The Unmaking of Conservatism

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, August 30, 2024

 

Only a fool would try to predict policy at a moment like this, when one presidential candidate is running on “vibes” and the other is, well, certifiable. But some predictions are so easy that they’re impossible to resist. When you have a clear lane to the hoop, you dunk.

 

So here it is, in four words: free Ozempic for all.

 

It’s the perfect pander. Americans are chubby, love “free” stuff, and stopped caring long ago about limited government. If you can bribe them to vote for you by promising free access to a miracle drug that will give them the bodies they’ve always wanted without demanding the discipline of dieting and exercise, you don’t think twice.

 

You dunk.

 

Given the trajectory of this campaign, whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will be the first to propose taxpayer-funded skinny pills is less certain than that one of them will. Both have abandoned former ideological commitments in favor of more popular positions aimed at winning swing voters. As they pander their way to a harmonic convergence on policy, launching hugely expensive bidding wars for important constituencies, it’s inevitable that one or the other will stumble into a pledge to make America thin and hot—with no cost to anyone, magically.

 

How far the two might potentially sink as they compete to out-pander the other was on my mind as I watched Trump sell out conservatives not once but twice in a single interview on Thursday. First, he was asked by NBC News how he’ll vote on Florida’s upcoming ballot initiative, which would have the practical effect of making abortion legal during all nine months of pregnancy if it passes:

There’s no way to square Florida’s current six-week ban with Trump’s belief that “we need more than six weeks.” A spokesman for Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed that ban into law, felt obliged to respond in a statement by reminding Trump that overturning the ban would lead to a number of outcomes he’s—supposedly—against. Only after a day of pressure from pro-life supporters did the candidate finally relent and declare—on a Friday evening before a three-day weekend—that he’d vote no on the initiative.

 

His disdain for six-week bans is old news, though. The real news on Thursday came in this exchange:

Free IVF treatments for everyone, paid for either by Uncle Sam or by private insurers under orders from Uncle Sam. Forget the harmonic convergence on policy, Philip Klein noted at National Review: Trump is now to the left of some prominent Democrats on this issue.

 

Government-financed IVF treatment, which costs tens of thousands of dollars, would impose an enormous cost on taxpayers, or, as a mandated benefit, would dramatically drive up insurance premiums. Outside of requirements to sell insurance to older and sicker patients and capping the cost to them, IVF is one of the most expensive benefits one can mandate. By taking this position, Trump is calling for hiking premiums on every American who does not use IVF. Had Democrats tried to mandate IVF federally when Obamacare was being debated, it’s quite possible that would have been the breaking point for the more moderate Democrats, and it would have tanked the whole bill. Put another way, Trump has taken a position that was deemed too left-wing for Barack Obama.

 

After years of apocalyptic Tea Party rhetoric about government power over health care, the head of the GOP is endorsing … insurance mandates, and not for any principled reason. He’s afraid that abortion politics will cost him the election and is desperate to reassure voters about the IVF component of that debate, at least.

 

So he’s bribing them, lavishly and blatantly, without even a pretense of caring that he’s starkly undermined the traditional Republican position. Democrats now have invaluable political cover from the head of the GOP to push harder for mandatory benefits of all sorts in insurance coverage.

 

What’s left for conservatives in a party whose leadership is increasingly pro-choice and pro-Obamacare?

 

He fights?

 

I considered that question in March, during a Republican primary in which Trump was already in flight from the pro-life movement.

 

But there was reason to believe at the time that he might eventually tap the brakes on his leftward shift. After all, his opponent in the general election was feeble, unpopular, and had trailed him every day in the national polling average since last September. Trump didn’t need to go all-out in pandering to the center to defeat an incumbent as weak as Joe Biden.

 

That was then.

 

His new opponent is polling higher than Biden and now leads in the national average. She’s also proven surprisingly shameless about pandering in her own right, even on Trump’s pet issue of immigration and notwithstanding the hard-left positions she took in the Democratic presidential primary in 2019. Kamala Harris’ unexpected political strength has put heavy pressure on her opponent to keep pace with her in wooing undecided centrist voters. And so, suddenly, he’s no longer tapping the brakes. He’s stepping on the gas.

 

With the Republican moving left and the Democrat moving right, are we sure our friend David French is wrong in believing there’s a conservative case for Harris, if only as the least bad choice among two very unconservative options?

 

Consider the proverbial three-legged stool of Reaganism.

 

The first leg is fiscal conservatism, which should be an easy advantage for Republicans. Not anymore: Trump’s desire to slash taxes on everything from income to Social Security to corporate revenue without commensurate spending cuts will create a deficit over the next 10 years that’s nearly five times higher than the deficit in Harris’ agenda.

 

He’s crazy about tariffs, he won’t touch entitlements, and he wants to set monetary policy to suit his political interests. There’s nothing meaningfully fiscally responsible about this guy, in case his taxpayer-funded IVF scam—or the gigantic deficits he ran during his first term—didn’t make that clear enough.

 

The second leg of the stool is hawkishness on national defense. To make the case for Trump over Harris here, you need to emphasize Israel to the exclusion of practically everything else. It’s true that his party supports the Jewish state more solidly than Harris’ does, although she’s sounded more Republican than progressive in her comments about Israel lately. But it’s also true that Harris’ party is now more willing to enforce the Pax Americana globally than Trump’s is.

 

On the question of who’s more likely to defend NATO and contain Russia by supporting Ukraine, there’s no contest. With respect to China, an evergreen rhetorical foil for Trump, there’s reason to believe Harris is more willing to come to the aid of an American ally like Taiwan than he is. Presumably, Trump would be tougher on Iran than modern Democrats like Harris have been, but he’s chattered lately about “friendly” relations with Tehran and the Biden White House has been willing to flex some naval muscle to restrain the mullahs from all-out war with Israel.

 

Ask yourself this: Having lived through the last eight years, which of our two candidates do you believe is more likely to invite Ayatollah Khamenei to a big back-slapping summit? Kamala Harris or a guy who continues to burble to this day about the love letters he received from Kim Jong Un?

 

The last leg of the stool is social conservatism. For all the hype about the culture war, Trump isn’t above capitulating in skirmishes and spends precious little time on the stump proposing DeSantis-style policy initiatives to advance a cultural agenda. The biggest right-wing cultural defeat of the last 20 years is the legalization and acceptance of gay marriage, and neither man on the Republican ticket has much to say about it, let alone about reversing it.

 

On abortion, even an increasingly pro-choice Trump is preferable to a liberal like Harris, who’s keen to reinstate the Roe regime via federal statute. But abortion in the post-Roe era is tricky for pro-lifers: If there isn’t enough public support to pass national restrictions (and there isn’t), then reducing the number of terminations is more a matter of persuasion than legislation. And it’s by no means clear that President Trump would be more useful in that persuasion effort than President Harris would.

 

Harris is a traditional Democrat saying traditionally Democratic things about abortion. She isn’t changing anyone’s mind on either side. Trump, on the other hand, is at this very moment creating a permission structure for right-wingers to treat abortion as a minor priority by bartering away pro-life positions in exchange (he hopes) for votes.

 

This is what David French, a staunch pro-lifer, worries about in making his case for Reaganites to support Harris. If conservatives insist on sticking with Trump as he moves further and further left on abortion, they’re inescapably validating the current national consensus that killing life in the womb is acceptable and should be lawful. The debate going forward will simply be over how generous state laws should be in legalizing terminations.

 

To force Republicans back toward the pro-life position, Trump has to pay an electoral price for his betrayal.

 

All in all, under the immense weight of Trumpism, each of the three legs of the Reaganite stool is breaking. Economist (and Dispatch contributor) Brian Riedl wondered on Thursday after the NBC News interview aired: “If a Democrat sought to destroy the GOP by creating a cult of personality, sabotaging other GOP lawmakers & candidates, making a mockery of its morality and character claims, all while undoing every conservative policy principle … would he have done anything different than Trump?”

 

Would he?

 

Trump’s apologists are forever insisting that “he fights!” but stop and think for a moment: What is he actually fighting for at this point? His right to hawk digital trading cards?

 

Conservatism as a rump movement.

 

I suppose the response to Riedl is that a Democratic imposter wouldn’t have endorsed a plan to deport millions of illegal immigrants.

 

Although … maybe he would have? Mass deportation will almost certainly fail as a project; when it does, even that element of Trumpism will be discredited as infeasible.

 

Trump’s not a Democratic imposter, though. He’s a nationalist. He’s never made (much of) a pretense of being a conservative. Nationalists prioritize a generous welfare state, strong measures to exclude foreigners, a much lighter military footprint abroad, and better relations with illiberal regimes. They fight the enemies within, not without. In hindsight, it was inevitable that the GOP’s agenda under Trump’s leadership would gradually elevate those priorities while sidelining traditional Republican concerns like the sanctity of life.

 

The remaking of the GOP as a nationalist project necessarily required its unmaking as a conservative one. So what are conservatives still doing in this party?

 

One answer to that is—they aren’t. Many Reaganites have drifted out of the Republican orbit over the last nine years. As I was writing this very piece, news broke that Liz Cheney is likely to endorse Kamala Harris next month. Millions of former Republicans who’ve left the party since 2016 will vote Democratic this fall in the name of stopping Trump. Dispatch conservatives: They’re real, and they’re spectacular.

 

But many have stuck with the GOP and will continue to do so, even as Trump proceeds with his project to turn it into some sort of National-Front-style European party. And they’ll rationalize doing so in a number of ways.

 

“Trump’s centrist pandering is all rhetoric. Once he’s reelected, he’ll govern as a conservative.”

 

One can’t rule out this possibility, I suppose, any more than one can rule out Harris doing the same thing in reverse if she wins. Trump is wildly erratic on a good day, will be term-limited as president, and suffers from authoritarian instincts that make it unlikely that he’ll show restraint. If a Republican Congress sends him a bill restricting abortion nationally, can you imagine him declining to sign it out of deference to states’ rights? Has he ever shown deference to anyone, about anything?

 

Plus, he’s a pathological liar. Why wouldn’t he lie about his intentions on abortion too?

 

He really might turn around after all of this moderate posturing and govern as the iron-fist abortion-banner of the pro-life movement’s dreams. (That’s certainly what the Harris people want voters to believe about his comments to NBC News.) But for what it’s worth, Lila Rose of the anti-abortion group Live Action says she’s spoken to his campaign and hasn’t received any reassurances that he’s being insincere. On Thursday, she declared that “we have two pro-abortion tickets this year” and hinted heavily that she won’t support Trump this fall unless he changes course, a rare show of spine for a pro-life leader. There’s no good reason to believe he’s lying.

 

“Trump will lose. And once he’s gone, the GOP will return to its conservative roots.”

 

Is that right? An entire generation of young Republicans has been weaned on Trumpism, not conservatism. Why would they suddenly prioritize fighting abortion after their hero taught them to prioritize fighting immigration and “globalists” instead?

 

Unmaking nationalism as the party’s guiding ideology will be even harder if Trumpist control of the GOP persists, as is likely. Trump will presumably continue as leader even if he loses a second time, thanks to the next round of idiotic “rigged election” propaganda immunizing him from accountability for his defeat. And after he dies or retires, a talented demagogue in the mold of Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, or Matt Gaetz would be more simpatico temperamentally with the new Republican base than a sober traditional conservative like Brian Kemp.

 

In fact, apart from Kemp and possibly DeSantis, there’s hardly any conservative political talent left in the post-Trump GOP that seems capable of overcoming MAGA’s “uniparty” hostility. (Right, Nikki?) Two days ago, I conceded that most Republican voters are malleable enough on ideology that they might revert to Reaganism if a charismatic leader came along and captured their imaginations. But who is that leader? The party could be pro-life again; who’s going to convince them to do it?

 

Pro-life leaders? Please. Apart from Rose, they’ve rolled over.

 

If Trump loses, pro-lifers will argue that his defeat was due to him moving too far to the left on abortion, depressing his base—and they might be right. But it’ll be trivially easy for nationalists to argue the opposite, that Trump didn’t move far enough to the left to defeat the potent ongoing pro-choice backlash to the end of Roe at the polls. If the new nationalist Republican Party wants to truly neutralize this issue, they’ll say, it’ll need to make even more concessions. The sacred goal of defeating the “deep state” requires nothing less.

 

“Yes, the GOP is increasingly left-ish, but it’s still better than the Democratic Party.”

 

Ultimately, this is the rationalization that will convince most traditional conservatives to stick with the party.

 

And why wouldn’t it? It’s the credo of anti-anti-Trumpism, the same rationalization that’s convinced them to stick with the party until now. For nine years, small-government right-wingers have coped with their declining influence within the Republican Party by making themselves useful to their new nationalist masters. They’ve attacked Democrats incessantly, punctuated by sporadic pro forma reminders that they don’t personally support Trump. In doing so, they’ve filled the same sort of niche that progressives occupy on the left, a rump ideological cohort that believes both parties are bad but that the other one remains, in important ways, meaningfully worse.

 

Frankly, that might be unfair to progressives: They devote much—much—more of their time holding the Democratic leadership accountable than anti-anti-Trump conservatives do vis-a-vis Trump.

 

Democrats’ own extremism on abortion in pressing for federal statutory rights and opposing practically all restrictions will supply plenty of reason for anti-anti-Trumpers to justify remaining with the GOP as the three-legged stool collapses beneath them. In fact, I wonder if abortion will ironically begin to take on outsized importance for the conservative rump as the differences on the issue between the two parties vanish. If it’s a high priority for you to remain part of the right’s partisan tribe, and if Trump’s nationalist agenda is offering you zero reason to do so, even small disagreements with Democrats over the high moral stakes of abortion might be enough of a fig leaf to rationalize remaining within the Republican tent.

 

By 2032, many Republican partisans will insist that the fate of the country rests on electing an authoritarian who supports a 20-week abortion ban over a liberal who supports one after 23 weeks. Thanks to Trump and their own spinelessness, that’s probably the future of conservatism.

Running on Gridlock

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, August 30, 2024

 

When it comes to gridlock, I am—within reason—an enthusiast. A connoisseur, even. Oodles of Americans are low-key gridlock aficionados, too. In one of those utterly predictable cases of stated preferences at odds with revealed preferences, Americans say they want less gridlock in Washington but actually vote very frequently (and in a predictable pattern) for divided government and, hence, for the gridlock that comes with it. 

 

But the Democrats are doing something a little unusual in 2024: They are running on gridlock. And Democrat-on-Democrat gridlock at that.

 

Quietly and off-the-record, of course.

 

Kamala Harris doesn’t say she wants divided government, and she probably doesn’t actually want divided government, either. But Harris’ allies in Congress and in the broader Democratic world are making a curious, cynical argument about the economic crazy-talk coming out of her campaign: Don’t worry about the nutty stuff—the price controls and all that—because none of it will get through Congress. 

 

Harris has big dreams for new price-gouging legislation (i.e., a federal law that would attempt to supplant by fiat the basic dynamics of supply and demand). But her allies tell Politico:

 

Such a bill has no chance of passing Congress anytime soon, even if Democrats win the White House and Congress this November, according to six Democratic lawmakers and five Democratic aides who were granted anonymity to discuss the matter candidly. These people said Democrats in Congress have privately been telling critics that this part of the Harris plan is not viable.

 

Rather, they’ve argued it’s a messaging tactic—a way to show that she understands food prices remain an economic burden for many Americans and to redirect voters’ anger about inflation to corporations, in a way that progressives in particular have cheered.

 

One must almost admire the cynicism there: This isn’t real and it doesn’t matter, it’s just rube-bait for our voters, who aren’t smart enough for us to talk to like functional adults about our actual policy goals. 

 

Nice.

 

That aside, the careful reader will notice that Harris’ friends are making a case for Democrat-led gridlock. Which is to say, they are asking Americans to take it on faith that Harris’ worst and battiest and leftiest ideas are going to be blocked by congressional Democrats, whose ranks are filled by such sensible and economically sophisticated people as … Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren. 

 

But if you can temporarily liberate yourself from partisan blinders, then you can follow this line of thinking through to its logical conclusion. If what Americans really need is President Harris hemmed in by an uncooperative Congress, then what Americans really need is a Republican-led Congress. 

 

Instead of a legislative branch under the leadership of such estimable worthies as Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, how about such trustworthy and totally normal Republican-variety human beings as coup-strategist Mike Johnson and—I don’t have a great modifier here—Matt Gaetz? Marjorie Taylor Greene? J.D. Vance?

 

I know: It doesn’t sound so great when you put it that way! But you get the point. 

 

I knew I was going to miss Mitch McConnell, but I didn’t think I would see Democrats secretly hoping for a Senate leader who would ruthlessly undermine Harris’ agenda if she is elected.  

 

If I thought for a second that these anonymity-demanding Democrats were serious about Congress’ rediscovering its self-respect to such an extent that a President Harris would have to worry a great deal about the opposition of her own party, I’d cheer. But that isn’t how Washington works right now. And it isn’t how Congress works, either, which is more specifically to the point.

 

From the Newt Gingrich years to the speakership of Nancy Pelosi, control over the legislative agenda has been wrested from motley and rivalrous collections of congressional grandees and committee chairmen. It has instead been granted to a tiny handful of party leaders, to such an extent that the House speaker and Senate majority leader now have something close to total control over the actions of their caucuses. 

 

Though the difference may be subtle, a negotiation between a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in Congress is not equivalent to a negotiation between a Democratic president and two Democratic congressional leaders with relatively narrow parochial interests. Considerations such as regional differences and competing constituency interests get flattened and compressed into the crude and simple calculation of D vs. R. That has many unhappy consequences, one of which is that it is difficult to have much confidence that a Democratic congressional majority would or could effectively contain even the most imbecilic policy ideas the Harris campaign has put forward.

 

It would be better to have some decent Democrat-aligned economist come into Harris HQ and beat staffers over the head with an Econ 101 syllabus until they internalize a few simple facts. If you are concerned about housing prices being too high, for example, then pushing down mortgage interest rates and subsidizing housing purchases is precisely the wrong policy. If you are worried about consolidation in the food industry, then handing down an expensive new set of federal mandates and regulations is precisely the wrong policy. After all, big, powerful market incumbents absolutely love expensive regulations, which add only marginally to their own already considerable legal overhead while suffocating potential new rivals that may be more innovative and nimble but lack a 98-person legal department or the present means to pay for one. Surely somebody Democrats would listen to could explain that to the Harris team. 

 

And that’s what you want. Because if you’re worried that somebody might be on the verge of doing something stupid and your best hope is that Congress won’t do something stupid and that it will transcend partisan considerations to avoid said stupidity … well, I have some bad news for you, Sunshine.

Elite Private Schools Are Teaching Antisemitism

By Melissa Langsam Braunstein

Thursday, August 22, 2024

 

While most people were busy living, progressives quietly captured the schools. As a result of this decades-long project, young Americans now finish high school fluent in both anti-Americanism and antisemitism. Congress probed antisemitism in public K–12 schools earlier this year. Independent schools, however, deserve their own scrutiny.

 

Only 10 percent of American students attend private, or independent, schools. But these schools punch above their weight. “While only about 1% of the schools in America” affiliate with the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), “nearly one-third of Biden’s cabinet attended these schools,” Undercover Mother, a Substack that covers independent schools, has noted.

 

“These schools have been leading in DEI for 20 to 30 years,” says Ashley Jacobs, executive director of Parents Unite, a nonprofit that promotes intellectual diversity and free expression in independent schools. There’s now “suffocating empathy everywhere.” DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) “comes out in a more sophisticated way at private schools because they have more money,” observes Kate Hudson, founder of Education Veritas, a nonprofit organization that informs the public about developments in public and private schools and colleges.

 

“Every bit of this stuff is tested in private schools because they’re a black box,” says a mother whose children graduated from a Hill School in New York City. “Trustees sign off on everything. They have unlimited money, and they can do whatever they want.” This is happening nationwide in schools that are “church-affiliated, secular, single-sex, coed, rural, suburban, urban.” In short, it’s pervasive.

 

Displeased parents often keep their children in these schools because “it’s the same everywhere,” explains Rose Bronstein, a Chicago independent-school parent. “Pick your poison, public or private. Parents like me, who use private school, think your child will be protected [and] won’t get this kind of curriculum. They try to cover it up with words. DEI is a cover-up for CRT [critical race theory]. ‘Social emotional learning’ sounds good to a layperson; it’s code for CRT and DEI. They keep changing the words until we catch on.”

 

The challenges that Jewish students face at independent schools are “just a symptom,” says the Hill School mother. “The issue is far bigger. If they’re not attacked for being Jewish, they’ll be attacked for being white or having parents who are wealthy [or] care about education.”

 

DEI holds that the world is binary. Groups of people are either “oppressors” or “oppressed,” and within DEI’s framework, Jews are white “oppressors.” Anything that contradicts that narrative is dismissed or summarily rewritten.

 

One New York City parent, whose children are now in college, recalled a decade-old incident. When her daughter was in sixth grade at a top school in the city, “she got the social-studies teacher that everyone wanted.” At back-to-school night, this teacher was “impressive, bright, engaging, and fun.” But the girl’s parents were struck by the classroom’s world map, where all of Israel was labeled “Palestine.”

 

“It was a topic of conversation in my house for days,” the parent continues. Because this teacher “was not picking on our Jewish kid” and “our child was not confused — she knew that the teacher had it wrong,” the parents didn’t protest. Instead, “we made it a priority to reeducate our kids as needed.” That reeducation became so customary, the children “sometimes would roll their eyes and say, ‘I get it.’ And they do. But what about the non-Jewish kids who are not being told by their parents that it’s wrong to refer to the State of Israel as ‘Palestine’?” This parent reflected: “When I think back, I wish I had not been silent. We need to stand up and call out even the subtle antisemitic tropes. And calling Israel ‘Palestine’ is not subtle.”

 

Jewish families in the Los Angeles area have faced their own challenges. Lori Weisskopf, mother of two Harvard-Westlake School graduates, recalls that in October 2022 her daughter found swastikas and the sentence “Hitler rocks” carved into her desk. In emails Weisskopf shared, the family reported the incident to school administrators, describing themselves as “shocked and disappointed.” A top administrator quickly replied, saying that he and his colleagues were “horrified” and promising to “do everything we can to identify the perpetrator and, more importantly, to educate our community about antisemitism and prevent further experiences like this one.” The administrator added, “Please do not share the pictures of the carvings, and please let us know if there are other students who you know saw the carvings and would benefit from some outreach from us right away.” Weisskopf was taken aback by that final sentence, reading it as redirecting concern from her daughter’s well-being to the school’s reputation.

 

The school subsequently met with tenth- through twelfth-graders to discuss opposing all hate speech, including antisemitism. Weisskopf was “frustrated and angered” that the administrator “claimed they were focused on finding the perpetrator” but tried to lower expectations by saying it “could have been anyone” — even someone unaffiliated with Harvard-Westlake. That seemed implausible, given the school’s security. Weisskopf also considered the school’s focus misplaced. She felt that Harvard-Westlake treated the incident as an isolated incident rather than as proof that antisemitism was resurgent and that Harvard-Westlake had not sufficiently educated the school community about it. And she was unhappy that neither administrator who promised to check on her daughter ever did.

 

A Harvard-Westlake spokesman was unaware that an administrator had advised a parent not to share photos of antisemitic graffiti. He shared a schoolwide letter that read, “This is an offense to all of us, not just our Jewish students and community members,” and that promised to treat the incident “with the utmost seriousness,” naming some corrective steps the school would take. The spokesman mentioned that Harvard-Westlake hosted speakers from the ADL and added a mandatory “field trip to the Museum of Tolerance.” He did not answer when asked whether the perpetrator was ever identified.

 

Former Brentwood School parent Jerome Eisenberg found the state of things so disturbing, he sued. “Our complaints were about latent antisemitism,” he says. “It was a situation where every group in the school had an affinity group. They created these after George Floyd. When we asked for a Jewish affinity group, it was backpedaled, in our opinion. They required two faculty advisers instead of one. You couldn’t be ‘political.’ People requesting it weren’t allowed to be officers. The school had to pick officers. That was our experience.”

 

Eisenberg’s attorney, civil-injury lawyer David Pivtorak, says the suit has been “resolved on mutually acceptable terms” and adds, “The complaint in the case alleged those [affinity groups] wielded some influence on general policies within the school. It alleged every other group had an affinity group, but Jewish parents were sandbagged, delayed, and essentially denied until it was too late to make any changes.” The Brentwood School did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Another Los Angeles–area independent-school parent relates that, during the 2021–22 school year, “they instituted race-based affinity groups” for elementary-school students “where kids that are not that ethnicity are not allowed to join the group.” She continues, “I wouldn’t want my kid to participate in any affinity groups. It’s like segregation. If you’re a white kid or Jewish, you didn’t have a group you could belong to.”

 

During the 2022–23 school year, the parent continues, “they decided to add the ‘white anti-racist group.’ Now it’s even worse. . . . There’s no Jewish group, so any white, Jewish kids have to join the white anti-racist group. The name says you’re racist; you need to learn how to not be a racist. . . . The first day of the meetings of these groups, . . . eight white and Jewish girls hid in the bathroom so they wouldn’t have to join the anti-racist group.” The parent concludes, “A lot of people think” that banishing DEI “is a right-wing, MAGA thing, but it has nothing to do with politics.”

 

DEI permeates independent schools in several ways. A California independent-school parent pointed to guest speakers including Angela Davis, whom the Amcha Initiative, which tracks campus antisemitism, has called “a well known anti-Zionist who aggressively promotes boycotts of the Jewish state and has condoned terrorism against it.” Davis, the California parent said, has addressed elite schools such as Choate and Andover “for decades.”

 

The California parent points also to the Klingenstein Center Heads of Schools Program at Teachers College, affiliated with Columbia University. That’s where heads of school “are cultivated and programmed in the NAIS agenda.” It “looks like a prestigious fellowship, but that’s one way the ideology seeps into every aspect of a school.” Two search firms specialize in placing fellows at “the most traditional and most elite academic NAIS private schools around the country.” Fellows then “ensure the institutions are captured from within and either lead or allow others within the institution to carry out the agenda,” including curricular changes and increased DEI spending. Teachers College did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Additionally, there are conferences and well-compensated DEI consultants. One such consultant, “a Nation of Islam person” whom the Hill School mother calls “absolutely poisonous,” addressed NAIS’s People of Color Conference for independent-school educators last fall. According to the California parent, the event featured speakers who favored “freeing Palestine,” and children’s books were available “about genocide in Gaza, . . . straight indoctrination picture books.”

 

A Virginia independent-school parent recounted her teenager’s experience last fall at NAIS’s Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC), which ran concurrently with the People of Color Conference. The Student Diversity Leadership Conference began as “a great learning experience.” But that changed when students began delivering minute-long extemporaneous speeches.

 

Videos taken by other attendees show a teenager spending nearly five minutes on “the genocide” that is “going on in Palestine.” He said, “Many people are like blaming Hamas,” but Israel “put these people . . . under like terrible, horrible conditions over like so many years. . . . What did you expect from these people?” The crowd roared approvingly. He continued: “Hamas has only like done like the event for only one day, and the whole world, the whole media is blaming for that one day.” He criticized social-media companies for favoring Israel and said that there is no “real freedom of expression” in the U.S. or Europe. His example of people being punished for opposing Israel was a student sent to the principal for scrawling “Free Palestine” in a school bathroom. He said that the school’s reaction was “confusing between like antisemitism and like anti-Israel, which is like different things.” The audience applauded enthusiastically.

 

In that room of 2,000 students, approximately 20 to 40 were Jewish. The daughter of the Virginia parent “was sitting with one other Jewish girl” from the event’s Jewish affinity group. “Behind her, she heard, ‘F*** the Jews! F*** Israel!’ ” Both Jewish girls “were very shaken” and gathered with other Jewish attendees. One of the “three adult facilitators for the Jewish affinity group” cried. “One child cried so much she was vomiting.” While Jewish students “sequestered themselves in this room, they heard somebody in the hallway saying, ‘Heil Hitler!’ ” One sobbing student was approached by “an NAIS employee . . . to find out why she was upset, and basically [the employee] told her that [the employee] didn’t think anything was wrong with what had been said, and that it didn’t resonate that way with her.” Many Jewish students wanted to leave at that point and called to ask whether their chaperones could arrive earlier than planned — but to no avail, as it turned out, for most of those students.

 

“My daughter came back to the hotel room and was crying hysterically all night,” the Virginia parent says. “I was on the phone with her. . . . We had two weeks where I had to sleep in her room with her. She was really traumatized. She’d never been exposed to anything like that before. She felt hated and in fear for her safety.”

 

The speaker who denounced Israel is “just a kid,” the parent acknowledges. “Who I really blame are the moderators and organization, who failed to set appropriate guidelines, which resulted in many children feeling afraid and unsafe at a conference designed to celebrate diversity and inclusion, and who then failed to offer any resolution or apology.”

 

An NAIS spokesperson says that the SDLC conference “aims to help students navigate complex and often challenging conversations respectfully. Students are invited to share their perspectives in various settings. . . . The remarks in question came from a student commenter. Some students were deeply offended by the comments. These students reached out to SDLC faculty members, who worked to support them and to facilitate discussions. As an organization, NAIS condemns antisemitism in all forms, and our work — at SDLC and more broadly — strives to embrace diversity and champion inclusivity.”

 

Some parents, however, would counter that last year’s SDLC is one more example of the frequent failing by independent schools to truly include or protect Jewish students. Jewish parents and their allies in combating antisemitism are, indeed, in a morass, but there are two possible ways out. The first is to seed new classical schools. The second is to reform existing institutions.

 

Reflecting on DEI and its antisemitism, chilling of speech, and unpopularity in opinion polls, Ashley Jacobs, the Parents Unite director, observes, “This goes away if people have the courage to speak up.” The California parent estimates that this would require “20 percent of people.” So will parents speak up? And if not now, when?

Why a Platform Is Poison for Kamala Harris

By Judson Berger

Friday, August 30, 2024

 

The rational voter would turn to RFK Jr. for three things, and three things only: instruction in falconry, expertise in roadkill-consumption laws by state, and a stinging assessment of why Kamala Harris’s campaign is policy-light.

 

“Who needs a policy when you have Trump to hate?” he said a week ago, as he suspended his campaign and endorsed the Republican nominee.

 

It was perhaps the truest thing Kennedy said, even if that’s not saying much. (Okay, he made a few valid points about censorship and ultra-processed foods, but how much do you want to praise a guy who sees a whale carcass and thinks: Glad I brought a chain saw?)

 

The Democratic nominee can eschew any commitment to a traditional campaign platform in part because negative partisanship will allow her to capture a near-majority of voters no matter what her policies end up being, when the choice is Harris or Donald Trump. But there’s more to it. Her No. 2 position in an unpopular administration puts her in a policy straitjacket: She can’t lean into that agenda too much, nor can she convincingly divorce herself from it. And so, as Audrey Fahlberg and Brittany Bernstein report, the message for now is joy, freedom — and TBD.

 

The campaign has no policy section on its website, has renounced several of the nominee’s past positions, and is endorsing plans this cycle that, in key respects, allies and the media insist will not actually become law. Harris’s anti-price-gouging plan is already being downplayed as not viable and a mere “messaging tactic,” per Politico. In other words, “never mind.”

 

In Thursday’s CNN interview alongside Tim Walz, Harris nevertheless talked up that plank of her economic agenda (among others, including a $25,000 credit for first-time homebuyers, despite concerns it could raise the cost of starter homes). Addressing the inconsistencies between her last presidential campaign and this one, she insisted simply that her “values have not changed.” The campaign is teasing additional detail. Harris spokeswoman Brooke Goren told National Review that voters “can expect more to come from the campaign in terms of her talking about her specific plans.” The New York Times reported that aides expect “a few targeted policy proposals, akin to the first planks of an economic agenda she rolled out” — but that the campaign “is unlikely to detail a broader agenda beyond what Mr. Biden has already articulated.”

 

The reality is that the Harris platform remains a mostly black box — and may stay that way, in a stark departure from tradition considering the policy output by this point of the party’s 2008 and 2016 nominees, as Audrey and Brittany detail. Jim Geraghty, after watching the CNN sit-down, can only conclude, “This is a campaign built on vibes, and it will remain a campaign built on vibes.” Does it matter? That’s the underlying question in Audrey’s latest magazine piece, which gets at the central problem for Harris — “figuring out how to present herself to voters as a fresh face and in no way responsible for the inflation, chaos overseas, and surge in illegal immigration that have occurred under the watch of the Biden-Harris administration.”

 

Jim wonders if the candidate can simply get away with running for president without a policy vision. After all, the nominee whose theme is “freedom” would be granting her future administration plenty of it by withholding any agenda by which to be measured. Jim writes,

 

If Harris wins the election, she’ll have an argument that she has a mandate to do whatever she pleases, as very few Americans demanded more specifics from her.

 

And if she wins, why should any presidential candidate spell out specific policy proposals ever again?

 

The nominee’s convention speech included a few references to policy goals, including pursuing a national abortion bill and reviving the recently failed border bill. But Obama adviser/strategist David Axelrod told Audrey that, while elaborating on the issues is important, “what I don’t sense in the public is this hungering for more white papers from her.” Axelrod noted that her rival is “not exactly a policy maven.” Trump, indeed, is all over the map — on abortion especially. But even Trump has a platform on his website, albeit one that contains as many specifics as it does lower-case letters.

 

Marc Thiessen, writing in the Washington Post, notes a historical detail that haunts Harris: A sitting VP has been elected president only once in the last 188 years. That was George H. W. Bush, who ran when his boss, Ronald Reagan, was about as above water in public-opinion polls as Harris’s is below. “Bush succeeded where other modern vice presidents failed for one simple reason: Americans wanted a third Reagan term. Today, no one wants another Biden term,” Thiessen writes.

 

Harris is understandably reluctant to commit herself to anything resembling such a thing, her economic plan notwithstanding. So, no, don’t expect the nominee to suddenly “have a plan for that,” à la Elizabeth Warren. That’s not this campaign — not this year.

Kamala Harris’s Tough-on-Crime Story Is Nothing Like Her Actual Record

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 30, 2024

 

Kamala Harris and her fellow Democrats really want you to know that the vice president rose up the political ranks from her start as a hard-nosed prosecutor.

 

Her party’s nominating convention hammered the theme home in speeches from her allies in biographical video packages featuring the candidate bearing down on criminals as California’s attorney general. In her acceptance speech, Harris previewed her intention to wield her background as a cudgel against Donald Trump, who “was found guilty of fraud by a jury of everyday Americans” and “separately found liable for committing sexual abuse.” In her first (long-awaited) interview with a major network, Harris talked up her status as the “only person in this race who prosecuted transnational criminal organizations who traffic in guns, drugs, and human beings.”

 

In a dramatic departure from the last decade, Democrats now thirst for a “prosecutor-in-chief.” Harris is only giving her adoring public what they want. Indeed, that’s all she’s ever done. When Democrats wanted a criminal-justice reformer whose foremost concern was curbing law enforcement’s excesses, real and imagined, she was that, too. The problem for Harris is that she has established for herself a much longer track record as a dedicated — indeed, radical — proponent of policies that could hardly be described as tough-on-crime.

 

As veteran San Francisco–based columnist Debra Saunders observed in 2010, the record of which Harris is so proud as the city’s district attorney doesn’t bear passing resemblance to her characterizations of it. Harris reinterpreted San Francisco’s 1989 sanctuary-city statute barring local officials from notifying federal immigration officers about the arrest of undocumented juveniles — “or offenders who claim to be juvenile,” Saunders noted. “Under her watch (for lack of a better word), the city flew drug offenders to Honduras.”

 

“When federal authorities stopped this practice in 2008, the city sent eight Hondurans who had been convicted to group homes, from which they escaped,” she continued. Lawbreakers enjoyed sanctuary in a “Harris job-training program for offenders.” And when she was confronted with the fact that her program functionally employed people who were ineligible to work in the United States, she acknowledged that “we had not in the design of” that program “made provisions for screening” citizenship status.

 

Upon Harris’s ascension to the national political scene, she made a point of endorsing every faddish de-carceral policy proposal that popped into progressives’ heads.

 

“This story is just one example of why we need bail reform now,” she wrote in 2017, citing the case of a pregnant Chicago woman arrested on a traffic violation who was denied bail and forced to give birth while in pretrial detention. Harris was rushing to the front of a parade already in progress. Cash-bail reforms were already gaining steam, and the experiment has had decidedly mixed results. In the years since, sympathetic stories like those Harris promulgated have been buried under an avalanche of preventable disasters. In city after city, violent recidivist offenders have been set free to attack law-abiding citizens and law enforcement alike as a result of cashless-bail reforms.

 

“I’m running to fight for an America where no mother or father has to teach their young son that people may stop him, arrest him, chase him, or kill him because of his race,” Harris told a cheering throng at the outset of her first presidential campaign in 2018. The shibboleth maintaining that police officers were uniquely inclined to mete out deadly force based on their own prejudices endured despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

 

“It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Harvard professor Roland Fryer in 2016, following the release of his study indicating that black Americans do experience more contacts with the police, and may even experience arrest-related force more often than white Americans, but that there is no evidence of racial bias when it came to the use of lethal force. And yet, whenever a cause célèbre involving deadly force against black Americans came down the pike — both in legitimately appalling incidences and in cases where the officers were exonerated by a court — Harris displayed no prudence or circumspection. Progressives were not in the market for prudence or circumspection, and she aimed to please.

 

In 2020, CNN’s Dana Bash confronted Harris with her claim in a 2009 book that she “would like to see more police officers on the streets.” But in that demonic year, asserting that a robust police presence equated to greater safety was anathema to the Left. So she jettisoned that position in favor of the more fashionable view: “It is status quo thinking to believe that putting more police on the streets creates more safety,” she told the New York Times in an interview headlined “Kamala Harris Is Done Explaining Racism.”

 

So, which is it? “I am very clear that we have got to, in America, reimagine how we are accomplishing public safety,” Harris said in response. But has she changed her mind? Harris declined to answer straight, relying instead on her endorsement of consequences for the worst offenders — rapists, molesters, and murderers. We can assume, however, that even violent criminality that fails to meet that measure shouldn’t merit preventative policing given the downsides associated with a law-enforcement presence in dangerous neighborhoods. At the time, that was what progressives wanted to hear.

 

“We can’t just speak the truth about police brutality in our nation,” Harris wrote later that year, “we must act to change our systems of justice and demand accountability.” What sort of accountability? “Let’s have a national registry of police officers who break the law,” she said in a conversation with activists. “Why? Because in a lot of cases, those cases don’t go to court. It’s an administrative hearing. The person might get fired. They just have to move to a new jurisdiction, their record doesn’t follow them, and then, you know what happens.”

 

That was an about-face from 2007, when, as the Times reported, Harris “stayed quiet as police unions opposed legislation granting public access to disciplinary hearings.” And for defensible reasons. Total administrative transparency creates incentives for “the potential abuse of the complaint-making process,” may “make it easier for disaffected parties to identify, locate, and potentially harm the officers who they believe wronged them,” and may “cause undeserved reputational harms to officers and departments.”

 

That logic proved compelling enough for Harris when her objective was to present herself as a “top cop.” And when she needed to make herself over into a crusader for progressive reforms, she did so. Now that the prime directive demands that she once again cast herself as a tough-as-nails prosecutor, she can be that, too.

 

This shouldn’t be enough to convince anyone of Harris’s sincerity, as her campaign tacitly admitted. In response to Donald Trump’s proposal to preserve and fund with taxpayer dollars the public’s access to in vitro fertilization treatments, the Harris camp dismissed it out of hand. After all, the former president has a long and established record of governing in ways that depart from his campaign-trail rhetoric. We should, therefore, disregard the Trump campaign’s claims designed to convince you that he has suddenly become a different person from the one you’ve grown accustomed to over the years.

 

That’s good advice. Harris’s voters would do well to follow it.

Kamala Harris Comes Out of Hiding

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, August 31, 2024

 

It was, Dana Bash said on CNN at 9 p.m. Thursday, “a watershed moment.” Not just a watershed — “a defining moment.” Why the fuss? Kamala Harris was giving an interview.

 

Think about that. Somehow, in the whirlwind of campaign 2024, we have reached the point where it’s news that the Democratic nominee for president of the United States of America will answer questions from the press. Until now, if you’ve been interested in Harris’s views, you’ve had to rely, with one or two exceptions, on the Harris whisperers — the unnamed aides quoted in mainstream media disavowing the vice president’s previous positions on health care, energy, the environment, immigration, and crime. The interview mattered because it was the first time we heard the nominee unfiltered, without her teleprompter, no notes.

 

Harris is elusive. It’s been over a month since she locked up the Democratic nomination, and we barely know anything about what she wants to do as president, or where she’d like to lead the country. One virtue of the long campaign is that, over two years, you get a feeling for candidates. You learn a lot — sometimes too much — about them. Democratic strategist David Axelrod once said that presidential campaigns “are like an MRI for the soul.” Harris missed her doctor’s appointment. She’s the first nominee in the modern era not to have won a primary. She’s delivered one major policy speech, on price controls, to mixed reviews. Then a Harris whisperer told the New York Times not to worry, the plan won’t become law anyway.

 

“I think she’s someone who doesn’t like feeling known, doesn’t like you assuming to have figured her out, and I think that’s true politically and personally,” Astead Herndon of the New York Times told a colleague this week. Harris’s suspicion of reporters was apparent in the conversation with Bash. She seemed to be spending more time trying not to mispronounce Bash’s first name than delivering a message directly and pithily. Forty days of preparation weren’t enough.

 

When Bash asked Harris if she would invite a Republican to join her cabinet, Harris reacted as though she hadn’t contemplated such a move. She looked downward for much of her answer, thinking through the question aloud before settling on sure, why not, as her response. The last Republican to serve in a Democrat’s cabinet was former defense secretary Bob Gates under Barack Obama. It did not end well.

 

Harris’s values may not have changed, but what were her values in the first place? She told Bash that the same values informed her support for the Green New Deal in 2019 and the (so-called) Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. But the two pieces of legislation are different in scope and method. The Green New Deal was a child of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and her socialist “Squad.” It aims to transform the U.S. economy. The Inflation Reduction Act was a massive spending bill, a grab bag of energy and health-care subsidies and an expansion of the IRS. Harris didn’t explain the through line that connects reducing the number of “farting cows” and shoving money into EV charging stations. Or perhaps she didn’t want to.

 

Bash asked some good questions, but rarely followed up. She mentioned Harris’s calls to ban fracking. When Harris said, “As president I will not ban fracking,” Bash moved on. The next subject was immigration. What about the time when Harris wanted to decriminalize border crossings? “I would enforce our laws as president going forward,” Harris said. What a relief.

 

In the end, Harris remained somewhat aloof, hesitant, withdrawn. She stuck close to her talking points. The interview was cut into segments, and the final piece was all soft — how Harris felt about the photo of her grandniece watching her accept the Democratic nomination, how vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, responded to his son’s joy at seeing his dad named as Harris’s running mate.

 

About Walz. Bash asked him to explain his misrepresentation of his National Guard service, his family’s fertility treatments, his DUI. He, too, stuck to the playbook. He emoted. He harrumphed. He avoided a direct answer. Bash could’ve pressed him further. It was a missed opportunity. One among many. 

 

A watershed? A defining moment? If so, the water’s under the bridge. And I wouldn’t say the moment defined Kamala Harris well.

Mourning in America

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, August 29, 2024

 

A wise man once said that the business of punditry is persuasion. Assuming that’s true, we won’t be conducting any business today.

 

That’s because the subject of Donald Trump’s toothy thumbs-up photo op amid the fallen at Arlington National Cemetery is persuasion-proof. There are already a thousand reasons to despise him; either you came around to doing so long ago or you’ve managed to rationalize away each of them, in which case this latest one won’t pose any problem.

 

Years ago, it was possible to believe there might be something he could do to alienate his apologists. Callousness toward the military was an obvious one: The right prides itself on being patriotic, and patriots rightly celebrate service members for the sacrifices they’ve made to defend America. If Trump were to stoop to his usual boorishness in attacking an opponent’s military record, it was thought, he might at last discover a line he’s not allowed to cross.

 

How naive we were. The rest of this column could be spent revisiting his various affronts to military honor over the years: goofing on John McCain for being captured in Vietnam; “feuding” with a Muslim Gold Star family in 2016; confiding in aides that he didn’t want wounded veterans in a parade because it “doesn’t look good for me;” declining to visit an American military cemetery outside Paris in 2018 for fear, allegedly, that his hair would get wet in the rain; saying on the same trip, according to four separate sources cited by The Atlantic, that the cemetery was “filled with losers” and that the Marines at Belleau Wood were “suckers” for having sacrificed their lives.

 

John Kelly, a four-star Marine general who went on to become Trump’s chief of staff, confirmed all of it on the record to CNN last October. According to The Atlantic, when Trump accompanied Kelly in 2017 on a visit to the grave of the general’s son Robert, who was himself killed in Afghanistan years earlier, he turned to Kelly and said of the fallen, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

 

In a test of credibility between a man with a dubious record of draft deferments on the one hand and a highly decorated officer who lost his son in combat on the other, it’s no contest: The right chooses to believe that Kelly, not Trump, is the liar. That’s what being “persuasion-proof” means. When Trump quasi-joked recently that receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom is “much better” than receiving the Medal of Honor because it doesn’t involve being maimed or killed, right-wing media didn’t so much as twitch an eyelid.’

 

To paraphrase one of his own formulations, Trump could insult a disabled soldier on Fifth Avenue at this point and not lose a single vote.

 

The Arlington visit is worth discussing anyway, though, just as it’s worth occasionally revisiting Trump’s infamous stunt in Lafayette Square in 2020. It’s not only a window onto his authoritarian psychology, as Jonathan Last ably explained on Wednesday, it’s the latest example of how the right’s refusal to hold him morally accountable begets awkward attempts by his critics to hold him legally accountable instead. 

 

Rules are made to be broken.

 

Monday was the third anniversary of the ISIS suicide attack at Kabul’s airport that killed 13 American service members during the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan. Relatives of two of the fallen invited Trump to visit the national cemetery with them to mark the occasion.

 

That’s his right. It’s also his right to take photographs while he’s there, as all visitors are allowed to do. He was apparently even granted permission to have his own photographer and/or videographer attend to chronicle the event. And the Gold Star families whom he accompanied were fine with it.

 

What he wasn’t allowed to do, per federal regulation, was engage in “partisan political activities” on the premises, which is why cemetery officials asked him not to bring campaign staff with him. According to multiple outlets, he was also explicitly warned not to take photos or video in Section 60, the part of the cemetery reserved for veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. You can understand why: The grief is still fresh for visitors in that area. As a matter of respect and compassion, they shouldn’t be disturbed by the presence of cameras.

 

Trump and his team ignored those rules, naturally, recording in Section 60 with campaign staff in tow. Then they turned the footage into a de facto campaign ad, replete with audio of Trump comparing Biden’s record in Afghanistan to his own, and posted it on TikTok. 

One photo published by Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who joined Trump on the trip, shows the group gathered behind the grave of airport bombing victim Darin Taylor Hoover. Clearly visible in the frame next to Hoover’s grave is that of Andrew Marckesano, who died a year earlier—and whose family did not give permission for their loved one’s memorial to be featured in a Trump campaign stunt, not that anyone on his team cares.

 

The icing on the cake is allegations of an “altercation” between a cemetery employee and members of Trump’s entourage during the visit. The employee reportedly tried to stop the group from filming in Section 60; according to an Army spokesman, she was “abruptly pushed aside.” No charges have been filed and Trump’s team claims to have footage proving that things never got physical, but there’s been plenty of verbal abuse in the aftermath. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung accused the employee of “suffering from a mental health episode” while top adviser Chris LaCivita called her a “despicable individual” for trying to stop Trump from filming his commercial—er, I mean paying his respects.

 

All of this feels familiar, no?

 

Not the setting, that is, but Trump’s M.O. It’s the classified documents fiasco all over again. He wanted something he couldn’t have; that something was minor enough that he calculated the relevant authorities wouldn’t go to war with him to block him from getting it; so he simply ignored the rules and dared them to do something about it.

 

He succeeded at Arlington and might yet succeed in the other matter. That’s what happens when a gangster by temperament leads a gang that includes millions of people: In nearly every dispute, the personal cost of litigating that dispute will be greater for his opponents than it will be for him. Not coincidentally, according to military sources who spoke to the New York Times, the reason the cemetery employee chose not to press charges over the alleged altercation is that “she feared Mr. Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation,” an entirely reasonable concern.

 

If Trump were president now, Jonathan Last noted in his piece, and that employee had tried to enforce the law against him and his campaign, he’d almost certainly retaliate professionally by firing her even if no one retaliated against her personally. “The only controlling limit is what the public will let you get away with” is how he describes Trump’s concept of rules, aptly.

 

A valuable thing.

 

Very much relatedly, Trump has always struggled to subordinate his personal interests to the public interest. That’s how he came to inquire of John Kelly what was “in it” for the men who died for their country.

 

I think he views access to government power and iconography the same way former governor turned Apprentice contestant turned federal convict turned Trump commutee Rod Blagojevich views Senate appointments. They’re a “f—ing valuable thing,” and no gangster worth his salt would turn down a f—ing valuable thing for something as airy as decorum or respect for the dead.

 

“Trump has repeatedly defied restrictions on using federal property for campaign purposes by staging a political speech at Mount Rushmore, participating in a television interview inside the Lincoln Memorial, and holding the 2020 Republican National Convention at the White House itself,” the Washington Post remembered in a story about his Arlington visit. Iconic public monuments are a valuable thing as backdrops for a politician eager to identify himself as a super-patriot and national savior, and Arlington National Cemetery is certainly iconic.

 

His eagerness to exploit official power for private benefit goes beyond exploiting federal property, though. When White House adviser Kellyanne Conway was accused of “persistent, notorious and deliberate Hatch Act violations” by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel in 2019, Trump shrugged it off and vowed not to fire her. He himself famously declined to place his business holdings in a true blind trust upon taking office in 2017 despite—or because of—the possibility that his financial interests might influence his decisions as president.

 

What was his first impeachment about if not the lengths to which he was willing to go to leverage his official power to serve his personal ends? What is the classified documents scandal about if not Trump’s “insistence that the trappings of power and property of the state should be inseparable from the person and interests of the dear leader,” in Last’s words?

 

He dominates his party to such a freakish degree that even his relationship with congressional Republicans has the feel of someone exploiting a public asset for private gain. The Daily Caller reported on Wednesday that House Speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. Mike McCaul intervened on Trump’s behalf after officials at Arlington initially resisted his visit, which the Caller implies was motivated by corrupt cemetery personnel wanting to deny the Republican nominee a powerful public appearance.

 

Maybe. Or maybe defense officials simply believe that a military cemetery should be a sanctuary from politics for the bereaved and other grateful visitors rather than the set of a political ad. According to the Post, they “were deeply concerned about the former president turning the visit into a campaign stop”—and were right to be, it turns out. But one thing about prominent gangsters is that they have many associates willing to abet them in their schemes; in Trump’s case, those associates happen to include figures as powerful as the speaker of the House.

 

If Trump was there to honor the dead rather than to cut a commercial, he could have attended, saluted, consoled the families, and left the cameras and campaign flunkies at home, and no one would have had any problem. But character, alas, is destiny. “He never understood why would you do anything that doesn’t benefit you,” a former senior Trump White House official (who sounds a lot like John Kelly) told the Post. “I remember talking to him about death and sacrifice for the country, and it was like talking Greek to him. That’s why it’s the height of hypocrisy he’s there laying a wreath, given his general feelings about veterans.”

 

The grimmest irony of this episode is that it was Spencer Cox, of all Republicans, who ended up by his side for the photo op. For years, Cox has positioned himself as a voice of civility in an increasingly Trumpy party; not until last month did he finally endorse his party’s nominee, leading The Atlantic to dub him “The Last Man in America to Change His Mind About Trump.” As if to prove how quickly Trumpism can corrupt its converts, within weeks he had a minor part in his new friend’s attempt to shamelessly politicize the country’s most hallowed cemetery.

 

Gangsters have many associates. Trump now has another.

 

Laws and norms.

 

On Wednesday afternoon, a Dispatch colleague and I found ourselves in a heated legal debate in the company Slack over whether Trump broke any laws with his Arlington visit. 

 

My colleague thought he was in the clear from the federal regulation banning ceremonies that include “partisan political activities” at military graveyards. He hadn’t done anything explicitly “partisan” there, after all. All visitors are allowed to take photographs, and he was a visitor. And two Gold Star families had invited him. It wasn’t like he was barging in on their gathering.

 

I countered that his activity became “partisan” when he turned the footage into a TikTok clip in which he expressly criticized the Biden-Harris White House for its Afghanistan fiasco. We’re two months out from an election, and he’s the Republican nominee for president. He shouldn’t be required to hold up a sign reading “Trump 2024” or “Vote GOP” to run afoul of the regulation’s language.

 

Nor should it matter that the two families invited him. The Marckesano family didn’t. Other grieving families visiting Section 60 didn’t. The relatives of the fallen are among America’s most sympathetic figures but they don’t get to carve out their own exceptions to federal law. The point of the regulation is to keep Arlington free from politics; if Trump gets a pass because he was able to find some supportive Gold Star families willing to chaperone him there, it won’t be hard for Democrats to find Trump-hating families to chaperone their own campaign stunts at the cemetery.

 

It’s an interesting legal debate! It’s also incredibly dispiriting that we felt obliged to have it.

 

Law simply shouldn’t matter here. The way you deter Trump and other sociopathic politicians from treating gravesites as stage sets is by shaming them and punishing them politically for their callousness. But … how you do that when the people in the best position to inflict that punishment, right-wing voters, refuse to do so?

 

This is the entire Trump legal saga in a nutshell. I remain convinced that the Justice Department never would have pursued him for interfering in the 2020 election had the right not given him a pass on it, morally and politically. If Senate Republicans had joined Democrats in disqualifying him from future office at his second impeachment trial, that would have been that. Or if Republican voters had turned their backs on him and rendered him an also-ran in this year’s presidential primary, that too would have been that.

 

In either case, the DOJ and the state prosecutors who’ve indicted him might have concluded that a disgraced Trump being held morally accountable by the right was enough to deter future coup-plotters. There’d be no urgent need in that case for the justice system to provide added deterrence given how wrenching it would be for the country to put an ex-president on trial. 

 

As it became mortifyingly clear that the right wouldn’t hold Trump accountable for anything, prosecutors decided that the law would have to supply the needed deterrence instead. That’s how we ended up with special counsel Jack Smith awkwardly trying to shoehorn Trump’s coup plot into a statute about fraud. And that’s how we ended up in the Dispatch Slack channel yesterday with me trying to shoehorn a TikTok video into a regulation about “partisan political activity.”

 

“This case is a bit like the Trump problem in miniature,” a second colleague observed during our Arlington debate. “Arguably not illegal but odious in a way the law couldn’t anticipate.” Just so. There’s no statute that squarely prohibits coup plots because lawmakers never imagined someone would try one—or that the people and their representatives would decline to deal harshly with anyone who dared.

 

The same goes for Trump’s photo op. Who would have thought a regulation might need to be extra specific in order to stop politicians from campaigning in military graveyards? Shouldn’t shame suffice to deter them?

 

Trump has no shame, and Republicans have completely abdicated their civic responsibility to make him behave as if he did. In a thoroughly amoral, persuasion-proof political culture, the only solutions to moral problems are legal ones.