The Restoration of Albert II

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, August 24, 2026

 

There is much to love about Monaco. It is the single most affluent country in the world, with the 38,087 very happy subjects of Prince Albert II enjoying a GDP per capita of damn near $300,000, more than twice that of rich little Switzerland and more than three times that of the United States, which is by far the most affluent country with a population much larger than that of greater Chicago. (But let’s not turn our noses up at rich countries with low headcounts such as Norway, Ireland, or Singapore—small can be beautiful.) There is no income tax in Monaco and the locals do not spend an inordinate amount of time fighting over politics—there is an elected parliament, but a good deal of the real power is wielded, generally lightly, by the monarch, and the ruling Grimaldi dynasty has been running the show down on that happy corner of the Riviera (with a few interruptions) since the late 13^th century. Sure, you can walk from one end of the principality to the other in a half hour and could shove the whole thing into Central Park with room to spare, but there is more to the Monegasque economy than Champagne corkage and yacht moorage—there is even a small manufacturing sector producing cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and electronics. There is no poverty to speak of. Monaco does not worry about losing people or capital to tax havens, having discovered the best way to approach that problem: Be the tax haven.

 

There are downsides, I suppose: People sometimes drive like madmen, and the traffic can be awfully loud. Prince Albert probably hears a lot of jokes of the sort that make a man wince.

 

Albert II—Grace Kelly’s boy—went to Amherst, but it doesn’t seem to have ruined him, and he competed in the Winter Olympics, driving the bobsled. Being something of a traditionalist where monarchy is concerned, he naturally has a few illegitimate children running around, which had once complicated succession planning, but eventually he managed to produce an heir with a wife, and the 11-year-old Marquis of Baux is a handsome little fellow.

 

I do not have much to say about hereditary monarchy other than that it seems to me, a good republican, fundamentally ridiculous. What is not ridiculous is Monaco’s debt-to-GDP ratio, which is 0.00 percent—about that, I say, “Long live the House of Grimaldi!”

 

(Not “Long live the king!” The first prince of Monaco adopted the title back when styling himself a king might have annoyed Louis XIII of France, which would have been a problem.)

 

Donald Trump likes to think of himself as a kind of royal figure: He plays around with kingly imagery and rhetoric, and then there’s all that tacky gold leaf and the “What if we went back in time and didn’t outright murder baby Hitler but switched him in the cradle with Liberace, instead?” aesthetic, his attraction to the noble title “baron,” which provided the name both of his youngest son (with a double-r) and “John Barron,” the imaginary friend Trump invented to lie to the New York Post about his sex life. (Who among us ... ?) But the thing about being a monarch—a real monarch, not a figurehead—is this: You have to take responsibility for stuff.

 

***

 

“We inherited this debt bomb from the Biden administration,” J.D. Vance, vice president and knee-walking sycophant, insisted during an appearance on a Newsmax program where someone called Carl Higbie pretends to be a journalist. “American taxpayers are getting fleeced because of the very high debt charges … very high debt charges that started under the Biden administration. This is a crisis that we inherited. … The issue that we’ve had under the Biden administration and what we’re still kind of dealing with is that the debt was growing faster than American GDP.”

 

Mockery has followed, though neither Vance nor Higbie has been mocked quite as much as he deserves.

 

Vance, who apparently has a taste for inversion, gets it exactly upside down. The economy in fact grew more quickly than the debt did during Biden’s term in office: When Joe Biden entered office (Q1 2021), debt was 124 percent of GDP; when Biden left office (Q1 2025), debt was down to 121 percent of GDP. Joe Biden had more cause than Donald Trump has to make Vance’s kind of complaint about his successor: When Donald Trump first entered office (Q1 2017), debt was only 103 percent of GDP; by Q2 2020, debt was 133 percent of GDP, and while debt pressure eased somewhat in the COVID recovery, it was 124 percent of GDP when Trump left office. But even before the dramatic COVID spike, debt-to-GDP was headed the wrong way during the first Trump administration. And it is headed the wrong way now: Debt was 121 percent of GDP when Trump took office the second time around and is about 126 percent today according to the latest estimates. Some of those numbers can be blamed on COVID, but much of it is just the usual stupid spending and cowardly tax policy.

 

Vance’s argument is, of course, dishonest: This is J.D. Vance we are talking about—of course it is dishonest. Vance is a man without integrity who serves men who hold honesty and honor in contempt, and he is nothing if not servile when it comes to his masters. But Vance’s argument is also a stupid one, which maybe also should go without saying. American pundits’ and partisans’ favorite party game is pin-the-debt-on-the-president, but the power to collect taxes, appropriate spending, and borrow money belongs to Congress, not to the president. Republican members of Congress voted for a great deal of spending while Biden was president. They had voted for a great deal of spending, and for tax cuts, during the first Trump administration, too. And then Republicans put together a gigantic—and gigantically irresponsible—spending package in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, for which not one single solitary Democrat in Congress cast a vote. The Trump bill added as much as $4.7 trillion to the debt through spending, through tax cuts, and, according to analysts at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, by contributing to higher interest rates on U.S. government debt—i.e., it is one cause of those “very high debt changes” that Vance is caterwauling about.

 

The Democrats have been no great shakes when it comes to fiscal probity. But to try to pretend that our current fiscal situation—entitlement and discretionary spending, the tax code, interest rates—is the result of Democratic actions taken during the Biden administration is beyond dishonest. It is contemptuous. It is evidence that J.D. Vance believes, possibly with good reason, that the people he is pinning his own political hopes on are stupid—breathtakingly stupid, the sort of people who couldn’t find their own asses with both hands and a map and who think that a manila folder is a Filipino contortionist.

 

Oh, but don’t worry, Vance assures us. The Trump administration has … a plan!

 

“We actually do have a plan to get the economy growing faster than the debt,” he told Newsmax.

 

Well.

 

***

 

Albert II was a space monkey. He was a rhesus macaque and the first mammal to be launched into space. (Do not ask about poor Albert I, who is remembered only as the first mammal launched on a rocket. RIP, would-be space monkey.) Not to be confused with the reigning Monegasque monarch, Albert II died on June 14, 1949, having survived his trip to space but not the fall—from 83 miles—when his capsule’s parachute failed to open. (His heart and respiratory rates were being recorded until the moment of impact, so if you are wondering how fast a poor little monkey’s heart is beating as he falls out of the sky at a terminal velocity of 300 mph or so, the data are on record, somewhere.) Albert II experienced a few minutes of weightlessness, but, because his capsule had no window, he did not have the opportunity to observe the Earth from space or to see the stars blazing out there in the vasty deep, and, though I cannot quite get into a monkey’s head in spite of decades of interacting with politicians, I am confident saying that Albert II would not have understood what he was seeing if he could have seen it.

 

The space monkey does not fly the rocket—he is only along for the ride.

 

As Tom Wolfe tells the story in The Right Stuff, the early astronauts insisted that windows be added to the spacecraft—because, without a window, they wouldn’t be pilots: They would only be “spam in a can,” as one of them put it. They would be space monkeys—generators of heart rates and respiratory data, but, basically, meat. They were keenly aware that the capsule originally had been designed for monkeys. Every time I hear a politician or a pundit insist that they have a great plan to make the economy do x, y, or z, I think about Albert II. At least that space monkey went to space.

 

There are two ways to get the economy to grow faster than the national debt: One is a faster-growing economy, the other is a slower-growing debt. (An intelligent policy would pursue both.) Because the real-world economy is dynamic and not subject to simple bookkeeping metrics, there is some variability and unpredictability when it comes to reducing debt, but the basic formula, generally reliable over time, is: 1) Tax more 2) Spend less 3) Understand that the less you are willing to do of No. 1 the more you will have to do of No. 2, and vice versa.

 

Reducing deficits is politically difficult and economically complicated, but it is much more straightforward than achieving a radical increase in real (meaning inflation-adjusted) economic growth to such an extent that GDP growth makes deficit spending economically irrelevant. I have been having this fight with my friends the naïve supply-siders for many years. If there were a magic formula for getting a sustainable, big bump in real GDP growth, then we would be doing that—the incentives for supporting such a program, if it existed, would be entirely bipartisan. But the truth is, nobody knows how to make that kind of growth happen. You may have heard me rehearse my conversation with my old friend Larry Kudlow, who has for many years been a leading voice among those arguing that we can simply grow our way out of our fiscal problems. (Readers who have heard this before will forgive the repetition, I hope.) Kudlow believes that there are reliable policies for making that kind of growth happen: “I did it once, Kevin, and I can do it again,” he told me, while insisting that I, on the other hand, am an “eat-your-spinach guy.”

 

And so I’ll say it again: It’s time to eat your f---ing spinach, guys. Forty trillion dollars is a lot of schmundo.

 

Kudlow served in the Reagan administration and in the first Trump administration, and there was a good deal of good economic news during both periods. But there most certainly was not the kind of real GDP growth that enabled us to outrun our spending problems. The Trump numbers I have noted above; in the Reagan years debt went from 31 percent of GDP in Q1 1981 to 50 percent of GDP in Q1 1989. Real GDP growth ran about 3.6 percent during the Reagan years; debt went up faster because there was a larger decrease in tax collections (from 19.1 percent of GDP in 1981 to 17.8 percent of GDP in 1989, a cut of 1.3 percentage points) than decrease in spending (from 21.6 percent of GDP in 1981 to 20.5 percent in 1989, a cut of 1.1 percentage points). Hence, deficits went from 2.5 percent of GDP in 1981 to 2.7 percent of GDP in 1989, with some relatively big deficits in between (5.9 percent in 1983, 4.7 percent in 1984, 5 percent in 1985, and 4.9 percent in 1986).

 

The Trump administration may or may not have a deficit plan. It has been three weeks away from a healthcare plan for a decade now. But say it does have a plan: Albert II probably had a plan for flying that space capsule to the nearest banana plantation, but the space monkey does not fly the rocket—and the president does not steer the economy. That is not how modern economies work.

 

As it is, nearly 30 percent of all U.S. government debt is the result of Trump-era policies and legislation signed into law by one Donald J. Trump. Some planner. Some pilot.

 

Frankly, I’d be more inclined to trust a monkey—any monkey, really, even though as a former resident of Delhi I have had some hairy experiences with monkeys. At least a monkey is a straight shooter. The monkeys have not yet proved themselves incompetent as a group, and I never have been lied to by a monkey.

 

Americans cannot say as much for J.D. Vance or the ghastly organ grinder holding his leash as he holds out his sad little fez for tips. Trump thinks he is the kind of great man who can rule by royal decree, but he is just another monkey strapped to a rocket he does not understand and could not possibly control.

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

By Michaell Baumgartner

Wednesday, August 05, 2026

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Jill Biden’s Unbelievable Debate ‘Stroke’ Story

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, May 28, 2026

 

Our problem is not just that we are misgoverned, and our problem is not just, as laid out in yesterday’s newsletter, that the top priorities of the president and his cabinet are not the top priorities of a majority of the electorate. (The president, further proving my point, yesterday: “I don’t care about the midterms.”)

 

No, our problem is that a significant chunk of our governing class is nowhere near as smart as they think they are, and in many cases, they’re quite dumb. And they think the American people, collectively, are dumb as well, and are easily fooled. This morning, we find that former first lady Jill Biden, who had the option of just enjoying a quiet retirement with her elderly husband, has instead chosen to emerge from private life to relitigate the notion that Joe Biden was going senile, and/or too old to serve another term.

 

Former first lady Jill Biden said she was “frightened” by her husband Joe Biden’s 2024 debate performance and thought he was having a stroke.

 

“I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” Jill Biden told CBS News Sunday Morning’s Rita Braver in an interview airing Sunday on CBS.

 

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”

 

Bullcrap.

 

If you are genuinely concerned that the president of the United States is having a stroke or other medical emergency, you interrupt the debate. If the First Lady of the United States says, “stop the debate, I think my husband is having a stroke,” the debate will stop. Jake Tapper and Dana Bash were not going to insist that the president finish. The president travels with a top-tier medical team. They will check him out thoroughly. (Note that for the first time in history, the 90-minute debate featured two commercial breaks.)

 

We know that Jill Biden did not genuinely think that her husband was having a stroke, because surely even a non-medical doctor like herself knows that if someone is having a stroke, they need medical attention immediately. “With each moment that a stroke goes untreated, the nervous tissue in the brain is rapidly and irreversibly damaged. That is why it’s important to seek immediate medical attention if you or someone you know begins to experience stroke symptoms.” About one quarter of people who suffer a stroke die within one year.

 

When every second counts, you don’t keep the president suffering an ongoing stroke up on the stage, waiting until the end of the debate and hoping for the best.

 

What Jill Biden is unwittingly declaring in this implausible nearly-two-years-late spin is, ‘I thought my husband was suffering a medical emergency that risked permanent brain damage and possibly death, but I concluded that finishing the debate was more important.”

 

The post-campaign books made clear that former president Biden never finished one of his practice sessions. It is genuinely an open question of whether, in the summer of 2024, Joe Biden could still put together 90 consecutive minutes of sharp, attentive public performance. As those books made clear:

 

By the end of 2022, Biden was forgetting the names of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Communications Director Kate Bedingfield, and the president’s speechwriters had adapted to a once infamously garrulous man who now found speaking a chore. “Everything got shorter: speeches, paragraphs, even sentences. The vocabulary shrank . . . they were slowly adapting to Biden’s shrinking capacities.”

 

By September 2023, Biden was at a Manhattan fundraiser, telling the donors the exact same story twice in a span of three minutes. That fall, he didn’t recognize DNC chairman Jaime Harrison, and Virginia Senator Mark Warner ended a phone call with Biden concluding that the president had no idea what was going on in his own counterterrorism policy. At a cabinet meeting that was likely the one held October 2, 2023, a cabinet secretary described Biden as “disoriented” and “out of it,” mouth agape.

 

Jill Biden thinks she can convince you that Joe Biden never looked as bad as he did on the debate stage before that night and never looked as bad since. Her contention is that the single time that in 81 years that Biden looked so utterly hapless, barely coherent, confused, and senile was the one time he was in front of television cameras with the whole country watching — an amazing coincidence. It’s the tired, “every time you can’t see him, he’s doing cartwheels down the hall” spin.

 

Of course, after the debate, Jill Biden did not merely insist that her husband was fine; she insisted he performed fine as well. “Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question!” she said, in the tone of a kindergarten teacher addressing one of the slower kids in her class. That does not sound like a woman terrified that her husband has just had a stroke.

 

There is probably no one on earth who had more unfettered access to Joe Biden in his unguarded moments during his presidency than Jill Biden. No one had a clearer picture of his mental state, memory, physical health, ability to focus, ability to enunciate and speak clearly, moods, and overall capacity to perform his duties as president than the first lady. (If you’re married, think about how well your spouse knows you compared to everyone else in your life, particularly your co-workers.)

 

For what it’s worth, some unnamed former Biden administration official is texting reporters, saying “she’s lying.” I believe you, unnamed former Biden administration official, but your argument would be way more powerful if you would just come out and say so publicly.

 

And mark it down, because this is the rare day I agree with former Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray: “Jill Biden expects the public to believe that Joe Biden had exactly one bad day ever—debate night? These people have no respect for voters. If you don’t want to answer real questions about your husband’s obvious cognitive decline, I get it. Just don’t do a book tour.”

 

And that’s the rub. Almost everyone in America is ready to leave the Biden presidency — a failure on many levels — in the rearview mirror and focus on the copious problems of the here and now. No one forced Jill Biden to write a memoir or release it now. She doesn’t need the money. The Bidens have a net worth of about $10 million and own two homes. Hachette purchased the rights to Biden’s presidential memoir for $10 million.

 

Someone out there is no doubt going to complain that Jill Biden isn’t newsworthy anymore and today’s newsletter should cover something really important, like “Trump administration officials have pressed the office responsible for printing the nation’s money to design a $250 bill featuring the president’s portrait.”

 

But even after all this, Jill Biden wants to re-litigate this argument. She was the architect of the giant failed effort to fool Americans into believing that Joe Biden was sharp and healthy enough to serve another four years as president. If you’re a Democrat, and you’re angry that Donald Trump is serving his second term, Jill Biden has a heck of a lot to do with how we ended up in this situation right now.

 

Starting next month, Jill Biden will be on an extensive book tour — New York, Washington, Nashville, Philadelphia. The publication date for the book is June 2. As far as I can tell, no one has reviewed the book yet, and I have not seen any early excerpts published in magazines. I suspect the audience for this book — what is likely to amount to an insufferable pile of lame excuses, implausible spin, blame-shifting and self-righteousness — is extremely limited. I am reminded of the title of Christopher Hitchens’ book about Bill Clinton: No One Left to Lie To.

 

ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, a House Democratic candidate in New Jersey, Adam Hamawy, volunteered in Bosnia during the summer of 1994 with a Chicago-based nonprofit called the “Benevolence International Foundation.”

 

Here’s what the U.S. Department of the Treasury had to say about the “Benevolence International Foundation” back in 2002:

 

Benevolence International Foundation (BIF) is a U.S. tax-exempt not-for-profit organization whose stated purpose is to conduct humanitarian relief projects throughout the world.  BIF was incorporated in the State of Illinois on March 30, 1992. Although BIF is incorporated in the United States, it operates around the world, in Bosnia, Chechnya, Pakistan, China, Ingushetia, Russia, and other nations.  BIF operates as Benevolence International Fund in Canada and as Bosanska Idealna Futura in Bosnia.

 

Enaam Arnaout, BIF’s Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors, recently was indicted in the United States for operating BIF as a racketeering enterprise and providing material support to organizations, including al Qaida, that are engaged in violent activities.

 

Substantial evidence documents the close relationship between Arnaout and Usama bin Laden, dating from the mid-1980s.   An article in the Arab News from 1988, reporting on bin Laden’s activities at the al Masada mujahideen camp in Afghanistan, included a photograph of Arnaout and bin Laden walking together.  In a March 2002 search of BIF’s offices, Bosnian law enforcement authorities discovered a host of evidence linking Arnaout to bin Laden and al Qaida.  Among the files were scanned letters between Arnaout and bin Laden, under their aliases.

 

In one handwritten letter, bin Laden indicates that Arnaout is authorized to sign on bin Laden’s behalf.

 

Various documents also established that Arnaout worked with others — including members of al Qaida — to purchase rockets, mortars, rifles, and offensive and defensive bombs, and to distribute them to various mujahideen camps, including camps operated by al Qaida.

 

It remains unclear if Hamawy is promoting his candidacy by touting his “firsthand expertise about Islamist terrorist groups.”

The Clock Ticks in Iran

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, February 19, 2026

 

The Americans and the Iranians are talking again, but it’s not clear why.

 

Their backs against the wall, representatives of the Iranian regime acceded in February to the Trump administration’s renewed overtures for talks centered on the future of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear-weapons program. But most of that program is now entombed beneath hundreds of tons of lightly irradiated rubble. There are reportedly few signs that Iran has either the resources or capabilities to recover it.

 

Tehran signaled its willingness to put its ballistic-missile program and its support for terrorist proxies on the table, but it will not abandon what it believes are two vital instruments of statecraft. Nor does the Trump administration want to merely limit those activities — not really. It wants to neutralize the threat posed by the regime, not just the tools of war at Tehran’s disposal.

 

Trump’s goal, unlike Barack Obama’s, is not to mollify and placate the Iranians but to hasten the regime’s inevitable collapse. And the Iran that America is confronting today across the negotiating table is measurably weaker than the one Obama not only failed to confront but, instead, courted and bolstered.

 

Near the end of his administration, Obama himself advocated something resembling a Richard Nixon–style détente with Iran. The talks that culminated in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) did not “bet on Iran changing,” he argued. After all, “we struck agreements with the Soviet Union” — why should this deal be controversial? And yet, a modus vivendi that would preserve the status quo was not all the Obama administration was interested in.It set out to alter the status quo in Iran’s favor.

 

To facilitate the speedy withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, Obama and his subordinates set out to empower the region’s Shiite militias, many of which were loyal to and supported by Iran. That project was of such paramount importance that Obama felt compelled to ignore the Iranian people’s demand for their own liberation, as he did when he refused to support the 2009 Green Revolution inside Iran. “And in retrospect,” Obama admitted in a rare moment of self-doubt 13 years later, “I think that was a mistake.”

 

At the time, however, Obama and his subordinates were brimming with confidence as they set out to impose their vision on the Middle East. That administration released prominent Shiite insurgents from military custody in the pursuit of what Stars and Stripes described as a “larger reconciliation” effort designed to facilitate a “peaceful integration” of those elements into Iraqi society. In fact, the militias were expected to bolster Iraqi security against the Sunni elements that formed the backbone of the anti-American insurgency in Iraq. It was necessary, Obama and company concluded, to give Iran a stronger hand in Iraq and look beyond the more than 600 U.S. troops killed as a result of Iran’s support for the insurgents.

 

Ultimately, Obama’s skepticism toward the Iraqi Security Forces proved prescient. In 2014, the ISF collapsed as Islamic State militants poured over the border from Syria. But that only strengthened Obama’s reliance on Iran’s proxies. Indeed, during one battle against ISIS forces in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, Politico reported, “the U.S. halted air strikes when it became clear that Iranian commanders were on the ground directing the Shiite fighters.”

 

Obama’s short-term goal was to get the U.S. out of the Middle East, but his long-term objective was to establish a durable balance of power between Iran, together with the Shiite Muslims in its orbit, and the region’s Sunni states. In the end, Iran could become a “very successful regional power,” Obama told the New Yorker. He hoped to establish an “equilibrium” in which “there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not active or proxy warfare” in the Middle East.

 

In much the same way that Ronald Reagan and his acolytes threw off the self-limiting orthodoxies that underwrote détente, Donald Trump and his team entered office with a much different outlook toward the Islamic Republic: What if the Iranian regime weren’t an established and permanent feature of modern life? What if it could be not just contained but rolled back? What if it didn’t have to exist at all?

 

***

 

In truth, by seeking accommodation with Iran, it was Obama who deviated from America’s consistent posture toward the Iranian regime. Trump restored the status quo ante with what he called a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, which manifested primarily in a more comprehensive sanctions regime targeting key sectors of the Iranian economy. But there was a diplomatic component to it, too — one that would not have been possible had Obama not tried to engineer a radical revision to the regional balance of power.

 

Throughout the Obama years, the Middle East’s Sunni powers — primarily Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — feared the power that America was granting to Iran via its terrorist proxies. In February 2017, reporting by the Wall Street Journal’s Maria Abi-Habib indicated that these Sunni states had been cultivating secret military-to-military and intelligence-sharing relations with Israel in observance of their mutual interest in containing a resurgent Iran. The Trump administration fostered those links until they flowered into the Abraham Accords.

 

All the while, Trump and company put the screws to Iran’s terrorist armies, both covertly and kinetically. He executed air strikes on Iran’s Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. He degraded the chemical warfare capabilities of Iran’s ally, Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime, contributing to its ultimately fatal decline. He green-lit the operation that took out Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Qasem Soleimani on Iraqi soil.

 

Throughout this campaign, the Trump administration observed remarkable restraint. The White House would have been justified in exacting a greater price from Iran for its provocations.

 

In the final years of Trump’s first term, Iran waged a region-wide campaign of provocations that seemed designed to draw the U.S. into a broader conflict. It pirated foreign-flagged vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. It conducted what its victims called “sophisticated and coordinated” special-forces strikes on oil tankers. It took down a multimillion-dollar American surveillance drone in international waters. It sponsored dozens of rocket and mortar attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq. And, in the most brazen assault of all, it mounted a drone attack on the Aramco petroleum-processing facility inside Saudi Arabia.

 

Through this series of provocations, the administration maintained a determined patience. After all, its strategic approach to Iran was working.

 

In the winter of 2017–18, Iran was crippled by paralyzing protests against the regime, many of which were fueled by the economic hardships that were the direct and desired result of Western sanctions. Iran was crippled by similar protests in the winter of 2019–20, when anti-government demonstrators clashed with security forces and set over 700 government-owned banks alight. In 2022, now out of office, Trump officials watched helplessly as Joe Biden and his administration reprised Obama’s indifference toward Iranian protesters who lashed out at their government over the murder of a young woman at the hands of Iran’s morality police. At least the Iranian people still had an appetite for their own liberation.

 

The Biden years were a contradictory period for the Iranian regime. Biden backed away from Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign and did his utmost to revive the JCPOA that Trump had scuttled. But the regime also behaved as though it understood that its time was short.

 

In the Biden administration’s own estimation, the regime intensified its efforts to break out with a fissionable nuclear device. Tehran deepened its support for hostile actors abroad, and its proxies accelerated the pace of their attacks on U.S. and Israeli targets throughout 2022 and 2023. “Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel,” the Wall Street Journal reported within hours of the October 7 massacre. That revelation explains why each of Iran’s terrorist projects — Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, and the region’s various Shiite militias — all but simultaneously joined the fight that Hamas started.

 

***

 

That might have been one of the worst military blunders in modern history. Over the next two years, Israel dramatically degraded Iran’s capacity to export terrorism across its borders.

 

The Jewish state dismantled Hamas in Gaza. It devastated Hezbollah from the air and hobbled its fighters with booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies. It decimated the Houthi militia’s leadership in ways Western forces could not or would not, despite their fighting an ongoing naval battle against this ragtag group of bandits that was as intense as anything American sailors had experienced since World War II. Finally, over the course of several direct engagements between Iranian forces and their Israeli counterparts, the Israeli military destroyed dozens of Iranian ballistic-missile launchers and much of its layered air-defense network. That groundwork set the foundation for Operation Midnight Hammer, the “largest B-2 operational strike in U.S. history,” in which the Iranian nuclear program was reduced to dust.

 

It seemed then that, in its nearly 50-year history, the Iranian regime had never been weaker. But we were soon to learn that it could be made weaker still.

 

As 2025 drew to a close, the Iranian street once again descended into chaos. But from the start, this round of civil unrest looked different. It began with the bazaaris — middle-class merchants on whom the regime had previously relied for support. They rose up to protest the collapsing value of the Iranian rial, which, amid spiraling inflation, was all but worthless. Power outages became common. Public services broke down. A water-shortage crisis compelled Iranian officials to discuss permanently relocating the government from Tehran. The situation was dire, and every Iranian citizen knew it.

 

The students soon joined the protests, as did industrial and white-collar workers. Government officials, including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, began chastising the mullahs for failing their people. Western media outlets were replete with reports that regime officials were moving money out of the country and even seeking out comfortable destinations for exile. The Islamic Republic seemed to be coming apart.

 

The regime faced an existential crisis. Ultimately, the clerisy at the top of the Iranian hierarchy met it with unspeakable violence.

 

Estimates of the number of Iranian civilians who were slaughtered by security forces vary. The Iranian regime acknowledges that thousands were killed. Dissident networks and human rights groups put the number of dead in the tens of thousands.

 

Trump did not ignore the slaughter. “I have let them know that if they start killing people,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt on January 8, “we’re going to hit them very hard.” This was no errant thought. Trump subsequently urged Iranian civilians to “keep protesting” and “take over your institutions” because “help is on the way.”

 

But help wasn’t on the way — not with the alacrity the moment demanded. Whether he knew it or not, Trump did not have the naval assets in place in the Persian Gulf region to make good on his threat. America’s deployed carrier groups were tied up either deterring Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific or squeezing and, ultimately, decapitating Venezuela’s Chavista regime in the Caribbean.

 

All of a sudden, Trump changed his tune. The president insisted that the Iranian regime had heeded his calls for circumspection and nonviolence, even as regime officials insisted that they had not. Trump pivoted, dispatching his preferred envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, to resume diplomatic negotiations with the theocracy’s representatives.

 

Now, however, the deficit of forward-deployed assets to the Persian Gulf that bedeviled Trump in January is no longer a problem. As of this writing, there is more than enough firepower in the region to execute what Reuters reporters claim is Trump’s ultimate goal: a “sustained, weeks-long” operation against the Islamic Republic. That operation would consist of air strikes on “Iranian state and security facilities” in what the Journal previously reported was Trump’s desire for a “decisive” showdown with the regime.

 

***

 

That brings us to where we are today: on the precipice. Trump has taken his administration’s policies to their logical conclusion. The sanctions regime was designed to weaken the regime’s hold on its people, and it has. The U.S. and Israeli operations targeting Iran’s terrorist proxies were supposed to degrade their capabilities and sap them of their resolve, and that’s what they achieved. The strikes on the Iranian nuclear program — a symptom, not the cause, of the regime’s suicidally millenarian outlook — could only mitigate the Iranian threat. So long as the Islamic Republic exists, it will wage the war against the West that it has prosecuted since its inception.

 

On many fronts, the Trump administration’s approach to geopolitics has been inconsistent. When it comes to Iran, however, Trump’s posture has not fluctuated. His administration deserves credit for logically concluding that the characterological changes we seek in the Iranian regime will come about only through its implosion. We are approaching a climax.

 

Trump has a choice now. He can act on his convictions and deliver the final blow to a regime that is one of the most, if not the most, malignant on earth — a geopolitical entity that has sacrificed whatever legitimacy it had — or he can shrink from that fraught but portentous project. Whatever he decides, Trump’s legacy hangs in the balance.

 

Will posterity remember him as just another president who missed one of many opportunities to rid ourselves of this blight on the global landscape, or as one who acted boldly in ways his predecessors would not?

 

Trump spent a decade bending the arc of history toward this point. He stands on the threshold of a new era. If the past is prologue, he will cross it.

Wrong Is Wrong

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

 

U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s This Week on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Donald Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the United Arab Emirates’ national security advisor, Sheikh Tahnoon.

 

Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty Financial, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “The deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president's company.”

 

“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” host George Stephanopoulos asked.

 

“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn't do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.” Blanche went on to boast how the president is utterly transparent about his questionable business practices: “I don't have a comment on it beyond President Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don't do so in secret. We don't learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it's happening.”

 

Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “Okay, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”

 

Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.

 

Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge: “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”

 

This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.

 

Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy In America, the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.

 

In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of blacks, women, and Native Americans notwithstanding), no one has access to special carve-outs and exemptions to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal of the whole idea of equality.

 

The problem in the modern era is that elites—of all ideological stripes—have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not our own.   

 

Pick an issue. Violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption, and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately, the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.

 

Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor—or your client’s transparency—means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.

Beware the Biden Nostalgia

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, February 03, 2026

 

The warning signs for Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections are mounting.

 

Over the weekend, a Democratic candidate’s special-election victory in a Texas State Senate seat that Donald Trump won in 2024 by 17 points sent a shock wave through Republican politics. More alarmingly, the Democratic candidate’s overperformance fits within a trend that saw double-digit swings toward Democrats in special and off-year elections throughout 2025. As of today, the Democratic Party’s lead in the generic congressional ballot test is the largest it has ever been in the second Trump era.

 

Maybe the most nauseating indication of the Democratic Party’s potentially imminent comeback are the early signs of something like nostalgia for Joe Biden’s presidency.

 

For the first time since it has asked the question, the Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll recently found that a majority of voters (51 percent) now believe that Donald Trump is doing a “worse job” than his predecessor. The margin is a tight one; 49 percent of respondents still say Trump outperforms Biden in the role of president. But in December, the same survey showed that 53 percent preferred Trump’s record over Biden’s. Last February, an overwhelming 58 percent said Trump outshone Biden in the presidency, with only 42 percent dissenting.

 

What’s more, the registered voters that Harvard-Harris’s pollsters surveyed seem to be retrospectively evaluating Biden’s policies through rose-tinted glasses, too. When respondents were asked whether the economy has fared worse under Trump or Biden, 53 percent said the economy is “worse than it was under Biden.” Only 47 percent believe Trump’s economy outperforms Biden’s, a decline of three points from December.

 

We can anticipate that the president’s critics will not soberly reflect on this tentative expression of buyer’s remorse among voters, feeling encouraged by the results but resolving not to overread them. The caricature that Joe Biden’s hapless image-makers engineered for the former president is about to make a comeback. We’re about to be subjected to an off-putting campaign aimed at convincing voters that they never had it as good as they did under the last Democratic president.

 

You can see it now, can’t you? Biden will be exhumed from his political grave, sporting a pair of aviators and a bomber jacket, armed with an ice cream cone, and strapped into a Mustang convertible. “Dark Brandon” will return, casting his ocular lasers on the many targets of his retribution.

 

This public relations campaign will not be for Biden’s benefit. Indeed, who is to say whether the former president will even be cognizant of it? Rather, its beneficiaries will be its executors: the dozens of Democratic staffers and hangers-on whose professional reputations remain tarnished by their association with that administration and its humiliating end. A Democratic Party that is too conscious of its own failings to release the findings of its own autopsy on the 2024 election cycle is not going to suddenly discover the virtue of prudence. If Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel dangle a political lifeline to Democratic establishmentarians, they’ll take it.

 

Those who will overinvest in our collective amnesia will not limit themselves to gauzy reflections on the campy elements of the 45th president’s tenure. They will probably try to convince you that his economy was fairer, his immigration policies more equitable, and his prosecution of the culture wars more benign than the wrecker currently occupying the Oval Office. If they do that, Biden’s backers will have succumbed to hubris.

 

The voting public may not remember feeling “financially squeezed” during the Biden years, as two-thirds said of their own experience at the time, but they do remember what rampant inflation felt like. They can certainly read a chart — at least enough to deduce that an annual inflation rate of 9.1 percent is an undesirable level of price instability.

 

The voters who don’t remember just how difficult Joe Biden found managing America’s illegal immigrant population are bound to be reminded of the former president’s failings. They’ll be asked to recall the former president’s allergy to border enforcement, how confounded he was by Congress’s failure to relieve him of his responsibility for border security, and Biden’s sudden discovery that he didn’t need the legislature’s imprimatur to take the migrant crisis seriously — but only if voters were angry enough about it. Border security is one of the few areas in which Trump’s approach is still viewed positively, and the GOP will relish the opportunity to remind the public of Biden’s record on immigration.

 

Democrats would love to pretend as though Trump’s grandfatherly predecessor was a noncombatant when it comes to cultural conflict — or, perhaps, at least less petty and vindictive than Trump. Nonsense.

 

The former president waged a whole-of-government crusade to operationalize the dubious shibboleths that captured the hearts of progressive activists at a time when that reliably unreasonable cohort was at its least rational. “Equity” was, by the administration’s own admission, baked into its every initiative. The Biden White House attempted to subvert the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by disbursing debt relief and grants explicitly on the basis of race. It tried to triage access to Covid vaccines based on race and employment (for preferred professions, like union-connected teachers), all while advertising that being unvaccinated would or, at least, should (and, in the case of the U.S. military, did) result in lost opportunities and social ostracization. By the end, the infirm president seemed to have convinced himself that he could amend the Constitution via social media.

 

The Biden White House handed out constitutionally obscene beneficences to favored constituencies like student-loan borrowers. The president himself admitted that he would ignore the courts to satisfy the activists who insisted that property owners should have no say over who occupied the premises they held or even whether they should be compensated for the inconvenience. Do Democrats really want a critical retrospective on the strong-arm campaign behind “gender-affirming care,” the administration’s contempt for Title IX proscriptions against gender discrimination, or his efforts to use the power of the state to intimidate (and possibly ruin) dissenters to this new catechism?

 

The Harvard-Harris poll’s results should be viewed within the context of the voters’ general dissatisfaction with the status quo. In every way they can, the voting public is communicating its desire to see the Trump administration reboot its tactical approach to governance. They are not clamoring for a Joe Biden restoration. But Democratic partisans will not be able to resist the temptation to embark on an “I told you so” tour, and the GOP is not going to stop them.

Disorder Ends in Violence

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

 

It seems the American people will tolerate only so much common sense. After a year of Donald Trump’s aptly named “common sense revolution,” we’re witnessing the rise of a nonsense counterrevolution doing all it can to make America nutty again. The left has its sights set, in particular, on the return of genuine law enforcement. 

 

It goes without saying that the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis is a tragedy. She in no way “deserved” to die. Which isn’t the same thing as saying that the ICE officer who shot her made the wrong decision in that moment. He, after all, didn’t deserve to face an oncoming SUV that forced him to make a split-second choice about self-defense (a choice he’ll no doubt ponder for the rest of his life).

 

Neither one deserved what the crazies forced on them. And that’s what’s especially sad about it all—the pointlessness.

 

And it took a whole of lot crazy to get to that fatal confrontation. Think of all the missteps that paved the way. First, you have to go back a few years, when the Biden administration let the border crisis fester to record proportions while denying there was a problem of any sort. The data vary, of course, because no one was keeping an eye on things. But it’s safe to say that at least 5.5 to 6 million illegal immigrants entered the country while Biden was in office.

 

Next, sanctuary cities provided safe havens for those who crossed the border illegally.

 

Then, when Donald Trump decided to do something about the border and the illegals, Democrats and liberal activists countered by trying to protect the illegals and obstruct ICE officials while they went about their work.

 

Why? What’s the argument for illegally interfering with federal law-enforcement agents who are trying to remove dangerous criminals from your own community? 

 

It’s not unreasonable to be uneasy with teams of armed men dressed for battle roaming local streets. But if the ICE-obstructors were really afraid of a deadly “secret police” force taking over, why would they be so eager to swarm officers and ceaselessly taunt them? That’s not the mob’s real justification.

 

The act of obstructing is all the argument that’s needed. Resisting law and order is, among a large swath of the left, a good in itself. This notion, too, goes back a few years. And anti-ICE activists wouldn’t feel so emboldened to break the law had they not been provided the template by those who came before them.

 

During the summer of 2020, the liberal establishment sanctioned riots as “mostly peaceful protests”—arson, looting, and fatalities notwithstanding. After the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, the anti-Semitic mobs that hit the streets and campuses chanting terrorist slogans verbatim and violating the civil rights of Jewish students were deemed “pro-Palestinian activists.” In both cases, police stood down lest they furnished the thugs with another flashpoint moment.

 

Everyone expected that this arrangement would persist indefinitely. In left-wing minds, law-enforcement officials—local and federal—exist to absorb abuse. But common sense says otherwise: Their job is not to smile in the face of apoplectic fanatics; it’s to serve and protect, which means, you know, enforcing the law. And the return of that status-quo understanding threatens the activists’ entire gameplan. Police and federal agents were supposed to remain punching bags. That’s what enabled radicals to get in their faces and tell them they were fascist killers.

 

The left is still committed to this two-sided cosplay. I hope they quickly come to grips with the fact that the other side isn’t playing anymore. It would spare us further senseless tragedies.

Rein In the Presidential Pardon Power

National Review Online

Monday, December 08, 2025

 

Our Constitution was framed by wise men, and it has served us well. But they were also wise to give us the power to amend it. The time has come to use that power to rein in or abolish presidential pardons.

 

Article II gives the president the sole and unchecked “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” This is limited only in two ways: it cannot prevent removals from office by impeachment, and it applies only to federal, not state, crimes. It is the closest thing to a royal power possessed by any one official of the national government. Once issued and accepted, a pardon cannot be stopped by legislation or the courts, or undone by a subsequent president. The only real remedies for presidential abuse are political and reputational.

 

From the beginning, the pardon power had its republican critics, but it long served its purpose. Alexander Hamilton argued, in Federalist No. 74, that presidential pardons could be best deployed in negotiating with rebels to lay down their arms. It was instead more commonly used to close eras of rebellion after the fact, from George Washington pardoning the leaders and participants in the Whiskey Rebellion six years later to more controversial pardons after the Civil War and after the draft resistance of the Vietnam era. Abraham Lincoln commuted a great many death sentences for deserters and Native American rebels, showing how clemency can be balanced with law, order, and justice. Warren Harding pardoned the unpopular socialist dissenter Eugene V. Debs. Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon after Watergate now looks like an act of self-sacrificing statesmanship that ended a long national nightmare but may have cost Ford reelection. Presidents have also used pardons to end abuses of lawfare, as George H. W. Bush did in pardoning Caspar Weinberger.

 

But several factors have conspired to produce more abusive pardons and fewer constraints for an already overbroad power. Since the failure of the Clinton impeachment, our presidential politics has de-emphasized character. The decline of Congress has left presidents less able to be checked. Lawfare and the vast expansion of federal criminal law have led partisans to rationalize tribal protection of their own side. Successive White Houses have grown bolder in disregarding an institutional pardon process, in back-loading pardons to the end of a presidency when political checks are least effective, and (in a Biden-era innovation) in letting staffers mass-produce pardons signed by autopen that are only nominally presidential decisions. Hamilton argued that federal justice might be too “sanguinary” without pardons, but that was in an era when felonies commonly led to executions; today, the federal death penalty is rare, and Joe Biden used commutations to all but abolish the federal death penalty without going through Congress to do so.

 

Recent Democratic presidencies have produced enough shocking examples of pardon abuse to convince any Republican that the process is hopelessly poisoned. Bill Clinton effectively sold pardons, even to the fugitive from justice Marc Rich. Political accountability for this fiasco was so tepid, the Justice Department flunkey who carried it out (Eric Holder) later became Barack Obama’s attorney general. Joe Biden handed out pardons like candy to his corrupt family members to cover the tracks of his family influence-peddling business — including pardons announced so late they were publicly known only after dignitaries were seated to witness Trump’s inauguration — then let his staff cover those tracks by mass-producing autopen pardons. That’s without even discussing the various left-wing radicals and terrorists pardoned by the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations for reasons of vote-buying and ideological sympathy for political violence.

 

Donald Trump’s presidencies have offered Democrats plenty of reasons of their own to mistrust the pardon power. Trump has openly used pardons, commutations, and clemency as leverage to gain political support from corrupt Democrats, to reward factional allies within the Republican Party such as Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and Joe Arpaio, and to mass-absolve participants in the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Trump has capriciously bulldozed the long-standing Justice Department process for issuing pardons. His latest pardons include Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar, whom Trump seems to hope can be induced to switch parties; fraudster David Gentile, whom Trump freed from paying $15.5 million in restitution to his victims; and former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted narco-trafficker of the sort that Trump is simultaneously claiming the authority to kill by drone strike without trial.

 

Enough is enough. None of this benefits anyone outside the privileged circles of Beltway influence or the cesspools of ideological extremism. If Congress passes a constitutional amendment to reform or abolish the pardon power on a timeline that is not obviously partisan, there might be enough popular support to get state legislatures on both sides of the partisan divide to prevent future mischief. A popular constitutional uprising against bipartisan elite corruption would be the healthiest sort of civics and would have met with the Founders’ approval.

 

Reforms short of complete abolition should be considered first. The easiest is that departing presidents could be prevented from issuing pardons between Election Day and the end of their terms, or at least have their power to do so curbed by their successors or by Congress. That would end pardons for which nobody could be accountable. Some classes of recipients — such as blood relatives, close aides, or alleged co-conspirators of a president — could be removed from the list of recipients of a unilateral pardon.

 

Alternatively, the pardon process could be subjected to systemic checks. Presidents could be required to post potential pardons for a notice and comment period, after which they might require the assent of other political actors, including leaders of Congress and the courts — or at least see their pardons subjected to a veto by either chamber of Congress. A separate body might even be created to review pardons. An amendment that strips presidents of their unilateral pardon power might even expand the scope of that power, allowing a politically accountable consensus to pardon worthy targets of state as well as federal offenses.

 

Another approach would be to resurrect a proposal that Roger Sherman made at the Constitutional Convention that would subject pardons to Senate approval just like appointments.

 

All of these are worthy topics for legislative debate, if we still do such things in Washington. Failing a thoughtful consensus, it would not be the worst outcome if the pardon power was outright abolished. It now engenders more mischief and scandal than the good it does.

Biden Set the Stage for Today’s Pardon Disgrace

By Noah Rothman

Monday, November 10, 2025

 

President Trump’s profligate pardons continued apace this week with the announcement that he would hand down “full, complete and unconditional” reprieves to anyone who was involved in his effort to alter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

 

The recipients of the president’s beneficence include Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Boris Epshteyn, Sidney Powell, and dozens of Republican activists “who signed paperwork falsely claiming to be legitimate presidential electors,” Politico reported, “a key component of the bid to pressure [Vice President Mike] Pence” to deny the certification of the states’ votes on January 6, 2021.

 

The maneuver does not seem to have moved the activist left to outrage. Perhaps they have only so much bandwidth for ire, given that they are consumed with hostility toward Democrats for (as it appears) allowing the government to reopen. Or maybe the muted reaction to Trump’s decision to pardon the erstwhile members of his inner circle before they were even charged with a crime represents a prudent effort to avoid having to once again condemn Joe Biden. After all, it’s not like Trump invented preemptive pardons.

 

Biden’s pardons of his family members, January 6 committee participants, and public officials like Anthony Fauci — all in the absence of any charge and seemingly only to promote the political narrative that the incoming Trump administration was salivating over the opportunity to persecute them — set the stage for today’s disgrace.

 

“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” the document announcing Trump’s pardons read. But these pardons and commutations will put an end to nothing. The proclamation only present us with more evidence that the political party that forges new weapons for itself to wield in the ongoing culture war will see those instruments turned against it soon enough.

 

And yet this unavoidable conclusion seems to elude the political class. Either that or its members can convince themselves that the urgency of our present circumstances compels us to set aside our prudential concerns and leap into the abyss.

The Biden Pardons Scandal Isn’t Going Away

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 30, 2025

 

The House Oversight Committee’s blockbuster report exposing the extent to which President Joe Biden’s infirmity led his administration’s staffers to assume presidential powers in his stead — “The Biden Autopen Presidency” — is enraging. At times, it veers into comedy.

 

The report details the shocking degree to which covering up the president’s declining mental acuity was a whole-of-administration effort prior to Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate — an event the report confirms was at least partially designed to neutralize the allegations of infirmity in special counsel Robert Hur’s report. The gambit failed, and most of Biden’s handlers knew it. Most, but not all.

 

“President Biden had pretty good answers,” said Biden adviser Mike Donilon, a figure who has been accused of concealing from the president polls that showed how unlikely his reelection had become.

 

Bruce Reed, the deputy chief of staff for policy in the Biden White House, concurred with Donilon’s blinkered assessment. Reed told the committee’s investigators that he was one of perhaps a handful of Democrats who were unfazed when Biden stumbled his way through an incoherent response to a question about the growing national debt — a ramble that culminated in Biden’s declaration that “we finally beat Medicare.”

 

“I’ve heard him say that phrase hundreds of times,” Reed said of Biden’s botch. That is hardly a comfort to those who allege that the president’s infirmities were observably apparent to his inner circle long before the June 27 debate.

 

The rest of the report is, however, bereft of this comic relief.

 

The document authored by the committee headed by Representative James Comer establishes just how lax the advisers were in observing the proper protocols for documenting the president’s consent to the use of his signature on executive initiatives. Everything from the military vaccine mandate to the pardons of his family members was governed by a loose, informal process, in which the president himself may or may not have played a large role.

 

The most damning revelation in the report pertains to just how much the president and his staff were aware — or should have been aware — that Biden was lying to the American people when his White House claimed to have set a record by issuing the largest-ever blanket pardon for nonviolent offenders.

 

Documents reviewed by the Oversight Committee show that Bradley Weinsheimer, a senior ethics attorney with the Justice Department, admonished the administration’s principals.

 

“I think you should stop saying that because it is untrue or at least misleading,” Weinsheimer wrote in a January 17, 2025, memo. “Even in that number, we identified violent offenders, including those who committed acts of violence during the offense of conviction, or who otherwise have a history of violence such that it is misleading to suggest that they are non-violent drug offenders.”

 

Weinsheimer complained that, “despite repeated requests and warnings,” Justice Department officials were “not afforded a reasonable opportunity to vet and provide input on those you were considering.” In a pointed warning that doubles as exculpation for his role in the debacle, Weinsheimer noted that he could not assess whether Biden himself was “aware of these backgrounds when making clemency decisions,” and he was quick to establish for the record that the DOJ “was largely excluded from the process, which we otherwise opposed.”

 

Weinsheimer’s bombshell memo was publicly reported in September by Axios’s Alex Thompson, but the committee’s investigation couldn’t find any senior administration officials who were aware of it. White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, for example, told investigators that he had no “specific recollection” of what was clearly an effort to create a paper trail indemnifying the Justice Department ahead of a congressional investigation into its role in the pardon scandal.

 

In a similar episode, Isa Qasim, deputy associate counsel in the Biden White House, circulated an internal communiqué in which he insisted that “the Vice President’s approval had been sufficient to obtain approval” for clemencies and pardons. After all, it might take “days or weeks for the president to review and approve” the record-setting “clemency package,” and presumably Kamala Harris had more time on her hands.

 

Senior Biden White House staff dismissed the memo as something they had “never seen” before and argued that its author was too “junior” to know that the pardon power flows from the president and no one else.

 

Biden’s blanket pardon of so-called nonviolent offenders released a number of violent criminals back into American society. They were considered nonviolent only by virtue of plea agreements that scrubbed accusations of violence from their respective records. As our own Audrey Fahlberg reported on Wednesday, one recipient of Biden’s beneficence is back in custody today after he allegedly participated in a shooting in Nebraska.

 

It’s been nearly a year, and Biden’s pardons scandal is not going away. Indeed, the president’s nakedly corrupt pardons of his own family members — a disgrace in which Hunter Biden himself participated, according to Comer’s report — may be the least politically damaging for Democrats. Joe Biden’s political career is over. By contrast, the talent that staffed his White House will have second lives in other offices, other Democratic administrations. When they resurface, their involvement in this scandal will find them.