Some Answers for Nicholas Kristof

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Friday, October 30, 2020

 

The New York Times columnist uses a series of “questions” — not all of them phrased in a way that would be acceptable on Jeopardy — to urge religious conservatives to adopt a more “nuanced” position on abortion.

 

Q: “Why do so many [Christians] see fervent opposition to any abortion as a religious dictate when the Bible never directly discusses abortion?” A: The same reason that many Christians believed (and believe) that Biblical faith demanded that they oppose chattel slavery. The Bible never directly condemns it, but tells us a lot that, upon reflection, clarifies where we should stand. In the case of abortion, that reflection — about, for example, the meaning of Exodus 20:13 among many other Biblical passages — should incorporate what we know about biology. Not all Christians see the Bible’s implications for abortion as pro-lifers do, of course, but that should not dissuade those of us who see them — just as William Wilberforce did not let himself be dissuaded by those Christians who thought slavery had a Biblical sanction.

 

Q: Why should human embryos receive legal protection when “half of zygotes never implant and establish a pregnancy”? After all, “we don’t mourn those zygotes or establish national commissions to improve zygote survival.” A: How much we mourn a death can vary for all kinds of legitimate reasons that have nothing to do with whether it is just to take action designed to cause death. People unknown to us die every day, and we never mourn them because we never hear about them. It doesn’t mean it would have been permissible for us to kill them. People in their 90s have a high natural death rate, too, and it shouldn’t be acceptable to kill them either. No one’s rights should depend on how other people react to their misfortunes and mistreatment.

 

Q: “If you’re troubled by abortions, shouldn’t you thank President Barack Obama for reducing them?” A: If the evidence bears out Kristof’s contention that increased contraceptive coverage thanks to Obamacare resulted in fewer abortions, pro-lifers should certainly acknowledge that positive side-effect of his policies. Kristof provides no evidence for this contention, however, and a graph of the history of the U.S. abortion rate does not show any inflection around the time of the law’s implementation that’s visible to the naked eye. If the contention is true, however, it would not imply that pro-lifers should rest easy about the advocacy of taxpayer-funded abortion by Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. Perhaps Kristof should devote a column to urging them to embrace a more nuanced policy, especially since their views have a greater near-term likelihood of being imposed than some of the anti-abortion views he writes about.

Why Progressives Are Freaked Out about Conservatives Controlling Just One Elite Institution

By Dan McLaughlin

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

 

The freakout by Democratic politicians and progressive and liberal pundits over the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett has really been something to behold. As Isaac Schorr noted, the New York Times ran seven simultaneous columns pushing Court-packing. David Harsanyi rounded up some of the alarmist Democratic reactions, such as Chuck Schumer calling Justice Barrett’s confirmation “one of the darkest . . . days in the long history of this Senate” and Ed Markey’s unhinged, up-is-down screed about how “Originalism is just a fancy word for discrimination.” Michael Brendan Dougherty noted the bizarre habit of saying that Justice Barrett is taking “Ginsburg’s seat,” as if Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not herself replace one of the two dissenters in Roe v. Wade. The tantrums on Twitter were even more technicolor. As usual, the online progressives were the most unhinged.

 

There are a variety of reasons for this sort of reaction, even coming as it does at a time when Democrats are full of optimism for the upcoming election. Some, of course, relates to the particulars of how we got to a Trump presidency and a Republican Senate that would confirm Trump nominees, and to the timing of the various appointments. Some is simply a recognition that the cultural left has long relied on the courts to enact policies that could not attract an electoral majority, and will now have to abandon that project for some period of years. Some is the famous inability of progressives to ever concede the legitimacy of anything that does not go their way.

 

But there is also one particular aspect of conservative success in filling the federal courts that contributes to the tone of hysteria that creeps into these reactions. The federal appellate courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, are elite institutions — indeed, the most elite institutions in all of American government and the legal profession. They are populated by highly educated professionals. They work with ideas. They are one of the few institutions of government that actually consumes the work of academics and sometimes translates it into policy. Their output is expected to be scholarly in character and taught in law schools. To see such institutions in the hands of conservatives, particularly social and religious conservatives, is intolerable to people whose worldview depends so heavily on sneering at the inferior intellect of anyone who holds to socially conservative views. That sneering is especially apparent any time a conservative is described as intelligent; the gag reflex you see in response is visceral.

 

Elite or wannabe-elite institutions in our culture these days tend to be dominated by social liberals and progressives, who in turn seek to drive out all dissenters. To be a conservative on a university faculty is to be, at a minimum, badly outnumbered. Often there are more-or-less open efforts to stamp out any remaining vestiges of disagreement. We see the same thing with big newspapers, magazines, and other journalistic institutions; with the arts and entertainment; increasingly in large corporations as well. The tribunes of the legal profession itself — the bar associations, the journals covering the legal industry, the people who hand out awards — are dominated by the same groups, and rarely even engage with the possibility that their values might not be the only good ones. But no amount of desire for social ostracism can change the fact that the Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts sit atop the legal food chain, where the bar’s disapproval must remain comparatively muted, if through clenched teeth. To a certain sort of progressive, this itself serves as a kind of standing rebuke, a nagging reminder that gets in the way of simply scorning the idea that conservatives could be capable of doing such a job.

 

Worse yet, the Supreme Court in particular is not just an elite institution, it is an elite credential. A law student may have no higher aspiration than to clerk for the Court. Big law firms compete to hire clerks, and law schools traditionally do as well. Supreme Court clerks are, with little irony, spoken of as a sort of elect priesthood. The inability to close off conservatives from the opportunity to join that elect by controlling hiring means that another generation of conservatives will survive to continue the tradition. It also means that law firms cannot simply boycott the clerks of conservative or Republican Justices, not when they are two-thirds of the Court. For the sorts of progressives who refuse to ever socialize with any Republican, this also means having to compete for jobs with only a third of the Justices.

 

Much of the angst in today’s politics — in any politics, but particularly in the current cultural moment — is about social status and who gets to control it. Losing a monopoly on that control in the courts will be a pebble in the shoe of many progressives for years to come.

Europe’s Vanishing COVID ‘Success’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, October 29, 2020

 

In the Czech Republic, the government is building emergency field hospitals out of fear that the health-care system will be overwhelmed by coronavirus patients. With new reported cases exceeding 15,000 a day at the end of October, the Czechs were suffering the highest per capita infection rate in the world except for tiny Andorra. France reached the landmark of more than 1 million new cases after President Emmanuel Macron declared a new national emergency and imposed a nationwide curfew; Spain saw more than 1 million new cases, too, and imposed similar measures. Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom have been at record infection rates. The president of Poland has tested positive. Ireland has reinstated a partial national lockdown. By late October, the overall infection rate in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom had been increasing for three months, rising to 249.8 per 100,000.

 

Things looked different over the summer. While the United States thrashed about, making culture-war issues out of masks and emergency measures, the Euro­peans and the British seemed — for a while — to have had a relatively steady hand on the tiller. The epidemic was a blow to sentimental notions of a truly united Europe — open borders were one of the first casualties, and the initial response to the epidemic was led by national governments acting not only independently of EU institutions but often counter to their advice. But those national responses were in many cases credible and seemingly effective: Germany, with its highly regarded public-health system — and its Germanness — seemed to lead the way, with a testing-and-distancing regime under which it fared better on both the economic and the medical front than did many of its neighbors and other advanced countries.

 

While Europe seemed to have things figured out, the United States was struggling. As European countries began reopening their borders to tourists and other travelers, visitors from China, Cuba, and Uganda were welcomed, but Americans were judged to be too high-risk. While the EU countries were seeing a daily average of 14 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 population, the United States was at more than 100 new daily cases per 100,000. The decision seemed to be a prudent one.

 

But Europe may not have been conservative enough. There was tremendous economic pressure to reopen to tourism and to allow venues such as restaurants and museums to reopen, and it was believed that masking, distancing, and other commonsense measures would be sufficient to keep the rate of new infections under control. More intensive efforts were reserved for infection hotspots. But that approach has proved insufficient, and the virus returned across Europe with striking suddenness. In Belgium, local governments are worried about being able to put enough police officers on the streets, and medical workers who have tested positive for the virus but are asymptomatic have been asked to return to work for fear that sidelined doctors and nurses will leave facilities unable to meet the demand for treatment.

 

While they have their differences, from one point of view the European and U.S. approaches have more in common with one another than they do with the (apparently) more successful (at this moment) programs implemented in much of East Asia. The difference, to put it in stark terms: Big Brother. Or, to put it in less dramatic terms, a less capacious view of individual autonomy and a readier acceptance of the subjugation of the individual interest to the social interest. It is easy for Western­ers to slip into stereotypes about orderly Confucian collectivists happily submitting to the Son of Heaven, but consider some of the measures that have been implemented in Asia: The majority of Asian-Pacific countries remain effectively closed to foreign tourists, even though this has imposed heavy costs on politically sensitive businesses; visitors to many Asian-Pacific destinations (Hong Kong, South Korea, New Zealand) are subjected to mandatory two-week quarantines — and, unlike in the West, these quarantines are enforced. In the United Kingdom, one study found that three-fourths of those told to quarantine because of COVID-19 exposure left isolation after a few days. Singapore arrests quarantine violators and those who fail to comply with social-distancing rules.

 

The return to a semblance of “normal life” in Seoul, for example, means a return to a life that would be far from normal for Americans, including heavy surveillance: Public-health authorities have access to every­thing from cell-phone data to security-camera footage to aid in their contact-tracing programs; those entering bars and movie theaters are made to scan QR codes so that any transmission happening through such venues can be traced. In late summer, South Korea experienced a small spike in new cases and imposed a snap shutdown, keeping new daily cases below 500.

 

In May, Chinese authorities tested the entire population of Wuhan — 11 million. After a small outbreak (a dozen cases clustered around a testing facility) in Qingdao, authorities announced that they would test the entire population of 9 million in just five days.

 

Compare these measures to what happened in the United States in the early days of the epidemic. The Trump admini­stration made the right decision in suspending flights from China, and Joe Biden et al. were wrong (and viciously dishonest) to denounce this as an excessive display of xenophobia. It wasn’t — it was, in a sense, an insufficient display of xenophobia: It shouldn’t have been limited to China, for one thing, and it probably wasn’t invasive enough in that those returning from abroad were not quarantined. President Trump was focused on China as a punitive measure and a political concern, but the interests of public health would have been better served by a more encompassing response.

 

None of which would sit very well with the American temperament.

 

China is a totalitarian gulag state. Singa­­pore is a parliamentary democracy with some pretty heavy-handed habits and traditions. South Korea is a presidential democracy with some pretty heavy-handed habits and traditions. But New Zealand is a liberal democracy with a thriving free-market economy, the reasonably satisfied electorate of which has re­elected the left-wing government of Jacinda Ardern largely on the strength of her leadership of the country’s (seemingly) effective (at the moment) anti-epidemic measures. New Zealand has a distinct political culture and distinct traditions, of course, but these are not nearly as alien to the American mode of life as is the brutal modus vivendi under Beijing. If there is something to be learned from the experiences of other countries — something that might be useful in the American context — then New Zealand is one place where we might focus our investigations.

 

But it may be that there is nothing to learn. It may be that we do not have much of an intellectual handle on the long-term course of this epidemic, that the second waves hitting Europe and the United States are simply the result of factors mainly exogenous to public-health policy, and that what’s happening in Belgium and Illinois today is going to be happening in Singapore and Auckland tomorrow. We are being tested, and the test is far from over. 

Teachers Unions and the Myth of ‘Public’ Schools

By Cameron Hilditch

Thursday, October 29, 2020

 

American taxpayers have been hoodwinked by the whole idea of “public schools.” No other institutions get away with such bad behavior on the part of some employees who staff them. We’ve been putting more and more money into the system for decades without reaping more returns for the nation’s children. Just this week, the national 2019 results for 12th grade student achievement were released, showing an average score of 37 percent reading proficiency and 24 percent math proficiency. These numbers are appalling but unlikely to improve as long as public teachers unions continue to behave like the nation’s most lucrative and powerful racketeering ring.

 

They get away with it in part because of the terms we’ve all been trained to use when speaking about them. Political language is often used to preempt political debates in this way. A case study would be the way the words “private” and “public” are used in political discussions. We speak of a private and a public sector; private and public land; and, of course, private and public schools. These terms stop us from thinking clearly.

 

The word “private” smacks of a desire to shield something from other people. It describes things that concern self rather than society and it’s almost always used in a defensive way. When we lift a book off a friend’s shelf and hear them shout, “That’s private!” we know we’ve been told to retreat from an unwanted advance into guarded territory. It’s a word used by individuals to make claims on their own behalf against the claims of others. For this reason, it’s at a distinct disadvantage in a democratic society.

 

The word “public” fares much better in majoritarian politics. It describes things that concern everyone rather than things that pertain to specific individuals. At a time when loneliness and social isolation are rampant, it conjures up associations with community, solidarity, and collective effort.

 

Neither of these terms are fit for the purposes they serve in political discourse, but the common use of “public” is the more pernicious one. By defining a given interest or industry as “public,” we give the impression that it benefits everyone in society instead of just a few individuals. This creates a blind spot in our discourse. It prevents us from recognizing the fact that the people who staff “public” institutions or those who sell their political prescriptions as salves to be applied in “the public interest” are just as nakedly self-interested as everybody else.

 

The saddest and most salient example of “public” institutions that are nothing of the sort in the United States is our “public” education system. These schools are advertised to taxpayers as institutions that serve every child in the nation. In reality, they serve the interests of no one other than the small group of Americans who work in these schools as teachers and administrators. This should not surprise us. We expect workers in the “private” sector to pursue their own financial gain. When “private” sector unions go on strike, they do so not for any altruistic reason but in pursuit of higher wages and better working conditions, and they do so unapologetically. But “public” sector unions operate within a different rhetorical framework that puts them at a distinct PR advantage when compared with their “private” sector counterparts. Since the teachers unions can shield their own avarice with claims of “public service” to children, they can manipulate the actual public into thinking that more money, job security, or political power for themselves is in everyone’s interest instead of their own. They can claim that the hopes and dreams of America’s children are somehow mystically present in their paychecks and their extended holidays as if the funds in each of their bank accounts amount to some sort of progressive eucharist of which the entire nation partakes. But a look at graduation rates, test scores, and graduate employability calls this into question.

 

We’ve seen a ramping-up of their special pleading during the pandemic as union leaders have identified the crisis as an opportune moment to blackmail students and parents for more concessions. The mafia-style protection racket proceeds apace even as I write this. Just this week, the Fairfax Education Association, a union that represents teachers in northern Virginia, announced its refusal to return to in-person schooling until August 2021 at the earliest. This is in spite of the fact that K-12 schools across the nation that have reopened have managed to avoid coronavirus surges so far.

 

In typical fashion, the teachers unions are arguing that their actions are meant to protect the health of both teachers and students. All this proves is that they either don’t know or don’t care about the extremely concerning negative effects that long-term distance learning is having on the neurology of children. My colleague Madeleine Kearns recently conducted an interview with the child psychiatrist Allan M. Josephson for National Review in which Dr Josephson details the disruption to childhood brain development that the policy of the teachers unions could bring about. Face-to-face interaction with other kids is critical if children are to develop the interpersonal problem-solving skills that will be required of them as adults. Clearly, no child psychiatrist was consulted when the Fairfax Education Association was putting together its list of demands or, if one was, he or she was summarily ignored.

 

Becky Pringle, the newly elected leader of the National Education Association (the country’s largest union) recently spoke out about what the policy of her 3-million strong organization would be if Donald Trump is reelected and Betsy DeVos kept on as secretary of Education. She said that “we will lift up all of the things that they are doing to destroy public education, to dismantle it, to hurt our educators’ rights to organize and have a voice to advocate at work for our students and for their community.” Notice the sentence structure. It isn’t “our students and … their community” whose “rights” are being “hurt.” It’s “our educators,” who stand in as middlemen between taxpaying parents and their children in order “to advocate at work for our students and for their community.” They claim the mantle of “public educators” when they should be called “taxpayer-funded educators.”

 

Political language is never more powerful than when it circumvents arguments by generating assumptions instead. The assumption that government-run schools operate in the “public interest” has prevented us from noticing the many ways in which teachers unions operate in their own self-interest. When all is said and done, the pandemic ought to have robbed the idea of “public education” of all its rhetorical currency. But as long as they have the language of the “public”-“private” divide to draw upon, they’ll probably succeed in convincing themselves and a good deal of voters that they are the selfless ones.

‘Anonymous’ Falls Flat

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, October 29, 2020

 

“Anonymous,” the unnamed Trump administration official who claimed in an infamous New York Times op-ed that he was secretly trying to “thwart” Trump’s policies, turned out to be . . . Miles Taylor, a former policy adviser and deputy chief of staff to Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielson, and eventually chief of staff in the department, although not until after the op-ed was published.

 

This revelation shouldn’t be a huge deal, and yet it feels like it just broke something important. It feels like the editors of the New York Times chose to play a massive prank on us. They watched the fervent Washington speculation that it was Mike Pence, James Mattis, Jared Kushner, Victoria Coates, and all along they knew it was . . . just some guy. We’ve seen other people conspire to try to pull off hoaxes and stir up frenzies and use the media to do it . . . but this time, one of the biggest voices in the media decided to facilitate the erroneous perception.

 

I speculated it was Jon Huntsman, ambassador to Russia, many times. I was wrong — wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Sorry, Governor/Ambassador. You seemed like the most incongruous figure in the Trump administration, but from all available evidence, you served professionally and with dignity. I should not have casually suggested you would behave like this weasel.

 

The New York Times op-ed editors’ decision to keep Taylor anonymous, and describing him, not all that accurately, as “a senior official in the Trump administration,” deliberately created a misleading impression that the author was a much more prominent, much more influential figure than he was. (“Senior”? By my count, he was 30 when the op-ed was published; he was in college when Obama was inaugurated.)

 

The op-ed appears to have wildly exaggerated what Taylor saw, heard, and did. Did cabinet officials really sit around, discussing invoking the 25th Amendment with Miles Taylor? How much would Taylor be involved in policy regarding Russia?

 

If the Times wanted to write a news article reporting that a policy adviser to the DHS secretary or a deputy chief of staff had a scathingly low opinion of the president . . . the story would run on, what, page A8? A16? (Those with long memories are probably remembering David Stockman, who was at least OMB director.) By no stretch of the imagination is it a shock when someone at that rank thinks the big boss is an incompetent buffoon.

 

And if you think your boss is not merely a buffoon but is hurting the country with his policies, the right thing to do is quit and find another job. You don’t stay and try to secretly throw sand in the gears. You’re not a spy or saboteur, working behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany. (For starters, no saboteur working against the Nazis wrote an op-ed in Le Figaro entitled, “I am a part of the Resistance inside Hitler’s War Machine.” If you are part of a secret plan, a key element of the plan is keeping it secret.)

 

Taylor chose to apply for that job and to take that job. No one dragged him, kicking and screaming, to advise on homeland-security policy. Taylor wanted to be a hero of The Resistance while still cashing an administration paycheck.

 

Perhaps the most perfectly ironic statement in this whole mess came from Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, who declared back in August, “People should stop paying attention to ‘Anonymous’ and focus on the Trump officials who are willing to put themselves out there publicly like Miles Taylor.” This is like saying we should be paying less attention to Batman and more attention to Bruce Wayne.

 

In his op-ed, Taylor said he was “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” It seems fair to ask . . . was he really? Because it sounds like one of the big issues on Taylor’s plate was the child-separation policy at the border, an approach that even some staunch conservatives find morally unacceptable.

 

In his public identity, Taylor said he helped enact a policy he thought was immoral, and wished he hadn’t. “People like me should have done more; looking back, I wish I had laid my body on the train tracks and said, ‘we can’t implement this.’”

 

Taylor signed on to help the Trump administration, told the New York Times he was secretly trying to stop the Trump administration, and then helped enact one of its most controversial policies. Wait, whose side was he really on, again?

Ezra Klein’s Grievance-Tinted Glasses

By John Loftus

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

 

‘Democrats see a political system increasingly rigged against them and the voters they represent,” Ezra Klein opines in his latest Vox piece, “and they are right.”

 

Klein goes on to make several erroneous claims as he outlines (what he thinks) are the stakes in the 2020 presidential election and airs his complaints about election outcomes and proper constitutional procedure.

 

First, in decrying the structure of the Electoral College and Senate, Klein conveniently ignores the fact that the United States is not a direct democracy, nor was it intended to be one. That Klein ignores this while making a sweeping assertion about the U.S. “political system” weakens his already-shoddy case. Why exactly is the Electoral College illegitimate or anti-democratic? Is it that the Electoral College is unconstitutional, or that the Democrats sometimes win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College, and therefore lose elections? Is it unconstitutional for states to decide their own voter-ID laws? And if some citizens do not register to vote under revised state laws, does that mean they are being suppressed by the fascist bogeyman? Or is the onus on the citizen?

 

The second erroneous claim is that Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) spoke for the entire Republican Party when he tweeted, “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” Klein writes, rather dramatically, “Rank democracy. There is no subtext in this election, only text; no dog whistles, only foghorns. Lee, a former Supreme Court clerk and one of the GOP’s brighter intellectual lights, is stating his party’s position simply: Democracy is the enemy, the specter stalking Republican power.” This simply isn’t true. Just as one would not assume that Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass.) speaks for the entire Democratic Party when he tweets, rather stupidly, “Originalism is just a fancy word for discrimination,” Ezra Klein should not assume that all Republicans believe democracy is the enemy — whatever that means. (Further, David Harsanyi writes compellingly here about how Lee’s tweet was taken out of context.)

 

Klein’s partisanship is again on full display when he discusses the pitfalls of mail-in ballots and voter fraud. “What if Trump wins,” he posits, “but only because shocking numbers of mail-in ballots sent by Democratic voters were thrown out?” Klein concedes that, indeed, voter fraud is not only possible but ought to be a legitimate concern for Democrats. But if a Republican raises this concern . . . well, then, it becomes  a conspiracy theory that undermines democratic norms. Such is the nature of Klein’s position. Everything that can be framed as harming Democrats is an issue. If it does not harm, or if it benefits, Democrats, it is in fact not an issue or an impediment to achieving direct democracy in America.

 

Had Hillary Clinton won the presidential election in 2016, it’s doubtful Klein would think the “political system” is rigged. Only when the results of elections do not align with his preferences does the “political system” become rigged, and suddenly, democracy is at stake. It seems that when Republicans play by constitutional procedure and achieve their desired outcomes — e.g., the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett — Ezra Klein thinks that the procedure ought to be radically reformed, consequences be damned.

Trump Reruns Just Aren’t as Exciting

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

 

There were always going to be challenges for Donald Trump’s reelection. The first is that he wouldn’t be running against Hillary Clinton, who managed to be extremely unpopular but threatening enough to unify many Republicans underneath Trump’s banner. The second is that his 2016 campaign overpromised in a way that made it impossible for him to deliver. He vowed to get rid of Obamacare, and “take care of everybody;” to increase spending, and get rid of the national debt; to bring the troops home, and end terrorism. He’d build a wall, and “Mexico would pay for it.” His only attempt at playing both sides of the issue this time is his emphasis on “law and order” when talking about rioters, but also attacking Biden’s crime bill and emphasizing his own attempts at criminal-justice reform.

 

Running on a four-year record is obviously different. And what we’ve found is that Trump’s need to work with existing Republicans in Congress and in his administration has made his administration more like that of a replacement-level Republican: tax cuts, conservative judges, and a foreign policy of confrontation with Iran. The populist Trump is almost gone. This is also a serious problem because it deprives him of the chance to run partly against his own party, which surely helped him win those crossover Obama-Trump voters. In 2016, a vote for Trump was not just a vote against Hillary Clinton, but a vote for a different Republican Party.

 

But, one of the most underrated challenges for Trump is that he is an entertainer, and the act is not new anymore. There’s a lack of vitality to the Trump campaign, which isn’t great when his campaign is claiming that Joe Biden has one foot in the grave. He’s lost the propulsive momentum of upending expectations at every turn. We’re more than five years removed from his trip down the escalator. And experienced television guys such as Trump know that you need a refresh, but he hasn’t given us one.

 

What we have instead is a weird rerun. Sleepy Joe in the place of Crooked Hillary. But the same exact plot twist is being tried again. Instead of Anthony Weiner, Hunter Biden is in the role of the indiscreet and avaricious horn dog whose computer is leading to an email scandal in the final weeks of the campaign.

 

Without the pitch-perfect casting of the first season — a Bush and a Clinton as antagonists — Trump has trouble relaying to the audience what his role in the drama is. Has any debate line in 2020 hit as hard as that moment four years ago when he turned on Hillary Clinton’s remark about how it’s good that he’s not in charge of the law and snapped back, “Because you’d be in jail.”

 

Like the comic relief inserted into a struggling sitcom, Trump used to have catchphrases that were anticipated and repeated eagerly by the audience. “And Mexico will pay for it.” And chants, “Lock her up.” What is his line for this year?

 

Trump has trouble getting anything positive out of his “norm-breaking.” And, because he is president, his words carry a different weight. 2016 Trump could question any aspect of the bipartisan consensus and probably get some juice out of it. He was a bold truth-teller, or the fool who is wiser than the wise men. But 2020 Trump is also President Trump. When the president floats the suggestion on Twitter of delaying the election, he comes across to different audiences as alternately scared, out of control, or vaguely menacing.

 

The president’s reelection agenda is about doing the first term over again, restoring the economy that was destroyed by the virus. Even the image of Amy Coney Barrett being sworn in on a balcony by Justice Clarence Thomas had a kind of valedictory note in it. It was the kind of moment that a struggling show ends its season on when the producers aren’t sure about getting renewed.

 

Sometimes you even get the sense that his opponents and antagonists have bought into the conceit of Trump’s drama. They have trouble imagining that an election will happen and the spell will be broken. They are hoping for a dramatic confrontation in the finale. They want Biden to ride in with the U.S. military and all the decent Republicans and crowbar Trump off the Resolute desk. They almost long for a last-minute gritty reboot, when Trump energetically tries to root out the Deep State that undermined him.

 

I think the truth of the matter is more boring, even if less satisfying. Donald Trump the politician has no second act. Even if he’s reelected.