late 2019 to early 2024, while the eurozone’s grew by 3.8 percent.

 

America and Europe made different choices about change. As the former embraced creative destruction, the latter sought to protect against it. Fifty years ago, the Dow Jones Industrial Average included General Motors, IBM, Kodak, Sears, and AT&T. Most have been replaced, unlike the largest firms in Europe over the past five decades. America’s defining companies today were unimaginable then. That is creative destruction at work.

 

Most importantly, America has preserved the freedom to fail. Economists Steven Davis and John Haltiwanger document high rates of firm entry, exit, and job turnover in the U.S. when compared with Europe. In the United States, roughly one in five firms is under five years old. In Germany, one in eight. When firms fail, workers find new jobs and capital shifts to more productive uses.

 

Europe’s largest economies chose differently. They shielded workers through employment laws that make firing expensive and worker councils that give labor substantial influence over corporate decisions. Because firms face higher costs and greater constraints in adjusting their workforce, they are more likely to retain excess labor when demand falls. Such employment protections benefit insiders — permanent workers with secure jobs — while making it harder for outsiders, young workers, and those trying to enter protected labor markets. Europe also embraced precautionary technology regulation that made commercialization more difficult, allowing America to capture markets first. This pattern repeats across emerging technologies: Regulation is imposed before European companies can scale, creating compliance burdens that suppress nascent ventures while solidifying incumbent platforms.

 

The European Commission asked Mario Draghi — the former president of the European Central Bank and prime minister of Italy — to diagnose Europe’s competitiveness crisis. His 2024 report clearly identified the problem: insufficient innovation and dynamism. Yet the political obstacles he identified remain.

 

Some European policymakers understand what must change. Others — like former Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton — are doubling down on the very regulations that slow commercialization. The problem is political: Free-market reforms impose concentrated losses on protected groups — unions, incumbent firms, and sheltered workers — while producing diffuse gains over years. Those who bear immediate costs have the power to block change; those who benefit are dispersed and unorganized. Europe’s political institutions predictably reward the former.

 

Prosperity requires continual disruption. Europe’s bet was that it could maximize both prosperity and protection. It couldn’t.

 

America generated extraordinary growth but distributed it unevenly. Europe pursued greater equality through protection—and accepted slower productivity growth as the price. America’s challenge is distributing growth; Europe’s is generating it. Unequal growth creates more prosperity than equal stagnation. For example, U.S. private AI investment reached roughly $286 billion in 2025, whereas no European country managed even $6 billion.

 

Europe increasingly depends on foreign technology, manufacturing, and capital in some of the industries that will define the next generation of growth. The result is more than lost market share. It is strategic dependence.

 

The United States’ advantage is not a fact of nature, however. Our labor markets remain relatively flexible, but the political terrain is shifting. Mandatory worker representation on corporate boards, restrictions on corporate restructuring, and sectoral bargaining that fixes wage standards across industries — ideas once considered fringe — are entering mainstream policy debate.

 

These are not just theoretical proposals. ESG imposed corporatist structures on American companies for years. Today’s restrictions on foreign investment in data centers and infrastructure reflect the same impulse: government deciding which companies deserve capital based on political criteria rather than returns. This is how Europe’s market inflexibility began.

 

American economic strength has historically rested on free markets, private property, and limited government. Rather than abandon those principles now, let’s not make Europe’s mistake our own.

The Replacement of Education with Violent Indoctrination

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

 

The Anti-Defamation League has produced one of the more valuable reports on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism since October 7, and it’s about campus bias in the classroom. Its value lies in mostly eschewing more subjective claims of students’ feelings of safety (though some are in the report) in favor of documenting clear examples of faculty subverting education to spread anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

 

Campus anti-Semitism is coming from the institutions themselves.

 

Many examples arise in required courses as well, where students are indoctrinated in violent bigotry with no relief.

 

A fair portion of these courses are outside the disciplines of political science. According to the report, for example, a professor at Illinois Urbana-Champaign opened his engineering class with a monologue on the Big Lie that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza. Presumably he eventually got around to teaching the actual subject material.

 

At Columbia’s public-health school, the core curriculum includes one professor who apparently refers to the Jewish state as “so-called Israel,” echoing violent eliminationist fantasies. The required health class reportedly also included discussion of Jewish “blood money”—in this case to describe Jews who donate to the school.

 

A National Cinema course at Northwestern echoed the ahistorical myth that Jews are “settler colonialists” in their land, ensuring that the students knew what kind of “art” was to be produced. Since the “colonialist” smear is not criticism of, say, Israeli policy but rather a bizarre lie intended to incite against Jews, such content can’t be dismissed as someone’s mere biased opinion. It is the instruction of ethnic cleansing.

 

Similarly, a literature course at the University of California, Berkeley, described Israel as the “Israeli Occupation Force,” a delegitimizing and violence-justifying moniker, while describing the terrorist group Hamas as admirable “resistance forces.”

 

The proliferation of pro-terrorism lessons is one of the more disturbing patterns in American higher education. Another Berkeley class was assigned a lesson on Leila Khaled, a Palestinian hijacker and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terrorist organization. The students were reportedly offered extra credit to attend anti-Zionist events outside of class.

 

The Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia reportedly did the same, promoting a course at the People’s Forum—a pro-Chinese Communist Party propaganda outfit—that required readings from PFLP documents.

 

Or imagine being in class with the University of California, Irvine professor who, the report states, called the events of October 7 and after “a gift from Allah to the world” and extolled such divine intervention, “whether it was 9/11 or the Second Intifada, or some other issue that is waking the Muslims’ spirit.”

 

The ADL notes the obvious problem in all this: “The impact of these dynamics is shaped in part by the authority faculty hold within the classroom. Students may feel constrained in their ability to challenge or question such content, particularly where participation, grading or academic relationships are at stake. This can be especially acute for Jewish students, who may experience such rhetoric not as abstract political discourse but as directly threatening, particularly when it relates to violence against Israelis or Jewish communities.”

 

Indeed, structuring academic incentives to promote anti-Jewish terrorists outside the classroom is not exactly subtle. It also raises the temperature on campus, moving the Overton Window regarding violence and violent rhetoric against students—especially when that rhetoric is coming from a student’s own professor.

 

The report documents other such cases: students being given extra credit to join an anti-Israel walkout, teachers canceling classes in support of a pro-Gaza walkout, and numerous similar incidents. Canceling multiple classes, as some teachers did, to have students attend anti-Israel indoctrination events is an obvious perversion of responsibilities—not to mention lazy in the extreme.

 

Then there’s the singling out of Israeli students, accused in class of being an “occupier,” a “murderer,” a “settler” and other such epithets directly.

 

When anti-Jewish activists on campus and in the media seek to dismiss such concerns, they pretend that bias in the classroom amounts to no more than teaching lessons in which Israel isn’t the good guy. But in truth, what’s been happening is nothing of the sort. It’s the dismantling of academic inquiry entirely in place of violent indoctrination.

Mamdani Solves the Problem of Too Much Liberty in New York City

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 13, 2026

 

Mamdani is trying to solve a problem, although not one that most New Yorkers would recognize as an issue. It’s the same conundrum that vexed Gavin Newsom and Joe Biden, both of whom failed in their attempt to remedy it. It’s the alleged problem of too few Americans voluntarily joining — or even just contributing to — organized labor organizations.

 

If the obdurate public won’t boost labor’s clout of their own accord, the American left has concluded, they must be forced into it.

 

This week, New York City’s socialist mayor endorsed a proposal introduced by his fellow socialists on the city council: the Delivery Protection Act. The bill would force big warehouse operators like Amazon and FedEx to obtain new licenses, with all the additional associated compliance costs, as well as hire thousands of city employees as couriers. “If the bill passes,” the Wall Street Journal reported, “New York could become the first city to require last-mile operators” — the delivery services that transport goods from truck bed to doorstep — “to make delivery workers direct employees.”

 

The mayor claims the new regulation will reduce commercial vehicle traffic in the city, contributing to pedestrians’ quality of life and fewer car accidents. But the Journal’s editorial board has put its finger on the Mamdani administration’s hidden agenda: artificially propping up the Teamsters union.

 

“The National Labor Relations Act doesn’t allow sub- and independent contractors to unionize,” the editorial observed. “By banning the subcontractor model, the bill could enable the Teamsters to unionize Amazon drivers and couriers.” That is precisely what Teamsters president Sean O’Brien has sought. So, too, have the nation’s trial lawyers and insurers, as the Journal explains:

 

One goal of the bill is to aid plaintiff attorneys who figure they can obtain bigger legal payouts for accidents from Amazon than they could from its small-business partners. Directly employing subcontractors could also impel Amazon to carry more expensive insurance coverage, which would raise delivery costs.

 

If enacted, at-home delivery services costs in New York City will balloon as the services on which the city’s residents rely become exposed to greater liability. But the law would be a great boon to the unions, public and private sector alike. For Mamdani, a contest between union interests and those of the majority of New Yorkers was no contest at all.

 

Mamdani’s maneuver harkens back to the earliest days of the Biden years. At the outset of his administration, Joe Biden threw his weight behind the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would have overridden state-level Right to Work laws — compelling non-unionized workers to join organized labor outfits or even forcing non-members to contribute a portion of their wages to organizations to which they do not belong.

 

Parts of the PRO Act were consciously modeled on a failed experiment in California: 2019’s Assembly Bill 5. The legislation was ostensibly designed to address the abuses and indignities that accompanied work in the so-called “gig economy.”

 

As Vox conceded at the time, this, too, was a gift to the Teamsters, as well as other service and transportation unions. But the people the law was supposedly designed to help — the drivers that firms like Uber and Lyft recognized as subcontractors — were not impressed. By forcing those and similar firms to reclassify their freelancers as employees, it would have robbed them of the flexibility that attracted them to the “gig” in the first place.

 

The Uber drivers were soon joined in their revolt by the independent writers, photographers, graphic designers, and other creative content producers whom California’s bureaucrats had casually rendered unemployable. “These were never good jobs,” California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez explained to her outraged constituents. They weren’t convinced.

 

Californians soon revolted, securing a proposition on the 2020 ballot that defined “app-based transportation” drivers as independent contractors. The proposition passed with a margin of nearly 3 million votes.

 

So, the problem that so vexes the left persists. Today, less than 10 percent of the nation’s private sector workforce is unionized — the lowest point in a long and steady decline in union membership that began in the 1980s. And although public opinion surveys indicate that Americans like unions, in the abstract, and see declining membership as undesirable, most non-union workers have no interest in joining one.

 

In 2020, the right-leaning pro-union organization American Compass asked non-union workers why they privileged their independence. Fully three-quarters of respondents said that it was the unions’ “political activity” that kept them away. But that’s exactly what Democrats like about organized labor, and it’s why the left will never stop forcing Americans to put their hard-earned cash into union pockets.

 

So, the root of the problem isn’t really the unions at all. Rather, it’s you and your unacceptable attachment to your liberty. Perhaps Mamdani will succeed where Democrats in Washington and Sacramento failed. But Americans have proven stubbornly attached to that whole “pursuit of happiness” thing, irritating though that may be to the haughty socialist technocrats who are convinced that you’re living your life all wrong.

Public Schools Shouldn’t Be Fiefdoms of Government Speech

By Philip Hamburger

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

Parent Justin Jacobsen has had it with Lincoln, Nebraska’s public schools. He’s therefore paid tens of thousands of dollars to educate his youngest children outside the government monopoly. Now, he’s taking legal action against state officials, asking the court to declare unconstitutional the state’s pressure to send his kids to public schools.

 

Today, Jacobsen filed suit in Lancaster County, Nebraska, District Court to preserve his freedom of speech in educating his children. This case heralds a new direction in constitutional jurisprudence that seeks to secure not only parents’ speech rights but also better education for children.

 

Instead of teaching reading, writing, and math skills, public schools are “push[ing] sexual things on kids, which is child abuse and indoctrination,” Jacobsen says. They’re inculcating politically charged messages in students, “put[ting] down police and ICE officers.” As a father who just wants his kids to get a good education, he is “exhausted by the race-baiting narratives” and is troubled by school messaging depicting the United States as “the worst ever.”

 

Americans disagree about such issues, and parents have a right to make their own choice of educational speech for their children. That’s why Jacobsen objects to Nebraska pressuring parents to adopt government education and consequently government viewpoints for educating their kids. And it’s why he’s teamed up with the New Civil Liberties Alliance, where I am the CEO, to bring his legal challenge.

 

Most cases defending parental choice in education focus on parental rights (as in Pierce v. Society of Sisters) and religious liberty (Mahmoud v. Taylor). Those cases don’t center on speech. But all education is speech. That means all parents have a freedom of educational speech in raising their children — a freedom to choose the schooling (whether state, private, or home schooling) they want for their children. When states simultaneously require parents to educate their children and offer cost-free education only at government-run schools, they make state instruction compulsory, unless parents pay to escape the indoctrination. That’s Jacobsen’s problem.

 

In addition to this direct coercion, Nebraska conditions its education funding on parents’ sending their kids to state schools, abandoning their own educational speech and subjecting their children to state speech. Many parents can’t afford to opt out of the inculcation of government viewpoints and so end up submitting.

 

Of course, states don’t have to fund education, public or private. But if they press parents to forsake their own speech and submit their children to government speech, they violate the First Amendment and Nebraska’s free-speech clause.

 

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is a famous equal protection case, but it’s also a conditions case: Brown declared that “the opportunity of an education . . . where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right, which must be made available to all on equal terms.” Public education, in other words, must be available without violating the Fourteenth Amendment — to which it need only be added that such education must be available without the First Amendment.

 

A state cannot pressure parents, either directly or by condition, to give up their educational speech or to adopt government educational speech. Although this has always been true, it’s especially important when states, such as Nebraska, introduce overtly ideological teachings.

 

States can avoid this speech danger in several ways, including vouchers. The point of the suit, however, isn’t to dictate any particular solution, but rather to vindicate parents’ free speech. Once the court has declared that the current system unconstitutionally pressures parents to subject their children to government educational speech, the state legislature can consider whether to adopt vouchers or other policies. At this stage, the point is that the current Nebraska system, like so many in this country, unconstitutionally pressures parents to abandon their choice of educational speech and to adopt government views.

 

The speech claim in this case has the potential to fulfill Brown’s promise of equality. That decision relied on the equal protection clause to end racial segregation in public schools. But it did not end educational inequalities. Nearly three-quarters of a century after Brown, it is time to further break down the barriers to education for all children, whatever their race and whatever their parents’ financial ability — and that includes an education free of government indoctrination.

We Are Being Tested

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

 

Vladimir Putin has never shied away from assassinating Russian critics who have fled to the West. But recent events suggest Moscow is expanding its violation of Western sovereignty in new and volatile ways, and the revelations should change how we view everything from the war in Ukraine to the Middle East conflict to the street protests here at home.

 

Last week, a drone carrying explosive material was discovered near a Ukrainian plane at an airport in eastern Germany. A police bomb squad disarmed it. A second drone was found flying near the airport. It flew right into a landing cargo plane.

 

The term “drone” has a hobbyist’s ring to it, and for a long time the main reason to use a drone was reconnaissance and observation. But a drone with explosives is not a toy plane or a motorized kite. It is a bomb. A Russian bomb was planted at a German airport near a Ukrainian jet. If the implications are true, then that would mean Russia has taken its active war against Ukraine into German territory and planted a bomb in a NATO country.

 

It’s an escalation of an existing strategy. Russia is poking and prodding at NATO’s defenses. “Hybrid attacks are taking place every day in NATO countries,” German Gen. Carsten Breuer told the Wall Street Journal. “Russia is testing us and looking at how we respond.” Moscow is also, he said, “shifting its economy and military to prepare for a wider conflict with the West.”

 

It’s not just Russia. I thought the airport drone was the most important geopolitical story of the past week until I read this one:

 

“Royal Navy spy drones used by Britain’s elite special forces secretly sent data to China, The Telegraph can reveal.

 

“The cameras on the K3 Scout surveillance drones had components made in China which were transmitting information to a device in the country.

 

“The Royal Marines have been using the £12m fleet since March and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was forced to remove all internet connectivity from the cameras after discovering the breach.”

 

So China’s been watching British Special Forces for five months now. That sounds bad enough, but the full picture is probably worse, though we can’t know for sure. After all, how likely is it that this is the only case in which Chinese parts were sending data back home?

 

Testing the West’s defenses this way is typical behavior from the wider China-led bloc. The Iranians, for example, use proxies to prod the good guys and look for weaknesses.

 

Leading up to the October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, the Palestinian government in Gaza wanted to see what Israel’s “smart and lethal” border security system, made up of a high-tech detection system around the border fence, was really made of. The Jerusalem Post described the findings of an Israeli report on the failures: “According to the report, Hamas carried out several test operations on the fence weeks before October 7, using motorcycles, small bridges, and explosives. One key test, conducted one week prior, involved blowing up a structural beam critical to the fence’s integrity. It succeeded. The report states this activity did not trigger an IDF response.”

 

And that’s only the border system. Analysts say that many of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s rocket attacks during that time were meant to test Israel’s missile defense but also to see how the IDF responded: who went where, which bases responded to alarms, about how many soldiers were regularly at these bases, etc. It’s common sense when you think about it—but apparently not enough higher-ups in the Israeli security sector were thinking about it.

 

Iran directly tested Israel’s defenses as well. Some of its missile salvos over the past few years were intended to see what Israel’s shield capacity looked like and what it would take to overwhelm defenses with a swarm of drones and missiles. Iran is also now testing Israel via Hezbollah, which has been using fiber-optic drones against Israeli targets. Such drones are a key component of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and both China and Iran are paying close attention to each innovation in military hardware.

 

Finally, the propaganda campaigns that fuel anti-Western activism are a key part of this as well. These campaigns are intended to isolate members of the alliance of democracies to prevent them from sharing military knowhow and intelligence the way the China-Russia-Iran axis is. It’s why pro-China activists and political figures argue against arming Ukraine. It’s also why anti-Israel activists want to make the Jewish state radioactive: to hamstring countries like Germany from obtaining the best defenses against Russian attacks.

 

The United States is the leader of the alliance that stands in the way of a new authoritarian hegemony over the global economy. We should be clear-eyed about the motives of those seeking to drive a wedge between us and our allies.

The Decoys

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, August 13, 2026

 

I’m surprised at how much attention the president’s deception at last month’s NATO summit in Turkey has gotten this week, but I shouldn’t be.

 

I’m surprised because Donald Trump engages in lots of deceptions, and few are as defensible as the one he perpetrated in Ankara. In an administration that churns out a new Watergate-tier scandal every few weeks, the president secretly switching planes to avoid a possible attack barely warrants comment.

 

According to the Washington Post, Trump boarded Air Force One to depart the summit on July 8 … and then, along with a few select aides, quietly sneaked out through a rear exit and into the container of an idling Turkish catering van. (There’s video, sort of.) He was driven across the tarmac to another U.S. military plane assigned to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and boarded surreptitiously. Both planes then flew to the United Kingdom. Upon arrival, the president sneaked back onto Air Force One and disembarked in front of the cameras to create the impression that he had been aboard the entire time.

 

Then he boarded the luxe new jet that he was gifted by the government of Qatar—aka the flying bribe—for the trip home.

 

Presidents have concealed their whereabouts from the public before for the sake of foiling terrorists, including turning Air Force One into a decoy while they flew in less conspicuous aircraft. And there was evidence of terrorism afoot in this case, it turns out. “U.S. and Israeli intelligence in July had uncovered a threat by Iranian proxies to launch a lightweight, shoulder-fired missile at Trump’s plane as he departed Ankara,” sources told the Wall Street Journal.

 

The CIA was reportedly skeptical of the plot, but two U.S. officials alleged to the New York Times that “someone in the vicinity of the NATO summit had been spotted with a shoulder-fired missile. And the Iranians knew specifically where Mr. Trump was staying in Ankara, including which floor of the building.” If the Secret Service had allowed the president to depart in Air Force One and the plane had been shot down, how would the agency possibly have justified disregarding that intelligence?

 

Its subterfuge was appropriate. At least one person aboard the decoy flight, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, evidently was aware of the threat and of the fact that the president had secretly switched planes. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was also on board and “likely aware,” an official told the Associated Press. It’s unclear whether other high-ranking passengers like advisers Stephen Miller and Steven Cheung knew the stakes, but either way, this wasn’t a case of VIPs being spared from risking their own necks while the rest of the presidential retinue was in danger.

 

There were, however, people aboard Air Force One—many, it seems—who were left in the dark about the risk. “The clandestine mission … was carried out unbeknownst to journalists and some White House staff members who believed they were on the same plane as the president,” the Washington Post reported. All were unwitting decoys. To maximize operational secrecy and better protect his own life, Trump was willing to risk theirs.

 

On the flight home from Britain, Trump spoke to reporters about potential Iranian threats to his plane without revealing the deception he’d just engaged in. “If I go, you go, right?” he half-joked about a midair disaster. “Perhaps someday you want to change professions.” But that too was a deception: If a missile had taken down Air Force One as it departed from Ankara, they would have been gone but he would not have.

 

And so you can understand why I say that I shouldn’t be surprised by how much coverage this incident has received. Not only does it involve the media’s favorite subject—i.e., the media, which was unknowingly placed in harm’s way by the leader of the free world—but it’s one of those memorable little vignettes that we get sometimes during presidencies that seem (emphasis on seem) to illuminate something essential about the occupant of the office.

 

Callousness, not cowardice.

 

The most famous example during my lifetime is Jimmy Carter’s run-in with a “killer rabbit” while vacationing back home in Georgia in 1979. That episode was promoted by Republicans as evidence that Carter was a wimp and a hapless clown; the then-president, an Annapolis grad who had specialized in nuclear technology during his military service, was neither.

 

But it jibed with the public’s sense that Carter was a weak leader overmatched by the threats America faced. And so the incident became a popular shorthand for the impotence of his administration.

 

A similar problem befell George H.W. Bush in 1992 when he had a run-in with, er, supermarket technology. During an appearance at a grocers convention in Florida, Bush was supposedly amazed to discover that items could be rung up instantaneously via a barcode scanner—or so a story in the Times alleged. Other reporters on the scene claimed they saw no such amazement and were backed up by eyewitnesses. Bush himself complained about the allegation to the Times.

 

No matter. The story conveniently corroborated the Democratic narrative that our wealthy, WASPy, patrician president could no longer relate to average Americans, who were still licking their wounds from the recession the previous year. And so the incident became a popular shorthand for Bush being “out of touch.”

 

The episode with Trump’s decoy plane strikes me as being in the same vein. It’s memorable because it confirms in an unusually vivid and succinct way something that his critics already discerned in his political persona—even though, as with Carter and Bush, reaction to it hasn’t been entirely fair.

 

For instance, some are treating the plane incident as an insight into the president’s alleged cowardice. I understand the impulse. He’s a five-time draft dodger, after all, and his endless blowhardery about “strength” and “toughness” does not sit comfortably with the image of him hiding from Iranians inside a Turkish catering van.

 

At The Atlantic, Tom Nichols went as far as to compare Trump’s behavior to that of Greg Stillson, the villainous politician whose career is ruined when he shields himself from an assassin by hiding behind a small child in Stephen King’s novel The Dead Zone. Stillson was willing to see an innocent die so that he might live; so was Trump vis-a-vis the White House press corps in Ankara, Nichols notes.

 

The problem with that analogy is that the president has already been through a Stillson-esque assassination attempt and didn’t reach for a child. On the contrary: The poise he exhibited, famously pumping his fist and shouting “fight, fight, fight!” as he bled from a wound to his ear, is now such an exalted part of the Trumpian mythos that he reportedly considered placing a replica of his fist atop the victory arch that he intends to build in Virginia.

 

After that episode, I doubt most Americans perceive cowardice as a key component of his persona. Even if they do, I don’t think taking a sensible precaution like switching planes against a terror plot is evidence of it, however amusing it might be to imagine him squeezed between racks of kebabs in the back of that truck. Prudence isn’t cowardly.

 

The Trumpian trait that the switcheroo demonstrates isn’t cowardice, it’s callous selfishness. Why weren’t the press members aboard told that the threat they faced on Air Force One was severe enough that the president and Secret Service deemed it unsafe? They were told when Bill Clinton pulled a similar switcheroo in 2000.

 

“They would have blabbed!” you might say. True—after Trump’s plane had landed safely in Britain. Reporters are willing to delay publishing information (or to withhold certain details altogether) if doing otherwise would credibly threaten national security. There’s no reason to think they would have endangered Trump deliberately by revealing his whereabouts while he was still in harm’s way. Or no good reason, I should say: If you’re the sort of populist who wears “Rope, tree, journalist: Some assembly required” T-shirts, you’ll believe anything.

 

“The press would have obliged the ground rules” of secrecy if Trump had told them about the threat, former Pentagon spokesman John Kirby assured the Wall Street Journal. “The last thing they would ever want to do is put anyone’s lives at risk, and in this case even their own. They also deserved—as did the unwitting staffers on the plane—the opportunity to make alternative travel plans. It is unconscionable that aircrew and passengers were allowed to fly in that aircraft at that particular moment, ignorant of the danger they were in.”

 

Had reporters been warned of the threat, they could have stayed behind on the ground while Air Force One took off with only the crew (and officials like Rubio, if they were willing to risk it) aboard. The decoy ruse still would have worked. The media stragglers could have flown home later commercially or on some other government plane.

 

Why they weren’t given that option is anyone’s guess, but there are three obvious possibilities, none of which reflects well on Trump. Maybe he convinced himself that they really would blab if they knew the truth and therefore they had to be deceived—even if they ended up dying en masse. Or maybe his malice toward the media is such that, if his valued deputies were obliged to face the risk of death aboard Air Force One, he wanted his enemies in the press to face it too.

 

My guess, though, is that he didn’t think about it at all. A plan was devised to protect him, and keeping it as secret as possible would maximize its chances of succeeding. That’s all he needed to know. Who cares what his safety meant for anyone else, be it Rubio, Miller, or the White House press corps?

 

Callousness, not cowardice. That’s the selfish core of Trump’s persona and that’s why this episode is illuminating and memorable.

 

What if?

 

That also makes it difficult to write about thoughtfully. There’s no truism in American politics in 2026 as self-evident as “The president is callous.” What’s left to say about it?

 

You’ll find examples literally anywhere you look. For instance, according to the Wall Street Journal, the White House has begun pressuring the Justice Department to resume prosecuting the man whom U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro recently cleared of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Trump is obviously angry that he’s been denied a scapegoat for the pool’s botched renovation and just as obviously feels no qualms about putting an innocent man through a legal ordeal if doing so will help Trump save face.

 

It’s a straight line from that mindset to putting other people’s lives in jeopardy to improve one’s own chances of departing Turkey safely.

 

Or how about what the president has done to the National Guard, which has now been deployed in Washington, D.C., for a full year and is set to remain there until the end of Trump’s term? Crime is down in the city—but crime is down in lots of American cities and was trending downward in D.C. long before the Guard arrived. According to best estimates, the military’s presence has somewhat reduced property crimes like car break-ins in the heavily trafficked tourist areas where the Guard is mostly stationed, but it’s done nothing at all to bring down the sort of violent crime in rough neighborhoods that supposedly justified the deployment in the first place.

 

All of which means that Guardsmen are spending long stretches away from their day jobs and their families to perform drudgery like picking up trash, mowing grass, and shoveling snow, all so that the president can enjoy a bit of law-and-order “dictator theater” in his backyard. Pure callousness.

 

And none of this touches on the sort of meta-callousness Trump routinely displays by obsessing over pet projects like ballrooms and monuments instead of public priorities like the cost of living.

 

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman recently recounted interviewing Trump in March, when the new war was raging, and finding him consumed by photos of maple trees he hoped to plant on the White House grounds rather than by battle plans or regional maps. One new analysis of the president’s many public statements this year found that, apart from Iran, he’s devoted more words to his construction plans than to any other subject. More than to the economy. And much, much more than to immigration.

 

The decoy incident reminded me of something that Anthony Scaramucci, who’s known Trump for years and was (very) briefly his White House communications director, said about him back in 2019. “He is so narcissistic, he doesn’t see people as people. He sees them as objects in his field of vision. And so therefore, that’s why he has no empathy,” he observed. “If you and I were in his field of vision and he had a cold and the two of us had to die for him to get a Kleenex, you’re f—ing dead.”

 

If a bunch of unwitting decoys on Air Force One had to die for him to leave Turkey safely, they were f—ing dead.

 

We’re left with this question: What if they had died? What if the plane had been shot down, killing everyone aboard, and Trump had been forced to explain why he didn’t warn them before they took off?

 

Why did Trump’s closest cronies, like Dan Scavino and Natalie “The Human Printer” Harp, get to abscond with him in the catering truck and secretly board Hegseth’s plane while others weren’t so lucky? Harp was Trump’s “first pick” to join him in his aerial lifeboat, a source told the Daily Mail. Why not Miller, a father of four children whose latest is 2 months old?

 

My guess is that the president would have glibly answered the criticism with something along the lines of what he told reporters on the flight home from Britain: Perhaps they all should have changed professions.

 

Back in 2015, when he first ran for office, Trump was asked about his affinity for Vladimir Putin by Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough. How can you respect someone “that kills journalists that don’t agree with him,” Scarborough wondered. “Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe,” an unfazed Trump replied.

 

He may have tried to minimize an Air Force One shootdown with similar deflections. Journalists die all the time. They pride themselves on taking dangerous risks to get a story, don’t they? Would it have been better if I had died on the plane with them? Why aren’t we talking about the late, great Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller?

 

None of which would explain why he didn’t give the passengers the courtesy of a heads-up and the option to stay behind.

 

Even so, and needless to say, he would receive the full-throated support of his party in spinning the incident. Amid the inevitable calls for a full ground invasion of Iran to “avenge Marco,” Republican politicians would feel obliged by a faint sense of decorum to pay lip service to the reporters who were sent to their deaths. But much of the “rope, tree, journalist” postliberal base would openly celebrate the media bloodletting, treating it as a silver lining in a tragedy that had taken immortal American hero Stephen Miller far too young.

 

And from top to bottom, all arms of the party would agree that the president’s survival was further proof of his ordination by God to lead America for as long as possible.

 

Before long, the “Trump hid the threat of a terrorist attack from its victims to protect himself” story would become just one more scandal that divides neatly along partisan lines before being ushered out of the news by some new Watergate-tier travesty. Within a few weeks, hardly anyone would remember it.

 

The thing about callousness is that you get used to it. And once you get used to it, you barely notice it at all.

A Better Approach to the Firearms Law Dispute

National Review Online

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

The Trump administration has announced that it does not intend to file an appeal in the case of Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF (consolidated with Jensen v. ATF). At stake in that litigation was whether the federal government is constitutionally permitted to require that those who obtain suppressors, short-barreled rifles (SBRs), and short-barreled shotguns (SBSs) must first register them with the ATF. Since 1934, that has been the law of the land. As of this week, it is not — for some Americans, at least. What happens next? Nobody is quite sure.

 

The court’s reasoning is thoroughly persuasive, and we will shed no tears over the weakening of some of the NFA’s least defensible elements. But this case has played out in a way that undermines the stability and predictability of the law. The best course now is for the Trump administration to appeal the decision so that a higher court can affirm that ruling more definitively.

 

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas’s ruling rests upon a change to the law that Congress made last year. Since 1934, those who have taken possession of suppressors, SBRs, and SBSs have been obliged to pay — and to prove that they had paid — a $200 tax. In 2025, however, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” zeroed out that tax. That zeroing out presented the federal government with a serious problem. Historically, the registration requirements in the NFA had been constitutionally justified under Congress’s power to tax. In 1937, for example, in Sonzinsky v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the $200 registration fee on the ground that, “as it is not attended by an offensive regulation, and since it operates as a tax, it is within the national taxing power.” But since 2025, certain items within the NFA no longer require the $200 registration fee, and, in consequence, the registration requirement is no longer “within the national taxing power.” Because the Constitution grants only a small number of enumerated powers to the federal government, this raised the question of under what power they could plausibly be justified going forward — a question that the District Court concluded had no satisfactory answer.

 

The court’s analysis is sound. Under Supreme Court precedent, an essential feature of a tax is that it produces at least some revenue for the government; a tax set at $0 produces none. As the decision confirms, taxes in other laws cannot be deemed to be part of the same regulatory scheme without handing Congress an impermissible general police power. And, for once, the malleable commerce clause cannot supply a justification, because the NFA’s text, structure, placement in the tax code, and statutory history show that Congress enacted the challenged provisions under the taxing power alone — unlike other federal gun laws that have been expressly tied to interstate commerce. Thus, the Court concluded, those provisions must be struck down.

 

So far, so good. And yet the result of this ruling is not as clear as it would be had it been issued by, say, the Supreme Court. The enforcement prohibition applied “against the Jensen plaintiffs and, where applicable, their members and customers.” In short: Some parts of the NFA have been struck down, in some places, for some people.

 

What should the federal government do in response to this mess? It could, in theory, decline to appeal the ruling and then decline to enforce those parts of the law everywhere, against all people. But, because there is no guarantee that the next administration would follow suit, that approach could yield a situation in which some of America’s most potent gun laws are in force only when a Democrat sits in the White House. That way lies chaos.

 

Nor do conservatives have much to gain from the habit of willfully leaving lower court orders in place. In this case, the policy outcome is salutary. But, as President Trump’s two presidencies have ably shown, the Democrats have far more to gain than the Republicans from treating the edicts of random court — or, more typically, deliberately forum-shopped court — as if they represented final national injunctions. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas is not the Supreme Court, or even the Fifth Circuit. By declining to take the case up the usual jurisprudential ladder — and thereby elevating this decision into something that it is manifestly not — the Trump administration is furthering a trend that, in other circumstances, it has rightly decried.

 

There have, in American history, been a handful of circumstances in which it was acceptable for a federal administration to decline to defend a federal law. This does not rise to that level. The litigation is too new, the court that issued the injunction is too small, the confusion caused by the ruling is too great. Odd as it might seem, the best way for the Trump administration to put this fine ruling on a firmer footing is to challenge it.