Dear Weekend Jolter,
In due time, this note will turn back to something other than the 2024 election, but it is the gigantic, glowing, magnetically charged orb that's been impossible to ignore. And so, the question of the week: Are we done here? Nikki Haley's defeat in the state that represented her best and probably only chance to shake up the race looks to all but hand the nomination to Donald Trump, barring acts of arteries, juries, or the Supreme Court (a.k.a. the "strange things happen" scenario).
Much of the rest of the Republican Party had answered in the affirmative well before Tuesday's New Hampshire vote. Tim Scott, Doug Burgum, Vivek Ramaswamy, ultimately Ron DeSantis — they and others all closed ranks behind the presumptive-presumptive nominee, and with the alacrity of someone who just learned his search history was in the hands of that person. So pronounced was the consolidation that Haley tried to use the endorsements to flip the script on Trump-camp claims that she represents the establishment, as Audrey Fahlberg reported. (Audrey also provides a tidy rundown of those politicians whom Haley once endorsed or appointed and who snubbed her to stay in Trump's good graces.)
It was all for naught. Haley says she's pressing on to South Carolina (Phil Klein explains here why Nevada doesn't really matter this year), but, as Jeff Blehar concluded on our liveblog earlier this week: "It's Biden versus Trump. Again. Set the controls for the heart of the sun." Yet those uniting behind the former president are endorsing not just him but quite likely an electoral doom-bringing. For Trump is already abandoning the necessary task of rebuilding a coalition; "uncut Trumpism" has no time for that. If I may steal Jeff Blehar's headline, in his haste to end the primary, Trump is losing the general.
New Hampshire bears the warning signs. As Phil noted on the liveblog, CNN's exit polling indicates that nearly four in ten Haley voters — many of them, yes, independents — showed up, essentially, out of Trump spite; a detail that should be treated as a "five alarm fire inside the RNC headquarters," as it speaks to Democrats' turnout strategy.
Trump is winning, now, and there can be no doubt or debate about it. He has executed an astonishing political comeback and act of historic defiance against the relentless artillery fire of criminal indictments, while engineering a mass memory-holing by the Republican establishment of his role in turning a violent mob on its members. How history will chronicle these episodes is a question worth pondering. For purposes of this election cycle, however, we can mark the moment Trump reestablished absolute party dominance as 9:38 on Tuesday night, when Senator Tim Scott interpreted an awkward remark about his opinion of Haley as a prompt to approach Trump — and profess his "love."
Record scratch: Primaries are not real life. The WWE-style spectacle that thrills Trump's base wears on a sizable minority of Republicans and on independent voters. If a general-election campaign is indeed starting early, expect those voters to be courted aggressively, by President Biden and by any third-party campaigns that form to break the binary. As NR's editorial cautions, the mobilization of independents against Trump in New Hampshire signals precisely how he could lose the middle in November. Here's Noah Rothman:
Trump's problems are not limited to the number of independent voters who just can't pull the lever for him (63 percent of independents in this year's New Hampshire primary said they would not vote for Trump in November). The former president also has to worry about Republicans who still identify as Republicans but are nonetheless hostile to Trump.
"Republican voters could have avoided giving Democrats what they wanted," our editorial states, "but instead are putting all their chips on their riskiest electoral bet." Andy McCarthy predicts this is a losing bet, as Trump shows no interest in attracting voters who don't already adore him. Biden faces his own enthusiasm gap, to be sure, but, as Andy writes, he'll "pretend to be a centrist" and take other steps to bring voters home: "He won't be very effective, but a little will be enough because he'll be the only one trying."
What's more, Trump will do his level best to repel voters, as seen in his latest warning that Haley donors "will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp" going forward. This is not a political movement, it's a club. With its own online platforms, cant, and expectations for conduct. Trump, of course, has familiarity with this format. He even has a clubhouse where dues-paying members can hang after Biden wins.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The New Hampshire–primary editorial, once more, is here: Trump's New Hampshire Win Comes with Warning Signs
Ron went wrong. A look at how: Ron DeSantis's Failed Experiment
We didn't have this on our 2024 bingo card: Milei's Free-Enterprise Serenade
ARTICLES
Zach Kessel & Ari Blaff: How the Washington Post Abandoned Basic Journalistic Standards Covering the Israel–Hamas War
Rich Lowry: Joe Biden's Death Wish
Jimmy Quinn: U.N. Agency for Palestinians Discloses Involvement of Employees in October 7 Attack; U.S. Pauses Funding
Noah Rothman: A Weak and Confused Case against Israel at the International Court
Noah Rothman: The Emotional-Blackmail Election
Jim Geraghty: The Big Choice Facing No Labels
Charles C. W. Cooke: The View from Outside the MAGA Bubble
Audrey Fahlberg: Haley Supporters Cling to Hope Despite Trump's New Hampshire Win: 'Strange Things Happen'
Audrey Fahlberg: Trump Rejects Now-Withdrawn Draft Resolution to Have RNC Declare Him 'Presumptive 2024 Nominee'
Christian Schneider: The Bad Guys Win
Andrew McCarthy: The GOP Is Now the Trump Party
Jack Butler: The DeSantis Campaign Was Too Online
Philip Klein: Ron DeSantis Was a Peloton Candidate in a Post-Covid World
Nina Shea: A Weaponized Church Is a Threat to Ukraine
Dan McLaughlin: How Chevron May Fall
Haley Strack: U.S., Chinese Researchers Wanted to Engineer Virus Similar to Covid One Year before Pandemic Outbreak, Internal Docs Show
Zach Kessel: Princeton University Library Adds Trigger Warnings to Archival Documents to 'Protect Researchers'
Ryan Mills: 'They're Being Played': Far-Left City Governments Pass Wave of Anti-Israel Cease-Fire Resolutions in Propaganda Win for Hamas
CAPITAL MATTERS
Stephen Moore finds the irony in a judge's decision to block a JetBlue–Spirit merger: The Unfriendly Skies
Dominic Pino busts a myth: The 'Resurgence' of Organized Labor Is Media Spin
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen spotlights his favorite big art fair of the year, a quality affair as always, and very American: This Year's Winter Show Crackles, Glows, Shines, and Consoles
Madeleine Kearns, on a missed opportunity: The Boys in the Boat Gets Stuck in the Shallows
FROM THE NEW, MARCH 2024 ISSUE OF NR
Audrey Fahlberg: Did Ron DeSantis Blow It?
Sebastian Junger: When Journalism Dies
Riley Gaines: Why Male Athletes Should Not Compete with Females
Sarah Schutte: Slipping the Surly Bonds
THE EXCERPTS WILL KEEP FIGHTING INTO SOUTH CAROLINA
The new issue of NR is out, and you can peruse its many offerings here. You may want to start with this one, by Riley Gaines, who makes a compelling and personal case for keeping the sexes separate in athletics — for women's sake:
The Biden administration is merely playing catch-up with the NCAA, however. The NCAA in 2010 announced that men could participate in women's sports as long as they had undergone a year of testosterone suppression. In 2022, it amended this announcement to permit sport-specific policies, but it in fact reiterated the testosterone-level criterion.
Enter Will, now Lia, Thomas. Will Thomas swam at the University of Pennsylvania, ranking 554th nationally in the 200-yard freestyle and 65th in the 500-yard freestyle. After a year of testosterone suppression, Lia Thomas won the 500-yard-freestyle NCAA championship outright, this time against women. I too competed against Thomas, and, against all odds, we tied. But the NCAA awarded the trophy to Thomas, signaling loud and clear that a pharmaceutically altered man is not only equivalent to a woman but better than one. I asked officials why Thomas should be given the trophy over me. They responded that it was crucial that Thomas hold the trophy when photos were being taken.
On top of federal and NCAA changes come policies from sports-governing bodies. USA Boxing, for example, permits men to literally beat women up, so long as the men have been sufficiently drugged. The International Powerlifting Federation, USA Cycling, and other groups have similar policies.
This is madness, and these policies are unfair. A woman is not a handicapped man.
Without fairness, what are competitive sports? Every athletic division and category is designed to create an even playing field. Eighteen-year-olds can't compete in the twelve-and-under league. Able-bodied Olympians can't compete in the Paralympics. Heavyweight athletes can't fight featherweights. These divisions have nothing to do with ageism, ableism, or fatphobia — instead they protect competition and safety. The same practice should apply to the sexes.
The report "Competition: Title IX, Male-Bodied Athletes, and the Threat to Women's Sports" by Independent Women's Forum details the unfairness that results when sex differences aren't acknowledged. Men are on average 30 percent stronger than women of equal stature, punch 30–162 percent harder, accelerate 20 percent faster, and jump 25 percent higher. Testosterone suppression doesn't solve the problem. As the report explains, not only do sex-based differences such as bone density, bone size, lung volume, heart size, muscle size, strength, endurance, and speed persist despite hormone impairment, sports associations' guidelines do not generally require that males who wish to compete with women have testosterone levels comparable to those of females. For example, the normal, 95 percent reference range for healthy menstruating women under 40 years of age is 0 to 1.7 nanomoles of testosterone per liter, but USA Boxing permits male boxers with up to 5 nanomoles per liter to compete in the female category.
This is a matter of not just fairness but safety. Take Payton McNabb, whose dreams of playing volleyball at the collegiate level were shattered after a head injury that left her unconscious. A male athlete had spiked a ball so powerfully in her face during a girls' high-school volleyball game that it became her last. She still suffers from memory loss, vision impairment, and partial paralysis on her right side almost 18 months after the incident.
Or consider the young field-hockey player in Massachusetts whose teeth were knocked out and whose jaw was permanently damaged after she was hit in the face with a ball slung by a male player. Her teammates couldn't bear to look as she shrieked in pain. The male went on to score the only two goals of that game and was praised for his performance.
Such disasters happen at an alarming rate. Of course, injuries can and do happen in female-only contests, but allowing males to play women's sports increases their likelihood and severity. Moreover, women who play coed sports accept the risks that attend them. Women who play women's sports, however, do not consent to having a volleyball spiked in their face by a man.
From Haley's primary-night party in New Hampshire, Audrey Fahlberg has gathered some revealing quotes from her supporters about what her path forward, if there is one, might actually be:
Haley's strongest supporters here are cheering her on, even though she has now lost to Trump in independent-heavy New Hampshire — where she has staked most of her campaign — and came in a distant third in the January 15 Iowa caucuses. Speaking with National Review inside her election-night party Tuesday evening, many Haley voters said that clearing the 40 percent vote threshold in New Hampshire puts her in a strong position to continue pressing forward.
"She's in great shape," said Pamela Valentine, a registered Republican who splits her time between New Hampshire and Massachusetts. "This is very early."
Before the Granite State primary was called for Trump, Eric Jostrom of Sugar Hill, N.H., said Haley would be wise to continue picking up delegates in the event that Trump's legal troubles complicate his path to the GOP nomination.
"Put it this way: Strange things happen," said an optimistic Jostrom, gin and tonic in hand. "They seem to be getting stranger all the time. Supposing she's out there, and she's in the race, Trump gets sidelined for one reason or another. What happens is she's got the field to herself."
Jack Butler pinpoints one of the key ways the DeSantis campaign lost its way:
One defect of DeSantis's campaign may not get enough attention: its catering to the right-wing Twittersphere. Before the campaign even began, DeSantis was making personnel moves that made sense only if one believed that the highly niche and weird right-wing ecosystem that had developed online was not just important, but perhaps paramount. As early as 2022, DeSantis was cultivating relations with some of that world's most prominent figures. As he geared up for the campaign itself last year, he hired some of them; many of his initial efforts took on a decidedly online flavor.
What did that look like? It started off with a ridiculously mealy-mouthed answer given to a former Fox News host about Ukraine. Reasonable disagreements about U.S. involvement in the conflict are possible, but the DeSantis answer was equivocating, ponderous, and set afire a field of straw men. It was most notable for its contrived sophistication papering over a patent superficiality, as in its description of Russia's war on Ukraine as a "territorial dispute" and its wanton invocation of our Constitution's main drafter to argue that Vladimir Putin's removal would be unlikely to "produce a pro-American, Madisonian constitutionalist in the Kremlin."
The analysis it contained did DeSantis no favors with the Right's hawks, and did not seem to impress doves, either. It was a futile attempt to find some kind of middle ground, on the apparent assumption that such balance-striking was necessary because of how dominant outright antipathy (versus a more historically recognizable apathy) toward the Ukrainian cause appears online. Though DeSantis walked the statement back, it presaged his incoherent approach to the issue during the primary, arguably more consequential for the manner of its incoherence than for its substance.
That happened before DeSantis's campaign even started. The formal beginning was itself a fiasco. Viewing its too-online character not as a bug but as a feature, the campaign launched on X (Twitter), using the Spaces conference-call feature.
Dan McLaughlin breaks down the recent Supreme Court arguments in cases that could result in the so-called Chevron doctrine's overturning. Why this matters, and what might happen:
The central question in Loper Bright and Relentless is whether the Court should discard the rule of Chevron that courts should defer to an agency's interpretation of a federal statute it is charged with enforcing, if the Court thinks the statute is "silent or ambiguous" and the agency's interpretation is a "reasonable" one. That deference applies even if it produces a reading of the meaning of the law that is not how the Court itself would interpret it in the absence of an agency rule. . . .
As our editorial explained, the Court should overturn Chevron. Its rule of deference allows the agencies to take the job of interpreting law out of the hands of the courts. It produces instability and inconsistency by allowing agencies to repeatedly change the meaning of statutes passed by Congress — or worse, when the agency doesn't change course, it lets a single presidential administration lock in the meaning of laws without asking Congress. It encourages the expansion of unilateral executive power. It reduces everyone's incentives to make law through the traditional bargaining process between the House, the Senate, and the White House.
Nothing in the Constitution gives agencies the power to interpret the law in ways binding upon the courts. In fact, the Constitution never mentions administrative agencies at all. The Court should presume that the separation of powers makes the judiciary supreme in its own area where the Constitution says nothing to the contrary.
It's the right moment to worry about an overweening executive. Anyone worried that Donald Trump might act like a dictator if elected to another term should want to tyrant-proof our system by reducing the lawmaking powers of the executive over the lives of American citizens, and fortify our traditional checks and balances. So, of course, should anyone who has watched Joe Biden act as a lawless rogue, dispense public money without congressional appropriations like a king, and threaten to borrow money without the consent of Congress and issue debt backed only by executive fiat. . . .
The challengers have identified two problems with Chevron. One is constitutional; the other is statutory. There is a very real chance that the Court may rule on the statutory argument and bypass the constitutional case. Indeed, there were signs in the oral argument that this may be exactly where the Court is headed.
With that backdrop, read on here for Dan's thinking on why the Supreme Court might rule relatively modestly but still produce a major victory for Chevron opponents.
Shout-Outs
Carl M. Cannon, at RealClearPolitics: Let the Primaries Continue
Peter Suderman, at Reason: Comedy’s Truthiness Problem
Michael Saltsman & Rebekah Paxton, at the Wall Street Journal: Why No One Goes Out to Eat in D.C. Anymore
CODA
I finally found — and subsequently paid too much for — an old vinyl copy of The Basement Tapes, the storied collaboration of Bob Dylan and the Band. (Not to be confused with the New Basement Tapes, a related and much more recent project which this note has previously recommended.) There's a lot to choose from in that collection, but "This Wheel's on Fire" stands out for me, in part for its stylistic echoes of "Ballad of a Thin Man," in part for its own unique force. Pete Hamill once wrote that "of all our poets, Dylan is the one who has most clearly taken the roiled sea and put it in a glass." Who can top that?
Enjoy, and thanks for reading.
Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
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