King Charles III at the US Congress ✎

Watching the King deliver a wonderful address with grace and humour, referencing shared cultural icons of Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens, it shows the respect and dignity a head of state should command.

My favourite part is when he said: “America’s words carry weight and meaning, as they have since independence. The actions of this great nation matter even more.”

I think the respect and dignity of the US government has been on the decline ever since Donald Trump. His rudeness and disrespectful attitude to his so-called allies (esp. Canada), and his vindictive egomania, has really tarnished the gravitas of the US.

Anyway, well done King Charles. 

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My favourite system of government is a Parliament with a constitutional monarchy. The best argument in favour of this approach was articulated by Sir Walter Bagehot. Bagehot famously divided the British government into two distinct branches: the dignified and the efficient. The Crown is the “dignified” part of our constitution. Its purpose is not to “govern”, but to provide the symbolic historical foundations of our nation. I think this is a deeply conservative institution and, my goodness, I can’t overestimate its importance. The Monarch is not elected, and don’t take sides in debates. They are a living bridge to our past, our culture, the nation’s history and continuity. They represent the nation’s shared identity from centuries ago to the present day which transcend the prevailing political differences of the day. 

In divided & difficult times, the Monarchy is consistent and visible. Their value to the UK is immeasurable.

Why the Supreme Court should strike down Trump’s tariff authority ✎

I have two points to make on this issue: first is a broader point, and, second, a legal analysis. 

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1. MAGA have given up on the American system of government

President Trump justified the tariffs, as usual, by invoking a national emergency.

And, why is that?

I think it’s because MAGA is that contingent of the right-wing that regard the Constitution as a museum relic.

It’s almost always a response of “but the Democrats ...”. If the Democrats abused power, then abuse of power is the new norm. In a very real sense, MAGA doesn’t really believe in the democratic republic anymore. They aren’t concerned with things like separation of powers, federalism, constitutional conventions etc.

MAGA are liberated from the quondam ideals of conservatism. They don’t at all believe in things that I regard as a virtue in government: self-restraint, the inherent desire for limited-government, checks-and-balances, deep skepticism of concentrated power, the norms of due process, not being swayed by the “passions of the moment”.

For example, judicial review, or the complex process of passing a bill, are classic examples of especially conservative governance that we get from the Founders. They are mechanisms of restraint to force compromise, reconsideration and long-term thinking. The separation of powers and federalism are not merely tools of efficiency; they are designed to limit power by dividing it and making it compete with itself.

MAGA see an opportunity, and call it a “crisis” or “emergency”, because they consider these old-fashioned notions outdated & frustrating obstacles towards their goals. MAGA doesn’t understand that, as a result of the system itself, they’ll lose occasionally. Many don’t even understand that the system was designed that way. For them, every defeat becomes a missed opportunity to solve a problem. They are Nietzscheans, just like the post-modernists. Radicals even. 

To me, it seems so obvious that national security is the inherent competence of Congress. To the extent that we are threatened, it is upon their authority to control trade with hostile nations. For example, by imposing on transactions the cost of its related externalities (such as regulating oil with Iran, or the fishing industry to mitigate the blight of overfishing etc). However, such power should be as limited as possible - not as expansive as possible (see below). Especially if the President turns out to be a moron.

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2. Is it against constitutional principles?

It doesn’t look it.

Andrew C. McCarthy has written (in “Trump Is Down, but Not Out, in the Tariffs Court Case”, NR) that, while it seems elementary that taxes are the business of Congress, the courts (including liberal judges) have accepted that the Presidency has in fact been empowered by the IEEPA. 

The IEEPA granted the President power to “regulate international commerce” after declaring a “national emergency” in response to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States. As he says, “even though Trump lost, he persuaded seven of the eleven judges that the IEEPA gives presidents tariff authority, to some extent”.

I have excerpted him at length below as he raises some very interesting points about how our constitution has (unfortunately) evolved towards greater executive power. Against this tide, the US Supreme Court has ruled (in favour of strengthening the legislature’s inherent power) by ruling that, in respect of “major questions” of public policy, legislative power cannot be assumed to have been delegated via vague and general language. It needs to be expressly rendered. This was the basis on which the judiciary - correctly, in my view - struck down Biden’s efforts to govern without Congress in the student loan forgiveness case of Biden v Nebraska (2023).

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Trump Is Down, but Not Out, in the Tariffs Court Case
By Andrew C. McCarthy
September 6, 2025 6:30 AM

This is not a constitutional law case; it is a statutory interpretation case. It is not about delegation; it is about what is meant by Congress’s grant in the IEEPA of presidential authority to “regulate” imports — i.e., are tariffs encompassed within regulatory power? (in other words, we just have to accept that Congress has empowered the President - the question is to what extent). We must stop focusing on delegation. That ship has sailed. Let’s just stipulate that we conservatives would like to pare back Congress’s penchants to delegate its powers and to prescribe vaguely defined “emergencies” as a pretext enabling presidents and executive agencies to legislate (a joke) ...

Fretting over delegation will cause you to miss one of the best arguments against the tariffs ... Remember, in the IEEPA, neither the word tariff nor any of its close analogues (e.g. duty, surcharge, or tax) appears. Sure, maybe Congress should never have delegated tariff authority in any statute; but the statutes in which it has done so powerfully illustrate that, when Congress truly intends to delegate tariff authority, it requires the executive to jump through many procedural hoops, and it restricts the amount of exaction the executive may prescribe, as well as its duration ... That’s a strong argument against the tariffs, especially when conjoined with two other points (lack of conditions and oversight by the legislators). First, in the IEEPA’s near half-century on the books, no president prior to Trump had invoked it as a rationale for imposing tariffs. Second, in enumerating Congress’s powers, Article I of the Constitution separately confers the powers (a) “to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and (b) “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations”; if the Framers had intended the power to tax (including to impose tariffs) to be subsumed by the power to regulate foreign commerce, there would have been no need to have discrete provisions (an interesting point that goes to regulating being separate conceptually from taxing).

The tariffs were challenged in Yoshida International v. United States (in the Nixon era) ... Just as in the Trump tariffs case, the lower court ruled against the president, concluding that the TWEA’s authority to regulate did not include the power to impose tariffs. On appeal, however, the CCPA reversed, reasoning that the word “regulate” encompassed tariffs that were “appropriately and reasonably related . . . to the particular nature of the emergency declared.” ... These judges thus rejected Trump’s tariffs only because they were not as deliberative and reasonable as Nixon’s. By contrast, the four dissenting justices would have gone all the way with Trump — deferring to a president’s foreign policy and national security judgments — a position Yoshida plainly supports. (This shows that the courts (incl. liberal judges) have been minded to agree with Trump on the history/scope of the power).

Why the Nixon Precedent Is Inapposite ... one of the salient purposes of the IEEPA — in conjunction with another post-Watergate statute, the 1976 National Emergencies Act — was to curtail the president’s ability to usurp legislative authority by the facile declaration of emergencies. Over time, ironically, the statutes seem to have had the opposite effect ...

For originalists, that should be the end of the case. Nevertheless, because the non-political branch is self-aware that national security or foreign policy are political matters that lie outside the judicial ken, there is a tendency to defer to the president in cases touching on such matters. Perhaps that makes sense when a private litigant, particularly a non-American, is challenging a president’s actions on the world stage, or when national security risks are palpable. But deference to the president is inappropriate in a case that turns on the separation of powers between the political branches. In that situation, any deference to the president could only come at Congress’s expense. (Good argument here, that the scope of the power is abridged by the separation of powers considerations - but I don’t think the courts are that concerned about Congress’ powers). The Framers gave Congress, not the president, the power to regulate foreign commerce and impose tariffs on imports. If anything, then, there should be a presumption against presidential action absent an unambiguous congressional grant of authority ...

Second, it is worth revisiting Biden v. Nebraska (2023), in which the Court rejected the last administration’s attempt to massively cancel student loans. I invite your attention, in particular, to Justice Elena Kagan’s spirited dissent. She berated her conservative colleagues over what she portrayed as their textualist pretensions. The statute at issue (the so-called HEROES Act) empowered the executive branch (the secretary of Education) to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” and to replace old loan agreements with new “terms and conditions.” For Kagan, the plain reading of the text — i.e., giving the words their most commonly understood meaning — easily embraced cancelation (indeed, she faulted the majority for overhyping the word modify in isolation, decoupling it from waive, which is undeniably close to cancel). Further, she scolded her conservative colleagues for resorting to the “major questions” doctrine — the concept that Congress must be especially clear if it intends to empower the executive power to take actions that have vast economic or political significance. In Kagan’s telling, this is just an artifice by which self-proclaimed textualists evade text when they don’t like the result it portends. (This contention prompted a thoughtful response from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who concurred in the ruling against Biden’s loan cancellations. Barrett countered that the major questions doctrine is a valuable tool for illuminating the context of the statute, not for nullifying its text.) Intriguingly, the Federal Circuit’s majority opinion against Trump’s tariffs relies heavily on the major questions doctrine. (I think Justice Elena Kagan is trapped and exemplifies the flaw of contextualism. She excoriated her judicial colleagues against adopting the “major questions” doctrine when it came to Biden’s desire to override an inherently Congressional power. How does she push back against Trump? Her school of thought is purposive interpretation. I.e. we should interpret the text in light of the context for which it was written (national emergency) and to achieve its stated purpose (regulate international commerce)).

Of course, the tariffs case is different from the loan forgiveness case because the contested statutory word in the former, regulate, has constitutional pedigree (as we’ve seen, Article I does not subsume the power to impose tariffs in the power to regulate foreign commerce). Even with that said, her Biden v. Nebraska dissent makes it hard for me to foresee Justice Kagan voting against the Trump tariffs, and she is one of the most influential justices on the Court. Consider that in conjunction with the number of Democratic-appointed judges who have signaled sympathy for the premise that the IEEPA empowers a president to impose tariffs. Doing so convinces me that many progressives like the idea of a future Democratic president unilaterally imposing tariffs in an effort to manage the economy — even if they have to let Trump wield that power for the next three years. (I think so too - that ship has sailed already).

Jew-haters and the Conservative Movement ✎

Around Halloween, appropriately, the online algorithms furnished an interview between Tucker Carlson & Nick Fuentes.

I watched it.

It’s one of the most disturbing things I’d seen in a very long time.

I was shocked by Fuentes’ shameless effrontery: he doesn’t even pretend to camouflage his insane views, including on the subject of women.

It was frightening when Tucker didn’t push back against Fuentes’ assertion that organised Jewry in America is a challenge to America’s problems and that Jews can’t be assimilated. The inference is that Jews have no place in America! 

These online discussions may appear as the odd irritation but, as the recent National Review editorial (“A Time for Choosing on Antisemitism”) points out, it may be an attempt to reshape the discussions in the Republican party post-Trump.

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I think lot of conservatives tend to follow the “no enemies on the right” line. As strategically defensible as it may be, antisemitism is nature’s way of telling us that the holder of those views has an empty mind and a nasty heart.

Of all the brilliant minds Tucker could pick, he chooses some YouTuber/influencer whose sole contribution to conservatism is rehabilitating the worst despots of the 20th century and, all-the-while, blaming Jews for our problems.

I’m all for debate and discussion and I don’t believe in no-platforming people, but when you give such a clown softball-questions in an interview (while conducting such a nasty & argumentative interview with Ted Cruz earlier this year over Israel) - then your bias is fairly plain to see.

Almost seventy years ago, one of my heros, William F. Buckley Jr. expelled the Jew haters and the Birchers from the American conservative movement. 

Buckley was an intellectual and a deep thinker. And sorely needed today. 

Fuentes is a virus and Carlson is the carrier.

I also think JD Vance may be more sympathetic to Tucker than the National Review editors appreciate. As such, for me, I would prefer Marco Rubio getting the Trump endorsement in 2028.

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A Time for Choosing on Antisemitism
By The Editors
October 30, 2025 6:30 AM

Tucker Carlson, knee-deep already, has taken another step into the muck with a friendly interview with Nick Fuentes.

The issue isn’t merely that Carlson “platformed” a white-nationalist influencer.

This framing allows Carlson and his defenders to portray the interview and others like it as an effort at open debate, as a good-faith attempt at engagement with alternative views.

The deeper problem is that Carlson didn’t actually challenge any of Fuentes’s noxious views that he has spelled out quite clearly over the years. Fuentes has engaged in Holocaust denial, called Adolf Hitler “really f***ing cool,” and said that if his movement gained power, it would execute “perfidious Jews.”

Carlson didn’t even need to go back through old clips to find objectionable statements. In his appearance, Fuentes stated that the “big challenge” to unifying the country against tribal interests was “organized Jewry in America,” and he expressed admiration for Soviet butcher Joseph Stalin. He did not receive any pushback from Carlson.

It also can’t be said that Carlson’s interviewing style is simply to let his guests speak. In June, Carlson held a combative interview with Senator Ted Cruz that descended into an extended shouting match. Why would Carlson choose to take an oppositional tack to a senator who has been fighting for conservatism for decades, but not to a podcaster who praises Stalin? The obvious answer is that Fuentes is an avowed Jew-hater while Cruz is a staunch supporter of Israel.

Carlson stated during his interview that he thinks Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and other figures who are Christian and support Israel have been infected by a “brain virus.” About these “Christian Zionists,” he said: “I dislike them more than anybody. Because it’s Christian heresy, and I’m offended by that as a Christian.”

It would be easy to dismiss Carlson, and his now-extensive history of promoting antisemitism, as the handiwork of another personality desperate for attention in the online economy. But Carlson is one of the nation’s most prominent and influential commentators. After the death of Charlie Kirk, Carlson has become a leading speaker for the organization that Kirk founded, Turning Point USA. When Vice President JD Vance subbed in as a host on Kirk’s podcast after the assassination, Carlson was his guest.

Carlson’s sway, though, is currently limited by the fact that President Trump — who happens to like Jews and who has been the strongest supporter of Israel of any U.S. president in history — is in charge of the Republican Party and ultimately defines MAGA.

In June, Trump ignored Carlson and joined Israel’s effort to take out Iran’s nuclear program, which was successful in neutralizing a threat that had been looming over the Middle East for decades without any U.S. casualties. Carlson had predicted that it would trigger World War III and that it could kill thousands of Americans within a week. Trump dismissed him as “kooky Tucker Carlson.”

Trump won’t be around forever, though. Which is one reason that Carlson, Fuentes, Candace Owens, and other online influencers are pushing so hard to try and remake the Republican Party and the conservative movement into one that is hostile toward Israel and the Jewish people.

The idea that it should be seen as the America First position to oppose Israel and American Jewry is not only a moral abomination; it makes no sense. Israel is a technologically innovative, staunchly pro-American nation in the heart of a strategically important region. Over the past several years, with U.S. support, Israeli actions have weakened the anti-American terrorist group the Houthis; neutered Hezbollah (the terrorist group that slaughtered 241 U.S. servicemembers in the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing); and crippled the nuclear program of a nation that has for decades vowed “Death to America.” It isn’t pro-Israel protesters in the U.S. who are burning American flags and calling for the “total eradication of Western civilization” — it is the so-called pro-Palestine movement. It wasn’t Israelis who handed out candy to celebrate the September 11 attacks — that was Palestinians.

George Washington, in a famous letter to a Jewish congregation in Newport, R.I., in 1790, wrote, “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants.” American Jews have enjoyed more security and freedom here than at any place in world history and rewarded that welcome by making positive contributions to the nation in just about every field imaginable. A version of America that is no longer safe for Jews to live in securely, and that is overtaken by anti-Israel zealots, is not an America that any conservative should want to live in.

Trump’s Presidency and the rule of law ✎

I read a great essay by Andrew C McCarthy entitled “The Trump Effect: On the Rule of Law” (National Review, Sept 2025). I have appended the article to the bottom. This blog post reflect my thoughts on this issue.

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For me, one of the most alarming things about Donald Trump was his willingness to try to overturn a Presidential election.

As it stands, the rule of law is in such a parlous state in the American body politic. Yet during the last US elections, I was surprised at how few of my fellow Americans weren’t as concerned by constitutional concerns and the rule of law among the miscellany of hot topics - inflation, wars, immigration etc.

The Democrats have done a lot of damage in recent times (as McCarthy write). And the Republican party is dominated by right-wing populists - not conservatives. The Republican Congress has no ability to tell President Trump no, not even sometimes. This is important because Congress is primus inter pares. Representatives write the laws, presidents are supposed to execute them faithfully, and the courts are meant to apply them without fear or favour. The ever greater deployment of executive power by President Trump is very serious. It frustrates the proper functioning of the legislative branch (by usurping their role) and/or hampers the proper functioning of the executive (power deployed for self-serving and/or ulterior motives).

Major problems:

• Use of executive orders rather than passing bills in Congress - and which presidents would then sign into law - most conspicuously in President Trump’s assumed unilateral power in imposing tariff taxes on American citizens. 
• Corruption of office for his children and his cronies - E.g. Connor Stringer and Melissa Lawford writing in “‘It’s open season for corruption’: How Trump turned the White House into a cash cow” (Telegraph, May 2025)
• Ousting US attorneys to install loyalists - E.g. Mr Erik Siebert’s “departure” in favour of President Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, Ms Halligan - relating to Trump’s vendetta against Comey. Erica Orden and Hailey Fuchs writing in “Donald Trump’s US attorneys, unvetted by the Senate, move full steam ahead” (Politico, Sept 2025) show just how much Trump’s US attorney nominees have been appointed, how ridiculously inexperienced they are, and especially how Trump has effectively discarded the required confirmation process of the Senate that all candidates have to go through. This is too ridiculous for words because any common law court would expect standing to bring an action. Actions by interim US Attorney’s office would be void for want of constitutional qualification to exercise the function and powers of that office. The American courts will not entertain such an outrage.
• Pushing the DOJ beyond constitutional norms in actively demanding prosecution political enemies - e.g. demanding Pam Bondi step up efforts to prosecute his enemies, including Comey and Laticia James. The Comey indictment is almost impossible to prove that it’s transparently malicious. Trump is effectively turning Comey - someone neither party liked - into a political martyr. While the courts cannot compel adherence to these constitutional norms, judges will very easily dismiss these flawed cases on grounds of selective prosecution, insufficient-evidence, or statute-of-limitations defences etc.
• McCarthy talks about the “perversion of prosecutorial discretion and equal protection of law” (see below).

Trump is a disgrace to the office of the presidency.

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The Trump Effect: On the Rule of Law

By Andrew C. McCarthy 

NR PLUS Magazine
November 2025 Issue

A country in which law is king asks not whether government hardball works but whether it is legal

‘In America the law is king.” That’s how Thomas Paine put it. “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

Nearing a year into his second term, President Trump has some very different ideas about what the law, and who the king, should be.

Trump has not been solely responsible for the rule of law’s erosion. There is history here. Kennedy and Johnson leveraged the FBI, wiretaps, and tax records to coerce businesses and spy on rivals, journalists, anti-war activists, and Martin Luther King Jr. And then there was Nixon and Watergate.

Obama’s innovation was “phone and pen” governance: A president who can’t get his way with Congress uses the administrative state to work his will. He and Biden (the third Obama term) forged the template Trump is exploiting: a dual perversion of prosecutorial discretion and equal protection of law.

The former used to be an unremarkable resource-allocation doctrine: There is more crime than prosecutorial resources, so priorities must guide decisions on what cases to bring. Obama refashioned prosecutorial discretion into a negation of the president’s duty to execute the laws faithfully. Decisions were based not on how best to enforce Congress’s laws but on how to effect the president’s will regarding what the law should be, subordinating the law to executive fiat. When Trump, without any justification, refuses to enforce the TikTok divestment statute (which mandates sale by the platform’s China-controlled owner), he walks a well-trodden path.

Equal protection, our principle that justice is blind, simultaneously gave way to the demonization of political opponents, gussied up as “social justice” (in the service of Democrats’ racial obsessions, economic distortions, climate alarmism, and sundry fetishes). Obama sicced the prosecutors and regulators on conservative organizations, gun retailers, police departments, etc. Biden’s lawfare aimed to bankrupt, incarcerate, and politically annihilate Trump, the Democrats’ archnemesis.

By early 2024, with the Republican nomination all but sewn up, Trump was reeling from half a billion dollars in civil verdicts. In a due process travesty led by the Biden Department of Justice and Democratic state district attorneys, he was looking at four potential criminal trials, queued up to chain him to courtrooms until Election Day. With cases steered to heavily Democratic jury pools, at least one preelection conviction seemed inevitable. (Trump was indeed convicted in Manhattan, in an absurd case involving hush money paid to a porn star.)

It’s easy now to forget that this pernicious strategy nearly worked. Trump, however, will never forget. Four things about the experience are indelible.

First, the brazenness of it. Democrats took unseemly glee in wielding prosecutorial power against him. In her campaign for New York attorney general, Letitia James vowed to dog Trump if elected, and she won in a landslide. Law enforcement could be politicized openly, without apology. Trump has devoured this lesson: Lawfare is craved by the parties’ base supporters, online “influencers,” and the nighttime cable carnivals.

Second, Democrats showed no mercy. In her civil-fraud prosecution of Trump, James tried to take his children down with him. Never the forgive-and-forget type, Trump will not let that go. In September, when his appointees at the FBI and DOJ executed search warrants at the home and office of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser and now tireless critic, the president observed that Bolton now knew how he felt when the FBI rifled through Melania Trump’s belongings during the Mar-a-Lago raid. Bolton had cheered the Biden DOJ’s classified documents probe of Trump. Now Trump is cheering his DOJ’s classified documents probe of Bolton.

Third, Trump was saved by the Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling that he had immunity from prosecution for executive actions, even if taken to further bogus claims of a stolen election. Trump argued a maximalist position — namely, a president must be able to engage without fear in conduct that many would condemn — and the Court substantially agreed with him. Or, at least, the majority agreed that Congress, rather than courts and prosecutors, is our system’s check on executive excess. This is constitutionally sound, but if an unscrupulous president intimidates the House and Senate caucuses of his party, he becomes unconstrained.

Finally, Democratic lawfare intensified Trump’s contempt for his first-term aides. Until the wheels came off after his 2020 election defeat, Trump mostly listened to these seasoned Washington insiders — kicking and screaming, sure, but he listened. And what did he get out of it? A better first term than he or we had any reason to expect, in my judgment. From his skewed perspective, though, Trump lost because these advisers let the Democrats “rig” the election only to have them, now victorious, persecute him — employing the abuses of power that these advisers had admonished were beneath presidential dignity. If he ever got back to the Oval Office, Trump would be Trump.

Well, he won. A different manner of man might assess that lawfare, having contributed mightily to the Democrats’ defeat, is too politically toxic. But the president — now 79 and facing no more elections — is obsessed with comeuppance. Congressional Democrats are an impotent minority, and Trump sees their “fake news” media allies as so biased and unpopular that bad press is good press.

Trump’s predecessors taught him nothing he didn’t already know. He has never felt compunction about exercising power punitively. Still, the Democrats’ lawfare in broad daylight was instructive. To the baseline they set, now add Trump’s “transactional” nature, his apathy about the rule of law, and his score-settling incentives and autocratic propensities.

This has proven combustible. And as Orwellian as it is audacious. Upon taking the reins as attorney general, Trump loyalist Pam Bondi established the “Weaponization Working Group.” Its self-described mission is to end the politicized abuse of law enforcement by . . . yes, unabashedly investigating Trump’s political nemeses. It’s now led by Ed Martin, raised to MAGA heights for his exertions on behalf of January 6 rioters. Trump granted clemency to all of them, 1,500 or so, including those who had viciously assaulted police. For good measure, he installed Martin as the DOJ’s pardon attorney. It’s a troll, but so was Trump’s attempt to appoint Martin as U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. That was too much, even for cowed Senate Republicans, after Martin announced investigations of Biden DOJ special counsel Jack Smith for the crime of investigating Trump, and of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) over hyperbolic rants against conservative Supreme Court justices.

No one thought Schumer’s foolish dudgeon was criminal, but highlighting it frames the prosecution that Smith based on Trump’s infamous January 6 Ellipse speech as sheer lawfare. To revise the history of the 2020 election as rigged and the ensuing indictments of Trump as partisan abuses of power is a core element of the Trump DOJ’s crusade.

Under Bondi and Kash Patel, Trump’s chosen FBI director, scores of agents and prosecutors who worked on the January 6 and Trump investigations have been purged or reassigned. That effort was steered by Emil Bove, the former Trump defense lawyer who’d been installed in a top DOJ post. Bove forced the resignations of top New York federal prosecutors who objected to his directive that they drop a corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, in crude exchange for Adams’s cooperation in Trump’s illegal-immigration crackdown. Bove has been rewarded with a coveted Third Circuit judgeship.

Meanwhile, Tulsi Gabbard and Bill Pulte, the myrmidons Trump selected as director of national intelligence and director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, have devoted their offices to the revisionist enterprise. Gabbard’s job is to hype Russiagate, the long exposed but — to the consternation of the MAGA base — insufficiently prosecuted Democratic scheme to smear Trump as a Kremlin mole. Based on Gabbard’s breathless disclosures, the DOJ is investigating James Comey and John Brennan, Obama’s FBI and CIA directors. (Trump grudgingly admits that the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling protects Obama himself.) Pulte’s perusal of mortgage filings by Trump tormentors Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook (a Biden appointee Trump is seeking to fire in his quest to control the Fed) have similarly yielded DOJ bank-fraud probes.

Naturally, these investigations are collectively hampered by weak evidence, immunity defenses, statute of limitations lapses, and patent selective prosecution claims. But the objective is not necessarily to charge. Lawfare makes the process the punishment. Trump’s targets will be put through the wringer to which he was subjected: searches, audits, legal fees, and constant anxiety.

When even a pretext for criminal investigation is lacking, the president’s tack is bill of attainder–style extortion. He has targeted the businesses of such antagonists as Chris Krebs (the former cybersecurity official who refuted Trump’s 2020 election-fraud blather) and law firms that formerly employed lawyers who led investigations against Trump. In executive orders, Trump blithely castigates the firms for all manner of misconduct and pronounces punishments — revoking security clearances, banning firm personnel from entering federal buildings, voiding contracts — that could potentially put them out of business. Some firms are fighting back in court. Others, however, have staved off extinction by agreeing to provide free legal work — aggregating to nearly a billion dollars in value — to Trump-favored causes.

By the same heavy-handed tactics, Trump has clobbered Harvard, Columbia, and other universities. It cannot be denied that there is virtue in the crusade against campus antisemitism and DEI activism. But in negotiations, Trump has demanded influence over curricula, faculty hiring, and viewpoint auditing. To pressure for capitulation, the administration has frozen billions in government research grants, blocked visa approval of foreign students, and threatened to revoke the institutions’ tax-exempt status, patents, and accreditation. Columbia said “uncle,” agreeing to pay $220 million (among other concessions). Harvard won a first litigation round when an Obama-appointed judge invalidated the funding freeze, but the university knows that victory may be short-lived and that Trump has leverage against which courts are powerless. Other institutions watch, and quake.

The shredding of due process is a feature of Trump’s immigration enforcement. It’s evident in Trump’s assertions that Biden’s border collapse makes compliance with statutory deportation procedures impractical and that judges who cry foul are uniformly “radical,” “crooked,” “unhinged,” “left-wing,” or “rogues.” The administration has orchestrated summary deportations, invoking inapplicable wartime measures — such as the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which Trump says was triggered by a Venezuelan gang’s “invasion” of the United States — to mass-remove alleged alien criminals to a notorious Salvadoran prison. (They were later repatriated to Venezuela, even as Trump has threatened war against the Maduro regime.) Other allegedly criminal aliens have been dispatched to such third-world basket cases as South Sudan, Honduras, and Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) — countries with which the administration cut deals to accept deportees who can’t be sent back to their home countries.

You can’t say the in terrorem effect is not working: The border crisis is over and aliens are self-deporting in droves. A country in which law is king, though, asks not whether government hardball works but whether it is legal.

Paradoxically, then, I’ll close on an optimistic note. Trump’s legacy includes the judges he appointed, particularly on the Supreme Court. It was a task he delegated to the Federalist Society and Senator Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), and it resulted in the appointment of jurists dedicated to the law, many of whom faithfully ruled against the worst excesses of Trump’s first term. At his second term’s start, Trump flooded the zone with controversial executive orders. He has since claimed unilateral power to fire agency heads and employees, cancel congressional funding, mothball agencies, impose tariffs at will, and exert lethal military force against alleged drug dealers on the high seas (an intensification of the saber-rattling against Venezuela). Challenges are now working their way up the court system. With the Republican Congress too paralyzed to check the president’s overreach — much of it usurping Congress’s own power — it will be up to the judiciary to restore order. The Supreme Court will do its part.

Of course, there is a limit to what judges can do. They can decide only the cases that come to them and have no power to enforce their judgments. But if law is still king in America, it is not because of courts. As Alexis de Tocqueville recognized, it is because regard for the law is basic to the American character. The resulting culture cannot be snuffed out by a president’s indifference to it. It will always present an opportunity for new leaders to rise on the promise of restoring the rule of law.

The Jimmy Kimmel situation ✎

I recommend a great article by Philip Klein writing in “The Government Shouldn’t Police Jimmy Kimmel’s Lies” (National Review, Sept 2025):

The move came in the face of threats from Trump and Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC. In late August, Trump said he supported the FCC revoking the broadcast licenses of ABC and NBC over their overwhelmingly critical coverage of his administration. This week, he was asked to respond to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s comments about the government’s ability to police “hate speech.” 

Taken together, it’s clear that the decision to sideline Kimmel cannot be merely dismissed as purely the actions of the private broadcasters. Instead, this was an example of the government using its powerful leverage over broadcasters to get them to take action. ABC and its affiliates may have pulled the trigger, but they did so with FCC guns pointed at their own heads if they did not.

This action is ultimately a victory for a certain ideological strain on the right that has been at war in recent years against limited-government impulses. Traditional conservatives still have a disinclination to leverage government power over individuals and businesses. But another element of the right (call it populist or MAGA or New Right) believes that the left will always wield government as a club when Democrats have power, so it would represent unilateral disarmament for Republicans to behave any differently. Indeed, when they had the opportunity, Democrats leaned on Big Tech companies to stifle conservative speech in the name of fighting “misinformation” — leading to the deplatforming, demonetization, and shadow-banning of conservatives or other news and commentary they didn’t like.

While I am obviously an opponent of the efforts by the previous administration to suppress conservative speech, I still believe that the proper response is to push to allow more speech rather than create an excuse for the radical left to go even further in efforts to crack down on dissent the next time they get the chance. 

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I completely agree with Mr Klein’s comments.

A free society should value freedom of speech and expression - most especially to views deemed “offensive” (JS Mill’s On Liberty).

Trump and his administration’s use of the power of the FCC (and other government organisations) to police opinions or “bias” (or “hate speech” - however you care to define that) is an improper and unconstitutional intrusion into the affairs of private organisations.

This is a clear abuse of the Presidency.

I think we should all be terrified of the increasing willingness of society and politics to “control” or “police” the thoughts and opinions of the electorate. (This is especially true, as I write this, in light of the unearthed documents vis-a-vis President Biden’s willingness to apply political pressured on to big tech to plainly control content on the internet). This kind of “progressivism” seems to be winning the day, even within the Republican Party, to the detriment of us all.

Another final thought: it’s worth asking whether the the FCC should have any authority to take action against news broadcasters under the auspices of “public harm” being prevented. In a free society, I don’t see why people can’t be free to lie and distort the facts if they care to do so. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be consequences - but I don’t recognise any value to FCC having any authority to revoke any license. Get rid of it.

The Epstein “client list” is a conspiracy theory ✎

The whole Epstein “client list” is turning into a conspiracy theory cult. Almost a McCarty-like religious mania. 

Without such a list, the worldview of MAGA would crumble. Therefore, surely, the answer must rely on yet another cover up ... or so the logic goes, and hence, the DoJ and FBI are said to be lying. 

If you consider for a moment; why in the world would the President have ever mentioned them in public if he was in the files. After all, he knows who he gave his money to, or with whom he did business. He simply mentioned the “files” to whip his base into a frenzy.

We already know that they broke-off relations in 2003/4 following some sordid affair by Epstein at one of Trump’s resorts. We already know that they were friends and met at parties and events. It seems everyone (even Steven Pinker) met Jeffery Epstein. He was everywhere, and he was able to get close to so many famous and well-connected people. Trouble is that we already knew all of this information. But the hunt persists for hidden secret “lists”! Our next course is to unseal court transcripts. Maybe it’s under his bed?

What is stunning is how this cult now seems to populate among the higher echelons our government and the media. Are we really going to grab Ms Ghislaine Maxwell to testify publicly in some prison-like conference before the media? It needs to stop.

We all know that the so-called Epstein files would have already been released by the Biden administration for being too juicy a story long ago. Either way, a secret as big as the alleged “Epstein files” or “client list” would be truly impossible to keep to a small number of people. Ergo, it’s classic wishful thinking. Unfortunately, the longer this conspiracy goes on, the greater our collective slide into a post-truth world.

Brendan O’Neill writing in “At last, the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory is falling apart” (Spiked) talks about its threat to democracy and why people indulge it:

The bigger question, though, is why so many people just can’t let go of the Epstein tale. No amount of the sunlight of disinfectant, no amount of hyper-clarified jail footage, can wake them from their Paedo Island stupor. And it’s because this conspiracy theory makes them feel good. It gives their lives meaning. It lets them circumvent the tough task of thinking seriously about power and democracy in the 21st century, and instead just say: ‘Everything is beyond our control.’ Like all conspiracy theorists – from 9/11 truthers to ‘anti-Zionist’ fruitcakes – they find strange comfort in the powerlessness bestowed on them by their own theories. Their frenzied belief in distant cabals absolves them of the far harder democratic duties of thought and discussion and change.

The lunacy is bipartisan now. Witness how well the Epstein tale lends itself to both right and left. For years it was held up by right-wing cranks as proof of the depravity of Clintonites and their Hollywood luvvies; now it is wielded to the end of damning Trumpists and ‘populists’ and what they have to hide. I don’t give a damn about Jeffrey Epstein. I don’t much care for the powerful people he mingled with either, though of course I think all are owed the presumption of innocence. I do care about democracy, though. And right now, there are few threats to democracy as insidious and toxic as the tragically fashionable belief that we are ruled by devils and there is nothing we can do about it.

There aren’t any new or meaningful files. There is no “list”. The wider conspiracy theories (incl. Epstein’s death) just aren’t true.

MAGA may have gone nuts, but the rest of us don’t have to.

Tucker Carlson’s cretinous antisemitism ✎

Tucker Carlson has become an antisemitic crank. 

Whenever he pops up in a story, he exhibits an embarrassing decline in intellect alongside an outlandish propensity for conspiracy theories (invariably with an antisemitic bent).

For example, why describe the podcaster (i.e. non-historian) Darryl Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United states” giving him platform for his revisionist history that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of the Second World War”; and, not Hitler. 

Recently on the Epstein debacle and the so-called “client list”, he said in a speech that Epstein was “working on behalf” of Israel:

... Where did all the money come from? And no one has ever gotten to the bottom of that because no one has ever tried. And moreover, it’s extremely obvious to anyone who watches that this guy had direct connections to a foreign government. Now, no one’s allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty. There is nothing wrong with saying that. There is nothing hateful about saying that. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about saying. There’s nothing even anti-Israel about saying that ... You have the former Israeli prime minister living in your house. You have had all this contact with the foreign government. Were you working on behalf of Mossad? Were you running a blackmail operation on behalf of foreign government? ... (Excerpted)

And, of course, all of this from his intellectual safe house of “… just asking questions ...” - the unmistakable refuge of the demagogue.

As we know, eventually, all such conspiracy theories devolve to some Jewish angle. 

The Epstein conspiracy is no different and it seems it won’t be easily killed.

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The reasons why the Mossad-Epstein conspiracy is ridiculous:

• It doesn’t make any sense for Israeli intelligence to connect itself to Epstein. Israeli intelligence is one of the few places on Earth in which idiots aren’t running things. He was investigated in 2005 and convicted in 2008. Why would Mossad be concerned with Mr Epstein’s island? What spy-trade skills did he possess? And who would Mossad be hoping to honey-trap - Mahmoud Abbas? It's ridiculous and would unnecessarily implicates Israel in his (by then) known pedophilia and sex scandals.
• Following the Jonathan Pollard espionage fiasco, Mossad & Israel must be aware of the serious repercussions involved in underhanded activities to US-Israeli relations.
• Former Israeli PM Ehud Barak met with Jeffrey Epstein “dozens of times, flew on private plane about 30 times in 2013-2017, including 2014 private flight in Florida” — and so what? Epstein met Clinton, did that make him a CIA spy? Also met Prince Andrew and the Duchess of York? And what does that prove?

The Trump-Musk divorce ✎

So, the romance has died – in such open nastiness and bickering. 

As I always said, Trump is not a conservative. No fiscal hawk. Cutting spending was merely a pretext to do away with programs he disliked and people he distrusted. And, now they’re gone: he’s perfectly happy to spend the savings (and then some) on stuff he wants.

Musk was naive. He bought into the notion that Trump actually wanted to get spending under control. I honestly think he was taken in with the hype of MAGA. Thus, he felt used and stupid with the tariffs and when the budget bill coming out. Musk torched his career thinking he was rescuing America just to find out he got suckered.

We all knew it would end this way. And, as always with Trump, taking the low road with insults and pettiness. This time, they both went to the gutter. Nothing more than a national embarrassment. Musk had a nasty side too. I remember him using the pedo accusation against someone who attacked him. Musk, this time, uses Epstein.

We have another 3.5 years of this embarrassment to end.

Nothing is serious anymore ✎

The “bigly beautiful bill”.

Is everything a slogan?

The cover-up of Biden’s decline ✎

This is a scandal. 

I watched this interview by Channel 4 with Tapper on his new book “Original Sin”.

It shows that the Democrats were willing to put the nation at risk to hold onto power.  They covered up for a man whose cognitive decline would disqualify him from any ordinary job.

Tapper would have us believe that the American journalistic community were not aware of the senility of President Biden because his inner circle kept a “tight lid” on the situation. 

The omerta-like attitude among the Democrats and the bullying by the Biden administration is interesting … but I’m just a blogger who reads the news, and it was v. clear to me that Biden was losing the plot. He looked like a confused old man most of the time last year, trying to find his words, forgetting names, trying to spit out 2-3 thoughts all at the same time resulting in garballed sentences, wandering around looking confused, falling over. Some people believed his decline was “fake news” until that disastrous debate. Since the mainstream media covered for him.

The truth is that America’s “establishment” journalists, for the most part, knew, or tried to avoid full knowledge of, the situation because (1) Biden was a Democrat, and (2) it could be “justified” because they wanted to avoid a Trump redux.

The scandal is not only about who ran the White House – but how the White House and the Democrat establishments deceived the American people, but how the mainstream media went along with it.

Deportation via the Alien Enemies Act ✎

Very recently U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. issued a permanent injunction against the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan immigrants from South Texas who have been accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang.

In short, the judge ruled that TdA may be harmful to society, but they did not constitute an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” as per the Alien Enemies Act. Thus, the President did not have lawful authority (under the Alien Enemies Act) to detain or deport Venezuelan immigrants.

Here is a summary of the judgment by Chris Geidner. Also CBS News.

I agree with the judgment, and want to make 4 points.

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1. The President simply cannot give himself war powers (via declaring a phony invasion) to despatch illegal aliens without any notice or hearing. Even if the 10 million or so illegal aliens in the US can be regarded as a “severe threat”, it doesn’t justify shortcuts around the law.

2. The President has no inherent power to deport anyone – that authority rests entirely with Congress. The Executive can only ever act within the terms and limits of legislation (which include constitutional procedural safeguards of due process – not optional). As Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review explained (concluding that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was unlawful):

to the extent he had protection against being deported to El Salvador, it was based on a remedy — withholding of removal — that is implemented by regulations based on Congress’s statutes … the involvement of the courts in immigration enforcement is extremely limited — confined to the narrow authority Congress has vested in them … Illegal aliens detained inside the country, if they don’t agree to rapid expulsion (as many do), are entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge and an appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals — again, Justice Department tribunals.

3. It is important to remember that these hearings before an immigration “judge” (technically, as McCarthy points out, from the executive and not the judicial branch of government) actually protect Americans. A tiny percentage of detainees, before an immigration judge every year, are accidentally arrested due to mistaken identity & then let go.

4. Respect for the Constitution and the rule of law are solid conservative positions.

Trump’s mercantilist tariffs ✎

What a joke. Three points to make:

(1) There are reasons, other than financial, for giving help to other countries either via tariff programs or USAID. It is called security. The system of established levies has given the world stability with secure markets. International trade, esp. since World War II, has made the U.S. a phenomenally rich nation. Frankly, until Donald Trump, tariffs were almost always a deranged niche left-wing idea. How did this insanity get into the Republican party?

Even if, for the sake of argument, the tariffs could work in their stated goal of bring manufacturing back to America; they won’t have enough time to work. The pain of the transition will be so great the House will fall to the Democrats in 2026 and the White House will fall to them in 2028. At that point the tariffs will be lifted, if not already. 

(2) No respect or consideration given to alliances. E.g. take Israel. They have almost no tariffs on U.S. goods to begin with. As a gesture of goodwill, the Knesset abolished some few remaining tariffs a few days ago. How was it “reciprocal” to put a 17 percent tax rate on Israeli goods?

(3) Even if I agreed with these tariffs (which I don’t), I am extremely disturbed by the sweeping unilateral authority Trump is claiming under the guise of “emergency powers”. No one man, and his pen, should have this much power over the global economy.

We have to hope that the courts stop him. This is illegal because either (1) setting taxes is an inherently non-delegable legislative function and/or (2) the U.S. trade deficit doesn’t meet the “emergency” threshold definition as the required basis for the order.

The New Orleans terrorist attack ✎

Poor people of New Orleans.

Maniac created by religious fanaticism & blind hatred that comes from being brainwashed.

It seems he had some financial woes. But, lots of people have financial problems. They get another job, seek the help of a financial advisor etc. They just don’t get into a pickup truck with a rifle and start randomly running over people.

This is what “globalise the intifada” means in reality.

November 5 US election bet - Harris will win ✎

I think Harris is going to win.

I think it seems to lean her way, women will turn out for her, and abortion is a big issue.

Trump’s polling bumped up briefly following the assassination attempt, but that didn’t translate into any sustained enthusiasm. Moreover, from what I’ve seen, the number of Republicans who will definitely vote for him has declined over the last two months. This is because people who like Trump tend to love him — but right-leaning voters (that don’t love him) tend to be turned off by him. His path to victory relies on a surge of Republican turnout across the board; and I don't think he can generate it.

Perhaps even more importantly, I think the January 6th insurrection was a serious scandal which left many voters with existential worries concerning Trump being in power again. Its aftermath has motivated voters against him & caused many more moderate right-leaning voters to sit this election out.

Harris is dreadful ... Trump is terrible.

What a choice!

President Biden finally taken down by the Democrats ✎

Finally. Biden has “stepped down” ... or taken down in a coup.

A sad end to one of the longest & most consequential careers in US politics. 

Propped by his party recently for so long despite voters being well-aware of the fact that the Democrats knew Biden wasn’t mentally capable. They tried to push him through the finish line anyway. 

Then, the disturbing and unsettling debate on June-27th against Donald Trump. The world was finally exposed to what insiders had known for months: Biden was in serious physical and mental decline ... Then, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump softened and buoyed the public’s perception of Trump (interesting that Trump took a more measured and “statesmanlike” approach than his erstwhile “conspiracy theory” rituals — I was expecting him to blame Biden for the assassination attempt), and made Trump seem stronger and more vigorous than Biden.

So finally, the “compassionate” Democrats knifed President Biden. One-by-one. Obama at first, followed by Pelosi ... which then created an “official” momentum to gut him. The omerta lifted. 

He made the most important and consequential announcement of his Presidency ... in a letter posted on Twitter/X. He neither appeared on camera, nor did we hear his voice. We didn’t see him at all that Sunday.

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If the Democrats lose the election, it will be a complete bloodbath.

Matthew Hennessey (below) argues that “the Democrats underestimate the price they will pay for lying this way ... The damage has been done. It’ll be a long time undoing it.”

Jill (his wife) and the White House staff must take the blame for allowing this humiliation. Biden was allowed to dig his own grave further and further — in public. He recently called himself “‘first Black woman’ to serve in White House”. He should have been treated with a bit more respect ... and honesty.

National Review has written about how President Biden was the “PiNO — President in Name Only” era:

Since at least the Afghanistan debacle, those of us paying attention have noticed that Biden’s age meant he couldn’t perform his duties like a normal president would. He made considerably fewer public appearances, appeared at few early morning or late-night events, took more time to recuperate from travel, conducted fewer interviews and press conferences, etc ... Normal presidents don’t skip Super Bowl interviews. Normal presidents don’t go nine months without a cabinet meeting. Normal presidents don’t spend almost every weekend at their beach house in Delaware, and normal presidents don’t have to use a teleprompter when making remarks to donors at closed-door fundraisers ... This is one of many reasons that, as the NR editors declare, Joe Biden should resign the presidency. He can’t do the job anymore. We have had a not-president for a while, and unless Biden resigns the office, we will have a not-president until January 20. He’s a PiNO — President in Name Only.

And, then Biden’s endorsement of Harris is her anointment in all but name in the perfunctory primary season. National Review again:

Harris has been a colossal disappointment to everyone who believed that the first woman vice president would be a heroic giant on the American political stage ... Beyond that, the laugh, her reliance on stock phrases like, “what can be, unburdened by what has been,” the constant vibe that she’s giving a book report on a book she didn’t read — there’s a nervousness or insecurity to Harris. She always seems like she’s bluffing.

In my opinion, the statesman who would add most stature to the Democrat ticket would be Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.

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President Biden, it’s time to go! ✎

I have just been reading a fascinating deep-dive into the White House’s machinations – orchestrated on the nation – of obscuring and concealing the President’s obvious physical frailty and mental ailing.

It has become embarrassing – even painful to watch. The recent embarrassing Zelensky/Putin gaffe is just too much. Everyone is waiting for the next slip-up. As Michael Moore recently said, his remaining in office is tantamount to elderly abuse.

It is an awful thing to have to witness this. It’s like watching a friend or loved one struggle enormously in a job at the end of their careers and hang on for too long. This is far worse, and with enormous consequences. Biden is supposed to be reading briefs and papers, and analysing world changes. Travelling in his job is “tiring him”; a “simple cold” incapacities him thinking and speaking clearly at a debate; and that he needs “more sleep”. In effect, this is a declaration that this poor guy is simply not up to the rigors of the office. Instead, we have his obvious confusion. Long drawn silences. The distant-vacant stares. And the awkward smile from spectators and eye-rolls.

Biden’s handlers are disgraceful. Lies, and lies. The more we hear, the clearer it is that they have been deliberately gaslighting journalists who have been persistently asking questions about Biden’s health over the past few years. Even labelling it a Republican conspiracy. If they’d just come clean, they wouldn’t be in this mess now.

E.g. after the Trump-Biden debate, it seems the White House were forced to acknowledge a “neurologist” had visited the President …

Following Joe Biden’s disastrous performance against Donald Trump in their debate on June 27, White House reporters started poring through the visitors log at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. One name kept cropping up again and again: Dr Kevin Cannard. The neurologist and specialist in movement disorders works at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which serves the president. Eagled-eyed journalists spotted that he visited the White House no fewer than eight times between last July and this March. The revelation forced a statement from the White House which suggested Dr Cannard had only seen Biden for his three annual physicals and the other visits were related to military personnel.

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And why are people naturally suspicious?

Part of the reason why the White House’s excuses are wearing thin is that a sceptical public is aware of the long history of various White House administrations keeping the ailments suffered by past presidents secret. Woodrow Wilson suffered a paralysing stroke in 1919 and the severity of his illness was downplayed. For the final two years of his term, all communication with Wilson went through his wife Edith. It was also well known that Franklin D Roosevelt was paralysed from the waist down after contracting polio in 1921. But he carefully cloaked his disability in public using leg braces and gripping the lectern in order to stand for speeches. The press agreed not to photograph or film him in his wheelchair or being lifted out of cars. When the president’s health deteriorated following the Tehran Conference in November 1943, his doctor told the press that Roosevelt was in “robust health” and his stamina was “far above average”. In fact he was suffering from severe hypertension and congestive heart failure. He was advised to limit his work to four hours a day (which was a little tricky with the Second World War still raging) and his smoking. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1945, shortly into his fourth term.

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Why should Biden step down?

As the article noted:

One undernoted issue is that the psychodrama is preventing other senior Democrats from taking the fight to Trump. Partly that’s because they don’t want to be seen as undermining Biden, and partly it’s because the White House won’t let them. “I worry that the core cadre of counsellors around the president continues to put roadblocks in the path of some of our most effective spokespeople,” says Brett Bruen, a former diplomat who worked in the Obama White House. “Part of it seems to stem from a worry that the contrast with the president’s energy and effectiveness on the campaign trail would be put in stark relief.”

People can complain about Trump’s arrant lies … but they won’t affect his support base. President Biden, on the other hand, will dissuade people from voting for him. In the end, it will give Trump the Presidency. It’s an outrageously stupid & dangerous gamble. 

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The DT article:

The Trump-Biden debate ✎

For those who haven’t seen it: CNN presidential debate.

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Biden lost completely

I have only v. serious doubts that President Biden is mentally sharp enough to be President after what we saw a few nights ago. This was not just a purported “cold” or “speech impediment”. Biden looked gone. And he is supposed to be occupying one of the most important and demanding roles for 4 years.

Everytime Biden glances at Trump .. it’s like he’s seeing him for the first time “😦”.

I felt sorry for him. He couldn’t even articulate a half-cogent counter-reply on abortion and Roe v Wade ... a softball question which he must have prepped for.

Without a script or teleprompter, he can barely recall a line or even a policy. I don’t think he knows half of it ... and it was clear he was also inventing statistics and making up stuff (e.g. on inflation or economy).

What a joke.

Trump won the debate, despite his (expected) flimflamming

WSJ had a v. interesting article covering the ridiculous exaggerations & near-hysterics from Trump during the debate. 

The Trump guilty verdict — some misgivings ✎

Incredible headline yesterday — to go in history. 

The NY jury found Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts.

A lot of people hate Trump. And for most people — as long as they agree with the result — they don’t really care about how it was obtained, or what the broader consequences might be. 

In my view, we should all care about the process. And, my provisional view is that there is something wrong with this conviction.

It feels like the law has been manipulated for political purposes.

I think Trump may have the last laugh on appeal.

Legal irregularities

Andrew McCarthy, at National Review (an anti-Trump publication), highlighted the many ways in which this case applies a wholly novel and flawed legal theory to Trump and suffers from major constitutional infirmities that will be raised on appeal. E.g., the jury instructions.

From my own readings, the obvious problems seem to be:

1. Prosecutor Bragg resuscitated a single misdemeanor — which could have been resolved with a fine etc. — and claimed that Mr Trump falsified business records in order to conceal “another crime” — which we later learned was supposed to be a “campaign finance” violation. This is because, by 2024, the statute of limitations for that false accounting charge had already expired. So, the prosecution “repackaged” it as a felony — arguing that the 2016 election had been rigged as a result of that false accounting. The felony — which has a much longer statute of limitations — is a violation of NY election law 17-152, which states that you cannot promote election “by unlawful means”. The “unlawful means” being the hush money payment.
2. Bragg’s team did not definitively state this until their closing arguments — and after the defence already addressed the court. The indictment failed to specify this crime (which it must under the constitution). God knows how, but Bragg was able to convict someone without telling them exactly what the crime was that they allegedly intended to commit. Therefore, Trump couldn’t defend himself properly. (Although, Tony Diver for DT has written about the “deny everything” flaw in Trump’s defence.)
3. Moreover, this is despite the fact that the DOJ and FEC have exclusive jurisdiction over campaign finance law (under the constitution), and had investigated this purported violation, and chose not to pursue it. Presumably because it was plain that Trump’s payment to Daniels did not qualify as a campaign expenditure.

Extra reading: vexatious prosecution

The WSJ has a very interesting editorial. The WSJ originally broke the hush-money story; and think Trump obviously committed that bit of sleaze. 

Broadly, the argument is that this was a targeted — if even malicious — prosecution. I’ve summarised the interesting bits:

Mr Bragg, an elected Democrat, ran for office as the man ready to take on Mr. Trump. When the new DA didn’t indict shortly after winning office, his top Trump prosecutors loudly quit, increasing the pressure on Mr. Bragg to do, well, something. Even after a guilty verdict, the case he ended up filing looks like a legal stretch.

To elevate these counts into felonies, the DA said Mr. Trump cooked the books with an intent to commit or cover up a second offence. What crime was that? At first Mr. Bragg was cagey. He eventually settled on a New York election law, rarely enforced, that prohibits conspiracies to promote political candidates “by unlawful means.” 

Yet what “unlawful means” did this alleged conspiracy use? The DA’s argument was that there were three: First, the hush money was effectively an illegally large donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Second, more business filings were falsified, including bank records for Mr. Cohen’s wire transfer to Ms. Daniels. Third, false statements were made to tax authorities, since Mr. Trump’s repayment of Mr. Cohen was structured as income and “grossed up” to cover the taxes he would need to pay on it.

In some ways this Russian nesting doll structure, to use another analogy, defies logic. Did Mr. Trump falsify business records in 2017 to cover up an illegal conspiracy to elect him in 2016, whose unlawful means included false information in Mr. Cohen’s tax return for 2017? There was hardly any direct evidence about Mr. Trump’s state of mind. Federal prosecutors squeezed a guilty plea out of Mr. Cohen but notably didn’t pursue Mr. Trump. One news report said the feds worried that his “lack of basic knowledge of campaign finance laws would make it hard to prove intent.”

A help to Mr. Bragg’s prosecution is that the jurors were instructed that as long as they were unanimous that Mr. Trump was guilty of falsifying business records to aid or cover up an illegal conspiracy to get him elected, they didn’t all have to agree about which theory of the “unlawful means” they found persuasive. Perhaps this will be taken up by Mr. Trump on appeal. He will almost certainly argue, too, that the Stormy pay-off wasn’t a campaign expense, as Brad Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, has been arguing all along.

We don’t doubt the sincerity of the Manhattan jurors, but many voters will digest all of this and conclude that, while Mr. Trump may be a cad, this conviction isn’t disqualifying for a second term in the White House. Judge Juan Merchan tolerated Mr. Bragg’s legal creativity in ways that an appeals court might not. What if Mr. Trump loses the election and then is vindicated on appeal? If Democrats think that too many Republicans today complain about stolen elections, imagine how many more might next year.

The state of America - how to overcome Trump and populism? ✎

America is in a serious political problem. 

My suspicion is that Trump is not particularly popular among right-wing politicians or conservatives. However, according to polls in the newspapers, he is enjoying - still - v. high approval ratings. He has a large and geographically spread out contingent of loyal supporters that will vote for him. I think this comes from populists, not conservatives; and that popularity allows them to dominate the Republican party. And they tend to be fanatical & extremely loud about it (and the elected officials who follow him also tend to be similarly dumb).

We're in an age of American populism; and it's not clear how the American political system can return to "normality" any time soon. Trump is so far ahead in the polls that he doesn't need to debate with the other candidates in the Republican primary debates. That's ridiculous. According to Tim Stanley (below), they're just been sitting back, and pledging their support to him while - no doubt - hoping his campaign implodes under his legal woes.

The American two-party system serves the established party platforms. Most people don't fit perfectly in a given camp, and tend to pick the least worst option. Both parties have populists, and they used to side with Democrats, but have recently enjoyed the Republicans. They usually sat at the back of the bus with conservatives in the driver's seat. If Trump wins the Republican nomination, then the populists will be in the driver's seat. And his polls suggest he enjoys very broad support.

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