Dear Weekend Jolter,
It is said that Donald Trump is fortunate in his enemies. Consider this another advantage Kamala Harris has taken from him in the cruel summer of 2024. The presumptive Democratic nominee would be heading into her party's convention next week on the back foot — were it not for her opponent.
The Democrat's campaign betrays a lack of confidence in several respects. Harris continues to evade the press save for 71-second encounters, she has reversed a whole suite of policy positions to suit general-election purposes with little explanation, she’s adopted her rival's bad tax proposal, she’s reprised the administration’s war on price-gouging to distract from its record on inflation, her campaign is reportedly rewriting news headlines and descriptions in Google ads, and it just produced a bizarre spot casting her as a merciless border hawk despite the all-hands effort to memory-hole her border portfolio as VP.
But exuberant crowds, equally exuberant media coverage, and polling don't register any of this.
That is, in part, a reflection of the lasting euphoria Democrats have allowed their voters to experience by doing what every poll told them to and ditching Joe Biden, and of the media's trading their role of chronicler for that of the ticket's in-house press shop.
It is also a reflection of how Republicans don't have a nominee capable of busting the myth of Kamala Harris. The gaseous feel-goodery of a movement that the Democratic ticket is cramming together from "joy"-huffing factions of what used to be a coalition can only be countered by a campaign of substance. Donald Trump is not running one, notwithstanding his statistic-heavy press conference in Bedminster on Thursday. He is, instead, playing into exactly the contrast the Democratic ticket hopes to strike, and will surely strike in Chicago next week if the convention isn't drowned out by anti-Israel theatrics.
Granted, his press conference in New Jersey had more meat (literally, figuratively) than the one at Mar-a-Lago a week earlier. Say what you will about the cereal boxes, sausages, and other food props he displayed while rattling off inflation figures; at least he was using them to talk about kitchen-table issues (literally). But this sort of demonstration is more the exception than the rule. Soon, Trump will return to falsely claiming his rival "A.I.'d" a fake crowd at an airport. Or to making fun of Senator Jon Tester's stomach. Or to going after the popular GOP governor of Georgia or hitting Harris for not committing to a single racial identity. Nikki Haley's critique — "you can't win on those things" — is correct.
Trump's first press conference, in Florida, was a prime opportunity for the Republican nominee to contrast his command of the facts and willingness to meet the press with his opponent's (Jim Geraghty imagines here what could have been). Instead, he botched a story about Willie Brown, whined about Harris's "border czar" performance without elaborating, pitched his plan to save Social Security by depriving it of funding, oddly described Biden's spending spree as "all of the different borrowings that he did," and tried to hit Tim Walz's record as Minnesota governor by . . . talking about former Virginia governor Ralph Northam.
Donald Trump is like Bill Clinton in all of the bad ways and none of the good ways. The Trump of today speaks in his own shorthand, as Dan McLaughlin writes — a language indecipherable to most. He has proposed three debates with Kamala Harris. Phil Klein warns, "If Trump doesn't sharpen his attacks in the coming weeks, he could very well get smoked when they face off."
It was on Twitter/X, of all places, that voters caught a glimpse of a Trump campaign message that could actually stick, posing the Reaganesque question, "Are you better off?" "If he is going to turn around his bid, he'll need to do more of this and less of what he has been doing," writes Charlie Cooke. ". . . Naturally, I have absolutely no confidence that Trump can do this."
Meantime, the mood of the Democratic Party no longer funereal, Kamala Harris is about to blow the roof off the United Center. The campaign just announced a $90 million media buy through the end of the month targeting battleground voters. Mark Wright predicts the convention's fawning media coverage on top of it will only sustain her surge.
Practically overnight, and with Trump as her opponent, Harris has flipped the Democrats' liabilities on their head through the audacious act of not being the sitting president. Trump is now the candidate for whom age is an issue. Trump is now the candidate tagged as representing the past. And until Harris is forced to return to the public eye, unscripted, Trump is the candidate who's out there bumbling and rambling and mixing up his facts.
With an enemy like this, who needs allies?
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Finally, Columbia's president has figured out how to fold up a tent. (Full disclosure: That joke is stolen wholesale from the Week.): Good Riddance to Minouche Shafik
"When Donald Trump and Kamala Harris agree on something, it's wise to exercise caution." So true: Harris Swipes a Bad Idea from Trump
What happens in Europe doesn't necessarily stay there, as far as speech regulation is concerned: The Long Arm of Europe's Crackdown on Speech
ARTICLES
Audrey Fahlberg: Kamala Harris Will Ride the Earned-Media Wave to Chicago
Jeffrey Blehar: The Harris Campaign's Hubris May Be on the Verge of Breeding Nemesis
Steve Delie: An Unconstitutional Agency May Finally Meet Its End
Noah Rothman: Kamala Harris's First Policy Proposal Is Economically Illiterate
Veronique de Rugy: President Harris. Same as Senator Harris
Dominic Pino: The UAW's Ludicrous Case against Trump and Musk Is a Free-Speech Tragedy
Dominic Pino: Team USA Owns the Summer Olympics
Haley Strack: The Feminist Breakdancer Who Lost the Olympics
Charles C. W. Cooke: Flying Is Getting Bloody Miserable
Zach Kessel: 'So Unimaginable and So Abhorrent': Federal Judge Orders UCLA to Stop Aiding Activists Enforcing Jew-Free Zones on Campus
Adrian Karatnycky: The Ukrainian Invasion of Russia Is a Game-Changer
Melissa Langsam Braunstein: The Reeducation of Josh Shapiro
Abigail Anthony: U.K. Nursing Organization Allows Members to Refuse Treatment for Racist Patients
James Lynch: Progressive L.A. Prosecutor George Gascón Accused of Forcing Deputy to Hide Evidence Against Sex Predator
James Lynch: The Massachusetts Health Department Declared War on Pregnancy Centers. Mothers Are Fighting Back
Jimmy Quinn: Chinese 'Friendship' Group Ramps Up U.S. Outreach with Government Blessing, Despite Intel Warning
CAPITAL MATTERS
Desmond Lachman, on Russia's self-inflicted inflation: Russia Has an Inflation Problem
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White, on the return of M. Night: Trap Goes Easy on Our Ensnarement
Brian Allen is writing about Impressionism at 150. Here, he's doing Degas, via a small show at the Clark Art Institute: Degas and Impressionism: A Thorny Artist Makes for a Quirky Show
THESE EXCERPTS ARE SO BRAT
A word (or more) from Noah Rothman on Kamala Harris's anti-"price-gouging" crusade:
That sounds a lot like a series of proposals Joe Biden outlined in his February State of the Union address, during and after which the president attacked companies that raise prices in response to macroeconomic conditions or attempt to meet demand by reducing the amount of product available for the same price — what Biden deemed "shrinkflation." You remember that, right? Of course, you don't! Because nothing at all came of it. It was a rank pander to the economically illiterate. And despite the presence of many who fit that description in the federal legislature, there are enough members of Congress who understand that allowing the executive branch to functionally set prices is a braindead idea that would only hurt consumers in the long run.
Harris is, in effect, attacking high prices for being high as though they increased in a vacuum. She is not addressing the economic inducements that lead to upward pressure on prices. Her formulation is that of Elizabeth Warren, who has had an outsized influence on the Biden White House's economic thinking. In the progressive imagination, prices increase because rapacious corporations seek to maximize profits (a theory that has no explanatory power when prices decline, but consistency is a hobgoblin and all that).
That's not what inflation is. Simply put, inflation is too much money chasing after too few goods. Rising prices are a market signal that creates incentives for firms to meet specific demands, which is why "the cure for high prices is high prices" is a truism. High costs (coupled with increased borrowing rates) limit demand to meet existing supplies, creating a cycle that eventually yields price stability. Distorting the price mechanism may keep prices low, but it also eliminates incentives for companies to meet demand where it exists. The result is a hopelessly dysfunctional economy typified by artificially low prices for goods that are poorly distributed and harder to find. By specifically targeting sectors like food production, which operate on thin margins even in the best of times, this policy would increase pressure on those firms to downsize. In the end, the Harris plan would yield less opportunity for individuals and limit the prospects for economic growth.
In short, Harris's proposal is not legislatively viable. It, like her no-tax-on-tips plan, is a ploy to misdirect the attention of the press away from the Biden administration-backed fiscal policies that contributed to inflation in the first place.
And from Veronique de Rugy, on the same:
In a relatively substance-free election season, the few policy ideas we hear are terrible. But now VP Harris has come up with the dumbest policy of them all: federal price controls. . . .
It is crazy. I can't think of an issue that has as little support among economists on the right, the center, and the left as price-control regulations (including rent control, which was pushed by Biden a few weeks ago, anti-price-gouging measures, and similar policies). It is especially silly as a way to fight inflation.
The economic literature is full of examples showing how attempts to cool inflation with price controls caused economic calamity. From the ancient Roman Republic, as Dominic Pino reminds us, to modern-day Venezuela, price controls bring the same disastrous results.
It is also politically idiotic. As Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post notes, a federal price-control policy isn't such a great message to run with when you have Donald Trump and J. D. Vance breathing down your neck.
ICYMI, a federal judge expressed the proper level of shock at campus treatment toward Jewish students, in this case at UCLA. Zach Kessel reports:
A Los Angeles federal district court ordered the University of California, Los Angeles, to stop allowing and assisting in self-described pro-Palestinian activists' creation of what amount to Jew-free zones on campus, holding that the university may not offer classes if Jewish students are prohibited from participating in the programming.
Those who occupied encampments on the university's property disallowed Jews from passing through the quad unless they would disavow Israel and, by extension, their Jewish faith. UCLA's position had been that the encampments preventing Jewish students from accessing certain areas of campus were not its responsibility.
Despite that contention, the university erected metal barriers around the encampment and directed Jewish students to leave, according to a lawsuit.
"In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith," Judge Mark C. Scarsi wrote on Tuesday. "This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion."
Team USA continues to dominate the summer games, as a national side hobby. Dominic Pino puts America's performance in perspective:
The United States won the most medals in the Summer Olympics, which concluded Sunday, continuing a streak that stretches back to the 2012 games. Team USA had 126 medals, 35 ahead of second-place China. It tied with China for most golds at 40, but won the tiebreaker with a 44–27 edge in silvers.
Looking back, America's dominance of the Summer Olympics is astonishing. Yet it's even more a testament to the greatness of the U.S. that Americans manage to win medal after medal without obsessing over the games like totalitarian states do.
Team USA has won the most medals at 19 of the 28 Summer Olympics that have awarded them, going back to 1904. The Soviet Union won the most medals six times. No other country has done it more than once.
The gap in total medal count is comical. The U.S. has won 2,755 Summer Olympics medals all time. In second place is the Soviet Union with 1,010. The Soviets won more medals per Summer Olympics they participated in, but they cheated in basically everything, and the U.S. solved that problem by ending their country. In second place among countries that still exist is Great Britain with 981.
The gap between the U.S. and the rest in specific sports is still more impressive. The U.S. has 861 all-time medals in track and field; Great Britain is second with 220. Three-hundred fifty-eight of those American medals are gold; no other country has more than 64.
In swimming, the U.S. rivalry with Australia is fierce at any given games. But the gap between the two best swimming nations is still huge. The U.S. has 615 medals in swimming; Australia has 230.
In shooting, which doesn't usually receive much attention, the U.S. is the all-time leader with 121 medals. China is second with 77. Team USA's 91 rowing medals are also the most all-time, and it is tied with Great Britain for the most rowing golds at 34. The U.S. even has the most gold medals all-time in soccer, and only Brazil has more total medals in the world's most popular sport (ten vs. nine). . . .
Individual U.S. states would be among the top medal-winners at this year's Olympics. Athletes who listed California as their home state won 50 medals, which would be sixth-best of any country, ahead of Japan or Germany.
The Houston Chronicle looked at athletes who are either from Texas or train in Texas. They won 18 gold medals and 43 total medals, which, respectively, would be fourth-most and seventh-most of any nation at the Paris games.
Athletes from the Los Angeles metro area won 27 medals, the same number as all of Canada and seven more than all of Brazil. Athletes from the Indianapolis area (population: 2 million) won eight medals, two more than India (population: 1.5 billion).
And on the subject of flying, Charlie is 100 percent right here. The whole experience has become terrible:
I've always loved flying. Historically, if I could fly somewhere, I would. Back when I lived in New York, I used to fly to Washington, D.C., rather than take the train, because, as I've outlined on many occasions on The Editors podcast, trains are annoying and anachronistic and a little bit communist, and they ought by rights to be destroyed with tanks and missiles by the assembled U.S. military. (Rollercoasters do not in any sense count as trains, and I will duel anyone who disagrees.) It has been my long-held opinion that there exist only two good ways to travel: by car and by plane. If the distance is relatively short, or you have enough time to enjoy the journey, cars are your best bet. If you're going a long way, or you need to be there stat, planes are your friend. Boats, buses, hovercraft, dirigibles — they can all stuff it.
But even I am beginning to lose my patience with what has become of air travel in recent months. Since April of this year, I have taken just one flight that was not either canceled or delayed for more than four hours. The rest of them — that's 17 in total — have been a disaster. Over the last six months, I have come to view my chance of taking the flight that I have booked in the same way as I viewed organizing a backyard barbeque when I lived at the mercy of the English weather: It could happen, but, in all likelihood, it won't. On flying days — or, rather, on days when I am scheduled to fly — I have grown to dread the buzz of my phone, which, invariably, arrives to tell me that my flight has been canceled or delayed and that my options are thus to request a refund or to rebook myself onto an alternative route that nobody but Marco Polo would consider interesting.
If I'm extremely lucky, the "when?" part of the rebooking equation is, "in five hours, so you'll need to sleep in Dallas tonight." Usually, though, it's not. Usually, it's "never," or, at best, "in three days, if you're willing to go via Azerbaijan." So ridiculous have the answers to my question of "when?" become, in fact, that, on three recent occasions, I have thrown my hands up and driven the whole way instead. In May, I drove from Phoenix to Jacksonville, Fla. In July, I drove from New York City to Washington, D.C. Last week, I drove from North Florida to Richmond, Va. I would happily have driven on some of the other occasions, too, but for the fact that doing so would not have helped me, because I'd have arrived at my destination after the event to which I was headed had finished. . . .
The question is, "Compared to a year ago, what is flying like?" And the answer to that one is, "It's completely bloody miserable, actually."
CODA
You know what's a great Paul Simon album? From his solo career, I mean. Yes, Graceland was, and is, great, a musical statement. But I think his follow-up, The Rhythm of the Saints, is better. "The Cool, Cool River" is one of my favorites. The way it dramatically builds and then casually fades away is, well — cool.
Enjoy those last bursts of summer, and thanks for reading.
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