Dear Weekend Jolter,
That sound you don't hear is the Resistance. It's the protests that struggle to galvanize followers. It's the media exposés drowned out by the sound of Joe and Mika's car cruising along Florida highways to Mar-a-Lago for a sit-down. It's the foreign backlash made petty by Donald Trump's red-carpet treatment as the already-president at the Élysée.
As his improbable second term comes into view, a testament to how muted the anti-Trump resistance has become is that one of the biggest acts of defiance to date is congressional Democrats' reported plans to boycott his inauguration. "More than a dozen" plan to sit it out, Axios reports.
More than a dozen — or 2.4 percent of Congress.
Though the president-elect's candidacy was opposed in apocalyptic terms, ambivalence appears to characterize the resist-Trump movement now that he has won — a far cry from the reaction in 2017, when the Women's March mobilization turned out hundreds of thousands in Washington and millions worldwide, and the administration faced a historic onslaught of multi-state lawsuits. It's still early, and Trump's looming inauguration could yet spark a new wave of demonstrations (at least one such protest is planned). A late-January burst of executive orders and decrees that test the bounds of presidential power could jolt Democrats into action. But, as Jim Geraghty already observed, something about the resistance seems — well, "exhausted."
Understandably so. As Jim wrote,
Trump won the second-highest number of votes for president ever cast, no one's questioning the legitimacy of his victory, Democrats in the Senate are signing off on some of his cabinet picks, and he starts his second term with at least an initially high approval rating. Trump may not be normal, but he's starting to look normalized.
Some have marched in protest of Trump's victory, but a sense of resignation pervades their labor. His critics see his election as appalling — but not illegitimate, this time, as Jim also observed Tuesday on The Editors. This month, for the first time since he invaded politics, Trump notched a net-positive favorability rating, according to the RCP average. As for the media coverage of his second ascent to power, Rich Lowry writes, “Since his rise in 2015, this is the least hostility toward, and least heavy breathing about, Trump that we've ever witnessed, and he's about to embark on four years in power with fewer ‘guardrails’ than the first time around.”
The resistance appears to be gearing up for at least subdued defiance in 2025, even if it's driven in part by 2028 presidential aspirations. The Economist predicts the state-level pushback will play out in three parts: "litigation, legislation and state-centred foreign policies." (Forgive the British spelling.) Litigation may be the most visible, as blue-state governors and attorneys general battle Trump anew on immigration, environmental rules, and more. Governor Gavin Newsom, one of the 2028 prospects, is already leading the charge after calling a special session to Trump-proof California, requesting $25 million for a state litigation fund "to defend California from unconstitutional federal overreach, challenge illegal federal actions in court, and take administrative actions to reduce potential harm."
At the local level, Boston recently voted to retain its "sanctuary" status, signaling it will keep its relationship with ICE frosty in a Trump second term, as Haley Strack reports. The president of Wesleyan University, for what it's worth, has pledged a similar policy of non-cooperation on immigration. Taking a drastically different approach, New York City mayor Eric Adams says he plans to be "working" and not "warring" with the Trump administration, voicing a willingness to cooperate on deporting illegal immigrants who have committed violent crimes — and meeting with Trump's incoming border czar. (The cooperation may be, um, reciprocal.)
How emboldened the Resistance 2.0 really becomes in 2025 and beyond may depend on Trump. As Rich has cautioned, "the most foreseeable early pitfall for the Trump presidency would be an effort to go after his adversaries" in a "campaign of counter-lawfare." Trump recently signaled his continuing interest in legal retribution by suing, of all people, an Iowa pollster (over a bad poll), a move Jeff Blehar justifiably decries as "punishment by process” and “an exercise in public relations, not justice in any sense our laws properly recognize."
As tempting as it may be for the incoming president to abuse the justice system as his reply to what he sees as abuse of the justice system, it would be inflammatory for the country. If he does, the resistance could rebound. State-level litigation, for one, seems inevitable, but Democrats should also be careful not to fight those policies that are broadly popular (and morally sound), such as deporting illegal-immigrant violent criminals and restricting gender-transition procedures for minors — even if Trump's name is associated with them. This would only perpetuate the impression that their party is out of touch, and risk their losing another election cycle for it.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
It was a lie: The Further Vindication of the Duke Lacrosse Players
Biden should resist the activists, for once: Don't Use Pardons to Nullify the Death Penalty
It works, and it is ours: Keep the Electoral College
Don't go wobbly: Trump Should Make TikTok American
ARTICLES
Charles C. W. Cooke: The Political Opportunists Are Making This a Silly Season to Remember
Charles C. W. Cooke: Contrast the WSJ Piece on Biden's Senility with Kamala Harris's Lies about It
Jeffrey Blehar: After the Biden Revelations, of What Value Is the Mainstream Political Media?
Mark Krikorian: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Venezuela?
Caroline Downey: ACLU Sues Washington Department of Corrections to Return Male Felon to Women's Prison
Rich Lowry: Trump Is Right about Creating a U.S. Iron Dome
Jim Geraghty: New Jersey Bedeviled: Four Possible Explanations for the Nonstop Drone Sightings
John Fund: Both Parties Are Driving the Runaway Social Security Insolvency Train
Noah Rothman: Biden Prods Progressives to Rescue His Legacy from History's Gutter
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Ireland's Alarming Antisemitism
James Lynch: USDA Planned to Give Millions to Nonprofit behind Risky Wuhan Bat Research as Recently as This Year
Lathan Watts: Bhattacharya's Battle for NIH Is Worth Fighting
Audrey Fahlberg: GOP Hawks Hope Trump Can Thread the Needle on TikTok: Preserve U.S. Access While Sidelining the CCP
David Zimmermann: Judge Allows Derek Chauvin's Legal Team to Inspect George Floyd's Heart to Test Alternative Theory
Jack Butler: Transgender Activists Don't Deserve the Moral High Ground
Haley Strack: The Lily Phillips Tragedy
Jay Nordlinger: 'The Sheer Stamina of Evil'
CAPITAL MATTERS
DOGE is not necessarily a new idea in Washington. John Hendrickson looks to the past, for insight as to how it could succeed this time: Herbert Hoover's Quest to Roll Back the Federal Government: A Lesson for the DOGE
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White, on an iconic actor's centennial: Brando, Our Greatest, Most Honest Liar
Brian Allen keeps it local this week: A Christmas Tale of My Local Museums
FROM THE NEW, FEBRUARY 2025 ISSUE OF NR
Ramesh Ponnuru: Why Bill Buckley's Ideas Still Matter
Andrew Ferguson: The Elements of Buckley's Style
James Rosen: Life of the Party
Matthew Continetti: Up from Kookery
Amity Shlaes: Impresario of the Free Market
Andrew Stuttaford: Trump Must End the War on Cars
Jack Butler: What Are 42 Heads of State Doing in Croaker, Virginia?
EVERGREEN EXCERPTS WHOSE NEEDLES WON'T FALL OFF
The new issue of NR is out, and it's something very special — a tribute to Buckley, for his centennial. Many great minds have been involved in this project, and Mark Wright can walk you through some of the highlights here. To start? How about Andrew Ferguson's dazzling essay:
The letter writer, signing himself (surely not herself) merely as "Fellow Conservative," had a grievance with William F. Buckley. The year was 1977, nearly 40 years ago, long before conservatives began making grievance their daily meat.
"You are one of the leading conservatives in this country," this Fellow began his letter, "but you wear your hair like a way-out liberal hippy." The incongruity between Buckley's lapidary political views and his untidy appearance was simply too much for the letter writer to square. "If you really are conservative," Fellow concluded, "why don't you make yourself look like one?"
Buckley replied with a wryly ironic humble-brag — "If I were also good looking, don't you think it would be just too much?" — and the letter was duly reprinted in NR's "Notes and Asides" department. At the time, I was a way-out liberal hippy myself, though we members of the way-out wing of hippiedom preferred the -ie suffix, even in the singular. Anyway, all of my way-out liberal hipp(ie) friends who gave the matter any thought agreed with Fellow Conservative: This Buckley, so unavoidable on television and in the newspapers, was hard to figure.
Watching him on Firing Line all those years ago, we couldn't stop wondering, "Does he try to look like that?" The hair, sometimes long, sometimes short, was never combed the same way twice, as though a rotation of barbers, each with a different tonsorial philosophy, lined up to take a whack at it from week to week. His everyday dress was conventional enough, except in its execution. In those days he was walking proof of a once undisputed principle — that if one is to be untidy, it is more appealing to be untidy in a suit and tie than in a T-shirt and cargo pants. (If nothing else you got points for trying.) The tie, knotted casually in a four-in-hand, never failed to be tugged akimbo, emerging from the button-down collar at varying angles and directions, and knotted either too loose or too tight. The suit may or may not have been ill-fitting; it was hard to tell, as we viewers mostly saw it and him as he lay recumbent in his infinitely reclinable host chair, nearly parallel to the floor.
The style wasn't tweedy enough for "absent-minded professor," nor was it self-conscious enough for "pre-postmodern novelist," and it definitely wasn't Wall Street banker, not even in aspirational form. It was sui generis, but it wasn't easy to guess what this sui's particular generis was. While his sentences, in print and on the air, appeared with unmistakable precision, machine-shopped pieces of argument fitted together like the innards of a Swiss watch, he looked as if he'd got dressed in a closet with the light off.
The question of William F. Buckley's style, I mean, was a question throughout the arc of his fame, and one began to suspect, as he became a fixture in our national life, that the style was deliberately confounding.
There are all kinds of style — or rather a man's style expresses itself in all kinds of ways, and it's unfair to ask for a foolish consistency. Buckley was author of perhaps the pithiest formulation of political populism ever made, the one about how he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. The remark is notable not only for its cleverness but also for its incongruity. For all the sartorial untidiness, Buckley's style of life was as far from populist as it is possible to be. He rode in a custom-made limousine, wintered (no populist turns a season into a verb) in Switzerland, sailed most of the seven oceans in his own sailboats, and split his time stateside between a mansion in Connecticut and a rather nice "maisonette" on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
We have since learned, of course, that committed populists themselves have no trouble squaring their political impulses with a leader who lives a non-populist life. The style of such a leader might, for example, include a personal 757, endless rounds of golf on courses he's named after himself, an eye for porn stars, and a Palm Beach mansion tricked out like an Edwardian bordello, and none of his followers will utter a peep. With Buckley the contrast between populist aspiration and populist reality seemed truer and more discordant; you got the idea that, matters of governance aside, he would much prefer a weekend with a group of Harvard professors than with those 2,000 Bostonians.
Back in 1980, the hugely popular — indeed, era-defining — Official Preppy Handbook placed Buckley at the pinnacle of preppiness, a god of the Prep Pantheon, alongside such stalwarts of the J. Press oxford button-down as George Plimpton and George H. W. Bush. The Handbook took particular note of Buckley's accent, which it identified as New England Nasal Nip. No doubt the accent was easily imitable. (One comedian, a man named David Frye, built a career from it in the 1970s.) But it was also untraceable to any known region, or traceable to several regions at once — a trained ear might discern a touch of the Carolinas, smatterings of Upper Class England, prep school in New York's Dutchess County, university at Yale. As his longtime friend and book editor Sam Vaughan pointed out (in a wonderful collection of Buckley's stuff, The Right Word), what his critics took to be an affected style of speaking was in fact a consequence of a motley upbringing.
"Buckley spoke no English until he was seven," Vaughan wrote. "Spanish was his first language and French his second." Before Buckley reached his teens, his father, a wealthy oilman from Texas, complained that his own children couldn't enunciate properly and sent his young namesake off to boarding school in England with the goal of curing a bad case of the mumbles. The boy stayed only a year or two, but you never know what will come from elocution lessons. In Buckley's case it was an indelible marker.
Whatever the drone-sightings are, the frenzy underscores the importance of building up U.S. missile defense, in the long term. From Rich Lowry:
One of Donald Trump's most consistent, if relatively neglected, policy promises during the campaign was to build an "Iron Dome" for America.
Trump included the proposal in the Republican platform — "A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY" — and he talked about the "greatest dome of them all" at rallies.
The idea got some more attention this week when Trump's national security adviser–designee, the Florida congressman Michael Waltz, mentioned it in a Sunday show interview regarding the mystery drone sightings over the East Coast.
I'm doubtful that the drones that people are reporting seeing at night are a threat, but Waltz — and Trump — are absolutely right about the imperative of creating a U.S. defense shield.
Trump can be all over the map on policy, sometimes during a single interview, but he's been remarkably consistent on this one. As Rebeccah L. Heinrichs points out, he was talking about a missile shield as far back as 1999, praising Ronald Reagan's push for SDI, and he set out a highly ambitious vision for missile defense while president.
At the 2024 Republican convention, Trump pledged to "replenish our military and build an Iron Dome missile defense system to ensure that no enemy can strike our homeland." He noted that "Israel has an Iron Dome," and asked, reasonably enough, "Why should other countries have this, and we don't?"
Critics will snipe, "Doesn't Trump know that Iron Dome is defending against short-range rockets and only works because Israel is a very small country? And that the cost of replicating that system here makes no sense because we aren't threatened by our neighbors — is someone going to rocket us from Toronto or Mexico City? — and would be prohibitively expensive in any case?"
Trump, though, shouldn't be taken literally when he speaks of Iron Dome. That's clearly shorthand for a more robust system appropriate for our particular defensive needs. As he said in a 2019 speech, "Regardless of the missile type or the geographic origins of the attack, we will ensure that enemy missiles find no sanctuary on Earth or in the skies above."
If it is easy to dismiss this as overpromising, it is an ambition that is more achievable than ever and should be one of the highest priorities of the United States government. A nuclear attack against the homeland is one of the most foreseeable threats to the existence of our society as we know it, and defending against it should be undertaken with a commensurate urgency and seriousness.
From NR's editorial on the Duke lacrosse-team allegations, revisited — and recanted:
In 2006, Duke University men's lacrosse team members hired Crystal Mangum, an erotic dancer, to entertain a private party. Mangum later claimed that she was raped by several attendees, including university students. The allegation proved a sensation. It captured the attention of the national press and the political class alike, the members of which appeared to take Mangum's accusations at face value.
The students were portrayed in the press as "privileged, racist brutes prone to binge drinking," according to the Washington Post, who were as titillated by Mangum's performance as they were by the opportunity to degrade a young black woman. "The history of white men and black women — the special fantasies and realities of exploitation — goes back to the nation's beginning and the arrival of slaves from Africa," Jesse Jackson wrote at the time. Duke president Richard Brodhead suspended the team even without any formal charges against its members. Local prosecutor Mike Nifong eventually charged some of the Duke lacrosse players, but the prosecution soon fell apart.
A forensic analysis of Mangum's body and the scene of the alleged crime did not substantiate the accuser's claims, and the discovery that Nifong had withheld exculpatory evidence (he would later resign and be disbarred) sealed the case's fate. "Based on the significant inconsistencies between the evidence and the various accounts given by the accusing witness," said then-attorney general and current North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, "we believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges." Sixteen months after the infamous party, Duke University agreed to settle a dispute with the players it had disparaged.
That should have been the end of this saga. But rather than admit that their worldview had misled them so, those who are partial to a collectivist theory of justice insisted that the Duke lacrosse players took advantage of the inequities inherent to the American justice system. Those intrepid few who still clung to the belief that American perfidy shielded Duke's players from true justice just had the rug pulled out from under them by Mangum herself.
"I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn't, and that was wrong," Mangum recently confessed during an interview from the correctional facility where she's serving a maximum 17-year sentence for the 2011 murder of her boyfriend. Mangum said she "made up a story that wasn't true" in the pursuit of "validation" from those around her. "I want them to know that I love them, and they didn't deserve that," she said of those she falsely accused. "I hope that they can forgive me." . . .
Mangum wasn't the only fraudster who preyed on the Left's uncharitable assumptions about young white men, in particular, but non-minorities broadly. . . . Indeed, there have been too many examples of this kind of injustice. It was a product of unquestioned fealty to the notion that white men, in particular, were due a karmic reckoning. "If there's ten people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all ten people," said Jared Polis, currently the governor of Colorado, turning Sir William Blackstone's ratio on its head. "I've seen this go down, and there really is no winning once the accusation is made," he added. "Someone who is wrongfully accused needs to do their best to put it behind them and move on."
Polis has a point there, sordid though it may be. The young men Mangum accused will never get back what her unfounded accusations and a credulous media landscape took from them.
Honorable Mention
Last call! National Review Institute has extended the deadline for applications for the Burke to Buckley Program to December 22. Here's the 411:
There are still a few spots left in National Review Institute's Burke to Buckley Fellowship Program in Miami, New York City, and Philadelphia. Burke to Buckley is intended for mid-career professionals from a wide variety of professions and industries. Over eight sessions, a small cohort gathers to engage in discussions of first principles and their application to current issues. Experts from academia and National Review serve as moderators for each session. For more information and to apply, click here. Apply today!
CODA
This is a little out of character, but I'll close with a Christmas-ish song. It's not exactly holiday cheer; plaintive is a better description. I recently heard it at a winter concert and thought it was quite beautiful. This is "Winter Song," by Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson.
Everybody, have a Merry Christmas, and New Year too. Thank you for reading, for subscribing, for checking in on this publication whenever you do, and for corresponding with me about music and such once in a while. Hopefully you can use this time to rekindle the hearth of home, and maybe even unplug from social media.
I, for one, will be checking out till '25. Which brings me to the final programming note of '24: There will be no Weekend Jolt next weekend, and the scoop-hunting Audrey Fahlberg will be in the driver's seat the weekend following (thanks, Audrey).
See you soon.
Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
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