Jay Jones’s Text Messages Reveal a Disqualifying Worldview

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Saturday, October 04, 2025

 

The most alarming of all the words in the Jay Jones text-messages scandal is “Yes.”

 

It comes after Jones’s interlocutor, the moderate Republican House Delegate, Carrie Coyner, reminds Jones that he had been “talking about hopping [sic] jennifer Gilbert’s children would die,” and that this is outrageous. “Yes,” Jones replies. “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

 

Why does this part, in particular, matter? I’ll tell you: Because it was considered, deliberate, malicious. Sometimes, people get carried away. Sometimes, people entertain angry thoughts that, once fed back to them, are abandoned in a puff of regret. Here, though, Jones confirms those thoughts, and then calmly explains their logic. By the point at which Jones writes “Yes,” he has already been admonished for fantasizing about murder via text message and on the phone, and he has already said aloud that he hopes that his political opponent’s children will be murdered in front of her. Taken within this context, Jones’s “Yes” isn’t a rash indiscretion or a lazy misstatement; it is a confirmation.

 

Of what? Of a worldview — that’s what. I have talked before on my podcast about the two types of bigots. On the one hand, you have the unthinking types, who say awful things about particular sorts of people, but who, having never really thought those things through, will back away or soften when challenged. While I dislike them, these people do not worry me a great deal. On the other hand, you have people whose bigotry is the product of an earnestly held, well-thought-through ideological framework. These people terrify me. In my experience, there is a big difference between the guy at the bar who says ugly things after a few drinks, and the guy with the website who has charts, historical narratives, and an inexhaustible patience for proselytizing. One is a casual idiot; the other is a committed zealot. And it is zealots, not idiots, who tend to change the world for the worse.

 

The same distinction applies here. That guy in the political argument whose language gets a little overheated? He doesn’t particularly bother me. Jay Jones? He bothers me. Jones is a professional politician, and he was talking to one of his colleagues, about one of his colleagues. To suggest that it would be a good thing if that colleagues’ children were murdered in front of her is psychotic in and of itself. But to explain it? To say “Yes?” To say “I’ve told you this before”? To say “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.” That’s an approach. It’s a philosophy. It’s a theory of political action.

 

More specifically, it’s a theory of political action that cannot coexist with the American constitutional order. “I hope your children are killed so that I can get my way on policy” is not an opinion; it’s a rejection of the social compact. There is simply no way that, having repeatedly expressed and defended such an idea, Jay Jones can serve as the attorney general of a U.S. state. Were he a random user on Twitter, perhaps it would be different. But he’s not — he’s a politician, seeking political power, and he has demonstrated beyond doubt that he cannot be trusted with that charge.

Hoxes and Fedgehogs

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, October 03, 2025

 

The Hedgehog and the Fox was arguably Isaiah Berlin’s most famous essay (deal with it, fans of Rabindranath Tagore and the Consciousness of Nationality). The title was a reference to a snippet allegedly written by the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

 

Berlin took this idea and ran with it with a certain amount of whimsy, not realizing that so many people would take it very seriously. Berlin divided philosophers into hedgehogs and foxes:  Plato, Nietzsche, Hegel, et al., were hedgehogs with (allegedly) just one big idea that drove their thinking and influence. (Berlin doesn’t really spell out the nature of everyone’s hedgehogginess or foxiness, and if he didn’t have to, I certainly don’t.) Aristotle, Shakespeare, Joyce, Balzac (Editor: “no need for potty mouth”), et al., were foxes.

 

The influence of this dichotomy has been remarkable (Wikipedia has a serviceable summary), working its way into business books, geopolitical strategy, pop psychology, and legal philosophy.

 

If it’s good enough for that stuff, it’s certainly good enough for rank punditry.

 

I think both the GOP and the Democrats are each having an identity crisis, but not the same identity crisis. The Democrats have a fox problem, the Republicans a hedgehog problem.

 

Here’s what I mean in a nutshell: The Democrats don’t know who they are; the Republicans do. And, yes, both are problems. Let’s start with the Democrats.

 

If you search for articles about the Democrats' “identity crisis,” you’ll find no shortage of results. The New Yorker: “The Democratic Party’s Identity Crisis.” Axios: “The 10 theories driving Dems' identity crisis.” The Associated Press: “Democrats clashed over their shutdown strategy. But the party’s identity crisis runs far deeper.” And so on.

 

In the Axios piece, Alex Thompson lays out 10 theories Democrats offer for why they’re a mess.  The fact that there are 10—and 10 hardly exhausts the number of theories out there—is itself evidence of the fox problem.

 

When Joe Biden was president, you could argue that Democrats had one big problem: Joe Biden. He was too old, too weak, too unpopular, and too unimaginative to lead the party. But Biden was still the keystone holding together the edifice of the Democratic Party because he was president.

 

I’m no expert on stonework, but I can imagine a scenario where a mason or engineer says, “Hey, that keystone is crumbling. We need to replace it, or the whole structure will collapse.” And then some idjit says “Okay” and just yanks it out, not thinking about the fact that the keystone, despite its decrepitude, was still the only thing holding everything together. Also, focusing on the keystone assumes that the rest of the structure is in good shape when in fact its sorry state was merely a symptom of a more systemic problem. When your car has a rust problem, something will break first due to rust, but that doesn’t mean all the other pieces aren’t rusty too.

 

The replacement for Biden was Kamala Harris, and Harris was in fact symptomatic of the party’s larger dysfunction.

 

The fatberg Omnicause.

 

The term “Omnicause” is widely credited to Mary Harrington in an Unherd essay from a few years ago. Hadley Freeman added some metaphorical color last year in the Jewish Chronicle, in her essay, “Welcome to the Omnicause, the fatberg of activism.”

 

“Fatberg,” if you didn’t know, isn’t the Department of War’s new term for overweight Jewish soldiers—it’s the term of art for a mass of congealed fats, grease, and oil that combine with wet wipes and generic trash in sewer systems.

 

Anyway, the point is that the progressive left is obsessed with the idea that everything is connected. “From Gaza to the climate,” one might imagine Greta Thunberg explaining, “it’s one supply chain of oppression: The war machine runs on the same fossil-fueled, settler-colonial patriarchal logic as border imperialism and the carceral state. Before we can provide housing for all, we must acknowledge the indigenous stolen land that the houses will be built on. Decarbonize, decolonize, democratize—all at once! Climate justice that isn’t trans-inclusive isn’t justice!”

 

That’s parody, but there’s a reason it has the ring of truth. For instance, just weeks after Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice president, she was given an intelligence briefing that used what she considered to be problematic adjectives to describe female foreign leaders. So according to the New York Times, she ordered up a review of intelligence briefings for unacceptably gendered language.

 

The most famous, and damaging, recent example of Omnicausism was when Harris told the ACLU that she favored government-funded transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants and criminals in federal custody. Video of her defending that position was turned into the Trump campaign’s most aired and most effective ad of the 2024 election cycle. It ended with “She’s for they/them. He’s for you.”

 

That ad and the issues behind it have been masticated plenty already, but it’s worth noting that while the text was about transgender issues, the subtext was that Harris cared more about fatberg solidarity than she did about the average voter. But what hasn’t gotten enough attention is why the ACLU pushed for such a policy in the first place. The ACLU used to have a very narrow but important mission: defending free speech and other First Amendment rights. But over the years, it has increasingly become a giant clump of wet wipes in the progressive fatberg.

 

The ACLU denies it has abandoned its historic mission, and that can be debated. But what is undebatable is that it expanded its contemporary mission to be a member in good standing of the Omnicause. Whatever you may think of the idea of tax dollars being spent to offer sex change surgeries (sorry, “gender-affirming care”) to federal prisoners and immigrant detainees, there’s no reason for the ACLU to take a position on it.

 

I even have some sympathy for the ACLU, because basically all progressive organizations these days are staffed by largely interchangeable Omnicausers. In 2022, nearly 700 ACLU staffers signed a petition demanding that the group condemn the war in Gaza and join the boycott, divest, and sanctions crowd. The leadership rejected the petition, to their credit. The Slack channel Jacobins at the New York Times had more immediate success with their internal revolt, the end result of which is that Bari Weiss will be the editor in chief of CBS News.

 

(I should make one quick nod to intellectual history. As much as I like the Omnicause thing, it’s not really a new idea. One can play intellectual connect-the-dots and trace it back to the popular fronts of the 20^th century and the social justice project generally.).

 

Strangers in a strange land.

 

What does this have to do with the Democrats’ identity problem? A lot. It’s not that everything the ideological base of the Democratic Party believes is wrong or unpopular. I may not like it, but some of their economic ideas are quite popular, as Zohran Mamdani’s glide path to Gracie Mansion suggests. But if you have to believe all of it, you’re going to get defined by the most offensive links in the Great Chain of Fatbergness. If you campaign on affordable housing, better access to health care, and liquidating the kulaks, don’t be surprised if your kulak liquidation proposal ends up in Republican ads. Whatever you think about Trump’s “they/them” ad, the simple fact is that it was completely fair game politically. It used Harris’ own words.

 

Indeed, Mamdani’s apparent success is itself a problem for Democrats, because the rest of the country doesn’t have the politics or demographics of New York City.

 

Regardless, that’s only a small aspect of the problem. For most of the last century, Democrats were the majority party. In 1977, 1 in 2 Americans identified as Democrats while barely 1 in 5 identified as Republicans. When I was in college, the South was still reliably blue. In their institutional memory and self-understanding, Democrats believe that they speak for “the people” the way, say, FDR did, while Republicans speak for “elites.” This self-conception endures in many progressive institutions and the mainstream media.

 

This leads to a tendency to assume that progressives still speak with authority for average Americans. But this gets the causality backward. Democrats used to speak with authority for average Americans because the party actually represented the views of average Americans. The views of average Americans don’t change with whatever Democrats say. If Democrats say 2+2 = 4, that’s representative of the views of Americans. If they start saying 2+2 = 37.6, Americans won’t just start believing that. In other words, just because Democrats use “Latinx” doesn’t automatically make the term popular. They’ve been slow to learn that lesson.

 

In the last quarter century, the things Democrats said—in obeisance to the Omnicause—drifted farther and farther from the attitudes of normal Americans. Like the ugly American who thinks if they just shout louder in English foreigners will understand, progressives just shouted “racist” or “bigot” louder as if that would just win the argument. The arrogance of it all just accelerated the trend of the white working class—the largest voting bloc now and for the foreseeable future—moving into the Republican fold.

 

The Democrats’ fox problem isn’t just that they believe lots of different things that don’t go together, it’s that they’ve got hedgehog envy and want the giant fatberger to be One Big Thing. And their One Big Thing is just not popular.

 

And, to be fair, the Democratic coalition is not one undifferentiated fatberg of left-wing radicals. But the Democratic coalition has no unifying hedgehoggy idea that pulls everyone together. Sure, opposing Trump helps because they can get an intraparty consensus around that, but it’s not enough. Private sector labor unions and public sector labor unions may talk a big game about unity, but they have divergent interests. Professional identity politics activists may see everything through the Omnicause prism, but the actual ethnic groups they purport to speak for don’t. The Democrats have scooped up a lot of college-educated suburban voters, but beyond attacking Trump, they haven’t figured out how to appeal to them without pissing off the rest of their coalition.

 

There’s an additional challenge for Democrats. The same muscle memory that makes them think they represent the mass of Americans also leads them to cling to a script that depends on Republicans playing their part.

 

The Democrats are the party of government. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

 

But two problems flow from this fact. The first is that if you’re the party of government and you let the fatberger cadres force ridiculous policies on crime, housing, and education on you, you won’t run the government well. And what is the point of being the party of government if you can’t run the government well? Most people want the government to fight crime, not fight for the rights of criminals. What is the point of being the party of public education if you put the interests of teachers’ unions above the interests of children? Those new suburban voters don’t want to send their kids to public schools to help make the case for higher salaries for public school teachers or to provide new recruits for settler-colonialism or queer theory. They’re happy to pay for public schools if public schools put kids first.

 

The second problem is that in a two-party system, being the party of government can only provide a comparative advantage when the other party isn’t the party of government.

 

The GOP is a big-government party now. Trump is not an ideological conservative—because he doesn’t really have an ideology and he’s not a conservative. Yuval Levin had a great piece at National Review that pointed out the fact that, despite all the drama about DOGE and rescissions and draconian cuts, Trump hasn’t changed the fiscal trajectory of the federal government at all. Trump’s tariffs are not only protectionist—the standard orientation of Democrats—they’re a major tax increase on Americans, the proceeds of which he now wants to distribute as subsidies for farmers. He’s not a constitutional originalist. He’s not (really) a pro-lifer. He’s certainly not laissez-faire or libertarian in any meaningful way. In short, he’s very few of the things the left and Democrats know how to argue with.

 

If your self-definition hinges on your enemy playing to type, it can be very confusing when your enemy doesn’t play to type anymore. If you’re a boxer who has never fought anything but right-handed opponents, a southpaw is going to catch you at a disadvantage.

 

The GOP’s crisis.

 

I could go on, but this is a good segue to the GOP’s identity crisis, which will require fewer words to describe.

 

The GOP should replace the elephant with the hedgehog. Because the GOP now simply stands for one thing: Donald Trump. You can hold virtually any position you want in the Republican Party today, so long as you don’t let it get in the way of supporting and applauding Trump. The Democratic message is a cacophony; the Republican message is simple: Trump. Trump’s favorite new hat reads: “Trump was right about everything.” Whatever you think about that (preposterous) statement, it’s a really pithy and accurate encapsulation of the GOP today.

 

And not just the GOP. As I noted earlier this week, the “institutional isomorphism” that has plagued the left for decades has infected the right. Most avowedly right-wing institutions have gone the way of talk radio and the Heritage Foundation. Indeed, Heritage should use an asterisk after the word “think” in think tank, indicating a footnote that reads “pending approval by Trump.” With a few notable exceptions, right-wing media is simply pro-Trump media.

 

Whether you call this a cult of personality or offer complicated institutional explanations involving the distorting role of primaries and the economic incentives created by balkanized media and small donors, it’s still an objective fact: The GOP’s identity has been totally defined by Donald Trump. What is the correct policy? Whatever Trump says it is.

 

Because the Democrats are a mess, this has worked to the advantage of the Republicans. But momentary electoral and political success only masks the GOP’s identity crisis. Whether for actuarial reasons or constitutional ones, Donald Trump won’t be president for that much longer.  When—or if—he leaves office, he will surely try to maintain control of the party.

 

But how will that work? If Republicans win in 2028, will an old man in Mar-a-Lago still dictate policy? Will the Republican candidate promise to follow Trump’s lead no matter what? That’s awfully beta male. Will such a candidate differentiate himself from Trump and earn the wrath of his superfans or Trump himself? What idea will unite the party after Trump? Or what ideas can a Republican campaign on that won’t make him look like a hypocrite or heretic to the faithful?

 

Max Weber pioneered the study of “charismatic” leaders. Charisma in this sense doesn’t mean “charming” in the colloquial sense but charming in the deeper more mystical sense: leaders who charm, ensorcell, inflame with passion. Charismatic leaders become whatever their followers want, or need, them to be. Like it or not, Trump is a charismatic leader.

 

But Weber also wrote about the bureaucratic or routinization of charisma (Veralltäglichung der Charisma) when charismatic leaders go away. Suddenly, the mystical, enchanting, unifying populist passions need to be encoded in rules, processes, and policies. What was once perceived as heroism devolves into schtick and kitsch. Battles for succession—like those that plagued Islam after Muhammad died, or Alexander the Great’s empire, or the civil rights movement after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—consume the once-unified movement as different factions vie for power. Revolutionary movements recede into bureaucratic drudgery. Grifters feed off the remaining passions. The Tea Party and Black Lives Matter movements started as organic populist uprisings and descended into money-grubbing fundraising operations quickly thereafter. The Republican Party under Lincoln was a righteous engine for human liberation and national salvation. After Lincoln, it descended into carpetbagging graft.

 

You can tell yourself the idea of MAGA will endure after Trump, but the only tangible idea holding MAGA together right now is Trump.

 

I don’t know when it will happen, but the GOP hedgehog of today is destined to become foxy sooner or later.

The Forgotten War No Longer

By Michael Baumgartner

Saturday, October 04, 2025

 

When Americans walk the National Mall, they see monuments to the great struggles that shaped our nation. World War II, Korea, Vietnam — each has a fitting place in our capital’s national memory. Yet the war that made the United States a continental power, the U.S.–Mexican War of 1846–1848, is conspicuously absent. There is no national memorial in Washington to honor the 13,000 Americans who died and the more than 100,000 who served in that conflict, or the immense national transformation that flowed from their sacrifice.

 

This is a startling omission. The Mexican War was the third-most-important territorial war in American history, behind only the Revolution and the Civil War. It expanded U.S. territory by nearly 25 percent, including the territory that became the State of California. It resolved the Texas question, established a durable border with Mexico that was defined by treaty, and propelled America into the Pacific world with deep-water ports and new trade routes. Within months of peace, the 1848 Gold Rush began, drawing global migration to San Francisco and fueling the rise of America’s industrial might. Without the Mexican War, there would be no continental republic, no Pacific gateway, and no secure foundation for the United States’ emergence as a world power.

 

Even those who had opposed the war came to carry forward its legacy. Abraham Lincoln, as a young Whig congressman, criticized President James K. Polk’s conduct of the conflict. Yet as president, Lincoln relentlessly pressed the expansion made possible by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo — supporting the transcontinental railroad and telegraph, agricultural expansion, the land-grant university system, and homesteading policies that knitted together the nation’s new lands.

 

The war represents both a geopolitical hinge point and a continuity of American purpose: to complete the continental project and unleash the full power of a republic that spanned from shore to shore.

 

But the case for a memorial goes beyond territory and economics. The Mexican War also left profound institutional and moral legacies that shaped America’s character and deserve remembrance.

 

·        It was the Army’s proving ground: Nearly every major commander of the Civil War learned the trade of war in Mexico. Grant and McClellan fought as junior officers, gaining the field experience that later preserved the Union.

 

·        It taught us hard lessons in insurgency and occupation: U.S. forces quickly achieved battlefield dominance but then faced a stubborn guerrilla resistance. It was here that General Winfield Scott issued his famed General Orders on martial law — prohibiting pillage, protecting civilians, and establishing military commissions. These orders balanced firmness with restraint and became a direct forerunner of the Lieber Code and the international Geneva Conventions. They showed that America could temper victory with law, a principle that endures in our armed forces today.

 

·        We learned the value of diplomatic doggedness: While Polk sought quick leverage for land concessions, politics in Mexico made early negotiations impossible. It fell to Nicholas Trist, the State Department’s envoy, to ignore a presidential recall and press on with talks. His defiance, explained in a 65-page memorandum, helped produce the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo — a framework that secured peace, normalized relations, and established the U.S.–Mexico border we still observe, with only minor changes later after the Gadsden Purchase of 1854. Trist’s stubborn professionalism reminds us that diplomacy requires courage as well as patience.

 

In all these ways, the Mexican War left marks far deeper than most Americans realize. It is not simply a “war of expansion,” as critics called it, but a crucible in which the Army was professionalized, the law of war advanced, and American diplomacy proved resilient. We would not be the America we know today but for the Mexican War.

 

That is why, as we approach the nation’s 250th anniversary, Congress should act to close this gap in our national memory. A fitting vehicle is before us: H.R.5510, the United States–Mexican War Memorial Act of 2025 that would designate Arlington Memorial Bridge as the U.S.–Mexican War Memorial Bridge. Built in the 1930s as a symbol of North–South reunion after the Civil War, the bridge stretches across the Potomac as a literal and figurative link in our civic landscape. To co-designate it for the Mexican War would extend that metaphor: from east to west, from shore to shore, honoring the sacrifice that completed America’s continental destiny. It would connect hallowed ground — Arlington, the nation’s resting place for its fallen — to the National Mall of remembrance, affirming that those who died in Mexico stand alongside the honored dead of every other American war.

 

Every war that shaped the United States should be honored in our capital. The Mexican War gave us California, secured the Southwest, opened the Pacific, and forged the officers and institutions that preserved the Union. The war’s 13,000 American dead fought and died as bravely as those in any conflict, and their legacy is with us still. On the Semiquincentennial of our Republic, it is time to ensure that this “forgotten war” is forgotten no longer.

Qatar Does Not Deserve Trump’s Unilateral Security Guarantee

National Review Online

Friday, October 03, 2025

 

Going forward, we are to avoid involvement in Middle Eastern wars — except if Qatar is attacked.

 

That’s the U.S. position, apparently, after Donald Trump’s America First foreign-policy doctrine took a remarkable turn this week when it was revealed that the president signed an executive order declaring that “it is the policy of the United States to guarantee the security and territorial integrity of the State of Qatar against external attack.”

 

News reports indicate that the executive order is meant to soothe the Qataris’ ruffled feathers after Israeli jets attacked Hamas’s leadership on their soil. The Trump administration may also be attempting to grease Qatar’s cooperation in its Gaza peace plan. Neither of these reasons is a sufficient explanation for this absurdity.

 

In 2022, Joe Biden labeled Qatar a major non-NATO ally. Americans may have been under the impression that the second Trump administration was intent on reversing Biden-era foolishness, but now Trump is compounding Joe Biden’s folly by unilaterally extending a promise of U.S. blood and treasure to defend an anti-American petrostate in the Persian Gulf.

 

But on what reasonable basis should the president ask Americans to “regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States,” as Trump’s executive order states? There is none. Indeed, in 2017 during his first term, Trump was far closer to the mark when he stated forthrightly that “the nation of Qatar has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level.”

 

NATO countries have an American security guarantee because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established by the Treaty of Washington in 1949. For all our petty squabbles and differences, the American people, through their representatives in the United States Senate, viewed the nations of Europe as friends and kindred Western democracies — and therefore worth defending even at the risk of war with the Soviet Union.

 

Qatar, on the other hand, though it hosts a major U.S. air base and other military facilities, does so as part of a deliberate strategy to cozy up to both the United States and Islamist jihadis of all stripes. Indeed, Qatar materially supports Hamas (and the Taliban, which harbored al-Qaeda and made war on America for 20 years), and it is a principal proponent of the Muslim Brotherhood and its loathsome Sunni Islamist ideology. What’s more, it is an ally of the Shiite jihadist regime across the Persian Gulf in Iran. Qatar is the home of Al Jazeera, which propagates the sharia supremacist worldview, and, as part of a deliberate campaign to increase its soft-power influence over America, it has spent billions and billions of dollars in this country.

 

Realists may believe, reasonably enough, that our interests need not always align with our values. But can Americans at least ask that those countries to whom we would send our sons and daughters to defend be genuine friends of the United States?

 

This initiative also trespasses against the Senate’s power to advise and consent to agreements with foreign states. Security guarantees delivered via Senate-approved treaties align with our constitutional order and the gravity and moment of such a decision. When Finland and Sweden joined NATO in 2023 and 2024 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Senate voted to approve their accession.

 

A president of the United States has no unilateral authority to give another country a security guarantee — at least one that the U.S. must honor. Presidential executive orders can be reversed or ignored by the next president. Treaties, by contrast, have the force of statutory law. Presidents must faithfully execute U.S. obligations under such treaties (or formally withdraw from them).

 

As president and commander in chief, Donald Trump has undeniable power to conduct U.S. foreign policy as he sees fit. If he wants to tell the Qataris they have an American security guarantee, no one can stop him. But to imagine that it’s a security guarantee on a par with NATO’s Article 5 is ridiculous. So is the idea that Qatar is a friend of America.

The Right Is More Tolerant Than They Get Credit For

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 03, 2025

 

Bari Weiss is neither a conservative nor a Republican. She has described herself as a “radical centrist” or a “left-leaning centrist.” In the (many) mainstream media profiles of her and her media venture, the Free Press, Weiss maintains that her ideological affinities have not changed. Rather, the political landscape has shifted under her feet. What was once liberal terrain has been ceded by the progressive left, which now makes enemies of the erstwhile allies who continue to occupy it.

 

And yet, you won’t find a happier bunch than conservatives and Republicans given the news that Weiss is set to ascend to the top of the heap at CBS News. Reportedly, when Paramount finalizes its purchase of the Free Press, it will make Wiess editor in chief of CBS News – long a bastion of left-wing like-think and a promulgator of the dubious narratives that such a condition incubates.

 

Rather, it is the left that is fit to be tied over Weiss’s ascension, even though she self-describes as one of their own. The right’s elation has nothing to do with the future CBS News chief’s ideological preferences. It is owed to the fact that, throughout her tenure in media, Weiss and the operations she runs have proven that they will not summarily dismiss or mischaracterize the right’s rejoinders to Democratic narratives. Occasionally, she and they will even find some merit in conservative critiques of center-left talking points.

 

The right isn’t just grudgingly accepting half a loaf here – they’re wildly enthusiastic over such a generous dispensation from the new owners of this legacy media outfit. And Weiss isn’t the only recipient of that sort of gratitude.

 

One of the more prominent Democrats in the swing state of Pennsylvania, Senator John Fetterman, has likewise ingratiated himself among right-of-center voters. According to Quinnipiac’s latest poll, Fetterman is viewed favorably by about as many Pennsylvania Republicans (62 percent) as is GOP Senator Dave McCormick (64 percent). Why?

 

It’s not as though Fetterman votes like a Republican. By some measures, his voting record in the Senate is more ideologically left-wing than one-third of his party’s Senate caucus. Fetterman has earned the affection of Pennsylvania Republicans merely by declining to endorse the flights of fancy encouraged by progressives on social media.

 

Fetterman has not jumped on the anti-Israel bandwagon. He does not back shutting down the government merely to relitigate a lost argument over a spending bill that was passed into law three months ago. He won’t go so far as to claim that the president has overturned the constitutional order in the absence of evidence to that effect, even if he’s perfectly comfortable critiquing Trump and the GOP’s conduct in strong but defensible terms.

 

There is no end to the grief Fetterman gets merely for supporting America’s steadfast geopolitical partners and declining to call Trump Hitler. He is pilloried by his left flank in hyperbolic terms only for saying things like “there isn’t a constitutional crisis” when, objectively, there isn’t one.

 

To the extent that Fetterman has earned a second look from the GOP, it is only for refusing to reinforce his co-partisans’ worst impulses and deny them their most self-destructive indulgences. Something similar could be said of Weiss.

 

Republican voters – a critical mass of them, at least, of which the loudest voices on social media are unrepresentative – don’t need to see a reflection of themselves to like what they’re looking at. You might not know that from the characterization of the modern Republican Party in the legacy press.

The Obamacare Ratchet Effect

By Dominic Pino

Friday, October 03, 2025

 

Senate Democrats have refused to vote for a continuing resolution that the House passed to fund the government for roughly the first six weeks of the new fiscal year, which began on October 1. Without any funding bill passed, the federal government is now in its third day of a shutdown.

 

One of Democrats’ stated reasons for refusing their consent is that they want Congress to extend Obamacare credits that Democrats passed in 2021 and are set to expire on December 31. Former Obama administration economist Steven Rattner posted on X that if these credits are not extended, “a 55-year-old couple making $85K would see their premiums more than triple to $24,535,” a rate that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called “OBSCENE.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries posted that Congress must, “Cancel the cuts. Lower the cost. Save Healthcare.”

 

In so doing, Democrats are effectively conceding that Obamacare as originally designed has failed, and the only way to keep the program functional is to dump more taxpayer dollars into it forever.

 

The 2021 credits were not part of the original law at all. They were passed by Democrats as part of the American Rescue Plan Act without a single Republican vote in either chamber of Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden. They were supposed to be a temporary Covid measure that would expire at the end of 2022. Then, in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats expanded them through the end of 2025, again without a single Republican vote.

 

Subsidies for Obamacare plans are supposed to stop when enrollees are at 400 percent of the federal poverty level. The 2021 actions removed that cap and also increased the amount of subsidy that enrollees who were previously eligible received. Enrollment in Obamacare marketplace plans has surged from 11 million to 24 million since the expanded credits were enacted.

 

That is a fundamentally different program from the one that Barack Obama sold taxpayers in 2010. The purpose of Obamacare, according to Democrats, was supposed to be making health care more affordable for everyone and subsidizing it for people with lower incomes. Over a decade later, Obamacare keeps raising costs for health insurance, and Democrats now insist that everyone, regardless of income, should be eligible for larger subsidies than Obama signed.

 

One group that is very happy about this state of affairs is health insurance companies, who are the recipients of the subsidies. “About half of all health care spending and the majority of health insurer revenue now comes directly from the government,” according to analysis from the Paragon Health Institute. Naturally, insurers are lobbying hard to extend the “temporary” credits that have already been extended once, for years beyond the Covid emergency they were supposed to address.

 

Benefiting less than one might expect are patients. Despite that massive surge in Obamacare enrollment, 12 million enrollees in the marketplace plans did not use their insurance at all in 2024. These are dream customers for insurers, who receive mostly taxpayer money in exchange for “covering” people who cost them absolutely nothing.

 

Paragon also estimates that 6.4 million people are improperly enrolled, meaning they are enrolled in fully subsidized plans despite having incomes that make them ineligible to receive full subsidies. This problem is greatest in Florida, which had 2.7 million people signed up for fully subsidized plans despite only having 621,000 residents with qualifying incomes. The Department of Justice has investigated two major instances of organized Obamacare fraud in Florida.

 

As the Economic Policy Innovation Center has explained, Obamacare mandates health insurance plans at expensive levels of benefits, so the government has to subsidize them to make them affordable. Those subsidies go to insurers, who in millions of instances get to keep the entire thing because their customers never make a claim. Insurers have little reason to keep costs down, since their customers aren’t price-sensitive, which then fuels even more calls for even more subsidies.

 

These results are exactly what one would expect given the incentives now present in Obamacare. There is simply too much federal money being made available through the program with little accountability. Letting the expanded credits expire at the end of this year, which is what will happen if Congress does nothing, would help to correct those incentives by reducing the size of the pile of money that insurers can reap.

 

It is true that without the subsidies, many enrollees will see higher premiums, potentially significantly higher. It is also true that many of the phantom enrollees will vanish, and with stricter law enforcement, improper enrollees would dwindle too. As things currently stand, Obamacare is stuck in a vicious cycle, and Democrats have shut down the government in part because they are demanding to keep it that way.

 

The Bureau of MAGA Statistics, August 2025–September 2025

 

As readers of this newsletter already know, President Trump nominated an unqualified economist, E. J. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation, to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing commissioner Erika McEntarfer in August. On September 30, news broke that he was pulling Antoni’s nomination amidst concerns that he could not secure Senate confirmation.

 

Concerns are reported to have been related to a variety of issues. Antoni once said he supported pausing the release of the jobs report for a period of time, an unprecedented move that would have terrified financial markets. He was present at the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. He formerly operated a Twitter account that spouted a variety of unseemly content.

 

Most importantly, he has a record of misstating facts about economic data to boost Trump, and has a sparse record of economic research to demonstrate any ability to lead the BLS. Perhaps most bizarrely, he co-wrote a paper in 2024 that suggests the most recent peak in the business cycle was in the fourth quarter of 2021. There is simply no way that there was more economic activity in late 2021 than in 2024, when the economy had fully reopened post-Covid and consumer spending, employment, hours worked, personal income, and manufacturing and trade sales were all higher.

 

“It is undeniable that BLS needs reform and E.J. was the right man for the job,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said after Antoni’s nomination was pulled. Trump and the Senate have now in effect denied he was the right man for the job.

 

For the BLS to be reformed, it needs a commissioner with deep statistical experience who can address boring, apolitical problems such as declining survey response rates. The Senate seems to have recognized that a partisan bomb-thrower is not the right kind of person to lead the agency. Trump has already damaged it by firing McEntarfer because he was upset about a jobs report that made him look bad, but the Senate can limit the damage by only agreeing to confirm a competent replacement. Denying Antoni is a positive sign that senators understand their task.

Dealing the Cards

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, October 02, 2025

 

Kevin Williamson is almost always right, and I’m throwing the “almost” in there mainly because I think Mrs. Williamson might quibble if I didn’t.

 

But I sure thought he was right last week in how he interpreted the president’s latest bipolar episode on Ukraine. “After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” Donald Trump wrote.

 

That sounded promising! Then came the conclusion: “In any event, I wish both Countries well. We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them. Good luck to all!”

 

Kevin read that as a kiss-off, surmising that “Trump has had enough of the Russia-Ukraine war.” So did David Sanger of the New York Times. So did Tom Nichols of The Atlantic. And so did I. The president spent the first eight months of his second term trying to broker a ceasefire and achieved precisely nothing. Now, it seemed, he was washing his hands of the conflict. Good luck to all.

 

Bipolar episodes are called “bipolar” for a reason, though. Another disorienting mood swing is always right around the corner.

 

And here it was, arriving last night in the pages of the Wall Street Journal: “The U.S. will provide Ukraine with intelligence for long-range missile strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure, American officials said, as the Trump administration weighs sending Kyiv powerful weapons that could put in range more targets within Russia.” The powerful weapons in question are Tomahawk missiles, which Volodymyr Zelensky has been seeking for ages.

 

Tomahawks have a range of 1,500 miles. As recently as six weeks ago, the Pentagon was preventing Ukraine from using any U.S.-supplied Army Tactical Missile Systems, which have a range of nearly 190 miles, to strike targets inside Russia. Now, suddenly, the United States is reportedly planning to help Kyiv zero in on those targets—and could make munitions available that would put Moscow itself within reach.

 

This administration is led by a guy who whined for two years that the Biden administration was courting World War III by supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russia. Fast-forward to October 2025 and it sounds like he’s ready to help Zelensky bomb the Kremlin. Now that’s bipolar.

 

Not that I’m complaining. When Trump told Ukraine’s president during their infamous Oval Office meeting in February that his country can’t win because “you don’t have the cards,” every Reaganite in America had the same thought: So deal him some f---ing cards. Seven months and many, many, many Russian bombings later, the White House is finally shuffling the deck and allegedly preparing to deal. I’ll golf clap for that.

 

Still, we’re left with an unthinkable possibility: Could Kevin and I have been (gasp) wrong? Trump isn’t washing his hands of the Ukraine war after all? He’s actually … doubling down?

 

Maybe. There are three ways to read the Journal’s scoop.

 

Bad romance.

 

One theory is that it’s a bluff.

 

Trump’s posture toward Vladimir Putin is best understood as a “situationship,” I wrote in July, a romance that lingers indefinitely in ambiguity because the parties’ desires are mismatched. One yearns for a committed relationship and will never relinquish the fantasy that it might happen. The other has no intention of committing but sometimes hints that he does, because he enjoys the affection and wants it to continue.

 

For the committed partner, a situationship is an endless cycle of false hope and realistic despair (bipolar, one might call it) in which most of his or her time is spent strategizing on how to get the other to commit. Sometimes that strategy involves dialing up the affection. And sometimes it involves dialing it waaaay down.

 

Leaking to the Journal that the U.S. might start selling Tomahawks to Europe for Ukraine’s use is the equivalent of the committed partner making out with someone at a party in front of their beloved in hopes of sparking their jealousy. They’re not interested in the person they’re kissing, only in the reaction it might inspire. You’re losing me. Don’t you care that you’re losing me?

 

In fairness to the president, his would-be boyfriend has treated him quite badly since January.

 

Trump came into office promising to end the war. Per his “you don’t have the cards” dressing-down of Zelensky, he seemed eager to broker a deal that favored Russia. All he asked of Moscow up front was a 30-day ceasefire as a show of good faith. Not only did Putin refuse, he made the president look like a schmuck by increasing the volume of air attacks on Ukraine after Trump took office.

 

Sure, the Russian continued to drop occasional hints about commitment, like when he agreed to a date in Alaska. But date night ended early—and two weeks later, to underline his contempt for the White House’s peace efforts, he bombarded Kyiv. The president had already begun to develop a sneaking suspicion that Putin wasn’t really interested in him and this seemed to confirm it. The situationship had hit the skids, a romance gone bad.

 

So now here he is, making out with Ukraine at the party by threatening to help Kyiv destroy the Kremlin’s energy infrastructure. He probably doesn’t mean it, as it’s hard to believe that a nationalist postliberal committed to “ending endless wars” is about to start guiding Ukrainian bombs into Mother Russia. Doing so would contradict the new “America First” National Defense Strategy that Pete Hegseth is preparing, which reportedly calls for “centering the Pentagon on perceived threats to the homeland, narrowing U.S. competition with China, and downplaying America’s role in Europe and Africa.”

 

It’s a bluff designed to spook Putin and bring him back to the bargaining table, nothing more. (You don’t get real security commitments from Donald Trump unless you’ve given him a plane. Sorry, Zelensky.) Maybe it’ll work and Russia will hastily agree to resume peace talks. But if it doesn’t, we’ll likely end up with the same sort of empty threats from the White House that we’ve seen with sanctions, with the U.S. remaining forever two weeks away from supplying the Ukrainians with the intelligence they need to strike Russian targets.

 

The hallmark of a situationship is that it never truly ends. The door is always open to a reconciliation, even—or especially—when the committed partner gets desperate enough to suck face with others.

 

Everyone loves a winner.

 

Another theory is that Trump wasn’t just talking smack last week when he declared that Ukraine can win the war. He may be privy to intelligence that the Russian war machine is running out of gas.

 

Literally.

 

Don’t look now, but the world’s third-biggest producer of oil is experiencing gasoline shortages. Wholesale prices of fuel have risen more than 50 percent in Russia since January, forcing some regions to begin rationing. According to one analysis, more than a third of the country’s oil-refining capacity is currently offline. And higher gas prices have naturally contributed to high inflation, which as of August stands north of 8 percent and has led the Russian central bank to raise benchmark interest rates to, gulp, 17 percent.

 

Where’d all the gas go? A lot of it went up in smoke—thanks to Ukraine. Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian facilities are the main cause of the country’s declining refining capacity, it turns out, responsible for disabling 70 percent of the facilities that are presently out of commission. The war has come home to Russia, which has three great strategic virtues for Kyiv.

 

First, it’s demoralizing for the aggressor. Whether the Russian people might ever be willing and able to confront Putin is unclear, but a major fuel crisis is the sort of thing that could plausibly test their patience. Second, it’s paralyzing for the military. An army that can’t move can’t win, and Zelensky’s drone force is bent on depriving Russia of the thing its troops need to move. When you’re outgunned, wrecking the enemy’s logistics is the smart way to fight.

 

And third, expensive gas is another blow to a regime that’s already struggling to pay for the war. A poor economic forecast this week led the Russian government to announce new tax hikes, raising the value-added tax from 20 percent to 22 while drastically lowering the revenue threshold for businesses at which it will kick in. Despite that, the military’s budget is set to shrink slightly next year. Vladimir Putin just doesn’t have the cards, it appears.

 

Perhaps the president has come to realize that. And if there’s one thing he can’t abide, it’s allying himself with losers.

 

Donald Trump isn’t a stickler about attending his daily intelligence briefings, but he does seem to understand Russia’s predicament. In last week’s “good luck to all” statement, he wondered what might happen once the Russian people “find out what is really going on with this War, the fact that it’s almost impossible for them to get Gasoline through the long lines that are being formed, and all of the other things that are taking place in their War Economy. … Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act.”

 

It would be out of character for him to behave rationally, but the case for putting the screws to Russia by beefing up Ukraine’s ability to target far-flung energy sites is now so compelling that even he may conceivably have been persuaded by it. You want to bring Putin to the table and end the war as soon as possible? Then give Zelensky what he needs to further starve the Russian military of fuel. To borrow the now-infamous words of his FCC chairman, Trump can end this conflict the easy way or the hard way. He tried doing it the easy way, by appealing to Putin personally. Now it’s time for the hard way.

 

Peace through strength, one might call it.

 

Frankly, NATO could use a display of strength from the United States right now. Last month, for the first time in the history of the alliance, NATO warplanes engaged Russian aerial weapons over a member’s territory. That happened in Poland; nine days later, three Russian fighter jets entered Estonian airspace and lingered until NATO fighters chased them off. Then, last Friday, mysterious drones were spotted over Germany and Denmark. It all has the feel of a test to see how the U.S. will respond to repeated provocations against an organization that our “America First” White House has never pretended to have much affection for.

 

Helping Ukraine hit targets in the Russian interior might be that response. I default to assuming personal motives in trying to divine Trump’s thinking—presumably he resents Putin’s attempts to make him look “weak”—but his awareness of Russia’s logistical problems might be influencing his decisions too. He won’t risk antagonizing a formidable enemy, but “a paper tiger,” as he described the Russian military in last week’s statement? Sure, he’ll get a little froggy with them.

 

The green light.

 

If either of the first two theories are correct, then Kevin and I are wrong about Trump giving up on the war. Under the first theory, he’s trying to bluff the Russians back to the table. Under the second, he’s planning to help Ukraine bomb the Russians into suing for peace.

 

But if the third theory is correct then we’re right. Under this one, the president really is washing his hands of the war—albeit doing it in a way that’s meant to put pressure on Russia.

 

Zelensky has wisely framed his request to the White House for Tomahawk missiles as a deterrent measure. “We need it, but it doesn't mean that we will use it,” he told Axios. “Because if we will have it, I think it's additional pressure on Putin to sit and speak.” That’s the way to reason with a guy who goes to bed each night dreaming of a Nobel Peace Prize.

 

It raises a knotty logistical question, though: If the U.S. gives Tomahawks to Ukraine, how will the Ukrainians fire them?

 

"The main launch platforms are combat ships or strategic bombers. We don’t have any strategic bomber aircraft," one Ukrainian government official reminded the Kyiv Independent. They don’t have much of a navy either. That means the missiles would need to be fired from land, which would require Typhon launcher systems. But Typhons are no ordinary piece of materiel.

 

“The United States only has two working Typhon batteries, with a third in progress,” military analyst Jennifer Kavanagh explained earlier this week. “Two of these systems are intended for use in Asia and one is earmarked for possible deployment to Germany.” The launchers are also huge and hard to maneuver, making them a ripe target for Russian attacks. And assuming that problem can be solved, Tomahawks themselves are in relatively short supply and needed for a potential Pacific conflict with China. Only a few allies have been allowed to purchase them. Even Israel has been told no.

 

We’ve all learned from hard experience that anything is possible in the Trump era. But our authoritarian leader arming a fledgling liberal nation with a prized weapon to counter Russian expansionism would be a genuine “huh” moment.

 

Almost certainly, then, the president isn’t going to give Zelensky any Tomahawks. Yet the fact that he’s willing to entertain the request publicly is worth something in itself.

 

That’s because other Ukrainian allies are willing to provide the muscle for strikes inside Russia. “Very shortly, very soon,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in July about supplying long-range weapons to Ukraine. The U.K. and France, meanwhile, gave Kyiv permission to target Russian sites nearly a year ago. Until this week, that seemed like the sort of thing that might potentially fracture NATO: Given Trump’s worries about World War III and his interest in midwifing a peace deal, one could imagine him warning Zelensky and the Europeans that the U.S. won’t tolerate a bombing campaign in the Russian interior that risks escalating the war.

 

Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal scoop might be the White House’s way of putting Moscow and Europe on notice that, on second thought, the president will tolerate that. He’s not giving Ukraine Tomahawks, and he may or may not follow through in providing intelligence on targets, but if the Ukrainians and their European allies want to bomb Russian refineries all over the map? Go nuts.

 

Trump may be done with the war, that is—and he’s also done with restraining NATO’s side of it. Ukraine and its allies have the green light to hit Russia. That’s what Putin gets for not taking peace seriously when the president gave him the chance.

 

The sticky wicket here is what happens if Putin responds to Ukraine’s long-range attacks by striking the NATO allies who supplied the missiles. Yes, that would be irrational, as an army that’s hurting for fuel and floundering against Zelensky’s forces is in no position to drag Poland and the Baltics into the fight. But staging air incursions into Poland, Estonia, Germany, and Denmark at this stage of the war isn’t very rational either.

 

A Russian nationalist who’s spent his adult life obsessed with avenging defeat in the Cold War and who’s already bet his legacy on the Russian military's ability to overcome any hardship might act unpredictably as the odds against him rise. Putin hasn’t managed to split Trump from NATO by flirting with him or by pulverizing Ukraine on the battlefield. He might reason that his last, best chance is to test the president’s commitment to Article 5 directly.

 

Probably not, though. Again, situationships are never really over: All it takes is a little flirting and hints of commitment to make things right. My guess is that Putin will figure out a way to make Trump fall in love again before any Tomahawks start falling on the Kremlin.