Dear Weekend Jolter,
This time, Donald Trump came armed with more than just grievance, though there was plenty of that.
The 47th and 45th president returned to Washington on Monday with the sort of bucket list a man carries late in life. He proceeded to tick off all his items in a few days. Thus began Trump redux.
Has he changed since 2017? Has the world conformed, become inured, to him? No matter the answer, his term represents the mother of all second chances. As Yuval Levin writes, the president would do well not to "over-read" his mandate as he charges in bearing Sharpies, if such a thing as that is possible for such a man as Trump:
Trump has returned because the Left could not take the electorate's "no" for an answer and reorient itself. Democrats wanted Trump's loss in 2020 to be followed by a redo of all the progressive excesses that had made it possible for him to be elected in the first place, and the public did not want that. They just wanted Trump gone. Exactly for that reason, it is vital that Republicans not make the same mistake now. Republicans want Biden's loss in 2024 to be followed by a redo of all the Trumpist excesses that made it possible for him to be elected in the first place, but that is not what the public appears to be looking for. Trump's circle seems to think the public has said "yes" to their agenda, and so is still not taking the electorate's repeated "no, thank you" in all directions for an answer. Trump won very narrowly, but insists he won in a landslide. That won't end well.
As Yuval explains, we are living through an unusual cycle in American politics, during which each party has gotten a do-over of the agenda voters had rejected in the election prior. Today, some (certainly not all) progressives seem to realize that their fixation on identity politics and dismissive attitude toward censorship, antisemitism, street crime, inflation, and illegal immigration were out of step with the priorities of ordinary Americans, and that this, not the sudden manifestation of 77 million fascists in the electorate, helps to explain why Trump was returned to the White House.
What Trump should do and what he will do at this juncture may diverge. He should pursue a program that he might term "MAGA" but, to call back to his inaugural address, is "common sense." As Rich Lowry writes, Trump was effectively given the chance to occupy the political center in the election and took it — on the border, the economy, gender ideology and DEI, and more. Indeed, these priorities were reflected in his address and in some of the executive actions he signed. From NR's editorial:
His pledges in his address to shut down the border, deport criminals, make it government policy that there are only two genders, and judge people on their merits rather than their race and gender are firmly in the middle of the American consensus, and not too long ago would have been utterly uncontroversial.
As for what Trump will do, on top of that? Consider the daily output of his presidency a sort of scoreboard for which impulse is winning at any given time in Trump's inner battle between wanting to deliver conventionally popular policies with a coating of rodomontade, and wanting to do fan service via outrageous acts of defiance. Trump the pragmatist, forever in competition with Trump the shock artist.
His mass pardon of January 6 rioters stands out in this regard. The returning president could have carefully vetted the cases and pardoned those charged with nonviolent offenses whose involvement was minimal. It’s what Trump, JD Vance, and Speaker Mike Johnson indicated would happen. Instead, Trump pardoned almost everyone, including, as David Zimmermann reports, about 600 defendants, many of whom were carrying weapons, charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding police — and commuted the sentences of a handful of others.
In so doing, Trump assured that January 6, a national disgrace, will result in no further legal consequences for its perpetrators. Joe Biden's last-minute pardons were egregious too (more on this below), but even if the Capitol riot has lost its political potency, it is difficult to imagine that the median voter thinks the penalty for assaulting a cop should be nothing. The International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Fraternal Order of Police don't think that. His Day One abuse of the clemency power will haunt the president's legacy; as Dan McLaughlin writes, it is no way to restore law and order either.
Other early moves flash Trump’s inclination toward spite and folly, which Susie Wiles, this season's John Kelly, may struggle to tamp down. His order denying so-called birthright citizenship to children of illegal immigrants picks a fight he is likely to lose (is already losing). Terminating security details for Iran-targeted John Bolton and Mike Pompeo as well as Anthony Fauci, threatening 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, renaming bodies of water, musing about would-be conquests such as the Panama Canal or the undefended kingdom of Canada — such preoccupations could, in time, test the patience and cohesion of his new coalition.
If these are the impulses that direct Trump's second term, it would point to what Yuval warns of: an indulgence of the excesses that drove voters to eject him in 2020. The “party of common sense" could be a generational slogan. But Trump has to live up to it. Doing so matters not just for his place in history or for the GOP more broadly; if he grossly overreaches and rekindles the revulsion that a clear majority once felt toward him, Democrats could table reassessment of their own excesses, rebuild the brand around anti-Trumpism, and seek yet another do-over. The cycle would churn on.
A healthier politics, then, depends on Trump's ability to pretend to be half normal for four years.
I know. I'm scared too.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The law is clear: Enforce the TikTok Ban
On Biden's last-second pardons: Joe Biden's Final Corrupt Acts
And back to Trump again, and his pardons: Pardoning Capitol Rioters Is No Way to Restore Law and Order
Beginning to sort through the EO barrage: Trump's Executive Order Blitz
ARTICLES
Noah Rothman: The Resistance Left's Addiction to Hyperbole
Noah Rothman: Trump's J6 Pardons Are a Prelude to More Political Violence
James Lynch: Trump Fires All Government DEI Staffers, Ends Affirmative Action for Contractors
David Zimmermann: Trump's Mass Deportation Operation Begins with Over 300 Criminal Aliens Rounded Up on Day One
Charles C. W. Cooke: DEI's Die-Hards Still Don't Get It
Audrey Fahlberg: Republicans Whisper Concerns About Gabbard Nomination, but Won't Dare Cross Trump — Yet
Audrey Fahlberg: Ultra-Accessible Trump Shocks D.C. After Four Years of Ultra-Insulated Biden: 'Like Night and Day'
Andrew McCarthy: Congress Must Compel Trump to Enforce the TikTok Law
Andrew McCarthy: A Bad Deal for Israel . . . and America
John Fund: Don't Forget the Lessons of Biden's Health Cover-Up
Jack Butler: The Swamp Is Yours Now, MAGA. Drain It
Rand Paul: Biden's Parting Protectionist Folly
Abigail Anthony: Princeton Professor Versus Right-Wing Hats
Caroline Downey: A California Sailing Coach Tried to Protect Women from Male Competition. He Paid the Price
James S. Burling: The Forgotten Victims of Government Overreach
CAPITAL MATTERS
Edward Ring, something of an authority on Earth's elements, weighs in on California's natural disasters: How California's Mismanagement of Fire and Water Makes Wildfires Worse
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen invites us into the classy and eclectic art abode known as the Menil Collection. Have a look around: Perfection in Houston, Courtesy of the Menil Collection
Armond White's latest Reading Right column deals with a dubious tech controversy: What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About AI
FROM THE NEW, MARCH 2025 ISSUE OF NR
Fred Bauer: Vandals of Civilization: Why Climate Activists Attack Our Cultural Heritage
Will Swaim: Wildfire of the Vanities: California's Political Model Has Failed
Abigail Anthony: I Joined the Trans Academy
Audrey Fahlberg: The Fragile GOP Trifecta
Jack Butler: Lee Edwards, Luminary of the Movement
Luther Ray Abel: There's Something about Curling
I SURE HOPE DOGE DOESN'T CUT THESE EXCERPTS
There's a lot happening in the world right now. Really, really important, seismic events with implications for geopolitics, American life, and corporate culture. Hey — would you like to read a story about curling? Thought so. From the just-pressed edition of NR, Luther Ray Abel’s ode to a winter sport:
The world falls in love with curling every four years. A handful of American dudes, who often look like they've just been turned out of the Wooden Nickel on College Avenue, compete against teams of similarly constructed men to decide which country will earn a gold medal for accurately launching rocks and massaging them into position with brooms. Men on couches everywhere appreciate that their body type is represented on the screen, and the women beside them swoon at the spectacle of men voluntarily sweeping and communicating. Then the ceremonies conclude, the mustached faces disappear from our minds, and life returns to normal. But curling continues, existing every winter between the Olympics in aluminum-sided buildings. And not only does it exist, it's thriving, with clubs popping up where men and women play every weeknight.
The sport began, as many do, to settle some beef between bored men. In the 16th century, it was recorded in Latin by a clerk that a monk and an abbot's representative took to throwing stones on a frozen lake to settle a challenge. Several years later, the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder depicted men playing a game thought to be curling in his Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap. But the move to organization and export waited until the 19th century, when the Grand Caledonian Curling Club was formed in Edinburgh. A visit from Queen Victoria, who was enchanted by the game, allowed the club to replace "Grand" with "Royal." With Scottish travel to English holdings the world over, the colder climates of North America were ripe for a winter pastime that took advantage of resources they had in abundance: time, ice, and boulders.
An appreciator of words, I'd had curling on my mind for some time as a sport with a lexicon that is entirely foreign to the average American, whose sports references are dominated by basketball, football, and baseball. Slam dunk, any given Sunday, eye on the ball — who doesn't know these expressions? But curling, with its Canadian and Scottish influences, comes with mouthfuls of Maple-Gaelic exoticism.
To learn more about this peculiar sport, its practitioners, and its patois, I made several trips to the Appleton Curling Club. I hoped to return with at least one expression that might be used to exhaustion in future projects.
The rather stupid online debate over whether Elon Musk gave a Nazi salute to Trump supporters is still worth unpacking, standing as the type of incident that sorts inveterate conspiracists from other people. Noah Rothman has at it:
The level of hostility directed at Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt over his refusal to lie in solidarity with his co-partisans on the Left is instructive.
Elon Musk was guilty only of making "an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm," Greenblatt's organization wrote in response to a surge of online agitation over footage of Musk making what his detractors called "a Nazi salute." Rather, the video of the event features Musk thanking Trump supporters for their election-year efforts, telling them that "My heart goes out to you," and twice putting his hand over his heart before thrusting it outward as if he were casting his heart into the crowd. "This is a delicate moment," the ADL conceded. "It's a new day, and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety." Nevertheless, right is right, and wrong is wrong.
"Just to be clear, you are defending a Heil Hitler salute that was performed and repeated for emphasis and clarity," congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez barked in just one illustrative example of the outrage this act of discretion inspired. "People can officially stop listening to you as any sort of reputable source of information now. You work for them." It's not as though Greenblatt and his group were the only prudent voices advocating against uncharitable and dubious inferences into Musk's mental state. But the ADL's candor was treated as a betrayal — perhaps because it was.
Of all the misapprehensions that most plague Democrats and their allies in the media, it is their unfounded presumption that they can shape our perceptions of reality through rhetoric. That's why Greenblatt's offense was seen as so egregious. He had defected from the mission, and all oars must row in the same direction if the trick is going to work.
The temptation to focus on promoting the conclusions they'd like to see the public reach over and above accurately describing the conditions they're observing ails the political press, in particular.
Lest we forget about the now-former president, NR's editorial deals justly with Biden's last gasp of pardon abuse, which, by the way, Andy McCarthy called:
The former president set the works in motion last month with the shameful pardon of his son. Hunter Biden had been the point man in the decades-long Biden family business of selling access to his father and his political influence to agents of corrupt and anti-American foreign regimes, including the Chinese Communist Party. He had been found guilty on federal firearms charges (by a jury) and tax charges (on a guilty plea), and was facing the likelihood of a significant prison sentence. This was only after the Biden Justice Department labored mightily to make the criminal investigations of the younger Biden disappear. . . .
Sure enough, in the last minutes before heading off to Donald Trump's inauguration, Biden pardoned his siblings: brothers Jim (Hunter's chief partner in the family biz) and Francis, and sister Valerie, along with Jim's and Valerie's spouses. Without a hint of irony, the former president, whose Justice Department hounded Trump for four years, claimed he was acting to protect his kin from partisan weaponization of the Justice Department.
Realizing how the Hunter pardon tainted his legacy, Biden transparently attempted to minimize its significance with a mountain of clemency grants. These included disgraceful commutations of 37 death row inmates (while leaving in place the three capital cases brought and defended by the Obama and Biden administrations), and thousands of sentencing reductions that are another abuse of the pardon power.
And then there are the preemptive pardons of public officials. Biden granted clemency to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who drove controversial Covid policy and potentially obfuscated the pandemic's origin; retired Army General Mark Milley, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who crossed swords with Trump following the Capitol riot; and the members and staff of the House January 6 Committee, which was deeply hostile to Trump and issued a scathing report recommending that he be charged with felonies (which the Biden DOJ special counsel proceeded to do).
There was no need for such pardons. No matter what one thinks of these officials, their actions in carrying out their official duties are immune from prosecution. But knowing he was going to pardon other family members just as he pardoned Hunter, Biden must have calculated that granting clemency to public officials would help pretty up his other self-serving pardons.
History will not be kind to Joe Biden — not to his family's monetization of the power of his offices of public trust, and not to his historic abuse of the pardon power.
Andy McCarthy weighs in on the Israel-Hamas deal that preceded the change in U.S. administrations. He's not so optimistic:
In the coming months, I wonder how foolish Presidents Trump and Biden will look for fighting over who should get credit for the cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas that went into effect this morning. . . .
Even now, all we have is the same framework for the terrible deal that Biden put on the table last spring. It is most certainly not an agreement for the release of all the hostages. It is a tenuous commitment for the release of 33 hostages, to be dribbled out over 42 days, beginning with a grand total of three today. After the first phase (and, indeed, during the first phase), you'll just have to trust Hamas — a designated terrorist organization under American law for nearly 30 years, the jihadist group whose atrocities 15 months ago began this latest round of sharia-supremacist Islam's multifront war of annihilation against Israel.
An interesting thing about that: When Trump started bellowing about hitting Hamas harder than anyone has ever been hit, at least you could say he was warning a terrorist organization that has been holding Americans for 15 months. Whether he was serious is another story, but at least he wasn't negotiating with terrorists. If the Biden administration wanted to negotiate with Hamas (through Qatar and Egypt) — and, by so doing, reward hostage-taking in a manner that assures future hostage-taking — that wasn't Trump's doing.
But now it is.
Let's be real. Trump drew a red line he had no intention of defending, reminiscent of President Obama's ill-considered red line in Syria. He was talking trash. Hamas and its backers took him seriously, not literally, and thus knew he wasn't serious. They were never going to release the hostages before Inauguration Day.
As ever, while Trump's apologists engage in revisionism about what he said, they simultaneously claim that what matters is his master plan. Personally, I don't think he has one — I think he got out over his skis and then pressured Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to something he could spin as a win.
Of course, I could be wrong. We're not privy to Trump's discussions with Netanyahu. Maybe, as the prime minister says, Trump gave him assurances that he'll have a well-armed free hand to prepare for and execute a decisive response when Hamas violates the agreement, as everyone knows it will do. We'll see.
Surely, though, Netanyahu grasps that anything he has been secretly promised is contingent on what things look like to Trump when Israel tries to cash in. The incoming president is, as they say, "transactional." His admirers regard this as an attribute of the skilled dealmaker. To my mind, it's a guarantee that he'll react to events rather than drive them — seeking an outcome that will be popular, with strategic benefits a second-order concern.
Jihadists are more hardheaded than that. They've studied Trump's dealings with the Taliban in his first term. They know that his instinct is to get out of confrontation, not dive in with both feet. Hell was never going to be unleashed. That was about as likely as Trump's ending the Ukraine war within the first 24 hours of his presidency, . . . or using his "bigger button" against Little Rocket Man (before they fell in love). Bottom line: Trump says a lot of stuff. . . .
After spending two years on the campaign trail railing about how "stupid" Biden's foreign policy is, Trump has delivered Biden's policy. He now says that only he could have gotten this done, which may be true but is nothing to brag about. Biden didn't get the deal done when he proposed it about eight months ago because Israel had the good sense to ignore him and forcefully prosecute the war against Hamas (and in multiple other fronts where jihadists backed by Iran and Qatar have attacked).
On that score, it is worth remembering why Israel had Hamas on the brink of destruction as an effective fighting force. Of course, it had killed many Hamas leaders and many jihadists on the ground. But you can't kill everybody. Consequently, a vital part of quelling Hamas has been capturing and detaining thousands of trained jihadists. Under the Trump/Biden-brokered cease-fire, however, a jaw-droppingly high percentage of those jihadists will be released.
CODA
Ladies and gentlemen, Elton John.
Thanks for reading, and go get some rest.
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