WITH JUDSON BERGER

December 09 2023

WITH JUDSON BERGER

December 09 2023

Can Anything Change the Trajectory of the GOP Race before Iowa?

Dear Weekend Jolter,

Ron DeSantis had his face-off with Gavin Newsom. Mike Pence dropped out, then Tim Scott dropped out. The four candidates who made the cut just had what is, for now, the last RNC-sanctioned debate before voting in the 2024 Republican primary cycle begins (CNN has since scheduled one unsanctioned, pre-Iowa debate).

And the polls have barely budged, save for some upward movement by Nikki Haley.

The pessimistic view is that, at this stage, the only thing that can change the trajectory of this race is the scenario that happens to be the one Newsom and DeSantis share as their most viable path to power: a major health event for the front-runner.

NR's Audrey Fahlberg was in Iowa last weekend reporting on dueling campaign events held by DeSantis and Donald Trump. This was her impression:

With about six weeks to go, the Florida governor's odds of overtaking the former president in Iowa next month look longer than ever. . . . His rally [in Newton] marked his completion of the "full Grassley," a nod to Republican senator Chuck Grassley's famous tradition of visiting all of Iowa's 99 counties every year.

And though it's an impressive feat, the excitement level in Newton on Saturday afternoon paled in comparison with the production that Trump put on earlier that day at an even smaller venue in Ankeny, where many supporters acted more like they were at a sports game than a political event: whooping and cheering throughout the former president's speech and standing atop tables to snap photos.

DeSantis and Haley, still, are pressing whatever advantages they possess, in the hopes that an early, upset win could shatter the inevitability aura surrounding Trump, thus resetting the board.

Haley recently pocketed the endorsement of Koch-affiliated Americans for Prosperity Action. More relevant to the first voting state, DeSantis pocketed those of Iowa governor Kim Reynolds and conservative leader Bob Vander Plaats. The Florida governor just completed visits to all 99 of Iowa's counties — and, as Audrey also reports, he's visiting Iowa churches as he works to forge a deeper connection with the state's Evangelicals.

Erick Erickson made the bold prediction a few days ago that DeSantis is actually likely to win Iowa. He cited the political and Evangelical machines of Reynolds and Vander Plaats, respectively (Vander Plaats "does not lose" when it comes to picking caucus candidates, as Noah Rothman recently reminded everyone), as well as the way DeSantis could take advantage of the caucus system's quirks. Henry Olsen made similar points a few weeks back, noting "Iowa's habit of late breaks" in suggesting — though not predicting — that DeSantis could defy the polls there. "If there's a formula for winning Iowa," Dan McLaughlin writes, "DeSantis has checked all the boxes, built all the organization, and done all the work."

And yet. The rift among the non-Trump candidates makes the task of building a coalition to topple him all the more difficult. GOP donors are moving toward Haley as their preferred Trump alternative now, and Wednesday's debate showed the former South Carolina governor, not Florida's, drawing much of the fire (“I love all the attention, fellas" was one of her better lines). Phil Klein noted on our debate liveblog that the not-Trumps, at this stage, need either the polls to be way off or an "earthquake." The debate didn't provide one — and how could it, with Trump depriving everybody on stage of any chance for a breakout by staying off of it?

Capturing the sheer lunacy of our political moment, Phil recently observed that for Trump's front-runner status, it's not the tactics or the missteps of rival candidates making the difference. No: "It's the indictments, stupid." More criminal charges make him stronger.

And, to repurpose Lewis Black — if you think about that sentence for more than three minutes, you'll self-inflict an aneurysm.

* * *

A few months back, this newsletter cautioned that "there's no controlling the Hunter Biden damage." The first son's trail of wreckage is just too messy. The latest indictment certainly demonstrates this to be the case. Per Andy McCarthy, the charges are a disaster for the president too. Read more here. And below.

NAME. RANK. LINK.

EDITORIALS

Bastions of free speech these universities are not. And yet, their administrations have suddenly become absolutists: University Presidents' Abhorrent Hypocrisy on Anti-Jewish Speech

The Biden administration thinks now is a good time to show (to borrow a term) 'daylight' with Israel: Kamala Harris's Performative Scolding of Israel

Better to be prepared than not: Republicans Need to Get to Work on Health Care

ARTICLES

Andrew McCarthy: The Hunter Biden Tax Indictment Is a Disaster for the White House

Andrew McCarthy: Double-Barrel Defeats for Trump on Immunity

Henry Olsen: How the 'Young Guns' Failed

Brittany Bernstein: Bank Records Show Direct Monthly Payment from Hunter Biden's Corporation to Joe Biden

Caroline Downey: Detransitioners Speak Out: Hear Their Stories on NR's New Podcast

Eyal Yakoby: Penn's Disgraceful Inaction on Campus Antisemitism

Jimmy Quinn: Witnesses Confirm Rape, Beheadings, 'Systematic Genital Mutilation' by Hamas

Noah Rothman: Fire the Insurrectionary Interns

Erielle Davidson: The Cruelty Was the Point

Zach Kessel: Pro-Palestinian Protesters Mob Jewish-Owned Philadelphia Falafel Restaurant

Michael Brendan Dougherty: Cancel the Ivies

Charles C. W. Cooke: Biden the Liar

Jay Nordlinger: The Trump effect, &c.

Stanisław Żaryn: The West Must Hold Strong in Its Support for Ukraine

Rich Lowry: The Dumbest Betrayal

Ramesh Ponnuru: Politico Botches a Hit

Jack Butler: The Long, Deleterious Afterlife of Covid Restrictions

CAPITAL MATTERS

Dominic Pino has an idea for what to do with all that unspent Covid-relief money: Congress Must Rescind the 'Bidenomics Slush Fund'

LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.

Yes, Travis Bickle, Armond White is talkin' to you: De Niro Goes Off-Teleprompter, Off-Script, Off Rocker

Brian Allen returns to Fort Worth, for a better experience than the last time: Milkweed, Fire, and Flowers: An Artist's Take on the Texas Grasslands

EXCERPTS/SIDE A

Henry Olsen's piece following on Kevin McCarthy's retirement announcement is an obit of sorts, for a class of fresh-faced Republicans you might recall were once highly touted:

Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy's announcement that he will resign from the chamber at the end of the year concludes the "Young Guns" era. Once touted as the party's future, McCarthy and his onetime comrades in arms — former speaker Paul Ryan and former house majority leader Eric Cantor — will be all out of office and on the outs with their party's voters.

Their failure to create the GOP of their dreams would be cautionary enough. Combined with the continuing failure of the Republicans who unseated them to construct a durable, governing alternative, it's a tale of how a party that loses touch with its voters can wander aimlessly for years.

None of this was expected in the heady days of 2010. Cantor, Ryan, and McCarthy were all House members under 50 — hence "young guns" — and all were on the rise. As the Amazon description of their jointly authored book states, Cantor was supposed to be the future speaker, Ryan the intellectual who provided policy guidance, and McCarthy the savvy political strategist to power their drive for a majority. Their aim was simple: Embody the spirit of the Tea Party and use political power to renew America's economic growth and entrepreneurial spirit.

As referenced above, university presidents who testified this week about the importance of free speech on campus don't have the record that suggests this is anything but a limited, case-sensitive embrace of that value — now that anti-Jewish protests and threats are at issue. From NR's editorial:

Asked yesterday by Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) whether students who call for "intifada" or shout "from the river to the sea" were acting "contrary to Harvard's code of conduct," Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, struck a notably enlightened pose. Such "hateful, reckless, offensive speech," Gay insisted, was "abhorrent" to her personally, and "at odds with the values of Harvard." But she could not in good conscience move to do anything about it, given Harvard's "commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful."

Ah.

The first problem with Gay's answer (which was not fixed by a subsequent clean-up attempt) is that it is a brazen lie. Harvard does not, in fact, "embrace a commitment to free expression." It does not tolerate views that its speech police consider to be "objectionable, offensive, hateful." And, as the plain language of its own policies makes clear, it does not endure opinions that are contrary to its "values." There is, of course, a strong case to be made for the university as an incubator of all ideas. Were Harvard known for a consistent liberalism, it might be able to defend the indulgence of students who chant "intifada" at their peers. But Harvard is not known for any such thing. On the contrary: Harvard is known for sanctioning scholars, for revoking acceptances, for disinviting academics, and for having created an environment in which students feel unable to share their beliefs. Per the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Harvard's score in the Free Speech Rankings is an "abysmal" "0.00 out of a possible 100.00." In its latest evaluation, FIRE accorded Harvard a "-10.69," which, the outfit recorded, is "more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below the second-to-last school in the rankings, its Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania."

Pressed by lawmakers, the president of Penn, M. Elizabeth Magill, was equally keen to wax lyrical about the joys of permissive deliberation. Judging whether or not to crack down on those who demand the genocide of Jews, Magill proposed, is "a context-dependent decision."

Picking up where last weekend's newsletter left off: Jimmy Quinn reports on a U.N. event organized by Israel's mission to the body, providing graphic testimony on Hamas's violence against women. This is difficult to get through, but the testimony is important in the face of relative silence — or equivocation — from too many women's groups and the U.N. itself:

Yael Richert, chief superintendent of the Israeli Police's Lahav 433 unit, described some of the horrifying testimony that her colleagues have gathered so far. Referring to an interview with a survivor of the Nova music festival, she said: "Everything was an apocalypse of corpses. Girls without any clothes on . . . without underwear. People cut in half, butchered, some were beheaded.

"There were girls with a broken pelvis, due to repetitive rapes. Their legs were spread wide apart in a split." Other survivors said that girls were pulled out of shelters, raped, then burned.

She also cited a police officer as saying that he had to stop his car at one point because there was a baby's cradle full of blood on the road, with a naked woman lying next to a dead baby. "She was naked, badly injured, bullets in her body." Richert referred to testimony from numerous other witnesses who saw dead women without underwear.

And Richert played a video from an interview that police conducted with a Nova survivor. That witness said she saw Hamas members shoot at victims' sexual organs. "They had a thing with sexual organs, both in woman and in man." In the clips, the witness said she saw a Hamas gunman rape a woman, amputate her breasts, then throw them onto the road.

Shari Mendez, a Jerusalem-based architect by training and IDF reserve morgue staff member involved in preparing the remains of female victims, called the toll of the massacre "unimaginable," citing the cruelty of the atrocities that she and others witnessed. Mendez said she saw victims who had been shot in several places and speculated that Hamas had deliberately mutilated the faces of some of the victims, based on the facial injuries that she saw.

Mendez said she saw evidence of sexual violence. "Many young women arrived in bloody, shredded rags and just in underwear, and their underwear was often very bloody. Our team commander saw several female soldiers who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in the breast," she said. "There seemed to be systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims."

"We saw several severed heads, one with a large kitchen knife still embedded in the neck," she said, adding that it was challenging to identify charred remains.

Another speaker, Simcha Greiniman from the first-responder group ZAKA, choked up and paused — someone on the dais at the front of the room handed him a glass of water — as he tried to describe what he saw as he walked into one house that had been targeted by Hamas.

We ran a piece this week by Stanisław Żaryn, an official in the Polish government. Hear his warnings about Russia's ultimate aims:

The specter of Russian imperialism has been hanging over Europe for a long time. However, for many years, some circles and states did not accept this, considering that it was possible to cooperate with Russia and even to build their own economic and political power on this very cooperation. The situation only changed when Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, which forced a shift in the West's attitude and policies toward Moscow. Today, however, after almost two years of war in Ukraine, there is a growing risk of another reset and a return to talks about future relations between Russia and the West. Sensing this opportunity, the Kremlin has recently stepped up measures calculated to force "negotiations" with Ukraine aimed at freezing the war in place.

This scenario represents a dangerous trap. In essence, after all, the "freezing" of the front would mean a practical recognition of the Russian occupation of Ukrainian soil, a kind of acceptance of war as a legitimate tool of Russian policy. Additionally, it would open the way for further pressure on the West and the corruption of those used to lobby for a return of business relations with Russia. And it would create a propaganda trap — if Ukraine launched a counteroffensive after the conflict had been frozen, it would become the aggressor who violated the terms of the truce accepted by the world.

The growing emphasis on negotiations and a frozen front may benefit Russia in many ways. It gives it a chance to press for the lifting of sanctions and for further actions to increase the potential for aggression. At the same time, Moscow will be able to appease the West with the prospect of "ending the war," which will be received with relief by many.

At the same time, the intelligence on the Kremlin's strategic plans leaves no room for doubt: Russia has embarked on an imperial course intended to stretch over many years and is consistently seeking to expand its aggressive military capabilities. This is evident in Russia's economic situation and structure. Western sanctions have not had a significant impact on Russia's war-making capability; the Kremlin has succeeded in finding new sources of funding, building new political and economic alliances, and finding ways to neutralize and circumvent sanctions. As a result, the Kremlin has been able to keep increasing spending on the modernization of its military capabilities. In next year's budget, the Russian government is planning to increase military spending to 6 percent of GDP (10.8 trillion rubles, or $112 billion) from the current 3.9 percent (6.4 trillion rubles, or $70.1 billion). Russia's continuing military buildup should, in time, allow it to continue the offensive against Ukraine or to threaten another state — perhaps a NATO member.

Shout-Outs

Cara Lombardo, Louise Radnofsky, and Andrew Beaton, at the Wall Street Journal: Jon Rahm Is Set to Join Saudi-Backed LIV Golf

Aaron Sibarium, at the Washington Free Beacon: Anti-Semitism Hearing Highlights Ivy League Hypocrisy on Free Speech

Ken LaCorte, on Substack: And then?

CODA

I'm not sure how many times I can get away with plugging a Steven Wilson song at the end of this newsletter, but dammit, I'm going to do it again. "Drive Home" is gorgeous all around, but guitarist Guthrie Govan's solo around the five-minute mark makes it. According to various accounts of the recording session, he did it in one take, and the seamless sound you hear is courtesy of a type of pickup that produces basically infinite sustain.

Happy listening, and thanks for reading.