Americans Deserve the Slush-Fund Obscenity

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, May 21, 2026

 

For a Never Trumper, watching the insurrection play out on January 6 was confusing. I was surprised by what was happening—and surprised that I was surprised.

 

The essence of the confusion was this: I did not expect to be this right.

 

Many other Dispatch conservatives doubtless felt the same. You knew a Donald Trump presidency would be a calamity, but surely not on the order of fascist goons hunting the vice president inside the Capitol during an unfolding coup plot.

 

I feel the same confusion about the slush fund the president has cooked up to remunerate those goons. We knew Trump 2.0 would be a civic catastrophe, much worse than Trump 1.0 was.

 

But I did not expect that we would be this right.

 

One might assume that a taxpayer-funded payday for criminals wouldn’t look worse as details emerged, the concept already being as rotten as rotten gets. One would be wrong. For instance, did you know that the part of the settlement that bars the IRS from proceeding with any pending audits of the president’s tax returns might be worth more than $100 million to him?

 

Trump, a billionaire, paid a total of $750 in income tax in 2016 and $750 again in 2017. The taxman will henceforth take no notice of that fact.

 

Did you also know that, under federal law, the only official empowered to ask the IRS to terminate an audit is the attorney general? That was a problem for Trump in this case, per Andy McCarthy: Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche used to be the president’s personal defense lawyer, and lawyers are supposed to recuse themselves in cases pitting their current client against a former one.

 

Blanche had an obvious conflict of interest. He ignored it and nuked Trump’s tax audits anyway.

 

Meanwhile, it turns out that the Justice Department didn’t bother to define the term “weaponization of government” in the instrument that created the fund, never mind that that’s the criterion for eligibility to receive money from it. Among the many miscreants now claiming to be a victim for its purposes are Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted by a jury of seditious conspiracy related to the insurrection and sentenced to 22 years before Trump sprung him from prison.

 

He’s hoping to be compensated for that “weaponization” to the tune of somewhere between $2 million and $5 million. “I’m not greedy,” he assured Reuters, “but my life was all f—ed up because of this."

 

Another likely applicant is the cable news outlet One America News Network, which settled multiple defamation suits stemming from its 2020 “rigged election” propaganda on the president’s behalf. It’s not clear how the federal government was “weaponized” against OAN, but that’s the beauty of the DOJ declining to explain itself. “Weaponization” can mean whatever Trump wants it to mean to justify letting MAGA stooges put their hands in the taxpayer cookie jar.

 

Again, I did not expect that we would be this right.

 

I also did not expect to feel a dark sense of justice in this obscene national humiliation, something that was absent on January 6. Without meaning to, the president has become an agent of moral retribution against the many Americans who’ve enabled him.

 

An alternate morality.

 

The thing about the slush fund is that it’s unapologetically indefensible, more so than anything Trump has done in his second term, I think.

 

His other major sins can be rationalized without resorting to blatant immorality. Fighting an unauthorized war with Iran? The regime was moving toward nuclear weapons. Starting a trade war with the whole planet? We urgently need to rebuild American industry. Goonish ICE tactics and National Guard deployments in blue cities? Someone needs to crack down on crime. Rampant personal corruption? No one’s being harmed by it. Everyone peddles influence in Washington.

 

There’s no way to rationalize using taxpayer money to make criminals rich.

 

The only way to do so is irrational. Only if you believe that the voices in the president’s head telling him that the 2020 election was rigged are correct might you conclude that the people who stormed the Capitol to try to unrig it did nothing immoral. But even that’s tricky. Letting them out of prison wasn’t enough? They deserve to be millionaires, too? Including the ones who beat cops?

 

When CNN put that question to Todd Blanche, the best he could do was whimper, “Just to be clear, people that hurt police get money all the time.”

 

There’s simply no spinning it. The closest thing I’ve seen to a defense of the fund that doesn’t amount to “yay, insurrection” comes from the DOJ itself—namely, that a similar settlement fund for Native American farmers was created during the Obama administration. But as Ed Whelan explained, that wasn’t analogous: The class of applicants was clearly defined, the settlement was approved by a court, and the beneficiaries didn’t abet the president in a plot to overthrow the duly elected incoming government.

 

What makes the slush fund so difficult to defend is that it proves in an unusually stark way that Trumpism isn’t so much a political program as it is an alternate morality.

 

I’ve made that point before repeatedly. Many Americans have come to the same conclusion, I suspect, which may explain why the United States is now the only major country where a majority of the people rate the morals and ethics of their countrymen as bad. Late-stage Trumpism has virtually no ideological content beyond the president’s momentary whims, as Iran doves would eagerly tell you. The true essence of his political program is captured in this paragraph from the New York Times’ new editorial about the fund (aptly titled “There Has Never Been an Example of Presidential Corruption Like This”):

 

It is worth pausing to put the fund into the larger context of Mr. Trump’s political project: He is destroying pillars of American democracy to empower himself. He claims elections are legitimate only if he wins. He uses federal law enforcement to investigate and prosecute his perceived enemies. He purges his party of officials who defy him. He describes members of the other party and civil society as traitors and enemies. He incentivizes his supporters to break the law on his behalf and rewards them when they do. He directs his allies to change election rules to keep his party in power.

 

For most of my life, the scourge of conservatism—in particular its Christian adherents—was moral relativism. Trump is moral relativism personified. Whether an action is right or wrong, good or evil, depends entirely on whether one benefits from it or not.

 

The slush fund is the ne plus ultra of that belief. A group of paranoid cretins bent on installing a right-wing dictatorship committed crimes, and they’re going to be rewarded for it with the American people’s money. It’s simple theft designed to induce support for future fascist assaults on the social contract. You can’t defend the fund without endorsing that as a morally just outcome, and you can’t endorse that as a morally just outcome without ridding yourself of conventional morality.

 

After four years of hard lessons, “respectable” Republicans had every reason to know what they were enabling when they chose to return Trump to office in 2024. Now he’s force-feeding them an immense sh-t sandwich in the form of looting the Treasury to reward his nastiest henchmen, behavior beneath the dignity of even a banana republic, and they don’t know what to say.

 

How can any decent person not relish watching them choke on it?

 

When bad things happen to bad people.

 

As I said earlier, all of this has created a strange (and ironic) dynamic in which the president is acting unwittingly as an instrument of retribution against his own political accomplices.

 

“Retribution” has been one of his favorite words since he introduced the term at CPAC in 2023 as the unofficial theme of his next presidential campaign. MAGA flunky Steve Bannon was so enamored of it that he took to referring to the address as Trump’s “Come Retribution” speech, repurposing a coded phrase used by Confederates in a plot to kill Abraham Lincoln.

 

The president doesn’t actually care about retribution, though. He cares about revenge.

 

“Retribution” is an element of justice, the idea that the guilty must pay—but only what they owe. It’s typically used in relation to offenses against society writ large, i.e. crimes; the punishment is assessed dispassionately and must be proportionate to be just. “Revenge” doesn’t care about proportionality, though, and it sure ain’t dispassionate. It’s an emotionally cathartic act of reprisal against some personal wrong.

 

You tell me: Which word better describes Trump’s campaign to imprison hated enemy James Comey for posting a photo of seashells or to hunt down the perpetrators of a grand election-rigged conspiracy at his expense that exists only in his own imagination?

 

Trump likes the term “retribution” because it carries a moral legitimacy that “revenge,” the thing he’s actually obsessed with, doesn’t. But that’s precisely why it’s the proper word to describe what his slush fund is visiting upon the various right-wingers who made it possible, especially those in the federal government. They deserve to suffer through this travesty, and they are.

 

The creeps at the mafia law firm we call “the Justice Department” deserve the humiliation of having to defend the fund. The thought of Blanche spending the next two and a half years answering questions at every press conference about insurrectionists buying Porsches with American tax dollars is delightful.

 

John Roberts and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court deserve the anguish of watching Trump’s crime spree play out unchecked, knowing that they encouraged it. Their 2024 decision that presidents are immune from prosecution for actions taken while executing their core powers was destined to incentivize a sociopath to behave with a sense of impunity, as was obvious even at the time. “Instead of taking heart from this ruling that he can carry out his duties vigorously and conscientiously without fear of being assailed by dubious prosecutions,” I predicted, a newly reelected Trump would “take heart from it that he can behave as reprehensibly as he likes without fear of being assailed by meritorious prosecutions.” And so he has.

 

Republicans in Congress deserve the political dilemma of whether to oppose the slush fund or not.

 

It speaks volumes about how loathsome the fund is that even the pitiful slumbering consciences of the Senate GOP have reportedly been roused by it. But they made this bed: More so than even the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, their cowardly paralysis since January 20 of last year convinced the president that he had a blank check for corruption from the legislature that his party controls. They gave him every reason to believe that he could, if he liked, open the vault at Fort Knox and send in the Capitol rioters to load up with as many gold bars as their wheelbarrows could carry.

 

And, essentially, that’s what he did.

 

If congressional Republicans end up looking the other way at that, they’ll enrage swing voters in an already terrible campaign environment. If they take action against it, they’ll enrage Trump and his pro-crime base. My guess is that they’ll try to split the baby, absurdly attempting to impose “restrictions” on the fund instead of repealing it outright. The proper response to a presidential plot to knock over Fort Knox, you see, is to declare that only some insurrectionists should be allowed to cart off some of the gold.

 

The punch line is that Trump will end up ignoring Congress anyway, misappropriating money to pay out whatever he likes from the fund and justifying it with thoughtful arguments like “something something unitary executive.” Republicans won’t do a thing in response.

 

Retribution, as I’ve said, is the idea that the guilty must pay and that their punishment should fit the crime. The intense disgrace that this slush fund is inflicting upon every Republican who conspired to make it possible—all of whom ignored endless warnings from the president’s critics that his second term would be a civic Chernobyl—is a fitting penalty. For once, Trump is Never Trumpers’ retribution.

 

Retribution against America?

 

It would be nice to be able to argue that the fund is also a form of retribution against the MAGA rank-and-file, but that’s a hard case to make. In what way are they being punished here, exactly?

 

“Shame”? Please. If they end up taking any issue with handing out bags of cash to insurrectionists, it will be that the payouts weren’t big enough.

 

If grassroots populists suffer any retribution from this, it will be having to watch their party lose by a bigger margin than expected in November. The slush fund is one of those scandals that’s so breathtakingly morally offensive that it might plausibly break containment among political junkies and reach the general public. People who are paying $4.50 a gallon for gas will not like seeing their tax dollars used to compensate George Santos and Rod Blagojevich for the government having so rudely insisted upon prosecuting them for their crimes.

 

But let’s not give the general American public too much moral credit. If gas were at $2.50 and the economy were roaring along, with no standoff in the Strait of Hormuz to slow it down, how much outrage would there be about the slush fund? How anxious would congressional Republicans be to show that they won’t stand for it?

 

One would like to think that the fund is so searing a humiliation for the United States that it would galvanize a civic backlash even in good times, but we already ran that experiment in 2024. Americans will elect a president who’s given every indication that he’ll damage the country terribly once in power, it turns out, if he makes it worth their while financially.

 

If the slush fund ends up hurting Republicans at the polls in November, that will be why. It’s not that it’s grotesquely corrupt, it’s that voters expected something in return for ignoring his corruption. They’re okay with the president, his cronies, and even his insurrectionist soldiers making out like bandits. But only if they’re making out like bandits, too.

 

The fact that they’ve gotten nothing but inflation, tariffs, and spiraling gas prices for their trouble is another form of unwitting presidential retribution. Let the punishment fit the crime.

The Kafkaesque Trial Facing Israel and Its Supporters

By Benjamin Kerstein

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

It is quite common for defenders of Israel to preface their statements with the phrase, “Israel isn’t a perfect country,” which is true, as far as it goes, but rather misses the point. Given the blizzard of defamation and demonization that surrounds the Jewish state, the issue is not whether Israel is perfect, but whether it is as imperfect as its enemies claim.

 

The answer is self-evident, because no country could be as imperfect as Israel’s enemies claim. Even Nazi Germany, perhaps the one completely uncomplicated case of an outright demonic regime, was only charged (rightly) with wanting to take over the world, whereas Israel is regularly charged with having already taken over the world. Demonization can only be taken so far before it takes on a distinct quality of the ludicrous.

 

This simple fact was demonstrated once again last week when the New York Times published Nicholas Kristof’s impossibly long opinion column (tellingly, it was not published in the news section), charging that Israel systemically sexually abuses Palestinian prisoners, including through the physical impossibility of trained rape dogs.

 

Regarding the piece itself, Israeli journalist Amit Segal has made short work of it. Kristof’s column draws on 14 unverified accounts, each of which lacks “details that would allow for investigation, verification, or refutation, to claim that systemic sexual abuse is widespread throughout the Israeli prison system,” Segal reports, referencing a Hebrew-language analysis by Israeli academic Danny Orbach. For comparison, in 2020, “approximately 16,000 complaints of sexual assault and harassment by guards against prisoners were recorded in the United States, with only a tiny fraction proven to be based on real incidents.”

 

Kristof’s column also relies on several testimonies provided by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a nongovernmental organization that Israel accuses of having links to Hamas. The NGO has a history of trafficking in unverified anti-Israel conspiracy theories, including “suspicions” that the Israeli military harvests the organs of Palestinians and invented a weapon that “evaporates” its victims’ bodies. Euro-Med’s chairman, Ramy Abdu, expressed support for Hamas’ October 7, 2023, massacre, and its board chairman, Richard Falk, has long flirted with 9/11 “truther” conspiracy theories, hinting that the attacks may have been an inside job led by American neoconservatives. In the presence of such witnesses, skepticism, at the very least, is warranted.

 

Yet there was apparently no scrutiny of Euro-Med’s claims on the part of Kristof or the New York Times. There are many reasons for this. The Times has become increasingly anti-Zionist and arguably antisemitic in recent years. For example, it published a Peter Beinart column calling for Israel’s dissolution and replacement with a vaguely defined binational state, was heavily criticized for running a remarkable quantity of stories hostile to New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, and has been accused of whitewashing New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s antisemitism. It is not impossible that its staff either wanted to believe Kristof’s story or did not believe it but printed it anyway for political purposes.

 

As for Kristof, he is a professional moralist—not always wrongly—tackling such topics as human trafficking, mass slaughter in Darfur, the dangers of pornography, and similar issues. As worthwhile as some of his other work may be, however, Kristof could not possibly have passed up the chance to once again play the denunciatory prophet. This predilection has gotten Kristof into trouble before, as when he hailed nurse Greg Mortenson for building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, only to see Mortenson exposed as a fraud. Under such circumstances, the phrase “don’t bother me with the facts” is an apt one.

 

Indeed, in this regard, it is important to acknowledge that not everything in Kristof’s article may be untrue. Certainly, the self-evidently mad charge that Israel trains dogs to rape prisoners is telling, but abuses happen in every prison system, and some of the claims made may be at least vaguely accurate. The point, however, is that, given the provenance of the reporting and the biases of the venue, there is no compelling and certainly no coercive reason to believe that any of it is accurate. This means that, contrary to the intentions of the accusers, the accusations, in and of themselves, bear no evidentiary or moral weight whatsoever.

 

In many ways, however, the accuracy or inaccuracy of the article itself is not the central issue. It is important, to be sure, but the purpose of such attacks is not to prove or disprove anything. It is to bury the reader beneath an avalanche of accusations, leaving critics to spend hours and months trying to unpack and disprove each one. Meanwhile, TikTok and similar platforms have transformed the dubious into the factual within milliseconds.

 

All of this underscores the ease with which guilt by accusation can be asserted in today’s media landscape. It is this landscape that is all-important in regard to Israel, because it constitutes something like a mechanism, an enormous engine whose sole purpose is to manufacture and disseminate the most barbarous and defamatory lies with the ultimate goal of delegitimizing and destroying the Jewish state.

 

Segal himself notes how this is done, writing, “[Kristof’s] interviewees, of course, were not found or selected by chance. This raises the question: who was Kristof’s ‘fixer’? Reporters who do not know the language almost always rely on local fixers, and Kristof claims he found the interviewees through ‘human rights organizations,’ which Orbach suggests points to a preplanned direction by Euro-Med or its ilk.”

 

None of this is new. There was the notorious “Jenin massacre” scandal of 2002, in which Palestinians and their supporters charged that Israel had killed hundreds of civilians in an operation in the West Bank city of Jenin during Operation Defensive Shield. Widely reported as true at the time, the charge was so conclusively debunked that even the United Nations, despite its longstanding hostility to the Jewish state, was forced to admit it was a lie.

 

More recently, there was the 2023 Al-Ahli Hospital bombing, the result of a misfired Palestinian rocket that was, initially, blamed on Israel by the Times and the global media as a whole. This is not even to speak of the “genocide” blood libel now parroted by the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, which began when Israeli military operations had barely started in 2023. Such libels stretch back to the beginning of Israeli history, indeed to the origins of Zionism itself, with the endlessly repeated charge that a Jewish liberation movement was, in fact, a “colonialist,” “imperialist,” “racist,” and “genocidal” endeavor.

 

Another cause for concern is the timing of Kristof’s article, which was published a day before the release of a meticulously documented Israeli report on Hamas’ rampant sexual violence during the October 7 massacre. This was not a coincidence. The goal was very likely to distract attention from the report, thus exonerating Hamas by default, and then to prove that, at the very least, Israel is as bad as Hamas.

 

Kristof was not subtle in this regard. Throughout his piece, he compares the alleged Israeli abuses to Hamas’ proven atrocities, implying equivalence if not the greater infamy of the former. He ends with the peroration: “Think of it this way: The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day.” There is little to be said about such a statement, except that, even if everything Kristof claims is true, it is a monstrous thing to say. All atrocities are, after all, incommensurable. But Kristof not only rejects this axiom, he also elevates one atrocity at the expense of the other and the alleged at the expense of the proven.

 

The mechanism that generated all this and more puts one in mind of Josef K.’s statement to the court in Franz Kafka’s The Trial: “There can be no doubt that behind all the pronouncements of this court, and in my case, behind the arrest and today’s inquiry, there exists an extensive organization.”

 

Today, the trial is conducted by a global tribunal, composed of media outlets like the New York Times as well as Muslim organizations, progressive “activists,” prominent NGOs, international institutions of all kinds, and innumerable social and cultural influencers. As in the case of Kristof’s article, these forces manufacture lies, gather the “evidence” to “prove” those lies, corral and coach “witnesses,” collate the “proof,” funnel it to journalists either gullible or malicious, and then disseminate the defamation worldwide. There is a reason, after all, why stories like Kristof’s, and numerous others like the “Jenin massacre” and the Al-Ahli bombing, only go in one direction.

 

This mechanism is not a conspiracy because it does not require conspiracy. It is simply a pervasive culture of hate, neither secret nor occluded, that acts in tandem because all who are party to it agree on the most essential point, which is the demonic nature of Israel and the Jews and the necessity of marginalizing and ghettoizing both.

 

For Israelis and Jews, this has terrible results. As in Kafka’s novel, our trial is for an infinite crime and it has no end. The result is a constant and psychologically exhausting atmosphere of defamation. We feel the world closing in around us, threatening to bury us under the sheer force of its hate, and we know that, out of the mechanism’s industrial-level incitement, violence will come. We remember the killing of Israeli embassy workers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim; the firebombing murder of pro-Israel protester Karen Diamond in Boulder, Colorado; the horrific Bondi Beach shooting that killed 15 people; and too many similar atrocities to live under any illusions.

 

I have no doubt that, because of Kristof’s article, there will be more politicians bloviating against Israel and the Jews, more hate rallies outside synagogues, more assaults on individual Jews and Jewish communities, and ultimately, more terrorism and more murder.

 

There is also the terrible wrong done to those who object to the defamation. We are charged with unfairly attacking good and honest people because those people “criticize Israeli policies.” The anguish this causes can hardly be exaggerated. First, it effectively charges us all with arguing in bad faith and outright lying for craven political reasons. Second, it gaslights and isolates us, because while Jews may be ignorant of many things, one thing we do know, with terrible intimacy, is antisemitism. Finally, because guilt is always presumed by accusation, it seeks to force us to “defend the indefensible,” even when the “indefensible” is a damnable lie.

 

All of this takes a terrible emotional toll. I have seen Jews rage in frustration, weep in anguish, and at times simply sit in despair at the constant barrage of hate to which the mechanism subjects us. One friend said to me, “I don’t know how to live in this world anymore.” We wonder not only whether the world can be wrong and the Jews right, but whether the world is, in some essential way, evil. This is a terrible burden to carry, and yet the mechanism presumes, in its arrogance, that we should carry it forever.

 

I do not think that we will consent to carry it forever. Sooner or later, the Jews will not stand for it. In a hopeful sign, a protest was recently held outside the New York Times building in response to Kristof’s article. It was attended by only a few hundred people, but it was passionate, strident, and uncompromising. I hope that protest is the seed of something larger, a movement of denunciation and dissent that will, at long last, stop up the gears of the mechanism and bring some relief to its beleaguered victims.

The Issue Is the Revolution

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

 

Paraphrasing a “radical” associated with the 1960s-era Students for a Democratic Society, the late David Horowitz once said of the activists’ outlook: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

 

That quote came to mind when I heard a nauseating diatribe from a handful of women who showed up at a Manhattan courthouse on Monday in support of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024.

 

The three activists, who described themselves as “Mangionistas,” seemed to revel in the taboos they were violating. They were thrilled at the degree to which their antisocial celebration of this act of human sacrifice and the pain that reverberates from it shocked their audience. Indeed, the activists took turns one-upping one another in a ghoulish contest to see which of them could more profoundly offend the sensibilities of their well-adjusted spectators:

 

“I’m saying fuck Brian Thompson. I don’t give a flying fuck he died,” says Ashley Rojas, wearing her press badge provided by @NYCMayorsOffice. Lena Weissbrot adds that Thompson’s teenage sons “are better off without him” and should “enjoy the blood money.” pic.twitter.com/uQnHIHoC0x

 

— Molly Crane-Newman (@molcranenewman) May 18, 2026

 

“I’m saying f*** Brian Thompson. I don’t give a flying f*** he died,” said one of the self-described Mangionistas, Ashley Rojas, of Mangione’s alleged victim. “His children are better off without him,” her compatriot, Lena Weissbrot, said of Thompson’s two teenage sons, who were robbed of their father. “They need to learn not to be like their dad, and enjoy the blood money, kids.”

 

“I’m standing on business, f*** Brian Thompson,” Rojas obliged when asked to repeat herself. “I liked it,” Weissbrot beamed while reflecting on Thompson’s death on a Manhattan sidewalk. “If you guys are okay with someone like Brian Thompson being around, and that being part of our society,” Rojas continued, “that says more about you as a person.”

 

It sure does.

 

This collection of addlepated miscreants eagerly peddled their ignorant misconceptions about the health-insurance industry, including the notion that insurers have more blood on their hands than does Osama bin Laden and, therefore, their summary execution should occasion celebrations.

 

“Let’s be honest: most average Americans support him,” Weissbrot said of Mangione. Americans have been made “blood sacrifices” by the rapacious capitalist enterprise, she continued. “Other countries have had revolutions for far less. We’re pretty much the most cucked and submissive population in all of human history. And I’m tired of it. Its time for everyone to grow some f***ing balls.”

 

There you have it: the issue is the revolution.

 

Mangione’s alleged murder of Thompson was, in this woman’s view, a revolutionary act — the propaganda of the deed that should by rights galvanize the American people to perform similar acts of terror. And in so doing, the righteous American mob would bring the revolution one day closer, at which point the rest of us would get what’s coming to us, too.

 

The future of journalism? Credentialed members of the NYC press corps came to Luigi Mangione’s hearing today to support the defendant they’re purportedly reporting on and to promote jury nullification “to the most cucked and submissive population in all of human history” pic.twitter.com/hmt7YOc2FX

 

— Molly Crane-Newman (@molcranenewman) May 18, 2026

 

At least they’re not being shy about it. If only their degeneracy were rare. Unfortunately for the rest of us, they’re only saying out loud what the audience that cheered Mangione’s name on Saturday Night Live was thinking. They’re just articulating what those who purchased the merchandise adorned with his face and writings. They’re saying with less self-consciousness what Senators Chris Murphy, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez conveyed when they equivocated in condemning Thompson’s killing, urging us to understand why the American people (as evinced by their apparent champion, Luigi Mangione) are so angry.

 

These three activists were bolder than most. But there are a lot more of them out there than many would like to admit.

The Thomas Massie Lesson

National Review Online

Thursday, May 21, 2026

 

It turns out that trying to appeal to the audience of left-wing podcaster Cenk Uygur is not the way to win a Republican primary.

 

Representative Thomas Massie made a last-minute appearance with Uygur for a friendly interview before losing a bitterly fought reelection battle widely considered a referendum on the future direction of the GOP. While it’s always dangerous to overinterpret the result of a single primary, Massie’s defeat certainly cuts against the idea that there is a large, real-world market for his brand of conspiratorial right-wing populism and isolationism.

 

Obviously, the most important determinant of the race was President Trump’s unremitting opposition. The Kentucky Republican had crossed Trump enough times for the president to make defeating him a priority. On some issues, such as his opposition to tariffs and the One Big Beautiful Bill, Massie’s stances could be defended on principled libertarian grounds regarding free trade and fiscal restraint. But he also became a thorn in the side of Trump by pushing unfounded conspiracy theories revolving around Jeffrey Epstein. He led a push to force the Department of Justice to foolishly release files from its investigation of the deceased child sex offender, which unfairly tarnished people merely mentioned in the files, while revealing nothing to support the representative’s lurid theories. Massie took it further by affirmatively smearing innocent people. This disgraceful escapade alone meant he deserved to lose.

 

Yet the simplest way to view the race is that Massie has joined a long list of Republicans who got on Trump’s bad side over the past decade and no longer have jobs in Republican politics. Put in the context of the recent defeats of Indiana state senators targeted by Trump and Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted for the second Trump impeachment, Massie’s demise is the norm, rather than an exceptional event.

 

On foreign policy, Massie opposed Trump’s war against Iran, and was rabidly and obsessively anti-Israel. He not only opposed aid to Israel, which again, could be explained on libertarian grounds, but regularly accused supporters of Israel of having a nefarious influence on America and of displaying dual loyalty. A few months after the October 7 attacks, Massie posted a meme ridiculing U.S. support for Israel, accusing Congress of turning its back on American patriotism in favor of Zionism. He dismissed colleagues who supported Israel as paid puppets of the pro-Israel lobbying group, AIPAC. When the United Democracy Project, an AIPAC-affiliated group, poured millions into the campaign to defeat him, Massie made opposing AIPAC a centerpiece of his campaign. In defeat, he couldn’t get Israel off his mind, ungraciously saying of his opponent, “I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent to concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”

 

All of this engendered the opposition of pro-Israel groups, which has created another grievance for Massie and his supporters. But there’s no reason that virulently anti-Israel advocates should be immune from pushback from their fellow citizens who disagree with them. One would think a good libertarian would at least understand this.

 

Who knows how much the contention over Israel moved the district’s voters one way or the other. The outcome demonstrates, though, that the mindless anti-Zionism that has become popular with podcasters is not a ticket to success in Republican primaries.

 

The same is not true on the Democratic side. So far this cycle, Graham Platner, a socialist anti-Israel activist who for decades had a Nazi tattoo, drove Maine’s sitting governor out of the Senate primary. On Tuesday night, the Hasan Piker–endorsed Chris Rabb, who made opposition to Israel a key part of his campaign, coasted to the nomination in a Philadelphia-area district.

 

The top Democratic vote-getter in a San Antonio–area congressional district in Texas was Maureen Galindo, who has pledged to write legislation to turn an ICE detention center into a prison for “American Zionists.” She will now face a run-off against the saner candidate, Johnny Garcia. In contrast, Ken Paxton, a Senate candidate on the Republican side who has won Trump’s endorsement, is staunchly pro-Israel and fought antisemitism as attorney general.

 

These data points suggest that among Democrats anti-Zionism has become a litmus test for successful anti-establishment candidates, but that’s not the case in the GOP. Let’s hope that Cenk Uygur Republicans never become a thing.

DNC Autopsy Exposes the Left’s ‘Gaza’ Excuse as Nonsense

By Noah Rothman

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

It’s hard to summon any sympathy for Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin following his reluctant decision to release a half-finished and wholly unsatisfying draft of the party’s long-awaited 2024 election “autopsy.” His fellow Democrats may, however, commiserate with the embattled party functionary over his torment by the far-left activist class amid its effort to force him to rewrite history.

 

Back in February, Axios reporter Holly Otterbein dropped a bombshell: The autopsy’s release was delayed due to internal Democratic friction over acknowledging the degree to which Benjamin Netanyahu tanked Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. According to Otterbein’s sources within the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project, which had supposedly been granted early access to the report, the Biden administration’s pro-Israel policies alienated fellow activists, handing the election to Donald Trump. Worse, the DNC was covering up what it knew, perhaps in a suicidal effort to preserve those pro-Israel policies — an indication of the extent of Israel’s malign reach.

 

The far left took the report as gospel. The “uncommitted” movement — an anti-Israel revolt against Harris originating within Muslim communities in Michigan — cost Harris winnable states, they said. If Harris had been willing to “consider an arms embargo on Israel as it continued its genocide against Palestinian people in Gaza,” RootsAction director Norman Solomon told the far-left talk show host Amy Goodman, there is “no doubt” that “she would have gained a lot more votes than she would have lost.” Indeed, in her post-campaign memoir, Harris herself accused Biden of hurting her chances by giving Netanyahu a “blank check” to prosecute the post-October 7 war against Hamas (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding).

 

It was all nonsense. The draft autopsy released to the public on Thursday contains no mention of either the Gaza Strip or Israel — not even once. With the exposure of the lie that the activists had retailed for months, those same activists pivoted to savaging the DNC for failing to produce fabricated evidence designed to prop up their delusion of self-importance.

 

The onetime DNC apparatchik David Hogg insisted, “We need to acknowledge the role that Gaza played in us losing younger voters,” whether that is true or not. Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed accused the Committee of choosing “to ignore the impact that our party’s failure to get it right on human rights had on the outcome of the 2024 election.” Maine’s Graham Platner was similarly incensed. “The words ‘Gaza’ and ‘genocide’ appear precisely zero times in the DNC autopsy,” he fumed. “Turning a blind eye to crimes against humanity was a grave injustice, and a terrible election strategy.”

 

The most durable conspiracy theories are those that are inherently unfalsifiable. Indeed, any effort to falsify them deepens their believers’ convictions. This one is a classic example. In the activists’ framework, the DNC’s failure to reference Gaza, Israel, or the imaginary “genocide” in the Palestinian territories is more evidence of pernicious Israeli influence.

 

Kamala Harris’s defeat may be one of the most overdetermined phenomena in modern political history. Her loss was attributable to Joe Biden’s infirmities and the party’s mulish refusal to acknowledge them, the inflation and migrant influx over which he presided, and her objective lack of political talent. Late deciders “were more concerned about Democrats being too extreme than Republicans,” one of the hundreds of data-rich post-election analyses read. The Jews’ supposedly mesmeric hold over Joe Biden’s presidency dominated the thinking of only a handful of far-left obsessives, the overwhelming majority of whom pulled the lever for Harris despite their misgivings. Pre-election polling found that — even when it came to foreign policy, a subject about which general election voters are notoriously apathetic — the war in Gaza was a subject of little salience to most voters.

 

Beyond that, as the think tank Third Way’s executive vice president for policy, Jim Kessler, observed, Harris lost in states where Democratic candidates triumphed in state-wide contests. Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin, Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, Nevada’s Jacky Rosen, Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin, and North Carolina’s Josh Stein managed to engineer victories for themselves despite maintaining, to varying degrees, a nuanced view toward Israel’s defensive war. Likewise, Kessler noted, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro had and maintains the support of a majority of Keystone State Democrats, all while Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman has shed Democratic support. The factor driving that discrepancy seems more likely to be their relative hostility toward Trump, not their almost indistinguishably sympathetic outlook toward Israel.

 

The evidence in support of the notion that an electorally relevant segment of the activist left scuttled Harris’s campaign is so thin that we can see why the activist class would attempt to strongarm Democrats into falsifying some. That’s all this ever was: a power play. It was a campaign prosecuted by the querulously myopic anti-Israel left to bully the DNC into conceding that they commanded more political authority than was empirically observable. And now that their strongarming failed, they’re busily accusing the DNC of executing a vast cover-up. And it might work.

 

Rank-and-file Democrats have every reason to be furious with a party that clearly refuses to debrief their voters. Martin himself admitted that the report “does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.” It is a dog’s breakfast of excuse-making and obfuscation, dressed up in nauseatingly saccharine prose. That anger will be exploited by the unscrupulous.

 

The activist left should be thanking the DNC for forcing them to confront their own impotence. After all, they failed.

 

They failed to muscle (literally) the party into endorsing their preferred delusions in 2024. They failed to extort the party into retroactively giving them more authority than they objectively deserved in 2025. And they failed to force the party into authoring a revisionist history of that election in 2026. Given this record of failure, you’d think Democrats would feel no qualms about excising this political tumor. But they dare not practice that sort of political hygiene.

 

Movements like these don’t win power through persuasion. They ascend through intimidation, menace, and the selective application of force. And that is why they’re rising to a place of primacy within the Democratic coalition today, even though their minority status within the Democratic Party should be clear. They will not countenance reality. Those who confront them with it risk real consequences. And all in the name of “anti-fascism.”

The Curious Case of Trump vs. Trump vs. Trump

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

To recap: Donald Trump has sued the Donald Trump administration over alleged wrongdoing by the Donald Trump administration, and an out-of-court settlement between Donald Trump and the Donald Trump administration will have Donald Trump’s DOJ ponying up the better part of $2 billion to be put into a fund controlled by Donald Trump and used for the benefit of—let’s check in here with dead-eyed White House trash panda J.D. Vance—“people who voted for Donald Trump and participated in the January 6th protests.”

 

We are going to need a whole brigade of additional tally-men to tally the bananas in this bananas republic.

 

One group of Trump sycophants negotiating with another group of Trump sycophants for the benefit of Trump sycophants and Trump himself: surely the toughest negotiation since Harry S. Stamper told the powers that be that none of his crew wanted to pay taxes again—“EVER”—in Armageddon. Trump did not demand immunity from taxes—only immunity from being investigated or prosecuted for not paying his taxes, for tax fraud, or for other tax-related shenanigans: immunity for himself, for his business associates, for Uday and Qusay and the rest of his ghastly cretinous spawn.

 

We are so used to hearing the words “billion” and “trillion” thrown around when talking about Washington spending that the sum in question—$1.776 billion, a number chosen for imbecilic marketing purposes—might seem measly. But that’s a good-sized squadron of high-end fighter jets, about 20 F-35s. It is more than the National Science Foundation will spend in a decade on its “X-Labs” program to support research into transformative technologies in fields such as quantum computing. The money is not the main complaint here—comically transparent graft is a bad policy at any price—but it is worth understanding that the sum in question is not trivial. And who is to say that Trump will not exceed that $1.776 billion budget for enriching his political allies? It is not as though the administration is waiting around for Congress to appropriate the funds.

 

Speaking of which: Congress, as usual, is doing approximately squat. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota has announced that he is “not a big fan” of the presidential slush fund, but, so far, he has taken no action to put a stop to this nonsense. Someone should introduce Sen. Thune to somebody in a position of real influence in Washington—say, the Senate majority leader or someone like that. Surely, a figure as powerful as the Senate majority leader would not just sit around like some useless putz and piss and moan about it all—that guy would do something, right?

 

J.D. Vance, the coprophagic charlatan who once compared Trump to Adolf Hitler before becoming the full-time monkey-butler serving the totally-nothing-like-Hitler administration, thinks the January 6 rioters—the dimwitted brownshirts in Trump’s failed 2021 coup d’état—just need a little more love and understanding, saying, in defense of the slush fund gambit:

 

You know who never, ever gets an ounce of sympathy when it comes to that disproportionate sentencing is people who voted for Donald Trump and participated in the January 6th protests.

 

And guess who is lining up with their hands out? The pillow guy, of course. Who else? The ONAN guys. [Not a typo. Not really, all things considered.] Proud Boys gruppenführer Enrique Tarrio. Registered sex offender Andrew Taake, who got a six-year sentence for assaulting police officers on January 6, was pardoned by Trump with a bonus get-out-of-jail-free card on a separate child-sex charge, and complains that he grew bazongas in prison because doctors had him injected with estrogen during his stay.

 

Which is to say: the biggest parade of schmucks, chiselers, lunatics, conspiracy kooks, and criminals since Trump’s last Cabinet meeting.

 

I already have heard from a few of my remaining conservative friends, out there in their bunkers: “Surely, this will be the thing that finally breaks the spell!”

 

No, it isn’t.

 

Trump’s slavering loyalists already have forgiven him for trying to overthrow the government—you think they’re going to get big mad over his stealing a little money? Especially when they think they—or someone they know from Twitter!—might get a few bucks out of the deal? Trump was right about his being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing any political support—and his implied contempt for his voters is entirely justified.

 

The United States is a country that loves a slogan: E pluribus unum. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” “All men are created equal.” But there is one that we need to translate into Latin and engrave in marble on some prominent site in the capital city:

 

“Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.”

Trump Gets It Right, Eventually, on Poland

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

Warsaw, Poland — Don’t blink, kids, because you don’t hear me say this all that often: President Trump got this decision absolutely right.

 

At least, as far as I can tell. At 4:26 p.m. ET, President Trump posted on Truth Social:

 

Based on the successful Election of the now President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, who I was proud to Endorse, and our relationship with him, I am pleased to announce that the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

 

(From the wording of the president’s post, you might think that Karol Nawrocki, a right-of-center candidate from the Law and Justice Party, was recently elected. He was elected in the second round of elections completed in June of last year and inaugurated in August.)

 

If you’ve been reading this newsletter this week, you know that the Polish government was blindsided by the decision to cancel the rotation of the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division — more than 4,000 soldiers and associated equipment to bases in Poland. (The administration later insisted it wasn’t a cancellation, merely a delay.) As I’ve been laying out all week, the Poles have done everything the U.S. — and in particular, the Trump administration — has asked as an ally. Whether or not the cancellation or delay was meant as a slap in the face to Poland, the move was widely interpreted that way.

 

Back on April 27, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said during a school visit in Marsberg, a town in his home region of Sauerland, “The Iranians are clearly stronger than expected and the Americans clearly have no truly convincing strategy in the negotiations either,” and “an entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, particularly by the so-called Revolutionary Guards.”

 

No U.S. president likes hearing the leader of an ally declare that his country is being humiliated by a hated enemy. At the beginning of May, the Pentagon announced that the U.S. would withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany.

 

The cancellation or delay of the rotation of troops to Poland came shortly thereafter. A German newspaper observed that the Pentagon’s decisions seemed to be punishing Poland almost as much as Germany:

 

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung questioned why the freeze targeted a country “exemplarily fulfilling all American demands regarding higher defense spending”, while acknowledging that “establishing the reasons for such a move is difficult.”

 

Trump’s Truth Social post didn’t specify if the 5,000 troops from the brigade combat team in Germany will be the ones moving to Poland. But no matter where the U.S. troops come from, it will bring a greater U.S. military presence to Eastern Europe, closer to where the threat is. And as the man who ran the civilian airport that turned into NATO’s main logistics hub for Ukraine told me yesterday, the Russians suddenly get a lot more hesitant and careful when the U.S. military is around.

 

Radek Sikorski, a former National Review contributor who is Poland’s minister of foreign affairs and deputy prime minister, said this morning:

 

Poland as you know, together with Lithuania, is the largest spender in NATO, 4.7 percent of GDP last year, 4.8 percent this year, and I have an additional reason for confidence this morning. I want to thank President Trump for his announcement that the rotation, the presence of American troops in Poland, will be maintained more or less at previous levels. I want to thank the president and everybody who contributed to these decisions: our friends in Congress, Ambassadors Whitaker and Rose, in NATO and Poland, and of course all the Polish officials that have contributed. I think Poland’s reputation as a country that takes defense seriously also helped. . . . All’s well, that ends well. . . . I think this makes Putin very uncomfortable.

 

‘Out Your Window, You Can See Patriot Missile Batteries . . .’

 

The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs staffers who organized this reporting trip unknowingly took me full circle by making one of our last stops Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport — the site of my first report from this region, back in the summer of 2023.

 

Some things still look the same from my first visit; there are still Patriot missile batteries in a ring around the airport. (Some of them were provided by the Germans.) Convoys of flatbed tractor-trailers carrying smaller green military trucks and Humvees line the roads.

 

Up until the end of 2021, Rzeszów-Jasionka was the eighth-largest airport in Poland, with about as many flights in a year as Dulles International Airport gets in a month. But Rzeszów-Jasionka had two key characteristics. First, it had the second-longest runway of the country’s airports, after Warsaw International, which meant the largest military cargo planes in NATO could land there. Second, it was the civilian airport closest to the Ukrainian border.

 

And so, as former airport CEO Michał Tabisz told us, when NATO needed a logistics hub for sending supplies into Ukraine — everything from military equipment to humanitarian relief going into Ukraine, and medivacs and refugees coming out — the civilian airport he was running suddenly became one of the most important locations in the war.

 

Around Christmas 2021, the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border became serious enough that he was told to expect a contingent from the Pentagon. In mid-January, the first U.S. troops arrived, and Rzeszów-Jasionka continued to operate as a civilian airport, with large stretches of it turning into a NATO air base.

 

“The Americans told us it was much nicer than Afghanistan — no dust, friendly locals, and everyone speaks English,” Tabisz said.

 

When the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in late February, the small airport had the job of “bringing a dozen C-17s a day in, unloading them, refueling them, and sending them back. . . . It was a crazy time. Now, I’m happy to have been part of it, but it was crazy.”

 

Tabisz said that the Russians targeted the airport with cyberattacks, hacking, and physical spying. “Until the Patriot batteries arrived, F-16s were doing air patrols above the airport.

 

You often could hear them but couldn’t see them.”

 

The airport now features the United Kingdom-manufactured Sky Saber, which was the most advanced anti-missile system in NATO when it was deployed.

 

The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense contacted Tabisz and said the system needed to be deployed and up and running “immediately.” Looking back, he says, it should have worried him that the MoD was in such a rush. The Sky Saber is a complicated and advanced system; the British troops told Tabisz that if they could get it up and running within a week, they would pop champagne. They did it in three days, and four days later, they did indeed pop a bottle of champagne in Tabisz’s office.

 

“If we knew how serious it was, we would not have been that brave,” he said with a smile.

 

I asked about any other examples of Russia’s “gray zone” warfare, and Tabisz said that while he’s heard of major attempts at sabotage, arson, drone incursions, and other Russian efforts around Poland and other NATO countries, he always felt like the Russians did less against his airport. “The presence of the Americans always sent a strong signal to the Russians.”

 

Construction on what became Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport began in 1937; those who remember history class will recall that the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, interrupting construction. It was built as an air base in 1940 using forced labor; then in 1944, the Nazis destroyed the airfield in the face of advancing Soviet forces; it was rebuilt as a civilian airport during the era of the Soviet occupation of Poland.

 

Thus, after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when Germany sent its troops to assist the Ukrainians, it marked the first time since 1945 that German troops were moving into Poland . . . and being welcomed.

 

“When the Luftwaffe landed, we looked at each other and said, ‘The boys are back,’’ Tabisz chuckled. He quickly added that Germany is a valued ally and member of NATO.

 

Throughout the use by NATO, and to this day, Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport is still used by civilians for flights around Europe.

 

“And we never canceled a single flight,” Tabisz boasted.