◼ Trump has always wanted to develop a crime-infested, corrupt, dangerous strip of land by the sea. But enough about Atlantic City . . .
◼ Elon Musk has not been content to let his Department of Government Efficiency serve merely as an adviser to policymakers like past government-cutting efforts such as the Reagan-era Grace Commission. His latest target is the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID, an effort by the Kennedy administration to buy goodwill in the Cold War, has done a lot of good over the years. But it has also come increasingly unmoored from its original purposes and attracted Republican critics for funding progressive boondoggles. Musk uncovered more. After two USAID security officials tried to stop Musk’s DOGE from gaining access to classified materials in restricted areas within the agency, employees were locked out and Musk declared, “We’re shutting it down.” President Trump then named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as USAID’s acting administrator. USAID should be fundamentally restructured or abolished, but without help from Congress, it may prove difficult to make that stick.
◼ Benjamin Netanyahu became the first foreign leader to visit the White House in President Trump’s second term. During the visit, Trump announced that he would renew the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. He declared that the U.S. would no longer participate in the anti-Israel United Nations Human Rights Council or fund the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which had employees who were involved in the October 7 massacres. And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reiterated that the U.S. will supply Israel with the weapons that Biden had put on hold. But Trump really shook things up with a wild two-part plan for postwar Gaza. He said he expects other countries to finance the relocation of the roughly 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza to other countries, while the U.S. takes a long-term ownership stake in Gaza, leveling it to the ground and transforming the waterfront area into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” No America First foreign policy would be consistent with allocating blood and treasure to a massive rebuilding effort in one of the most volatile stretches of land in the world. The optimists’ case is that Trump is simply stirring up the pot to open up a range of possibilities that may have otherwise been out of reach. But everybody should be clear that the stated plan is not going to happen.
◼ As part of the trans craze, male athletes infiltrated women’s competitions and locker rooms, with woeful consequences: Sometimes, men claimed a spot on each rank of the podium in women’s divisions. President Trump has intervened with his executive order “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports.” The order, announced on Wednesday, aims to ensure that Title IX promotes equal opportunity and equal protection in sports on the basis of sex rather than gender. Trump’s order directs the secretary of education to pursue action against educational institutions or sports associations that require women either to compete against males or undress in their presence. Moreover, it empowers all executive departments and agencies to rescind funding from programs that flout these sex-based protections. It also instructs the Department of Justice to arrange the necessary resources to enforce these policies. But perhaps only minimal enforcement will be needed, as even the most high-profile organizations, such as the NCAA, have already begun changes. Within 60 days, a White House official will convene female athletes, representatives of sports-governing bodies, and state attorneys general to identify and promote the best practices for ensuring equal opportunity in sports. Progressives aren’t going to give up on this issue, although polling shows that a supermajority of Americans wants women’s athletics to be, well, exactly that.
◼ Defenses of President Trump’s reckless and incoherent trade policies amount to claims that he is exercising strategic ambiguity. The strategy apparently is to negotiate stronger security on both borders simultaneously and to end fentanyl overdoses (even though most fentanyl that crosses the border is carried by U.S. citizens) by threatening to violate the trade agreement with Mexico and Canada that in his first term Trump said was the best ever. At the same time, he imposed tariffs on China, but at less than half the rate against Mexico and Canada. After insisting that the tariffs were not a negotiating tool and that there was nothing Mexico and Canada could do to avoid them, he suspended the tariffs on them, in exchange for commitments to cooperation that their leaders had already made. His trade adviser, Peter Navarro, said that the goal of the tariffs was to replace the income tax. All of this relies on powers that are constitutionally suspect and involves no input from Congress. Trump moved the deadline forward 30 days, so we’ll get to do it all again next month. Sometimes ambiguity is just confusion.
◼ Gadflies’ and dissenters’ deeply felt convictions can make them admirable even if they are wrongheaded. They aren’t usually appointed to positions of major governmental responsibility after accumulating zero or very little relevant experience, though. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard have both cleared key Senate committee votes that appear to pave the way for their confirmations as, respectively, secretary of health and human services and director of national intelligence. Both are unfit. Their confirmation hearings, however, reflected not bold dissent from the Washington consensus but eleventh-hour conversions to make peace with that consensus. Kennedy wanted everyone to know that he’s not anti-vaccine, while Gabbard couldn’t persuasively explain why she’d gone from a fierce, uncompromising opponent of Section 702 of FISA, which allows the U.S. to surveil foreigners overseas, to a firm supporter. They have advanced in part because Donald Trump is at the peak of his influence over his party. Republican senators have also been hesitant to object to rewarding converts who, especially in the case of Kennedy, have their own following and helped expand Trump’s coalition. Whether their supporters can be brought into the Republican Party over the longer term when they shed their outsider status is uncertain. So is whether Trump will live to regret giving them power over policies that could go very wrong on his watch.
◼ Over the weekend, in a desperate gesture of futility, the Democratic National Committee elected David Hogg as one of three vice chairmen. The position is primarily symbolic, and Hogg’s election to it is meant to symbolize the Democratic Party’s commitment to the “youth vote” in the coming 2026 elections. Hogg, the anti-gun activist who came to prominence as a survivor of the high-school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in 2018, represents a demographic that is slipping away from the Democrats. Generation Z swung sharply to the right in 2024 in ways not seen since the Reagan Revolution of 1980. Slightly less than 50 percent of voters under the age of 30 cast their ballot for Donald Trump. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, for contrast, rolled up 60+ percent of young voters. Hogg says he is “politically toxic,” which is the first sign in his public life of self-awareness.
◼ Secretary of State Marco Rubio has named Darren Beattie to an important post: undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. The man or woman in this position represents American values to the world. Beattie worked in the first Trump administration as a speechwriter. He was fired in 2018 for appearing at a white-nationalist conference. Beattie regards Vladimir Putin as greater than NATO—much greater. The way he put it in a tweet is, “Putin>>>>>NATO.” He also wrote, “NATO is a greater threat to American liberty than the Chinese Communist Party.” In 2021, the State Department designated the CCP’s persecution of the Uyghurs a genocide. Several weeks later, Beattie wrote: “The Chinese aren’t genocidal. They just object to ughur supremacy and uyghurness. If uyghurs simply reject ughur supremacy, they’ll have no problem functioning in Chinese society” (sics omitted for brevity). On January 6 of that year, after a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, Beattie tweeted that several black Americans should “learn their place” and “take a knee to MAGA.” For instance, he wrote, “Kay Cole[s] James of Heritage Foundation needs to learn her natural place and take a KNEE to MAGA.” And so on and so forth. So far, Beattie is in charge of public diplomacy in an “acting” capacity. He ought to be removed altogether. His presence at the State Department stains our nation.
◼ Price controls are a bad idea that has endured since, at least, Babylon notwithstanding millennia of failure. It’s therefore no great surprise that Senator Bernie Sanders (I, Vt.) is promoting a bill to “temporarily” cap credit card interest rates at 10 percent, and not much more of one that Donald Trump, playing the populist, supported such a cap on the campaign trail. Their partner in economic illiteracy is Senator Josh Hawley (Mo.). Even Republicans, such as Hawley, who like to distance themselves from the market fundamentalist boogeyman, should draw the line at supporting legislation that will hurt those it purports to help. Prices—and interest rates are just the price of money—are not drawn out of a hat. Supply and demand determine them. For government to “help” by fixing a price cap well below current rates in the credit card market would mean that issuers sharply reduce such lending to less qualified borrowers, leaving them with fewer and worse places to turn. At least the loan sharks will be better off.
◼ One might expect that a Spanish-language musical about a Mexican drug cartel kingpin who escapes his life of crime with an attorney who helps him transition into a woman would not attract a mass following. And it hasn’t. The film Emilia Pérez has, however, stunned the critics. It won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and Best Film at the Golden Globes. It secured no fewer than 13 Oscar nominations. Informed speculation might lead observers to conclude that the film’s pro-transgenderism themes, not the production itself, wowed the arbiters of culture. That, and the film’s lead actor, Karla Gascón, who previously identified as Carlos Gascón when he associated himself with the accidents of his birth. Gascón was heralded as a star for the ages, in large measure for promoting transgenderism from a celebrity’s perch. But that celebrity was short-lived. The people using Gascón as a vehicle to smuggle pro-trans narratives into the culture discovered that their avatar has an extensive record of making impolitic comments on social media. Gascón sneered at the “deeply disgusting” form of conservative dress Islamic codes prescribed for women. “Islam fails to comply with international rights,” the actor wrote. George Floyd was a “drug addict swindler,” Gascón added. He speculated that Hitler “simply had his opinions about Jews.” Overnight, this promising rising talent had become, in Variety’s estimation, the “Donald Trump of Oscar Season.” If Gascón is surprised by the about-face, it’s because the actor mistook the admiration for genuine respect rather than what it was: condescension.
◼ Starting in 2020, the National Football League stenciled END RACISM on the endlines under the goalposts at its games. It has announced that the phrase will not appear at the Super Bowl this year, having been replaced by CHOOSE LOVE. Both are odd messages from a league that regularly and disproportionately makes black men multimillionaires and whose product is based on regulated interpersonal violence. Regardless, we find it unlikely that any racist or hateful people are changing their behavior after reading the endlines at NFL games, so maybe just painting the line would do?
◼ Roughly half a century after the Daily Telegraph first prepared her obituary, Marianne Faithfull, an icon of swinging London who survived drug addiction, alcoholism, anorexia, homelessness, two suicide attempts, and involvement with three Rolling Stones, has died at 78. She was widely mourned as a “national treasure,” a British honor higher than any bauble from the monarch. Faithfull’s recording of “As Tears Go By” (a song written by the Stones’ manager, whom she met at, of course, a party, and by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards)—together, it should be said, with her remarkable beauty—launched her as a pop star and cultural phenomenon. Her rise was marked by heroic hedonism and capped by a four-year relationship with Jagger. And then she burned out, lost, it seemed forever, before a triumphant rebirth with a deeper voice (laryngitis, smoking, and drugs) and a bleak, widely praised album, Broken English, far removed from the gentle folk music that was once her trademark. The road back had its bumps, but a series of releases established her as the outrageous, clever, (sometimes) charming and very (her mother was an Austro-Hungarian baroness) grande dame of Bohemia. R.I.P.
