Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) defended President Joe Biden’s ability to carry out a second term, warning voters in the key swing state of Michigan “not to be fatalistic” about his campaign amid questions about his age and mental acuity.
During a campaign stop on Thursday, Newsom reiterated his support for Biden as the party’s nominee and sought to ease voter concerns that the president is not the strongest candidate to take on former President Donald Trump in November. The comments come even as Newsom himself has been floated as a contender to replace Biden at the top of the ticket, something the California governor has denied having interest in.
“What I need to convince you of is not to be fatalistic, not to fall prey to all this negativity,” Newsom told the group of Democrats. “I believe in this man. I believe in his character. I believe that he has been one of the most transformative presidents in our collective lifetime.”
Newsom’s visit comes at a crucial time as Democrats view Michigan as one of the most crucial battleground states to win in 2024. Trump carried the state in 2016 before Biden won it in 2020 — making it one of the handful of swing states likely to determine the outcome of the election in November.
The vote of confidence also comes as several Democrats and party donors have openly considered replacing Biden at the top of the ticket.
One group of donors and strategists is pooling resources into a new political action committee to help fund an alternative candidate should Biden withdraw from the presidential race, according to a new report from the New York Times. Meanwhile, at least three Democratic lawmakers have publicly called on Biden to withdraw from the race, increasing pressure on the president as he seeks to convince voters he can handle a second term.
Concerns about Biden’s age have been present throughout his term but were especially exacerbated after the first presidential debate. The president had a worse-than-expected performance last week, making multiple verbal slip-ups and repeatedly losing his train of thought.
His performance has prompted some major donors to consider pouring their resources into down-ballot races rather than the White House, according to reports. Others have even gone so far as to threaten to withhold funds from the Democratic Party altogether unless Biden steps down.
Gideon Stein, a donor with deep connections to the Democratic Party, said his family would withhold roughly $3.5 million in planned donations to nonprofit and political organizations involved in the presidential race unless Biden withdrew, according to the New York Times. Abigail Disney, the heiress of the Disney family fortune, also said Biden’s campaign and committees supporting the president “will not receive another dime from me until they bite the bullet and replace Biden at the top of the ticket,” the outlet reported.
However, Biden has insisted he will not be dropping out, arguing his performance was due to his busy travel schedule and intense preparation for the debate. The White House has also denied reports that the president is having conversations about whether to withdraw from the race.
Hamas sent an updated response to the latest ceasefire proposal with Israel a couple of days ago, which represented a “breakthrough on a critical impasse,” according to a senior Biden administration official.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Thursday that he had dispatched the Israeli negotiators to meet with mediators in response to Hamas’s updated stance.
Word of Hamas’s latest response broke publicly Wednesday, which was the first news of possible movement since its most recent rejection of the deal President Joe Biden outlined at the end of May.
“I have to say, given the recent developments, we do believe there is a pretty significant opening here, and we welcome the prime minister’s readiness to try to seize that opening by empowering his negotiating team to engage directly in Doha, [Qatar], over coming days in the Oval Office,” the official said. “I think what we got back from Hamas was a pretty significant adjustment to what had been their position, and we think that is encouraging.”
Netanyahu and Biden spoke Thursday about Hamas’s response.
“President Biden and the Prime Minister discussed ongoing efforts to finalize a ceasefire deal together with the release of hostages, as outlined by President Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council, the G7, and countries around the world,” White House officials said in a readout of the call. “The leaders discussed the recent response received from Hamas. The President welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision to authorize his negotiators to engage with U.S., Qatari, and Egyptian mediators in an effort to close out the deal.”
The official dismissed the possibility that a deal was imminent, saying, “I just want to emphasize this does not mean this deal is going to be closed in a period of days.”
The U.S., Egypt, and Qatar have acted as mediators over the course of the more than eight months of war, though their efforts have remained fruitless, dating back to the one-week ceasefire agreement in late November 2023. There have been several instances in which the negotiations appeared close to a deal this spring, but they have all collapsed.
Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has devastated the enclave. Roughly 35,000 people have been killed, and it is unknown how many of them are civilians and how many are combatants, though even Israeli officials indicated earlier this spring that at least half had been civilians. The entire population is facing severe food insecurity, and most of the population has been displaced.
Israeli officials have indicated the war in Gaza is winding down and that much of Hamas has been defeated, though they continue carrying out operations against the group.
The war began after Hamas carried out the largest terrorist attack in Israel’s history on Oct. 7, 2023. Early that morning, more than 1,000 militants overpowered the Israel-Gaza border and poured into southern Israel, where those terrorists proceeded to kill roughly 1,200 people, many of whom were civilians, and kidnapped approximately 250 more.
About 100 hostages were released during the November ceasefire. It is unclear how many of the remaining hostages are still alive.
On May 31, Biden outlined a proposal that Israel had agreed to, which would begin a six-week ceasefire during the first phase of the deal. During that period, Israeli forces would withdraw from population centers in Gaza, the international community would surge humanitarian aid into the strip, and Israel would release a large number of Palestinians detained by Israeli forces. Women, children, and hostages in need of medical care would be released during this time as well.
The deal was widely supported internationally, but Hamas did not agree to it.
The issue that had prevented many previous iterations of ceasefire proposals was whether the agreement would amount to a lasting ceasefire, effectively allowing the portions of Hamas that are still intact to remain that way and potentially reconstitute, or whether Israel would be permitted to have the option to continue its military operations once the first phase ends.
What a relief. For four years, the Democrats told half the country to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears. The media joined in, stigmatizing and slandering anyone who stated the obvious. Joe Biden was mentally and physically unfit for the presidency in 2020. He hid from the public for four years. The White House, the Democrats, and the media lied to the public when they insisted that he was fine. And they knew they were lying.
Biden’s disintegration in his debate with Donald Trump isn’t a scandal, so much as the moment at which the obvious can no longer be denied. The scandal is that Biden’s team, senior Democratic figures, and the media misled the public and made a joke of American democracy for four years. And they are still doing it.
President Joe Biden speaks to members of the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Friday, March 1, 2024, to travel to Camp David, Md., for the weekend. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
It so happens that the Biden-Trump debate occurred unusually early in the election season — right in the sweet spot between the closure of the Democratic primaries on June 8 and the opening of the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19. Having forestalled an open primary, the Democrats can now preempt a contested convention. The same media that covered for Biden’s debility, called Hunter Biden’s laptop “Russian disinformation,” and continue to show a weird lack of interest in the origins of COVID-19 are now covering for the Democrats while the party’s minions clean up the Biden mess and its bigwigs bicker over his successor.
I say “the media,” but not everyone went along with the lie. I called Biden “senile” before he took office. On his Inauguration Day, I congratulated “President Harris” as the inevitable and disastrous future. In August 2021, after the fiasco of the Afghanistan withdrawal, I wrote that Biden was “unfit to be the President of the United States,” that it was “obvious when he was running for office that he lacks the physical stamina and mental acuity for the job,” and that the “part-time president” was visibly worsening and should resign.
This took no vision or courage. I was an immigrant and historian writing for a British outlet, so I wasn’t part of the incestuous club of East Coast political journalism. I had nothing to lose by going against the tide, and much to gain. Nor were these novel insights. The whole world, the Democrats and the media excepted, always saw President Joe Biden this way. America’s allies were relieved that Trump was out, but they saw perfectly well that the purported leader of the free world was a corrupt dotard. America’s enemies saw it the same way. See: Afghanistan, Ukraine, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iranian nuclear program, and the Taiwan Strait. And also the southern border.
I mention all this not just to disassociate myself from the 80% of American journalists who are little more than Democratic publicists, but also because the media cover-up will be part of the political cleanup. The attack on American democracy can no longer be denied, so its backers are falling back on minimizing the crime and explaining away the motives. Jonathan Chait, writing in New York magazine on July 2, reckons that Biden’s team began with a “small, containable problem.” They had “good and noble reasons” to contain it by “managing the president’s schedule and public profile.” The problem worsened their “predicament.” It was “too late to come clean,” so they “redoubled their denial.” They are now “desperate and playing for time.”
A case can be made for Plato’s “noble lie” in wartime, as in the patriotic fraud of keeping FDR’s wheelchair and illness out of the papers. There is nothing “good and noble” about misleading the public in a peacetime election and presidency — and we are, despite the Biden administration’s best efforts, still in peacetime or thereabouts. FDR had to fight Hitler and Hirohito. JFK and Reagan had to contain the Soviets. Biden was charged with keeping out Trump. If you think that is also the war of “democracy versus autocracy,” you have Biden brain.
If Biden wasn’t running the country, who was? Conservatives with their heads wedged in the rabbit hole of conspiracy imagine Barack Obama running a remote-controlled White House from his basement. This is too literal and too quaint. The modern presidency resembles a monarchy only in its ceremonial form. Its content is bureaucratic. If the buck could still stop at Truman’s desk, it was because FDR’s expansion of the bureaucracy was only the beginning. It was still possible then to speak of American democracy without sighing.
Today, the buck never nears the Resolute desk. Our bureaucracies, like the French nobility before 1789, are resolute only in guarding their privileges and dodging the pitchforks. In order for things to stay the same, nothing must change. The incompetence of Biden appointees such as Janet Yellen, Mayor Pete, and Antony Blinken isn’t an accident. It’s impotence by design, like Biden’s placeholder presidency, or putting Kamala Harris on the ticket in 2020 and trying to ditch her now.
The presidency’s function is now symbolic: an allegedly noble fiction. The Biden plot was preceded by the West Wing plotline in which President Bartlet hides his MS from the public. The reality is tragedy replaying as farce: an endless rerun where no one can walk and talk at the same time, and no one really wants to fix it. The liberals are illiberal. The Democrats are undemocratic. Do the Republicans really want to save the republic?
Former President Donald Trump has a secret plan to bring the war in Ukraine to a quick conclusion. Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee-in-waiting, says he plans to implement it even before he takes office, after beating President Joe Biden in their looming rematch.
“I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelensky as president-elect before I take office on Jan. 20,” the once and very likely future president said at last month’s debate with Biden. “People being killed so needlessly, so stupidly, and I will get it settled and I’ll get it settled fast before I take office.”
A Ukrainian soldier mechanic of 43rd artillery brigade, shows a heart while firing by 2s7 self-propelled howitzer toward Russian positions at the frontline in Donetsk region, Ukraine, Monday, June 24, 2024. (Evgeniy Maloletka/AP)
Trump has kept the specifics of his peace proposal close to the vest, but he’s suggested that, like his promise to secure the freedom of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, it is based on his personal relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I will have him [Gershkovich] out very quickly, as soon as I take office, before I take office … literally as soon as I win the election,” Trump promised at the debate.
Trump’s been cagey about exactly how as president he would force both sides to the negotiating table, but he’s openly suggested he would cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine if President Volodymyr Zelensky refused to make concessions to Putin.
When asked directly, Trump has avoided endorsing Zelensky’s vision of victory, which would require Russia to withdraw from all occupied territory, including the Crimean Peninsula, and Ukraine joining NATO.
“I don’t think in terms of winning and losing. I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people,” Trump said at a CNN town hall event last May. “I want everybody to stop dying. They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying.”
Trump’s idea is to pressure Zelensky to cede Crimea and the Donbas border region to Russia,” according to insiders who spoke to the Washington Post in early April.
“Privately, Trump has said that he thinks both Russia and Ukraine ‘want to save face, they want a way out,’ and that people in parts of Ukraine would be okay with being part of Russia,” the newspaper reported.
Coincidentally, just a few days later, the America First Policy Institute, a think tank led by two Trump advisers, published a little-noticed research report fleshing out the kind of approach they’d like to see Biden or Trump take.
“This should start with a formal U.S. policy to bring the war to a conclusion. Specifically, it would mean a formal U.S. policy to seek a cease-fire and negotiated settlement of the Ukraine conflict,” said the white paper, authored by retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, a former Trump national security adviser, and Fred Fleitz, who served as chief of staff in Trump’s National Security Council.
“The United States would continue to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement but would also condition future American military aid on Ukraine’s participation in peace talks with Russia,” the document added.
To convince Putin to join peace talks, the U.S. and other NATO nations would “offer to put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees.”
Kellogg spelled out the carrots and sticks in blunter terms in an interview with Reuters.
“We tell the Ukrainians, ‘You’ve got to come to the table, and if you don’t come to the table, support from the United States will dry up,’” Kellogg said. “And you tell Putin, ‘He’s got to come to the table, and if you don’t come to the table, then we’ll give Ukrainians everything they need to kill you in the field.’”
Putin shouldn’t need much convincing, given his forces are taking horrific losses on the battlefield and that with the proposed conditions, he would be in a strong position to force Ukraine to surrender the entirety of four regions claimed by Moscow, one of his stated preconditions for a peace agreement.
“The Ukrainian troops must be completely withdrawn from the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions,” Putin said, during a meeting with his Foreign Affairs Ministry officials at the Kremlin on June 14.
“As soon as Kyiv declares that it is ready to make this decision and begin a real withdrawal of troops from these regions, and also officially notifies that it abandons its plans to join NATO, our side will follow an order to cease fire and start negotiations will be issued by us that very moment,” Putin said.
Zelensky who’s pushing his own peace plan, promptly rejected Putin’s conditions, comparing them to Adolf Hitler’s demands for capitulation during World War II.
“These messages are messages of ultimatum,” Zelensky said. “It’s the same thing Hitler did.”
While Zelensky said Ukraine will work with whoever is the U.S. president next year, he’s worried that defeatism is taking hold of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.
“Ukraine’s not winning that war,” Trump argued at the June debate. “They’re running out of people, they’re running out of soldiers, they’ve lost so many people. It’s so sad.”
Trump’s desire to wrap up the war quickly is putting tremendous pressure on Zelensky, who fears under Trump the U.S. would be happy to write off large portions of Ukraine to appease Putin.
“It is impossible to help Ukraine with one hand and shake Putin’s hand with the other,” Zelensky told the Philadelphia Inquirer in a June 24 interview in Kyiv. “It will not work.”
“Everybody is still afraid that Russia can split apart, everybody is afraid of what will happen to Russia without Putin and whether it will stay as it is or get worse,” Zelensky said, arguing that U.S. half-measures, such as restricting Ukraine’s ability to use long-range ATACMS rockets to hit deep into Russian territory, are giving Putin a free hand to improve his negotiating position.
“Any step forward on our territory, any occupation, any village even fully destroyed is positive for them because it is important for them to bargain as much as possible,” he said.
Like many in his base, Trump believes the U.S. is pouring good money after bad to prop up Ukraine in a war it’s destined to lose and that Zelensky is soaking the U.S. and its allies in his quixotic pursuit of glory.
“Every time that Zelensky comes to this country, he walks away with $60 billion. He’s the greatest salesman ever,” Trump has said on several occasions.
It’s an argument that resonates with his base and is echoed by his most vocal supporters, including Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who at this writing is still in contention to be Trump’s running mate.
“People who want us to put limitless resources into Ukraine, they want us to believe two things at once,” Vance said on Fox News Sunday in April. “On the one hand, they want us to believe the Ukrainians are on the verge of victory in the far eastern part of Ukraine. On the other hand, they want us to believe that Vladimir Putin is about to march all the way to Paris. You can’t believe both of those things at the same time.”
“It’s not that we don’t admire the courageousness of the Ukrainians — we certainly do. It’s that America is stretched too thin. We do not have the industrial capacity to support a war in Ukraine, a war in Israel, potentially a war in East Asia if the Chinese invade Taiwan,” he said, repeating an argument he first made at the Munich Security Conference in February. “So America has to pick and choose.”
Trump may see himself as master of the “Art of the Deal,” but outgoing Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, who has been tapped to be the European Union’s top diplomat, has a warning for Trump about Russian negotiating tactics that she said date back to the days of Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.
“Three things. First, demand the maximum. Do not ask, but demand something that has never been yours. Second, present ultimatums, threaten. And third, do not give one inch in negotiations,” Kallas said in an interview. “Because there will be always people in the West who will offer you something, and then in the end, you will have one-third or even one-half of something you didn’t have before.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker argues for an alternative strategy to counter Putin’s strategy of grinding away at a war of attrition until the West folds — find a way to make Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership a fait accompli.
“If we tell Vladimir Putin that Ukraine cannot join NATO until after the war, then that’s a message to Putin to continue the war,” Volker said in an interview with Euromaidan Press.
“NATO can make a commitment to Ukraine but also a public statement that would be read by Russia that we would help defend Ukrainian territory that Ukraine controls,” Volker said. “So, no more Russian seizure of territory, but we would not engage to retake territory militarily alongside Ukrainian forces. That’s a matter for Ukraine itself.”
Trump argues if anyone should be doing more to help Ukraine, it should be European countries, not the U.S., because “it has a bigger impact on them, because of location, because we have an ocean in between.”
It’s an argument that has echoes of America’s isolationist sentiment before its entry into World War II.
“Some of our people like to believe that wars in Europe and in Asia are of no concern to us,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in a December 1940 fireside chat. “But the width of those oceans is not what it was in the days of clipper ships.”
“They tell you that the Axis powers are going to win anyway, that all of this bloodshed in the world could be saved, that the United States might just as well throw its influence into the scale of a dictated peace and get the best out of it that we can,” Roosevelt said.
“They call it a ‘negotiated peace.’ Nonsense! … Such a dictated peace would be no peace at all. It would be only another armistice.”
Ukraine already learned a hard lesson about the value of Russian security guarantees when, in 1994, it gave its nuclear weapons back to Russia in return for a guarantee from Moscow that its territorial sovereignty would never be violated.
“A ceasefire is the best option for the Russians so they can prepare for taking even more,” Zelensky says.
While her husband was holed up in Camp David as Democratic Party kingmakers worked overtime to resuscitate his imploding reelection bid, first lady Jill Biden reminded the world that she is indeed the power behind the throne and, more importantly, why she will push the president, come hell or high water, to Election Day.
In her third Vogue magazine cover since Joe Biden‘s inauguration, beating the First Lady record previously set by Michelle Obama, a monochromatic Dr. McB stares off contentedly into the distance, like an airbrushed Lenin or designer-dud-clad Mao. Days after former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton made clear that Democrats are stuck with the incumbent even after a debate performance that can be mostly kindly described as a borderline medical emergency, the first lady in white is embossed with her own sordid reminder: “WE WILL DECIDE OUR FUTURE.”
First lady Dr. Jill Biden on the cover of the August edition of Vogue.
Petrified by the presumption that a real journalist would uncover the actual story of the consummate socialite pulling off a real-life Weekend at Bernie’s but with the presidency, the hagiographers at Vogue stick to the shallow depths of hackneyed sartorial studies — “She looks like she’s ready to party, and in a way, she is—these are her people” — and peddling the party line that “democracy is on the line.”
The problem for the Bidens is that voters agree, and increasingly and for good reason, voters across the aisle view the party in power as the greater threat to our democratic process. In a national CBS News poll after the debate, voters agreed that both Biden and former President Donald Trump were equally dangerous to democracy, despite Biden’s previous lead on the issue. Even before the debate, swing state voters gave Trump an 11-point advantage on the question of protecting democracy.
Alas, that is a consequence of the Democratic Party quite literally canceling state primaries until Biden, with 99% of delegates secured, revealed he could not spar against Trump without falling on his face, let alone against Russian President Vladimir Putin or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Jane O’Meara Sanders, the wife of the socialist senator-turned-Biden loyalist Bernie Sanders (I-VT), likened Dr. Jill to former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In reality, Biden is likely more of an Edith Wilson type. Careful not to let facts get in the way of the narrative, Vogue omits the first lady’s reported full-time job of cordoning off the president from staff before sunrise and after sundown. (Medical professionals have a word for octogenarians incapable of retaining their faculties after the sun is down.)
Instead, the plain old professor Jill of Vogue is a mere mannequin, a still rather pretty older lady who excels at the abstract — “advocating” and campaigning, holding the hands of strangers, telling them “please” and “thank you.” But a picture is worth 1,000 words, and the magazine’s cover star, complete in a $2,820 Ralph Lauren dress, can’t lie: Joe Biden will remain president because that is what Jill Biden has decided.
For most people, the first thing that comes to mind when seeing a picture of the U.S. Olympic swim team should be excitement for a group of athletes who get to live a lifelong dream.
But for a group of ever-bitter liberals, there is a problem with the U.S. Olympic swim team: It is too white.
Katie Ledecky gets ready for the Women’s 800 freestyle finals Saturday, June 22, 2024, at the US Swimming Olympic Trials in Indianapolis. (Michael Conroy/AP)
The U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials concluded Sunday at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, and the roster of U.S. athletes who will swim at the 2024 Paris Olympics was finalized.
A longtime swimming powerhouse, the United States’s swim team features stars such as Katie Ledecky, Lilly King, Regan Smith, Caeleb Dressel, Bobby Finke, and Ryan Murphy, alongside a number of newcomers who will surely make their mark on Olympic history.
In a post on X, Georgetown University law professor Janel George claimed the legacy of Jim Crow and segregation is the reason that so many people on the team are white.
“When people say that Jim Crow was so long ago, it’s important to remember the lasting effects of segregated spaces — like segregated swimming pools — and the continued impact across generations,” she wrote, sharing a picture of the team. “This visual reflects that legacy.”
Now, it should be noted that there are a couple of nonwhite swimmers on the team. Simone Manuel, an Olympic medalist from the last two games, will return to swim the 50 freestyle and participate in a relay, while University of Texas standout Shaine Casas will make his Olympic debut in the 200 individual medley.
While George is correct that Jim Crow was not all that long ago, the implicit nature of her remark is that the U.S. Olympic swim team is discriminating against black swimmers and she would rather have a more racially diverse team than the one who can win the most medals.
But this Georgetown law professor would never make the same remark about the U.S. Olympic track and field team, which is overwhelmingly nonwhite. Nor would she say the same about the basketball and tennis teams, two other sports that have a history of segregation but have a number of black athletes.
There is a saying that the U.S. Olympic swim team is the hardest team to make in the world. Only two athletes from a single nation are allowed to compete in each individual event, and there are only four swimmers on each of the seven relay teams, many of whom come from the roster of athletes who made the team in an individual event. In 2024, the U.S. Olympic team has a total of 46 swimmers, 20 women and 26 men, with a number of athletes, including Ledecky, Smith, and Dressel, qualifying to swim multiple events.
The development of highly competitive swimmers and the breadth of talent in the U.S. is so robust that multiple swimmers who competed at the trials missed out on a spot on the team but would otherwise have had a legitimate shot at winning an Olympic medal. It could easily be argued that the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials are, in some events, more competitive than the Olympics.
Swimming doesn’t discriminate by race. It discriminates only against those who don’t touch the wall first.
The Summer Olympics are when the United States flexes its superiority over every other country in the world, including our European friends. This year, the festivities are starting before the Games even begin.
The U.S. Olympic team will be bringing air conditioning units to the Olympic Village for the Games in Paris, which “undercuts organizers’ plans to cut carbon emissions,” according to the Associated Press. After all, you do not get to be the best Olympic country on the planet by letting your athletes stew in non-air-conditioned venues in the summer. Greatness doesn’t sleep at 79 degrees Fahrenheit.
That is especially true when the outrage is unfounded. The U.S. is not the only country providing its athletes with AC for the Games (Britain, Germany, and Canada are among those doing the same). And 74% of France’s energy production comes from nuclear energy, which, of course, does not produce carbon emissions. Maybe California Democrats will force ineffective sacrifices on its residents to pretend they are saving the planet, but that is why they are leading a failing state into the ground and not the greatest Olympic program of all time.
American athletes will be well rested and well cooled and hopefully on their way to yet another dominant performance over world-worst polluter China in the process, because that is what America is all about. You can keep your pretentious climate slacktivism, and we will keep our gold medals and crisp, cool air conditioning.
Trump leads President Joe Biden by 19 points among those ages 45 to 65, roughly Gen X, while the race is within the margin of error for boomers, millennials, and Generation Z.
(Illustration by Tatiana Lozano / Washington Examiner; AP and Getty Images)
The extraordinary generation gap has spurred endless speculation and recrimination among very online millennial pundits.
One simple explanation is that Gen X isn’t all that Trumpy but that it has very good real-world reasons to support the Republican Party over Biden’s Democratic Party.
Gen Xers got jobs, paid off student loans, got married in their 20s, and had children. This isn’t just a story. It’s the facts. The average age at first marriage in the early 2000s was about 25 for women and a bit higher for men — meaning the average Gen Xer was married with a job within a decade of leaving school.
The birth rate was higher in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, when Gen X was the bulk of the baby-makers. Once the millennials entered their mid- to late 20s, the birthrate fell and kept plummeting. Births have fallen almost every year since 2007 and are now down more than 16%.
So the people who became grown-ups in a normal way are Republicans now. Trump expanded our child tax credit, and under him, the economy was really good, with nearly no inflation.
Millennials, to their discredit, have always cared more about national politics — they care more about other people’s business, families, and communities than they ought to and are less interested in forming families or being involved in their neighborhood than they ought to be.
“I guess Donald Trump as the end point of Gen X nihilism makes sense,” very online millennial liberal pundit Matt Yglesias concluded.
If you think life is about what happens on NPR and CNN and in Congress, then yes, folks who care mostly about their family and neighborhood look like nihilists.
Sure, Trump made politics crazy, but under him, the economy was more normal. If you wanted to mind your family and your job, the Trump era was better than the Biden era. The worst part of the Trump era was the nonsense forced on us by Biden’s party and defended by Biden to this day: the lockdowns and school closures.
Biden’s party took over school boards, closed schools for a year, and abandoned regular curricula in exchange for preaching racial determinism and transgenderism.
So maybe it’s that simple: If you want a normal life of family, community, and work, you are more likely to be Republican, and the folks most likely to be parents are the most likely to desire normality.
The singer-songwriter, man of letters, adopted son of the Lone Star State, and sort of serious political contender died on June 27 at the age of 79.
Kinky Friedman. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
Perplexed people looking for leading indicators of the present political moment could do worse than to take a long hard look at the 2006 Texas gubernatorial election. That year, incumbent Republican Gov. Rick Perry faced formidable challenges from not only Democratic contender Chris Bell but independent candidates Carole Keeton Strayhorn and the already world-famous Friedman.
Born in Chicago in 1944 to psychologist Thomas Friedman and his wife, Minnie, Richard Samet Friedman (as he was then known) likely had little conscious memory of his hometown: While he was a very small child, his parents, who were Jewish, pulled up stakes for the Texas Hill Country. There, they established a 266-acre camp for children called Echo Hill Ranch, which continues to operate to the present day. He spoke of his upbringing with sincere appreciation.
Perry managed to remain in residence at the Texas Governor’s Mansion, but Strayhorn and Friedman, between them, amassed 30.5% of the vote. And, in a larger, more profound way, the don’t-give-a-damn outsider politics of Friedman have utterly supplanted the play-it-safe insider politics of Perry and his ilk. Can anyone doubt that Friedman, had he somehow captured the governorship and felt compelled to make a quixotic White House run, would have fared better than the notoriously bad presidential aspirant Perry later did?
Long before he gave American electoral politics a welcome kick in the pants, Kinky Friedman had fashioned a career out of giving American pieties and platitudes a fulsome ribbing. In his capacity as a cheeky, intentionally offensive country-rock singer-songwriter, Friedman sent up both his times and his chosen genre.
“I was bar mitzvahed in Houston and went to Hebrew school,” Friedman said in a 2012 interview with journalist Simon Marks. “I was raised as a Jew in Texas, even though people on the East Coast don’t think that’s possible.” He added, “It’s a good thing to grow up in a minority. … It also makes a good artist or author to be on the outside looking in.”
Friedman did stints at the University of Texas, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1966, and in the Peace Corps. Then he found an artistic outlet for his naturally acerbic personality: country music that was sometimes poetic, frequently profane, and surprisingly popular. In his heyday in the 1970s, Friedman brought his ingratiating manner, Western garb, and appealing voice to tunes with titles like “Arsehole from El Paso” and “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed,” the latter of which included lines undoubtedly conceived with the sole intention of inciting vitriol from feminists: “Before you make your weekly visit to the shrink/ You’d better occupy the kitchen/ Liberate the sink.”
This sort of thing might be expected to have a short half-life, and by the 1980s, Friedman had begun the process of diversifying his repertoire. He became an unlikely specialist in quasi-comic, semi-autobiographical mystery novels, including Greenwich Killing Time (1986), Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola (1993), and Armadillos and Old Lace (1994), and his views on modern life were given unfiltered expression in a column for Texas Monthly. As much as Fran Lebowitz, Friedman became less known for any single work of art, literary or otherwise, than for incarnating a certain disaffected comic persona.
It was this attitude of cynical comic candor that Friedman brought to his 2006 gubernatorial campaign, which melded actual policy notions (an inimitably Texas-style stew that included legalizing marijuana and beefing up border security) with the more general aim of underscoring, through his presence, the weaknesses of the politicians around him. During a debate with his fellow candidates, Friedman defined “politics” this way: “‘Poli’ means more than one [and] ‘ticks’ are blood-sucking parasites,” he said. And, defending his outre language in past public utterances, he said, “If you ain’t offending somebody, you ain’t getting anything done.” That Perry’s rejoinder to Friedman, something about how “words matter,” sounds so lame is a sign of how Friedman-style bluntness has become the coin of the realm.
Yet his pugnaciousness and political incorrectness should not constitute his entire legacy: Entirely unfaked was his devotion to maintaining his parents’ camp, which focused on serving children of military personnel who had lost their lives, and to his dogs, one of whom he named Winston Randolph Spencer Churchill Friedman. (Entirely unfaked, too, was his admiration, frequently repeated, for the greatest of all British prime ministers.)
In 2015, when he was promoting his new album, The Loneliest Man I Ever Met, I had the fun fortune of interviewing Friedman by phone. His politics were, as ever, ecumenical. “I wouldn’t mind voting for, of the group, Ben Carson, Trump, and Bernie Sanders,” he told me back then. “You’ve got three men who I know are not corrupt.” Other than that, though, he was not optimistic. “They’re the Crips and the Bloods, the Republicans and Democrats,” he said. “And I like my idea of limiting all elected officials to two terms: one in office and one in prison.”
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
Former President Donald Trump held nothing back in a scathing Fourth of July post in which he took aim at President Biden and radical left-wing efforts to fundamentally transform the United States.
“Happy Fourth of July to all, including to our highly incapable ‘President,’ who uses Prosecutors to go after his Political Opponent, who choked like a dog during the Debate but tried to pretend it was ‘International Travel’ (only 12 days rest!) and, when that gig was up, he blamed it on a ‘cold.’” Trump wrote.
“Therefore, why would anyone say he’s cognitively challenged?”
The former president then reiterated his belief that he will be facing Vice President Harris in the general election. In a candid golf course discussion on Wednesday, Trump stated President Biden is getting out of the race. “She’s so fu***ng bad,” Trump said of Harris
“Also, respects to our potentially new Democrat Challenger, Laffin’ Kamala Harris. She did poorly in the Democrat Nominating process, starting out at Number Two, and ending up defeated and dropping out, even before getting to Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a ‘highly talented’ politician,” the post continued. “Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco.”
Trump also addressed Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the Biden Administration’s federal criminal cases against their lead political rival.
“Someone else that I have to compliment is a Deranged Biden Prosecutor named Jack Smith, who has become a Legend in his own mind for all of those cases he has lost,” Trump wrote. Smith has the distinction of having one of his cases unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court.
“The Corrupt Prosecutors are working hard for Crooked Joe, but it will never be enough — MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
