Why the Constitution Is Better Than the Declaration of Independence

By Andy Smarick

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

 

The most important divide today in American public life is not between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, or liberals and postliberals. It’s between those who see governing as a spectator sport and those in the arena.

 

The first group—the commentariat—is made up of academics, cable news figures, talk radio hosts, columnists, pundits, political YouTubers, and the like. These are the talkers and writers with clever ideas and punchy words who bear no public responsibility for those ideas or words. The second group—public servants—runs our governing institutions and are accountable for the decisions they make.

 

Today, the difference is stark. At any given moment, you can find a spicy, rhetorically striking take on the dispute du jour from a confident commentator holding forth on a podcast, Substack, or X. At the same time, those actually governing are quietly trying to solve a local problem, balance a city budget, or manage an agency’s dozens of programs.

 

But as we prepare to celebrate the nation’s 250^th birthday, we should recognize the same divide between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The former deals in abstractions and employs grand language. Indeed, those who signed it had had little opportunity to run governments; for instance, domestic assemblies were generally subordinate to the British crown, Parliament, and royal governors. The Constitution, on the other hand, was fashioned by those who’d been responsible for leading states and the nation during and after the Revolution. When it came to the toughest issues, they couldn’t rely on vague concepts and flowery language. They had to sweat the details and craft workable solutions.

 

The Constitution is unquestionably the superior document. The Declaration would look entirely different had the Constitution not saved America from the shambles of the Articles of Confederation and had it not devised the ingenious medley of democracy, republicanism, liberty, federalism, separation of powers, and governmental constraints. Without the Constitution, our Declaration of Independence would be seen like the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: a lofty statement followed by failed governing.

 

This doesn’t mean that we should ignore the Declaration. We should simply appreciate it for what it is: theory and sentiment, not a serious guide to governing. In fact, if we want to understand today’s political dysfunction, namely Uncle Sam’s ineptitude and our dilapidated public square, we should recognize the profound difference between the commentariat-style approach of the Declaration and the public-servant-style approach of the Constitution. Four instances demonstrate the difference.

 

The Constitution vs. the Declaration.

 

First, the Declaration’s flourishes and abstractions start in its opening sentence, designed to justify our creation of an independent nation. Rather than citing the wisdom of democratic rule or the English tradition of representative government, the Declaration points to the vague “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” That phrase might be rousing, but neither the Bible nor natural law provides a blueprint for governing; both remain at the level of nebulous principles—principles that have been contested for millennia. In fact, both can be used to justify a host of governing systems, including benevolent monarchies. And neither advises on how to establish a new government, much less a democratic one. Sparkling prose and generalities take precedence over sturdy specifics.

 

The opening of the Constitution is entirely different. The framers weren’t interested in rhapsodizing. They had a concrete task: Create a workable government fitting the American character. They were explicit and precise, though less melodic, about where the right to form a nation and the right to craft law come from: “We the people.” American citizens were establishing the governing charter, and then they and future generations would rule democratically. Indeed, the remainder of the Constitution spells out America’s system of self-government: the sovereignty of the people, the roles of the branches, the republican nature of state governments, and so on. The Constitution is the work of practitioners, not poets.

 

Second, for commentators a good turn of phrase is more important than precision: The goal is to be taken seriously, not literally. This sad fact is typified by the Declaration’s most famous phrase: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s primary author, did not actually believe that. He owned slaves and thought those of African descent were inferior. He did not believe in the political equality of women or Native Americans. Many signers agreed with him and believed only property owners should have the vote. The term “self-evident” is certainly charming, but human equality was obviously not self-evident to Jefferson. He would not have written those famous words about equality had he believed that the Declaration was a true legal, governing document subject to exacting interpretation.

 

The framers of the Constitution couldn’t hide behind such majestic-sounding feints. They knew they were writing a binding legal document. Though they came up far short on matters like race and sex, their specifics advanced the cause of equality beyond what other nations had done: The people—not the elite—were in charge, religious tests and titles of nobility were banned, states couldn’t discriminate against citizens of other states, states were guaranteed a republican form of government. Moreover, with the adoption of the Bill of Rights during the first Congress, Americans were equally protected from government abuse. With the ratification of the 13^th, 14^th, 15^th, and 19^th amendments, the rights of black Americans and women were expanded. The Constitution meant what it said and did far more for equality than Jefferson’s glowing but hollow sentiment.

 

Third, the frustrating vagueness continues in the Declaration’s next phrase, that the people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The words are lyrical but accomplish little in practice. What does a right to life actually guarantee? Which liberties, exactly? What does “pursuit of happiness” mean? Had the Declaration rooted our rights in the common law, we’d at least have a list found in history and tradition: The American people could point to long-recognized protections like due process, warrants, and trial by jury. Or had the Declaration said that our rights are those codified by the people, Americans would know that they could create liberties through law. Instead, in the Declaration, our rights are unspecified, and the ostensible source—the Creator—never provided an inventory. The insecurity of our rights is then compounded by the Declaration’s following phrase, which says that the state’s just powers come from the “consent of the governed.” But there is a philosophical tradition arguing that the people can consent to governments that recognize few to no rights. The Declaration’s approach to rights is lip service, not legwork.

 

The Constitution, on the other hand, is crystal clear about our liberties. Even prior to the Bill of Rights, the Constitution explicitly protected habeas corpus and prohibited bills of attainder and ex post facto laws. With the first 10 amendments, Americans secured rights related to speech, religion, the press, firearms, government search and seizure, speedy trials, self-incrimination, excessive punishments, and more. In short, our rights are protected because they are named and embedded in an actionable legal document. The Constitution did that.

 

Fourth, the Declaration claims that governments are created to protect rights (“to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men”). Though that idea was popular among some Enlightenment-era philosophers, history (not to mention common sense) tells us something quite different. Ancient city-states and republics demonstrated that people form governing communities for reasons far beyond liberty. Needless to say, Sparta’s government did not begin each day with an ode to individual rights. Indeed, the millennia-old concept of the “common good” is more about personal duty and community authority than about liberty. Today, people expect governments to operate public schools, collect trash, police the streets, and maintain highways, not just protect rights.

 

The Constitution corrects this error. Rather than speaking philosophically about the hypothesized purpose of all governments, the Constitution’s preamble speaks directly to why this government is being created. And in doing so, it looks beyond rights. It names affirmative governing aims related to justice, defense, peace, and the general welfare. Then, in Article I, it lists a host of government powers that, again, extend far beyond the protection of rights, including borrowing money, regulating commerce, coining money, and declaring war. The necessary and proper clause authorizes even more. Because the Constitution was written by those experienced in governing, who understood that they were writing a charter for a real government, its language concretely addresses the purposes and activities of governing. It is not satisfied by high-minded rhetoric about liberty.

 

In all four of these ways, the Declaration prioritized fanciful ideas and language. The Constitution had to be the grown-up in the room. The Constitution properly elevated popular sovereignty over natural law, it did the heavy lifting on equality, it provided specifics and muscle on rights, and it fixed the Declaration’s mistake on the purpose of government. In fairness, the Declaration did ably list our grievances with the British crown and clearly state our separation. Those are its lasting contributions. But on the most important aspects of governing, it was thankfully overruled by the Constitution.

 

The reason the Declaration made so many mistakes is the same reason American public life is in disrepair today. In the Declaration, statecraft is a matter of bold, elegant pronouncements. But when crafty rhetoric is the goal, you become prone to overstatement, instigation, imprecision, insincerity, and impracticality. People who are serious about governing learn  quickly that they don’t have that luxury. They must accurately assess problems and opportunities, develop feasible proposals, build majority coalitions, offer concessions, craft compromises, and execute uneasy agreements.

 

Our public square is now overflowing with commentators, those who want to offer the clever analysis, issue the withering critique, and then go to lunch. Everywhere you turn is a figure with big ideas and brash words but no meaningful experience in governing and no intention of getting it. Today’s America struggles to seriously discuss statecraft, much less practice it, because public leaders now prioritize rhetoric instead of results, statements instead of solutions.

 

We’re filled to the brim with Jeffersons when we desperately need Madisons.

 

The right way to celebrate the 250^th.

 

I love America, and I’m excited to celebrate our 250^th anniversary. It is not my aim to rain on our semiquincentennial parade.

 

But there is a danger in learning the wrong lesson from this year’s commemoration of the Declaration. Yes, absolutely, celebrate the founding of America, the greatest nation the planet has known. No, do not think that saying bold things is as valuable as, much less the same as, governing well.

 

We face a legitimate crisis today: Everyone wants to talk about governing, but few want to govern. So many talented, ambitious young professionals today want to be pundits, not public servants. This fits today’s talk-don’t-do ethic: More than half of Gen Zers want to be influencers as a career. Pew now tracks the universe of “news influencers.” A growing number of those in public office now, especially in Washington, spend their time making social media videos and angling for spots on podcasts and cable news instead of focusing on their governing responsibilities. Some of them would rather be media figures than in office. We have a president with an overwhelming media presence but no legislative agenda. The DOGE disaster was led and operated by those with big ideas and sharp words but no governing experience. In short, the commentary industry is booming while our nation’s biggest problems—uncontrolled national debt, illegal immigration, China’s rise, AI’s threats, inflation, cratering student achievement—go unaddressed.

 

Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo famously said that we campaign in poetry but govern in prose. His point was that there is a time for rhetorical flourishes, but we must also do the hard, unglamorous, necessary day-to-day work of governing. To our nation’s detriment, we seem to have entirely forgotten the second part. As we celebrate America’s independence this summer, let’s remember that there would be no America to celebrate if we had only Jefferson’s poetry. We needed the prose writers committed to governing, namely those who crafted the Constitution and then served in federal, state, and local capacities.

 

As another former New York governor repeatedly argued more than a century ago:

 

The man who really counts in the world is the doer, not the mere critic—the man who actually does the work, even if roughly and imperfectly, not the man who only talks or writes about how it ought to be done.

 

President Theodore Roosevelt’s sentiment is as timely as ever: Get out of the cheap seats and into the arena. Indeed, the very best way to honor America on this 250^th anniversary is to stop writing and talking and start serving.

A Watergate Every Week

By David A. Graham

Monday, June 29, 2026

 

Back in 2016, before he converted to the MAGA cause, J. D. Vance was deeply wary of Donald Trump. He wrote to a law-school classmate that he went “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

 

For most people, “cynical asshole” would seem pejorative, but perhaps Vance meant it as something to aspire to. Late last week, the vice president visited the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in Yorba Linda, California, and quipped, “Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media. It kind of sounds like J.D. Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”

 

Vance went on to suggest that the scandal that toppled Nixon was no big deal, and that the 37th president was a victim of nefarious forces. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be, like, a 12-hour news story,” he said. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

 

Vance is correct about how Watergate would’ve landed today, but the lesson is not what he claims. Since 1974, Americans have become pessimistic about their leaders, deeply polarized in their partisanship, and distrustful of the media—all of which means that Watergate very well might pass quickly in today’s environment. The best evidence is that the Trump administration weathers scandals on the Watergate level routinely. As Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote of Vance’s remark, “‘We do a Watergate twice a day’ is a crazy way to confess your own corruption.”

 

Vance, who has previously admitted to making up stories for political purposes, also offered a bogus history of what happened in Watergate: “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.” (As the journalist Ed Kilgore notes, the same revisionism has been peddled by the Vance-allied propagandist Christopher Rufo.)

 

Once again, Vance is right to draw a comparison but takes the wrong lesson. Trump’s first impeachment, for soliciting foreign interference from Ukraine in the 2020 election, and Nixon’s downfall share two important things: First, both men did what they were accused of, though both insisted that their actions had been fine. (Trump: “a perfect conversation.” Nixon: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”) Second, the most damning evidence against both of them came not from “deep state” bureaucrats but from their own appointed political aides. The question of accountability is where the stories start to differ: Nixon was forced to resign by Republicans dismayed by his behavior; today, lockstep partisanship means that many GOP members of Congress pulled their punches in Trump’s two impeachment trials. Now Trump, like Nixon before him, is using the muscle of the federal government to bully and persecute his political adversaries.

 

More than one year ago, my colleague Anne Applebaum described the Trump administration as the most corrupt in American history, and the headlines routinely provide attestation. Over the weekend, for example, The New York Times reported on how Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick struck a deal with the Kazakh government to give an American company access to Kazakh tungsten deposits, and to provide $1.6 billion in financing; the sons of both Trump and Lutnick now stand to profit from business arrangements based on the deal. A week before this, the Times reported that the administration killed an investigation into how a convicted fraudster had obtained clemency from the president—only one of many cases of what look like pay-to-play commutations and pardons.

 

The Wall Street Journal recently delved into how the billionaire Larry Ellison’s roughly $45 million donation to a Trump-supporting nonprofit in the 2024 election helped facilitate his son David’s acquisition of Paramount, the corporate parent of CBS News, which he has moved to make a media ally of the White House, and pending acquisition of CNN. (A Paramount spokesperson told the Journal that the company had made no commitments to any government body about coverage.) The Washington Post reported earlier this month that more than half of the publicly identified donors to Trump’s intended White House ballroom have won new or larger federal contracts in recent months—totaling more than $50 billion. The president is aiming to host a major international conference at his own property—a step scandalous enough that he was forced to back down by Republicans when he tried it during his first term. No wonder the FBI has dissolved its public-corruption unit.

 

This is not an exhaustive list, even for the past few weeks, which is part of the point: Watergate shocked the conscience because it was so rare to have such a fetid scandal break into view. But by following Steve Bannon’s maxim to “flood the zone with shit,” Trump has avoided the monthslong drip-drip of Watergate revelations, overwhelmed the press, and desensitized the public. Hardly anyone can maintain a mental list of all the improprieties.

 

Ironically, Watergate paved the way for this. It was not the first instance of awful behavior by a president, but it led to a new era of close scrutiny of politicians, which turned up many scandals. This in turn numbed the public to any individual example, even as it deepened their dim impression of politicians as a whole. If it’s true that Watergate wouldn’t make a dent today, that is a reason to lament the fallen state of politics, not to conclude that Watergate was just fine.

 

This would be a powerful argument coming from the vice president, who has worried about what he sees as insufficient morality in American society and has said that his role is “to try to apply moral principles in ways that get the best outcomes.” Instead, Vance has concluded that his best chance at political advancement is to hitch himself to the corrupt and unethical Trump. Such cynicism would do Nixon proud.

Stop Throat Clearing and Start Denouncing

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

 

American Jews need to stop with the apologizing.

 

After spending 500 words attacking AIPAC earlier this week, Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote: “This is all a long way of saying that AIPAC has had an extremely negative impact on American politics, and on the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians for a very long time. They deserve to be criticized, exposed, and opposed. That said, this election cycle has brought a disturbing trend of progressive candidates and electeds depicting AIPAC as a bogeyman, and as THE evil influence in American politics.”

 

That said. Oh, by the way. Nevertheless.

 

“There are real, important critiques of AIPAC and of money in politics,” begins a tweet by Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, gingerly laying the groundwork for the mildest rebuke of left-wing anti-Semitism you will ever read: “Dehumanizing ‘monsters’ rhetoric or coffee shops arbitrarily banning a Jewish congressman reinforce the same divisive, dangerous, zero-sum dynamics the right has long pushed.”

 

Banning a Jew from a coffee shop is bad because it’s… politically divisive? Also, I can’t help but notice that no one is named in the tweet. Who used “dehumanizing ‘monsters’ rhetoric?” It was the mayor of New York City, progressive darling Zohran Mamdani. Seems worth mentioning.

 

The Twitter/X page of New York Jewish Agenda, a liberal political group, leads with the following statement: “We have been deeply critical of AIPAC’s policies and approach to politics. No matter those very deep differences, it’s vital that our leaders do not resort to rhetoric and attacks that only reinforce polarization and division. Especially at this moment of fear and rising antisemitism, flattening these urgent conversations with dehumanizing language is counterproductive to building a broad and vibrant movement for human dignity.”

 

Wonder who they’re talking about! The only one named in the tweet is AIPAC. Allow me to repeat myself: The only one named in a tweet about an anti-Semitic attack on AIPAC is AIPAC.

 

Perhaps it’s worth noting that Mamdani’s anti-Semitism coordinator was director of New York Jewish Agenda when the mayor hired her.

 

Some reporting also took this, shall we say, measured tone. “I can confidently say few journalists who report on Israel, the Jewish world or otherwise have covered AIPAC with as much scrutiny as yours truly,” begins Ben Samuels’s piece at Haaretz. His reporting has covered “how AIPAC fuels Israel’s hyperpoliticization in American politics and the long-standing role it plays in fomenting Israel as a wedge issue within the American Jewish community.”

 

AIPAC, Samuels says, was not always very happy with him: “In fact, some of the most contentious and difficult conversations of my career have been with senior AIPAC officials who have resented Haaretz’s framing of the organization’s allegiance to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, its embodiment of Big Money’s role in U.S. electoral politics, its push for policies antithetical to the Democratic Party’s base and its increasingly out-of-step demands at dictating the American-Jewish conversation surrounding Israeli policy — whether that be on the Gaza war, Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, or Netanyahu’s efforts to gut Israel’s judiciary.”

 

Now I know what you’re thinking: When do we get to the be that as it may? Here it is: “All of this should be duly considered when I warn that criticism of AIPAC has far surpassed dangerous territory, where valid critiques have too often devolved into ad hominem dehumanization—all while American Jews’ acute concerns over antisemitism and communal safety are more pressing than at any other time in recent memory.”

 

Look: a bit of throat-clearing as a rhetorical device is something we all use. Sometimes, in fact, it’s the polite way to handle a difficult conversation. That said, be that as it may, nevertheless, one should seek to convey the level of one’s discomfort honestly when objecting to rhetoric or behavior in the political arena.

 

Example: After that coffee shop told Rep. Dan Goldman that they don’t serve his kind, Democratic congressman Josh Gottheimer, who is Jewish, posted a picture of Goldman’s office after it was vandalized a couple years ago by anti-Zionist lunatics. He put that picture side by side with a Berlin shop hit by anti-Semitic graffiti in 1933. “These are the same photo,” Gottheimer wrote, adding: “Enough is enough. Where do we draw the line?”

 

Clear and right to the point. In response, Jared Moskowitz—another Jewish Democrat in the House of Representatives—wrote: “This time we are gonna fight back.”

 

Moskowitz and Gottheimer have been, to their great credit, urging the pro-Israel Jewish community to go on the offensive. As Gottheimer said last month: “I am sick and tired of people apologizing, of making excuses. We should feel proud of the U.S.-Israel relationship, of the independence, of what it’s done for America, of the bipartisan nature, historically, of the relationship and thank God we have Israel to help us fight terror, to stand for freedom and to stand for democracy.”

 

Elected Jewish Democrats are up against a rising tide of anti-Semitism within their caucus. Those who are fighting back deserve the same unapologetic support from left-of-center and Democratic Party-associated Jewish groups and figures.

 

 

This Is How You Got Graham Platner

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, June 29, 2026

 

I pay special attention to polls about pride in America, mostly as a matter of narcissism.

 

I’m keen to know how many people have had their patriotism shattered by the relentless demoralizing scumbaggery of the MAGA era, as I have. Am I the exception or the rule?

 

A little of both, it seems. Gallup’s new data strongly suggests a “Trump effect” on deteriorating American pride, in case the pitiful attendance at the Great American State Fair this past weekend didn’t already clue you in. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

 

For instance, ousting Donald Trump in 2020 and regaining control of the White House did boost patriotism among the left—but only modestly and temporarily. The highest share of Democrats who said they were “extremely proud” to be American in recent years was 34 percent in 2024. By comparison, the lowest share that said so during the hated George W. Bush administration was 46 percent.

 

Independents followed a similar arc. Extreme pride in being an American dipped within that group after the first year of the first Trump administration; then Joe Biden became president and … it kept falling, recovering slightly in 2024 before dropping further during Trump 2.0. Public dispiritedness at the abiding popularity of a corrupt, demagogic postliberal buffoon can’t explain all of that.

 

But it explains a lot, I think. Between the depths of the Bush years in 2006 all the way through the end of Barack Obama’s administration, the share of adults who claimed they were extremely or very proud to be American barely budged. Then you-know-who took office and the numbers began to plummet, from 81 percent in 2016 to 75 percent the following year to 63 percent in 2020 to 53 percent today, the lowest mark this century.

 

Among independents, extreme pride in being American has gone from 55 percent in 2006 to 28 percent in 2026. Among Democrats, it’s all but vanished. The 46 percent who felt extremely proud 20 years ago has collapsed to 14 percent now.

 

Seeing that this morning, I thought, “This is how you got Graham Platner.”

 

It stands to reason that a party whose sense of patriotism has collapsed will be more willing to send burn-it-all-down socialists into the government, even personally obnoxious ones like the chud from Maine or the anti-miscegenation woke muppet who clinched a House seat last week in New York City. Another member of the Democratic Socialists of America is poised to oust 30-year Democratic incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado tomorrow night. And far-left Abdul El-Sayed has become the frontrunner for his party’s Senate nomination in Michigan, one of the country’s traditional bellwethers.

 

Socialists have even begun to perform well in favorability surveys. New data from pollster G. Elliott Morris finds that the six most popular (or least unpopular) politicians in America are Democrats; those seven include Sen. Bernie Sanders, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all of whom have been associated with the left’s radical DSA wing at one time or another.

 

What might explain it?

 

Washington Examiner editor Peter Laffin has a theory. “Trump had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to delegitimize the opposition after 2024 through effective conservative governance and honorable comportment,” he wrote this morning. “But he couldn’t escape his impulsiveness, and he could very well go down as the figure who ushered in socialism in the U.S.”

 

Is that the answer?

 

As I noted last week, the president’s right-wing apologists love to credit his continued political viability to a popular backlash to progressivism. “This is how you got Trump,” they’ll snort, alluding to how the elite left’s condescension and cultural excesses alienate the working class. But that logic works, or should work, both ways: If socialists sweep into federal office this fall, presumably that too would be driven by some sort of backlash among hoi polloi—to the right this time, not the left.

 

What will the nature of the backlash be, according to Republicans? When they ask themselves “What did we do wrong to make a creep like Graham Platner electable?” what conclusion will they reach?

 

The wrong answers.

 

We can start with a conclusion they won’t reach. They won’t embrace Laffin’s theory.

 

Admitting that Trump cocked things up so badly as to make socialism attractive by comparison would require right-wingers to admit they erred catastrophically in reelecting him. They’ll never do it. They spent 10 years being warned by “elites” that the president is an embarrassing civic blight on America who’s as incompetent as he is crooked. They’d sooner pay $12 per gallon for gas before they acknowledge that those elites were correct.

 

Laffin himself isn’t correct either, of course. There’s a germ of truth in what he said: Had Trump’s second term looked more like his first, focused on the economy and less sidetracked by self-indulgent nonsense like foolish wars or putting his image on U.S. passports, he’d be more popular than he is.

 

But there was no universe in which he might have delivered “effective conservative governance and honorable comportment,” and to pretend otherwise is to stoop to self-indulgent nonsense yourself. Trump warned everyone what the point of his second term would be and what caliber of person it would employ; Republican voters who now feign surprise and dismay that he’s governed as he has are transparently making excuses for their own knowing dereliction of civic duty. They knew he was a snake when they took him in.

 

A more popular answer on the right to the question of “How did we get Graham Platner?” will be: We didn’t! The election in Maine was rigged.

 

That will be the president’s answer to defeats across the country, certainly, and so it will also be the answer mindlessly adopted by many right-wingers—but not all of them, and possibly not most. The 2020 reprise we’re headed for is destined to be less popular among Republicans than the original.

 

Trump himself won’t be on the ballot this time, reducing his supporters’ emotional investment in the midterms and their urgency to find excuses for defeat. And his victory in 2024 will inadvertently undercut some of the conspiracy theories that might be used to rationalize a November disaster. If, as we’ll be told, socialist victories are due to America having imported a third-world electorate, how do we explain the president and his party having done so well with nonwhite voters two years ago?

 

How believable will it be that Graham Platner won on the strength of illegal immigrants voting en masse in … Maine?

 

The real problem for “Stop the Steal” this time around, though, is that influential right-wing factions will be incentivized by their respective policy hobby horses to call b.s. on it. That wasn’t a problem in 2020, when every stripe of populism was foursquare behind the coup attempt, but this fall will be different. Iran doves like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Megyn Kelly will look to blame a GOP defeat on Trump’s war, not on Democratic vote-rigging. And Iran hawks like Mark Levin will look to blame it on J.D. Vance’s (i.e., Trump’s) peace-deal capitulation to end that war.

 

The lines of battle for control of the post-Trump party in 2028 are being drawn. Successfully scapegoating a rival faction for a Republican midterm wipeout will matter more to right-wing populists than advancing the latest face-saving excuse for a major presidential failure. And circumstances might make it easy: If the economy tanks or gas prices climb again, the idea that Democrats had to cheat to win won’t pass the laugh test.

 

So “How did we get Graham Platner?” is likely to become a battle royal of narratives. The “rigged!” cranks will struggle with the Tuckerites who insist that Republican warmongering and obeisance to Israel seeded a popular appetite for a radical socialist alternative. And the Levinites will allege that dejected hawks stayed home rather than turn out for a right-wing party whose foreign policy has become a pale imitation of Jew-hating leftism.

 

There are more persuasive answers to the Platner question, though.

 

The cost of living.

 

The obvious reason socialists are getting a hearing from voters is that the cost of living has bedeviled the last two presidents.

 

That probably explains why patriotism didn’t rebound among Democrats and independents during the Biden era. Pride in being American is tied up in the idea of the American dream; when the American dream feels out of reach, that pride lags. (Especially among the young.) And when it feels out of reach across two separate administrations, one left-wing and right-wing, voters might plausibly deduce that the problem may not be solvable with traditional politics and policies.

 

America needs to try something different to make life affordable again. Socialism sure is different.

 

It’s not just inflation, though. For many years, across many administrations, leaders of both parties have agreed that the United States needs to break certain bad habits—and then haven’t broken them. Middle Eastern wars, enormous annual federal deficits, uncertainty about what to do with the millions of illegal immigrants who have been here for years: No matter whom one elects, including a gonzo outsider like Trump, the problems recur, deepen, or simply never get addressed.

 

The less Americans feel they have to lose by giving someone like Darializa Avila Chevalier a crack at power, the more likely they’ll be to do so.

 

The president’s failures have been especially helpful to socialists, I think, because the promise of his 2016 campaign has proven fraudulent twice over. The implied warranty of Trumpism is that bureaucracy makes big problems unfixable; if you want real change in the United States, you need a strongman who’ll bulldoze laws and rules to impose his will on “the swamp.” Americans took him up on that offer—and, apart from controlling the border, it’s been a disaster. Life is still expensive. The annual deficit is grotesque. Even the U.S. military seems less formidable than it used to be.

 

To make matters worse, the president got elected and reelected by insisting that he’d champion a working class that had been forgotten by Republicans and Democrats, with special emphasis on bringing down costs in 2024. Americans believed him, only to find that he cares less about affordability than he does about the amount of algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

 

If you’re the sort of person who was intrigued by the potential of postliberal authoritarianism to solve previously unsolvable problems, Trumpism has been a bust. So maybe it’s time to roll the dice on the left’s version, in which power is less concentrated and redistributing wealth is a higher priority.

 

Republican voters will find it hard to concede that Trump’s failure on affordability is how we got Graham Platner. For one thing, they won’t want to admit that the president’s blue-collar credentials are almost entirely cultural, not economic. But I think the right is also instinctively allergic to interpreting politics through the lens of class and redistribution. They associate such things with the Marxist left, and I think on some level they resist the idea that control of the government should depend on which side is delivering tangible improvements for voters.

 

To the modern right-wing tribalist, politics isn’t a contest to see who can deliver more. (Except with respect to deportations.) It’s an existential struggle to keep the left out of power so that they don’t destroy the country. Concede that socialists are benefiting from Trump’s failure to bring down the cost of living and you’re conceding that, in some circumstances, the public might reasonably prefer socialist leaders. Unthinkable.

 

The Trump factor.

 

The other correct answer to the question “How did we get Graham Platner?” is related to the decline in Democratic and independent patriotism. The ceaseless humiliations that the president continues to inflict on the United States aren’t the only reason that pride in being an American is down, but it certainly is a reason to anyone outside the MAGA cult.

 

It’s not just a matter of him behaving badly or “impulsively,” to borrow Laffin’s excruciating euphemism. It’s the squalor of it all. Trumpism is an experiment in what would happen if America were run like a third-world country—sidelining the legislature, installing cranks and imbeciles in high positions, using the police to harass enemies, abusing state power in all sorts of ways to enrich friends and family, delegitimizing every political development that doesn’t go your way as a product of cheating or criminal activity. (Including algae.) Tinpot dictators don’t debase themselves in their daily pronouncements as reliably as our president does.

 

We dwell on those subjects a lot in this newsletter, so I won’t belabor the point. But if you grew up, as I did, with “American exceptionalism” as the engine of your patriotic pride, the last 10 years have been a sustained exercise in having your face ground in a pile of s--t. (If you grew up during the Trump era, you never had that engine to begin with.) Americans might once have been an exception to the grubby manner in which most other populations on Earth governed their countries, but no more. If we’re exceptional now, it’s only insofar as we gave a second chance at leadership to a man any respectable people would have thrown in prison or exiled after his first term ended the way it did.

 

Patriotism will recover somewhat once Trump is gone, but I’ll be surprised if it ever rebounds completely. Having seen what other Americans are willing to elect and indulge, the disillusionment about exceptionalism can never be undone.

 

And that partly explains how you get Graham Platner. When you lose respect for your country, electing unfit, unrespectable people to office can only feel less objectionable. That’s basically what populists say when asked why they excuse Trump’s poor character, no? I came to hate the system, so I was willing to overlook a dishonorable candidate’s flaws to shake it up.

 

Well, a lot of people hate “the system” that Trump and MAGA have created. If there’s a guy out there willing to tear it down, who cares if he once had a Nazi tattoo? The branch of government he’s running for functionally doesn’t even exist anymore! Political squalor is like any other good: If you make it profitable, as the right did by twice electing the president, you’ll get more of it.

 

Needless to say, I don’t expect any soul-searching on this point from Republicans in November if Platner and the other socialists win. The market among the grassroots right for less squalor and more dignity is, shall we say, not robust.

 

If anything, I imagine many will seize on a swell of support for “godless communism” as an excuse to become more radically squalid in their politics. That’s another impediment to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” plans, in fact: Postliberals will want mainstream Republicans to believe that the socialist threat is real and rising, not an artifact of election chicanery. It can’t be defeated by banning mail-in ballots or tightening voting procedures. It can only be defeated by—you guessed it—the GOP becoming even more fascist.

 

In addition to the self-serving explanations by the Carlsons and Levins that I mentioned earlier, my guess is that many right-wingers will explain a rising socialist tide at the polls as a mysterious organic outgrowth of the left’s supposedly fundamental radicalism. Trump didn’t cause anyone to support Platner, you see, nor did the remorseless cost of living. What caused it is that Democrats are America-hating Marxists at heart and many of them are simply being more honest with themselves about it, for whatever reason.

 

Maybe so. It’s true that Democrats’ pride in America has consistently lagged behind Republicans’ throughout this century per the Gallup poll I flagged above. There’s something in leftist ideology that’s less comfortable with patriotism—possibly the transnational ambitions of class war, possibly its preoccupation with “progress” disposing it to dwell on the nation’s sins. But it’s also true that electing a boorish demagogue like Trump who wraps himself in the flag for cynical reasons is influencing how Americans view that flag.

 

Nationalism and patriotism are distinct things. But when the president treats authentic American patriotism as a tribal totem of postliberals, go figure that some Democrats and independents might become polarized around feeling pride in America, coming to view it as an expression of MAGA-style nationalist chauvinism. And inevitably finding themselves more tolerant of anti-Americanism in leaders than they should be.

 

That’s how you get Darializa Avila Chevalier, and we will get her in November. If we get Graham Platner too, don’t be surprised.

U.S. Power, Not International Law, Determines Whether the Strait of Hormuz Is Open

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

 

Combat in the Persian Gulf is once again tenuously paused, but it escalated over the weekend, after last Thursday when Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces conducted a drone strike against the Ever Lovely, a container vessel that was attempting to pass through the Hormuz Strait.

 

The weekend’s fighting is a timely reminder. The strait (a narrow international shipping channel that 20 percent of global sea trade, including vital energy commerce, passes through) has been kept open since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution by one thing and one thing alone: American power. There are no international law restraints to which the Iranian regime is or will agree to be bound.

 

The latest episode, like all the rest since early April, reaffirms that it takes two to make a cease-fire. President Trump’s illusions of grandeur notwithstanding, he is powerless to dictate one unilaterally.

 

Meanwhile, everything the president has done since he launched the war in late February — the unilateral military aggression, the unhinged Trumpian twaddle on social media, the inevitable climbdowns, the self-contradictory claims about the state of the conflict and the nature of the Iranian regime — has convinced the IRGC and other Iranian leaders that their control of the strait is analogous to their relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons. That is, it’s worth fighting for at all costs since it could shift the strategic balance in the regime’s favor, despite domestic and foreign hopes for the regime’s demise.

 

On Friday, I addressed one of the two principal follies of the Trump administration’s approach to the war: the mulish failure to grasp the regime’s apocalyptic interpretation of Islam. Tehran’s hegemonic ambitions and endemic anti-Americanism make negotiating with it pointless. Regime operatives are indoctrinated in the jihadist conception of war as deception (as Islam’s prophet instructed). Therefore, nothing regime operatives say in negotiations is trustworthy, and nothing to which they “agree” in a writing — such as Trump’s memorandum of understanding — is worth the paper it’s written on.

 

Since survival is the highest priority, it is especially crucial to grasp the regime’s deception doctrine when it believes it is in an existential crisis. The fact that Trump was bluffing about “regime change” and killing “a whole civilization” does not change the Iranian regime’s ideology.

 

Now let’s turn to the other administration folly: the notion that there is some tenet or norm of international law regarding free transit through the strait that Iran has previously accepted and will eventually come around to again.

 

It’s just not true.

 

What has kept the strait open since President Reagan attacked Iran’s forces and sank most of its navy in the 1988 tanker war has been the jihadist regime’s belief that the United States government regards free shipping through the channel as a vital interest. So much so that, if the regime challenged the status quo, our armed forces would surely be deployed to fight to a decisive conclusion that could be ruinous for Tehran.

 

Free shipping through the strait, and the expectation that it would persist because of American power, was the state of play on February 28. That’s when the president, without a specific congressional authorization or American public support, unilaterally ordered the aerial invasion of Iran in a palpable attempt to force a quick surrender. Trump’s gut told him a Venezuela-style taming of the historically implacable jihadist regime was in the cards. He listened to what he wanted to believe, even though U.S. military and intelligence analysts warned him that a quick surrender was unlikely and that Iran could respond by closing the strait and attacking regional U.S. allies, especially those that host American military installations.

 

Iran responded just as our analysts predicted it would. The strait was de facto closed: Iran essentially warned that ships attempting to transit through could expect to be attacked; it struck a handful of vessels and planted some mines. This persuaded insurers not to indemnify shipping through the strait and the crews themselves not to attempt passage.

 

The administration’s initial response was to deny that the strait was closed (on the risible theory that ships could attempt to pass through . . . if they were willing to run the suicidal risk). That soon gave way to a claim that, by obstructing commerce on “international waters,” Iran was in violation of international law and needed to stand down or face global condemnation (because, y’know, the world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terrorism famously frets about what people are saying in Washington and European chancelleries).

 

Alas, the American international-law rhetoric is untenable.

 

The overarching assumption of civilized nations is that a country’s territorial waters extend for twelve miles from its coastline. Beyond that lies the open seas, where transit is essentially free. The Hormuz Strait, however, is only 19 miles wide at its narrowest point. Hence, under the default formula, the strait is not part of international waters; at any point in the narrows, it is within the territorial waters of either Iran or Oman, the relevant coastal states.

 

I use the term “the default formula” advisedly. The twelve-mile rule comes from a multilateral compact, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS), which was completed and opened for signing in 1982, during the Reagan administration and three years after Khomeini’s revolution in Iran. UNCLOS has special rules (in its articles 34–41) that apply to “straits used for international navigation,” such as the Hormuz Strait. These rules generally mandate free transit. This means that the strait is not part of international waters; rather, free transit is granted under UNCLOS rules in light of the strait’s significance to global trade.

 

Here’s the problem: Neither the United States nor Iran ever ratified UNCLOS.

 

The American objection to the treaty has nothing to do with the rules applicable to narrow sea channels. Those rules promote America’s interests. Although the U.S. was deeply involved in crafting UNCLOS, our government never ratified it for two reasons. First, as the world’s dominant naval power and guarantor of free global trade, it would be foolish to forfeit sovereign freedom of action to an international institution that, like the U.N. itself, would have anti-American tendencies. Second and relatedly, UNCLOS provisions related to seabed mining are objectionable.

 

The Iranian complaint is more specific to the Hormuz Strait. While the Khomeini regime purported to sign the treaty (during the brutal Iran-Iraq war), it has never ratified UNCLOS precisely because it realized that its geographical influence over the strait is a major strategic advantage.

 

Although it has not ratified UNCLOS rules related to narrow trade routes, the U.S. approves of them. Consequently, it argues that these rules are so universally accepted that they have evolved into supposedly binding customary international law. Iran, by contrast, observes that a nation may not be bound by international compacts that it has not ratified under its domestic law — the venerable principle of pacta tertiis nec nocent nec prosunt (agreements neither harm nor benefit third parties). Iran shrewdly calculates, moreover, that the United States would never agree, based on anything as vague as customary international law, to be bound against its interests by treaty terms, largely crafted by its enemies, to which it never lawfully assented.

 

This spotlights the weakness of the current American position. There are sea lanes on both the Iranian and Omani sides of the strait. To break the Iranian impediment, the Trump administration has encouraged ships, such as the Ever Lovely, to cross on the Omani side — i.e., beyond twelve miles from Iran’s coastline. This, our diplomats contend, is outside of Iran’s territorial waters, even though it is not, strictly speaking, “international waters” (being within Oman’s jurisdiction).

 

But such contentions assume Iran’s indulgence of UNCLOS. The regime, to the contrary, does not agree that it is bound by either UNCLOS’s twelve-mile territorial waters rule or its free-transit provisions for narrow straits. And even if a non-UNCLOS nation were to accept those terms, the Iranian regime would argue that they are inapplicable in wartime. In that connection, the regime maintains that it was Trump who started the war, and that its responsive closure of the strait is consistent with its sovereign international-law right of self-defense.

 

What’s more, the regime scoffs at the notion that the United States is free to eschew ratification of UNCLOS yet simultaneously claim that UNCLOS provisions it likes are somehow binding on another non-ratifier.

 

Our government and our allies can quibble about some or all of this. Western diplomats counter that Iran benefits from international trade and has waived its objections through decades of abiding free transit through the strait. Maybe so, but such pleading misses the point.

 

The international realm is not like our domestic rule of law. In our own country, we are one people united by our national Constitution, which binds us to accept properly enacted laws, including those of states in which we don’t reside. In international relations, by contrast, even ostensibly binding commitments are often ignored, rescinded, or flat-out broken. What undergirds international agreements are not courts or legal arrangements; it is the perception that severe sanctions, up to and including the use of force, could be the wage of undermining them.

 

All the more, that is the case when there are no binding commitments.

 

The Hormuz Strait has been opened because the Khomeini-founded government was convinced, especially after the tanker war, that the American military response to an Iranian attempt to close the strait would be devastating. In the years that followed, as long as the Iranian regime did not believe it faced an existential threat from the United States, it tried neither to close nor to toll the strait, calculating that the potential cost of a certain American military response was not worth paying.

 

But times have changed. Once President Trump threatened regime change, the regime had nothing left to lose. So it played its ace in the hole. If a U.S. president is going to threaten regime change — while intensively bombing regime targets and thereby demonstrating to the regime that he might be serious — then that president had better be ready to finish the job because the regime is going to resort to measures reserved only for such existential peril.

 

When it resorts to such measures, America’s stark alternative is to escalate and force the regime’s surrender on our terms or capitulate and accept a new reality that would have been understood as intolerable just four months ago. That is why I continue to believe the president should seek congressional authorization to use force to open the strait. Regardless of how we got to this point, and all righteous objections to the administration’s heedless approach, our enemies’ claim to control this critical channel threatens our vital security and economic interests. That should be unacceptable to Congress. A congressional authorization would convey seriousness of purpose to Tehran — something sorely needed at the moment.

 

The Hormuz Strait has been opened for the past four decades, not because of any consensus about international waters and commerce rules applicable to narrow sea lanes. It has been open — and Americans and the world have flourished from global trade — because the jihadist regime in Tehran understood that the United States would not tolerate Iranian restrictions. No parchment promises will change that. President Trump raised the stakes. Now the American choice is to force the regime to stand down or suffer a humiliating defeat that empowers our enemies.

California Is Still Doomed

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

 

The State of California probably deserves its own sub-annex at the Carnival of Fools, to honor its MVP presence in our little institution’s history. Imagine a tiny circus tent adjacent to our main hall, with calliope music playing on a loop and Gavin Newsom starring as The Man Who Juggles Chainsaws, Incompetently. (It beats playing the geek — we gave that role to Swalwell when he came begging around, desperate for a job.)

 

However, Governor Newsom is about to suffer sharply for his incompetence; now those razor-edged interest groups that he’s juggling are actively gassed up and running. On June 25, it became official that the so-called Billionaire Tax will be on the ballot in California. The ballot initiative was circulated by the SEIU–United Healthcare Workers West union, and it will be backed by its organizing power in November.

 

It is an impossibly bad idea with obvious negative economic implications: a “one time” extractive tax of 5 percent on every billionaire in the state. A full 5 percent of each billionaire’s total worth above $1.1 billion (including items of estimated historical value) will be automatically expropriated by the state. (It will apply retroactively to anyone who lived in California on January 1, 2026 — so there is no escape now.)

 

Many had assumed it would be withdrawn from the ballot after some kind of backdoor arrangement between Newsom and the unions, at taxpayer expense. Instead, no deal: The deadline has now passed, the proposal is on the ballot, and there is every reason to think it could win in an environment where progressives are lurching to the left so hard and so fast that even Mao Zedong, were he alive, would be sounding cautionary notes. (“Whoa there, you might want to take a step back and rethink that whole abolish-the-prisons thing.”)

 

So now, Newsom has to put on a new act: A California-only billionaire tax is a terrible idea, he says, but since the voters of his state are going to march off the cliff (and his state is so obviously important), the rest of the nation owes it to California to also commit suicide — because we’re all in this together as a country, aren’t we? In a political pivot truly worthy of a man with his head on a spindle, Newsom now argues that we need a nationwide billionaire tax: “It’s time for a national billionaires’ tax and a new social contract. 10 percent of Americans own two-thirds of the wealth. It’s time for an economic reset for America.” His logic is clear: Those dastardly billionaires who want to flee the wreckage of California should not be allowed to save themselves by moving to Florida or Texas. (That way, he hopes, they’ll simply stay where the weather’s great and contribute to his state’s tax base.)

 

Leave aside what will happen to California if this tax passes — a quick infusion of money followed by the collapse of the state’s tax revenue — and imagine Newsom running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 with the legacy of the complete implosion of the Golden State’s finances. There is a reason I am offering him a starring role in the Carnival of Fools, if he wants to take it.

 

And if he doesn’t, I’ll feature him here anyway.

 

Scott Wiener Can’t Go Home — Until After November, at Least

 

Let’s zero in on San Francisco, where it’s going to be yet another beautiful breezy 70-degree day today, as it has been all month. It’s undeniably true that, once you set aside the abundance of human waste, discarded needles, and junkie criminals covering its streets, S.F. remains one of the most gorgeous cities in America — its residents don’t deserve weather and land that lovely, and they demonstrate it daily.

 

They did so once again this weekend. On Friday, State Senator Scott Wiener — currently representing California’s eleventh district and seeking its congressional seat (about which more later) — was confronted on camera by a mob of angry pro-Palestinian queer men, chased out of Mission Dolores Park, and prevented from attending the yearly San Francisco Trans March. Why? Has San Francisco suddenly taken a page from Chicago and become MAGA country? No, it’s merely because Wiener was a day late to calling Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide.”

 

Since you’re reading NR, I can guess what you’re probably thinking: something between “That’s a shame” and “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.” And yes, Wiener is a bête noire for conservatives nationally, who have been familiar with the notably queer antics of this exceptionally aggressive left-wing culture warrior for years. (His notoriety, despite his only having been a state senator, speaks for itself — Wiener has courted the spotlight on LGBTQ+ issues in a way guaranteed to raise the hackles of all conservatives.)

 

But watch the video of the confrontation anyway (linked above and proudly posted by its off-camera instigator, a man named Dimitry Yakoushkin). Listen to its inherent theatricality, as Yakoushkin’s voice calculatedly evolves from a normal tone into a hoarse, hysterical rant. “How can you do this to San Francisco?” he wails disconsolately, as if making a direct appeal to the heavens. Quote of the afternoon, heard loudly from a man (?) near the end: “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel, you piece of sh**.”

 

And all because Wiener acknowledges Israel’s right to exist and hesitated to call Israeli operations in Gaza a “genocide.” (He does now, but his failure to do so quickly enough apparently reveals the depraved Zionist traitor to queer values lurking within.) My esteemed editor Rich Lowry wrote about the strange reality of queer activists who have become militant about the issue of “genocide” in Gaza. It is a “sympathy for the underdog” logic as irrational as it is inevitable.

 

But there’s also a fair amount of grubby campaign politics involved in all of this. Wiener is locked in a bitter congressional battle, which may come as a surprise to NR readers who live outside the state and assume he’s a shoo-in: It is all too easy to forget that California’s “top two” system tends to set up brutal intra-Democratic slugfests in its many ultra-blue districts and local races. California’s eleventh district in particular, composed 100 percent of the city of San Francisco, is obviously one of the bluest in the nation. It has been insulated from California’s Democratic turf wars since 2012 for one reason only: It is the seat occupied, for now, by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

 

And Pelosi has endorsed someone else in the race. Wiener has a statewide and national profile, but apparently that has come at a cost to his local roots, and so Pelosi has thrown her considerable power behind Connie Chan, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. What makes this endorsement even more significant is that Chan is regarded as the more progressive candidate of the two: In the fun house that is city and state politics, Wiener’s prominent “YIMBY” affiliations have perversely opened him to charges of associating with “capitalists” and “developers” against the environment. Wiener is still favored to win — he is practically an LGBTQ+ celebrity among San Francisco’s resoundingly progressive electorate — but given that the leftmost candidates in Democratic-only races across the nation are surging, and since the dean of the Democrats has endorsed his opponent, he cannot take his race for granted.

 

Now guess whom the man who videotaped himself rousing a mob against Wiener is supporting? Connie Chan, needless to say. Yakoushkin, who describes himself as an activist — the theatrical public pleading was a tip-off — was basically doing a freelance oppo hit on behalf of the progressive left. In a race where Wiener is a cultural celebrity, petty differences suddenly become urgent and unbridgeable divisions, and Chan’s campaign will need to drive every wedge it possibly can.

 

The irony remains rich, nevertheless. Wiener has been everything the queer community has ever asked for in a legislative champion — to the point of insanity — and his reward is to be ostracized by the worst of his own people, at least so long as there is a race to be won or lost. You know what? It’s a shame; it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

 

Trump Is Back — in Passport Form!

 

Donald Trump slapped his name on the Kennedy Center, our nation’s 250th-anniversary celebrations, and America’s annual national park passes. So it’s really no surprise that, after adding his signature to all new paper money, our endlessly egotistical president has done so to U.S. passports as well. Over the weekend, he announced a commemorative “patriot passport” that features his own hulking visage, looming threateningly over the Resolute Desk, on the first page.

 

It’s yet another pathetically hilarious Trump trifle — the self-tributes will not cease until he leaves office — and it’s not going to become the standard-issue passport design, thankfully. But Trump doesn’t seem to be quite sure what passports are for: He proudly showed off the new design to the world on Truth Social with the incoherent advertisement, “The U.S.A. New Passport, which says, ‘Welcome, but be good!” I don’t know what Trump uses a passport for, but I don’t need or use mine to hang around my own country. I use it to visit other countries. This matters acutely to me, because I have to get my passport reissued, and a Trump-branded one seems like a great way to signal to any foreign airport worker that you would appreciate as much “extra” customs screening as possible.

 

But what if Jonathan Last has been right all along and Trump really is a secret Stalin? What if this betokens the backdoor introduction of a Soviet-style internal passport system? Newsom, at least, would certainly appreciate the value of forbidding internal migration. But imagine if I were legally enserfed as a taxpayer to the Chicagoland Oblast? Most of my colleagues have long assumed that I already am.

The UN’s ‘War Crimes’ Recycling Op

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, June 25, 2026

 

About a third of the way through the latest UN-associated report accusing Israel of genocide, I realized why it felt like I’d read this before. It wasn’t just because of the subject, though such reports are by now a dime a dozen. It was because I was reading an already-debunked accusation from a prior report.

 

In other words, I had already read this.

 

The report was a lazy remix presented to the UN as an independent document by experts. Sure, they added a new unfounded accusation here and there, but the conclusion was predetermined and based to a large degree on other people’s previous lies about Israel.

 

I’ll explain. The report is focused on “Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children” as proof that the Jewish state is committing the “crime of genocide.”

 

Which means it sets out to do two things: to show that Israel deliberately targets Palestinian children because they are children, and to argue that this targeting itself amounts to genocide.

 

Now, because genocide requires intent, the conclusion of the report never gets off the ground. So even by its own “standards” (to use that term very, very loosely) it unintentionally absolves Israel of genocide while merely claiming to do otherwise.

 

What we’re left with, then, is a list of unsubstantiated Israeli crimes. A representative case: Parents of an injured girl inside a tent claimed she was shot by a quadcopter outside the tent, and to substantiate the accusation, the commission looked at “images” of what they were told was the bullet. The shooting and the victim were intentional because, they said, no one else was shot.

 

The great risk faced by the authors, then, was that someone might actually read the report and realize just how flimsy the methodology was. As long as absolutely no one read beyond the headline, the commission members’ reputations could plausibly survive it.

 

What’s even the point of putting out a report like this? When I saw the Washington Post story about the new genocide claim, I understood why the report was issued: headlines that generate other headlines for the public to ingest and then move on. We are living in a time of Idiocracy-style institutional embarrassment. Democracy, as you may have heard, dies in darkness.

 

Had the reporters (another term one must use loosely here, I’m afraid) read the report thoroughly, they would have noticed a couple of things.

 

First, the repetition of debunked claims: “In a previous report published in March 2025, the Commission concluded that Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare, including the destruction of the Al-Basma In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) Centre.”

 

As Salo Aizenberg has explained at length, the case of Al-Basma has become a trigger for the genocide accusation despite the fact that “no forensic analysis was undertaken, no fragments recovered or examined, no trajectory studies performed, no experts dispatched, and no effort made to reconstruct the events of that day. Even the UN report concedes it is not actually certain how the clinic was damaged, stating it was ‘most probably’ an Israeli shell.”

 

Most telling of all was the fact that the initial claim was that Al-Basma was the most damaged structure in the area, supposedly proving that it was therefore intentionally targeted. But wire photos show that, right next to the clinic, a multi-story building had been left with a gaping hole, which, as Aizenberg notes, means that building and not the fertility clinic was almost certainly the target of any strike.

 

The Al-Basma story is relevant for another reason: it is an example of genuinely tragic loss—tanks of frozen embryos were destroyed—but not evidence of genocide.

 

This theme reappears throughout the report. “The Commission applied an integrated child rights analysis in preparing this report to examine holistically all aspects of Palestinian children’s lives and development, including the harm caused by Israeli attacks on their physical, emotional, social and cognitive well-being,” the authors write.

 

There has indeed been trauma experienced by the people of Gaza, very much including children. The trauma of war for children, however, gets eclipsed when bad actors mix truth and fiction, and when those bad actors manipulate people’s stories into false accusations of genocide.

 

For example: The report claims that Israeli attacks hit Gaza schools and therefore prove an intention to deprive Gaza’s younger generations of a future. Presto: genocide. But the report itself even admits that Gaza’s schools were closed soon after Hamas initiated the war. Those buildings—again, as the report itself notes—were then repurposed. Twisting that into a deliberate destruction of Gazan “education” is not only obviously false but a cheapening of the impact of war. And that is without even pointing out that Hamas fighters used these buildings and in many cases turned them into legitimate targets, making Hamas solely responsible for the deaths caused by its human shield strategy.

 

Dishonest activists posing as “experts” will always be trying to con the public. The media should ask itself whether it really wants to continue being complicit in this shameful game.

If the Fed Is Not Executive, What Is It?

National Review Online

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

 

The Supreme Court decided two big cases Monday on the president’s power to remove executive branch officials. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote both decisions, only got them half-right. In Trump v. Slaughter, the Court very properly concluded that the Constitution puts the president, and only the president, in charge of the executive branch, and therefore the president must be able to fire anyone (other than the vice president, who is independently elected) who runs an agency with executive powers. In Slaughter, that meant the head of the Federal Trade Commission. The pity is that we have a Federal Trade Commission.

 

In Trump v. Cook, the Court surprised Court-watchers by not only doing the expected thing and blocking Donald Trump from removing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, but also going further to create a special rule just for the Fed: Congress can, but doesn’t have to, restrict the president from removing the governors.

 

Slaughter is good law and good policy. It restores how the executive branch was understood to work before the 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor (which the Court overruled in Slaughter) distorted it. It also finally settles in Andrew Johnson’s favor the constitutional question over which he was impeached in 1868. We don’t doubt that Donald Trump and his successors may use this power imprudently at times, but the president acquires that power through politics, and the remedy for its misuse is political. That’s democracy.

 

Cook is another matter. Trump tried to comply with the law restricting Cook’s removal by alleging that she had committed mortgage fraud and thus could be removed “for cause.” He didn’t argue, as in Slaughter, that he had the power to remove her at will. For once, Trump listened to shrewd legal advice from good lawyers, and the Court hung him with it. Did it even need to? Trump’s campaign to bend the powers of his office against Cook and Jerome Powell in order to get cheaper money is bad monetary policy, shameful abuse of his prosecutorial powers, and an ominous precedent. For the moment, however, Congress seems to have stopped him, and done so by means of its traditional leverage over appointments.

 

Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, who joined the three liberals to make a 5–4 majority in Cook, were quite blunt in emphasizing their view that the Fed is essential. But the Constitution contains no “too big to be illegal” clause.

 

There is a great deal to be said in favor of an independent central bank, and there would be still more to be said if Congress gave the Fed fewer powers and a narrower, more focused mandate to keep the currency stable and predictable. But there are also downsides to an independent Fed: If we’ve had fewer financial crises and depressions on the Fed’s watch, we have not had zero, and there’s nobody to hold accountable when they happen. Moreover, any government agency that needs answer to nobody is prone to mission creep.

 

More to the point, as Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, “If the Court prefers an independent Federal Reserve Board, then its issue is not with the President but with the Constitution.” The Founders may have concluded that a central bank free of political pressure was necessary, and Alexander Hamilton may have won the argument with James Madison that the Constitution empowers Congress to create a central bank — but we know very well that they typically preferred to strike the separation-of-powers balance in favor of democratically accountable branches that were checked by other branches. When they wanted to create a truly independent branch, as they did with the judiciary, they did so explicitly. They could have put an independent central bank in the Constitution; if we want to secure one, we still could. As things stand, the Court’s decision wouldn’t stop Congress if it decided to end the Fed’s independence.

 

If the president controls the executive branch, and doesn’t control the Fed, then what is the Fed? It’s not a legislature, because Article I creates only two houses of Congress. It’s not a court. The Constitution doesn’t mention a fourth branch. But now we have one.