THIS EDITION OF THE WEEK IS SPONSORED BY |
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NATIONAL REVIEW
JAN 10, 2025 |
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◼ "Imagine there's no Heaven," they sang at Carter's funeral, and that pretty much was how his presidency felt.
◼ Judge Juan Merchan appears anxious to impose sentence on Trump later this morning, and he can now proceed now that a closely divided Supreme Court has denied the defendant's petition to halt the proceedings. In May, a jury found Trump guilty of falsifying business records. That's usually a misdemeanor, rarely prosecuted in New York, but inflated by Alvin Bragg, Manhattan's elected progressive district attorney, into 34 felonies, and portrayed by the judge (an activist Democrat whose daughter is a campaign operative who worked for Kamala Harris) in crime-of-the-century terms, as part of a successful plot to steal the 2016 election. Yet Merchan does not take his own rhetoric seriously: He has promised Trump will not face either jail or probation. The judge just wants the sentencing pronounced and the judgment formalized so that Trump enters the presidency in ten days as a convicted felon. This he will now do, though with several asterisks.
◼ New Year's Day brought a grim reminder that jihadist terror remains a national-security challenge: Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a Texas-born Army veteran, plowed a pickup truck into Bourbon Street revelers, killing 14 and wounding dozens of others. Another grim reminder: Our government persists in its conscious avoidance of jihadism's catalyst. At the first press conference, a top FBI official announced that "this is not a terrorist event." Not only had Jabbar driven a vehicle into a crowd (which has become a global terrorist go-to); he had been flying from the truck's rear hitch the black flag made notorious by al-Qaeda and ISIS. Yet, since the Obama years' reimagining of counterterrorism as "countering violent extremism," security personnel have been instructed to blind themselves to the nexus between an ideology rooted in fundamentalist Islam and brutality carried out by Muslims. Ergo, the FBI will not call terrorism "terrorism" unless and until agents find some tie, however strained, to a formally designated terrorist organization the government regards as peddling a false version of Islam. If we don't deal gimlet-eyed with what fuels the threat, we ensure more attacks.
◼ Just when it seemed anti-Trump lawfare was winding down, Jack Smith reemerged. Lawyers for President-elect Trump learned from press leaks that Smith had prepared a two-volume final report on the January 6 and Mar-a-Lago investigations. Attorney General Merrick Garland has told Congress that the January 6 volume should be made public. In this instance, however, there was no need for a final report at all. Smith filed extensive indictments in both investigations, supplemented by voluminous memoranda and, in the January 6 case, a 2,000-page proffer of what Smith claimed he could prove—its release timed to fuel Democratic messaging in the campaign's final three weeks. These cases were relentlessly trumpeted . . . but the public elected Trump anyway. Rushing out final reports in the last days of Biden's term is a petulant gesture by partisans who haven't grasped that lawfare hurt them more than it hurt their nemesis.
◼ Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has overcome the grumbling of a handful of House Republicans to win a vote to keep his job. An endorsement from Trump helped. Johnson was on track to lose reelection during the first round of voting when Representatives Thomas Massie (R., Ky.), Keith Self (R., Tex.) and Ralph Norman (R., S.C) voted against him during a roll call vote. But Norman and Self switched to backing Johnson before the vote closed, helping the Louisianan win reelection during the first round of voting. Johnson isn't perfect—as 2024 came to a close, he initially allowed a continuing resolution to turn into a Christmas tree—but running a House majority with just 220 members and a usually unified opposition is an extremely difficult job, and it's hard to believe that any other House Republican would do better. But Johnson's close call, and the turmoil over the CR at the end of the year, demonstrates how very little is going to be easy in this Congress.
◼ It felt like old times when Trump, at a pre-inauguration press conference, advertised his intention to incept a Greater American Co-Prosperity Sphere into existence. Trump said the Gulf of Mexico should become the "Gulf of America," speculated that the United States could acquire the Panama Canal and Greenland through force of arms, and even entertained the prospect of Canadian Anschluss. Predictably, Democrats and their allies in the political press beat their chests over the impropriety of it all. (America's allies in Denmark, Canada, and Panama were more justified in their revulsion.) It is, however, unclear what Trump gets from winding up his adversaries, save the psychological satisfaction his supporters derive from seeing them squirm. Threatening military force against treaty-bound allies to expand the American territorial footprint is not credible and therefore not a clever negotiating tactic. And it provides Democrats with an opportunity to criticize the president-elect for being distracted from his campaign trail pledges to reduce inflation and rein in illegal immigration. Maybe it's 5D chess, or maybe Trump's fans are seeking rationality where there is none to be found. |
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◼ Mark Zuckerberg has announced substantial changes to how Facebook and Instagram will be moderated. Among the planned changes are to get "rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X"; to move all content-moderation teams from California to Texas; to accept that certain propositions in the realms of "gender" and "immigration" are debatable; to tune the sites' "content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content"; and to work with the Trump administration to "push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more." Reasonable observers can debate Zuckerburg's motivations, but the changes are all welcome. Better still, they are sufficiently concrete as to make measurement easy. If Zuckerberg does not get rid of the fact-checkers in favor of community notes, move his moderation teams to Texas, or stop banning users for expressing quotidian political opinions, it will be obvious. Zuckerberg is not the first Silicon Valley entrepreneur to alter course in this manner. But he is certainly one of the most consequential. Activists have been determined to control the flow of information through Facebook and Instagram for a reason: It works. That this manipulation will be coming to an end—at least for now—is terrific news indeed.
◼ Over Christmas, Elon Musk and his allies in the tech sector posted on X in support of the H-1B visa program and drew backlash from MAGA accounts. The two sides were largely talking past each other. Musk said he wants to bring in only the top 0.1 percent of engineering talent from the around the world. Although there are MAGA influencers who object even to this idea, it's obviously in our national interest to skim exceptionally gifted people from other countries. On the other hand, H-1B visas are scammy, often aren't used to bring in top talent as advertised, and create uniquely abusive employment relationships that in some ways resemble indentured servitude. An obvious reform would be to select H-1B visa recipients by highest salary offers rather than by, in the current arrangement, lottery. More broadly, the immigration system, which admits more than a million people annually, should be reformed by Congress to put a much greater emphasis on merit rather than family connections. On that point, Musk is not only right but emblematic.
◼ "Higher alcohol consumption increases alcohol-related cancer risk," Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote this week at the outset of a campaign to compel Congress to update the warning labels on alcoholic beverages to include that risk, among many others. The data he cited suggests that drinkers experience elevated risk of some cancers—2 percent in men and 5.5 percent in women—if they're having two or more drinks "every day." Do we really need the federal government to hold us by the hand and inform us that consuming low-dose poisons on a daily basis is bad for us? |
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A MESSAGE FROM DONORSTRUST |
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◼ The images of the Los Angeles area are downright apocalyptic, and as we write zero percent of the three major wildfires ravaging Los Angeles County is contained. This is first and foremost a tragic human story, spurred by a drought and intense Santa Ana winds from the north, factors beyond the control of any government policy. But there will be fair questions about government actions leading up to the wildfires. Most embarrassingly, mayor Karen Bass was in Ghana, roughly 7,400 miles away from her city, when the fires struck, attending the inauguration of John Dramani Mahama. Governor Gavin Newsom had assured the public he had "directed state departments to coordinate and strategically position fire engines, hand crews, aircraft and additional support in key areas," but amid the fires, some residents said fire crews were nowhere to be found and firefighters reported hydrants coming up dry. In October, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning "for the foreseeable future," aiming to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed. The fires need to be put out—and then it will be time for the recriminations to run hot.
◼ New York City's new congestion "pricing" is a tax masquerading as a market mechanism. It will be charged, albeit at a greatly reduced rate, even in the middle of the night, a time not generally known for traffic jams even in Manhattan. In reality, there has always been a congestion charge, one payable in extra time spent by those who chose to drive. But it was not something the city—content to increase congestion by carving out bike lanes wherever it saw fit—could monetize or, for that matter, use as a weapon in its continuing war against cars. Congestion pricing is a wager as well as a tax, a bet that the toll (and the signal it sends) will not do severe damage to the businesses now paywalled within the "Congestion Relief Zone" or, indeed, beyond. As for encouraging new arrivals, we've seen better welcome mats, especially as there is now talk that the proceeds of congestion pricing, meant for the notoriously incompetent MTA, will not be enough to fix its budgetary woes, and that broader tax increases will be needed. Congestion pricing on the exits out of New York could help.
◼ The incoming Trump administration is well served by its skepticism toward the international institutions that are either dominated or heavily influenced by America's enemies. Trump and his U.N. ambassador nominee, Elise Stefanik, would advance U.S. interests not by engaging with the U.N. General Assembly and its various organs but by isolating and marginalizing them instead. What benefits does the United States accrue from its support for U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA? The organization failed to reform itself since it was discovered that several employees took part in the October 7 massacre. Congress must extend its pause on funding for that organization, and the Trump administration should lobby our allies to do the same. Likewise, the U.S. lends its imprimatur to UNESCO (the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) and the Human Rights Council at risk to its moral authority. The outfits are shot through with cranks and antisemites. Even the U.N.'s peacekeeping operations are questionable. Its deployments to southern Lebanon, which were designed to keep Hezbollah out, somehow let Hezbollah in—a condition remedied only by the Israel Defense Forces. Come to think of it, we could always redeploy the money there.
◼ Jimmy Carter won the Democratic presidential nomination, and the 1976 election, in great part because of who he was not: George McGovern, George Wallace, or Richard Nixon. With effort, one can recall good things he did as president. He put missiles in Europe to defy Soviet buildups and bolster the NATO alliance. He brokered peace between Israel and Egypt. He installed Paul Volcker, the man who finally broke inflation, as chairman of the Fed. It needs an effort to recall these because so much else went wrong. The Soviet Union and its clients had been on a roll worldwide throughout the Seventies, from Africa to Indochina; during his administration, Afghanistan would fall, too. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat paid for the peace with his life. Inflation, pre-Volcker, raged simultaneously with recession, something liberal economists said could not happen. The shah of Iran fell to a despotic anti-American zealot, and the helicopters sent to rescue our kidnapped diplomats crashed in the Iranian desert. Carter was nagging, almost canting—his Southern Baptist faith could sour him as much as it sustained him—yet at the same time he seemed feeble. A submarine commander, an agribusinessman, and an ex-governor, he could not lead. Carter's post-presidency, widely praised, was overpraised. He helped eradicate scourges such as the Guinea worm. But he also fancied himself an emeritus freelance diplomat. Yet he was honest, he was earnest. He was married to Rosalynn Carter, née Smith, a fellow product of Plains, Ga., from 1946 until her death in 2023. He followed what he believed to be the right path. Dead at 100, the longest-lived man to have held the presidency. R.I.P.
◼ David Boris Rivkin Jr. was a legal dynamo. An immigrant from the Soviet Union in his late teens, he claimed his education in his adopted country by sheer force of will at Georgetown University and Columbia Law School. As a survivor of Soviet oppression, Rivkin embraced the American promise of liberty through his fierce and frequent defense of constitutional government and the rule of law. He did so as a lawyer in the Reagan White House, at the U.S. Justice Department, and in the office of Vice President Dan Quayle. He did so in private practice, arguing against Obamacare's individual mandate. And he did so as a unique and powerful legal commentator in National Review and in the Wall Street Journal. He defended the Constitution as it is written, not as he wished it would be. He was especially powerful in defending the Constitution's structure, including the separation of powers. That led to frequent critiques of presidential overreach, including President Obama's circumvention of Congress when pursuing DACA and DAPA and, more recently, President Biden's vaccine mandates. Brilliant, witty, acerbic, he made us wiser. R.I.P. |
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