◼ The widely predicted breakup between Elon Musk and Donald Trump is getting so intensely nasty and personal that even Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are telling them to calm down. Musk’s time at DOGE is wrapping up with about $180 billion in accumulated savings. That’s considerably lower than the goal Musk set last autumn, but it’s not chopped liver. Alas, all those savings will be more than offset by the effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill that passed the House and awaits action in the Senate. The Congressional Budget Office examined the bill’s likely effects on the deficit and the debt and concluded that it would increase the federal debt by $2.4 trillion over ten years. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk declared on X. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong.” On Thursday, Trump shot back by contending Musk was primarily concerned with protecting Tesla’s subsidies. Musk accused Trump first of ingratitude and then of being in the Epstein files. Trump is correct that the bill blocks devastating tax increases and makes some modest but much-needed reforms to Medicaid. Musk is correct that deals that keep increasing the deficit by trillions aren’t putting us anywhere near a path to fiscal responsibility. Both should heed any better angels that have not already fled the scene.
◼ A man shouting “Free Palestine” and ranting about Zionists used improvised incendiary devices against a crowd of people in Boulder, Colo. They were gathering as part of a weekly “Run for Their Lives” event calling for the return of the remaining hostages in Hamas captivity. The suspect has been identified as Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national who first entered the United States on a tourist visa in August 2022. When he overstayed that visa, the Biden administration granted him work authorization in March 2023 for two years. Since that two-year period ended this past March and was not renewed, Soliman is currently in the country illegally. Following the attack, Soliman’s family was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be processed for expedited deportation, a welcome move that was then paused by a Biden-appointed U.S. District Court judge, Gordon Gallagher. We trust this decision will be overturned. Meanwhile, the intifada is here and is spreading: from New York City, to Washington, to the Rockies.
◼ After the Court of International Trade temporarily struck down most of Donald Trump’s tariffs, he blamed, of all people, Leonard Leo. “I was new to Washington,” Trump says, “and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges.” Now, Trump rues the “bad advice” he got “on numerous Judicial Nominations.” Never mind that the one Trump appointee on the three-judge panel came recommended by Trump’s U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and is a lifelong Democrat, not a Federalist Society stalwart. Not only is Trump’s broadside an echo of left-wing smears against Leo—one of the right’s most effective activists—it’s also profoundly ungrateful. Exit polls in 2016 found that Trump owed his margin of victory to voters who ranked the Supreme Court as their top issue. Trump was able to bid successfully for those voters by aligning himself with Federalist Society views of the judiciary. In office, listening to the advice of Leo and other conservative legal movement figures helped Trump send the Senate a steady pipeline of high-quality judicial nominees, resulting in an unprecedented number of confirmations to the federal appellate courts as well as three Supreme Court justices. Without the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Trump might well have spent the summer and fall of 2024 on trial in federal courtrooms. Leo responded with characteristic grace; Trump could still learn something from him.
◼ Double or nothing! Trump announced right before they came into effect that the steel and aluminum tariffs would be 50 percent instead of the previously announced 25 percent. He said so in a speech at a steel plant in Pennsylvania, and the American Iron and Steel Institute applauded the move. What’s good for the steel industry is bad for just about everyone else, especially domestic manufacturing firms that will now have higher input prices. American businesses already pay almost double the world price for steel, and tariffs allow domestic steel producers to raise prices as well. Doubling the tariff rate right before enactment also discredits any “strategic” justification for this protectionism. One would think if there were some kind of strategy to tailor the tariffs for maximum economic benefit that there would be a difference between one rate and twice that rate. But Trump enjoys tariffs, and no court has ruled against these. So American businesses will have to pay the price for his caprice.
◼ The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the standard for proving employment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act is the same no matter whether the plaintiff is a member of a majority group or a minority group. It thus rejected an effort by the Sixth Circuit to apply a higher burden of proof of additional “background facts” to a heterosexual woman’s claim that her lesbian boss’s promotion of another lesbian amounted to employment discrimination. As even Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s majority opinion concluded, the law protects individuals, not groups. It is worth questioning whether either Title VII or the courts’ interpretation of it make it too easy to file these lawsuits, and Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a characteristically incisive concurring opinion (joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch) arguing that the Court should reconsider the standards it invented in a 1973 case. But so long as we have Title VII lawsuits, their rules ought to be the same for everyone.
◼ In 2005, Congress enacted the Promotion of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act to stop lawsuits that aimed at backdoor gun regulation. The Mexican government tried to get around PLCAA with a lawsuit arguing that American gunmakers were aiding and abetting the sale of guns that would make their way into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. Running to an American court is easier than fighting the cartels or rooting out their influence at the highest levels of Mexican government, we suppose. Shamefully, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit bought the theory, but the Supreme Court has now unanimously rejected it. Justice Elena Kagan’s opinion noted that Mexico was trying to punish American firms for the conduct of rogue downstream gun dealers that Mexico’s own complaint couldn’t even identify. “Mexico’s suit closely resembles the ones Congress had in mind,” Kagan concluded, and the statute’s narrow aiding-and-abetting “exception, if Mexico’s suit fell within it, would swallow most of the rule. We doubt Congress intended to draft such a capacious way out of PLCAA, and in fact it did not.”
◼ Wisconsin exempts religiously run charities that are “operated primarily for religious purposes” from unemployment compensation taxes. The state supreme court denied that exemption to Catholic Charities because it doesn’t serve only Catholics and doesn’t use its charitable acts to proselytize. The U.S. Supreme Court had to explain that penalizing “inherently religious choices (namely, whether to proselytize or serve only co-religionists)” amounts to discriminating between denominations, just “like a law exempting only those religious organizations that perform baptisms or worship on Sundays.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the decision for a unanimous Court, which may count as a miracle in its own right.
◼ “Russia holds all the cards,” Trump told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in a tempestuous Oval Office exchange in March. We now know why Zelensky was unfazed. Over the weekend, an operation 18 months in the making culminated in spectacular success. In that period, Ukraine managed to smuggle into Russia a fleet of small quadcopter drones armed with explosives. Those drones were loaded into crates, which were piled onto modified shipping containers and trucked to locations throughout the Russian Federation. Each was parked adjacent to a key airfield and, at the appointed time, the drones executed simultaneous remote attacks on Moscow’s strategic long-range aircraft. The operation, innovative and daring, destroyed at least a dozen bombers, fighters, and reconnaissance planes. The targets, all of which were military in nature, accentuate the moral distinction between Ukraine’s tactics and Russia’s barbarous efforts to bomb Kyiv’s civilians into submission. Although the operation highlights America’s vulnerability to a similar asymmetric assault, it also demonstrates once again why Ukraine is a worthy as well as a righteous partner.
◼ A U.S.-backed charity, supported both by private security and the Israel Defense Forces, embarked on an effort to distribute humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. With the help of a shockingly credulous press, a variety of international institutions have responded by retailing fabrications designed (and sometimes explicitly said) to show why they should have a monopoly on aid distribution. We were told the population was starving as a result of an IDF hold on aid—a fallacy exposed by the AFP’s observation that “residents have resorted to grinding lentils, pasta and rice for baking bread amid severe shortages of flour.” We were treated to the staggeringly innumerate claim that 14,000 infants would starve within 48 hours if action was not taken. And when the U.S.-Israeli aid program ramped up, U.N. officials and their stenographers regularly alleged that the distribution sites were kill boxes in which Israelis lured civilians with the aim of killing them. There is a sense of dread pervading all this that the U.N. aid effort, which has been co-opted by Hamas (as evinced by civilian raids on the U.N. food storehouses that Hamas holds hostage), could be coming apart—and with it, the key to the terrorist group’s rule over the Strip.
◼ Bonjour tristesse. There may not be much left of what used to be thought of as the French way of life, and as from July 1, there will be even less. This loss is sharpened by the way that a new law—an extensive ban on outdoor smoking—is being justified on grounds more typically associated with those puritanical Anglo-Saxons: It is “for the children.” From that dread July date, smoking will be banned in outdoor spaces where the little tykes can be expected to be found. According to the minister responsible, “the freedom to smoke must end where the freedom of children to breathe fresh air begins.” That includes even beaches and public parks. One consolation: The ban will not apply to outdoor café terraces. There, at least, a customer enjoying a Gauloise can ponder the joys of living in a state that can control its smokers, but not its streets.
◼ During the 2024 Paris Olympics, Italy’s Angela Carini quit 46 seconds into a women’s boxing match against Algerian opponent Imane Khelif. Khelif was one of two competitors in the women’s boxing division who was previously disqualified from the 2023 International Boxing Association Women’s World Boxing Championships after failing a sex-identification test. Association president Umar Kremlev said in 2023 that Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting were ineligible for the women’s championship because DNA tests had “proved they had XY chromosomes.” Lin did not appeal the association’s decision; Khelif appealed but then withdrew. In defense of its “inclusive” policies, the Paris 2024 Boxing Unit and the International Olympic Committee asserted that, as was the case in previous competitions, “the gender and age of the athletes are based on their passport.” Khelif and Lin were permitted to continue competing in the women’s division, and each won a gold medal. Recently, American journalist Alan Abrahamson, who is a member of the IOC’s press committee, published an excerpt of Khelif’s 2023 lab test results that stated “chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype.” That the IOC allowed Khelif to compete against women is, and always was, below the belt.
◼ After nearly 30 years, Sam Tanenhaus is finally publishing his biography of William F. Buckley Jr., an epic 900-page project to match an epic life. Tanenhaus deserves credit for the care he took in the research and writing. But Tanenhaus is a center-left writer who pronounced conservatism dead nearly 15 years ago, and his preoccupations blight the book. He maintains that Buckley was a mere “intellectual entertainer,” which significantly underrates his talent and achievement. Buckley obviously made an indispensable contribution to defining modern conservatism through his writing and advocacy, his friendship and correspondence with every conservative intellectual worth knowing (all of whom considered him at least a peer), through his institution building, and through NR. Predictably, Tanenhaus dwells on Buckley’s editorials in the 1950s favoring segregation. Those editorials were disgracefully wrong, but Buckley had changed on the underlying question by the 1960s. Tanenhaus is also fond of making, as Barton Swaim of the Wall Street Journal aptly put it in his review, “vague imputations of dishonesty,” which tend to be loosely supported at best and tell us more about the worldview of the biographer than about the integrity of his subject. Tanenhaus does grant that Buckley was a “great man.” Still, his massive volume doesn’t do justice to a man who lived a legendary life and changed the 20th century.
◼ In 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln said that the “silent artillery of time” was doing “what invading foeman could never do”: deprive America of the enduring influence and example of those who survived the Revolutionary War. John Tyler, America’s tenth president, was born in 1790, a few years after that war, and had no memory of it, but doubtless knew many who did. Three years after Lincoln’s speech, Tyler became the ailing William Henry Harrison’s vice president, and then president himself. His succession was no sure thing procedurally, but he asserted it as the vice president’s role in the event of a president’s death. His term in office was mixed. He left it as a man literally without a party but endorsed Democrat James K. Polk. Historical posterity remembers John Tyler little. But his actual posterity is a different story. Tyler married his first wife, Letitia Christian, in 1813; they had eight children. He remarried in 1844, after her death, and then had seven with his second wife, Julia Gardiner. Lyon, his 13th child, was born in 1853; his father lived until 1862, long enough to win a post in the Confederacy but not long enough to take it. Lyon, who was president of William & Mary, lived until 1935. His son Harrison Ruffin Tyler was born in 1928. Befitting a man who was an improbably extant link to America’s early years, Harrison Tyler was deeply interested in history. He spent many years tending to the Sherwood Forest Plantation site, which his father, a slaveholder, had owned, and nearby Fort Pocahontas, a Civil War-era Union supply depot built by black soldiers. He purchased both himself (he had a long and successful career as a chemical engineer). But the silent artillery of time spares no man. Harrison Tyler, this 21st-century reminder of a 19th-century president, is no more. Dead at 96. R.I.P.