A Nothingburger (With Ketchup and Diet Coke)
Let’s just say that Trump’s address Wednesday night was not the height of presidential oratory.
Some rare good economic news this morning: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an annualized inflation rate last month of 2.7 percent, a slower rise in prices than the 3.1 percent rate economists had projected. The data-collection gap caused by the recent government shutdown makes it hard to put this number in context, and other indicators, like the jobs market, are still indicating a worrying economic slowdown—but perhaps we can hope that slowdown won’t continue to be accompanied by punishing inflation after all. Happy Thursday.
Oh, and by the way, sign up for a Bulwark+ membership today and your first 30 days are free:
Can We Get Those 18 Minutes Back?
by William Kristol
What to think of Donald Trump’s speech from the White House last night?
I’m with Tim Miller: “I was embarrassed. It’s really unbelievably stupid that we’re here, that this person is the president, and that that was real—that was not a spoof.”
I’d only add that it’s unbelievably stupid that we’re stuck with this person as president for three more years. And we’re stuck with apologists like Newt Gingrich, once a formidable figure. Last night, Newt made this unbelievably stupid statement: “Some day, people will say it was one of the most important speeches of his career . . . I think it’s a very, very important speech.”
No, it wasn’t a very, very important speech. It wasn’t even a slightly important speech. It was a pointless speech. It was a waste of 18 minutes of prime time.
But it also left me with a sense of relief. Only perhaps temporary relief, to be sure—but still, you take what you can get these days.
Why?
Because Trump didn’t use the network prime time he’d requested to announce we were going to war in Venezuela. After all his bellicose rhetoric, after all his bluster in press gaggles, Trump had a chance to make his case for war to the nation. He failed to take it. He didn’t even mention Venezuela.
I suppose Trump could still launch an attack soon. He surely doesn’t think a president has some kind of obligation, if he’s going to use military force, to explain the rationale to the public—let alone to get authorization for it from the people’s representatives in Congress. Perhaps he’s just waiting until Congress is out of town next week, so there’s less chance of effective pushback.
Still, the idea of a war with Venezuela is already unpopular. It’s hard to see why it’s going to get any more popular. Perhaps Trump will continue to bluff rather than fight. So maybe we’ll be spared an unauthorized and unjustified foreign war.
Which would be good.
There’s another reason for my sense of relief. Last night’s speech reveals Trump has no sense of how he might save his foundering presidency, or even much of an inclination to try to do so. Indeed, yesterday’s Republican meltdown in the House in the face of increased health insurance costs, a faltering economy, and the deadline for the release of the Epstein files tomorrow—all of these suggest a rough holiday season for the administration.
Which is good. A weaker Trump administration is better for America.
One more point. A normal president, speaking after this past week—in which two U.S. soldiers were killed in Syria, after the shooting of the students at Brown, after the terrible attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Sydney, and after the horrible murder of Rob and Michele Reiner—would have said something about how we mourned these tragedies. He might have asked for prayers for victims and their families in this holiday season.
Of course, this never even occurred to the pathological narcissistic we have as our president. Indeed, I doubt people thought he’d bother mentioning this at all: The soft bigotry of low expectations.
In any case, Trump is an embarrassment. And he will be a failed president. The question is how much more damage he’ll be able to do to our polity, our society, and our country.
His Glory Is He Has Such Friends
by Will Saletan
Donald Trump’s central goal in his prime-time address on Wednesday night was to reconnect with his voters. Many of them have said he’s spending too much time on foreign affairs and not enough on domestic concerns, especially the cost of living.
So it was odd to hear the president, in his remarks, reassure America that the country is doing well because his foreign buddies say so.
“One year ago our country was dead. We were absolutely dead,” Trump said. But “now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. And that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months.”
During those months, Trump has named many of the autocrats and VIPs he claims have said this to him: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, “the king of Saudi Arabia,” “the emir of Qatar,” the prime minister of Hungary, and “every leader of NATO.”
Trump is, of course, lying. Some foreign leaders, to flatter him and mitigate their risk of exorbitant tariffs, have probably told him he’s doing a great job. But it’s absurd to imagine that all the presidents and prime ministers of NATO countries have told him (as Trump has alleged more than once) that America was dead a year ago. To say such a thing wouldn’t just overtax their tolerance for self-abasing dishonesty, it would damage their post-Trump relations with the United States.
So why does Trump keep boasting that they said it? Because he’s a pathological narcissist. And because he thinks it will impress Americans.
Last month, Trump hosted a White House dinner to honor a man for whom he has expressed glowing affection. It wasn’t a Pennsylvania miner or a Michigan auto worker. It was Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. In his remarks, Trump said the crown prince was the first to tell him, “One year ago, we thought your country was dead. And now you have the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
Then Trump told the crown prince why he was so grateful for those words: “I want to thank you for giving me one of the most effective lines that I have.”
That’s how Trump thinks about the praise he extracts—or fabricates—from foreign leaders. It’s material he can use to manipulate American voters.
In his speech last night, Trump insisted, as he always does, that he’s bringing prices down. That’s a lie, and Americans know it. He’s more interested in starting wars and chasing phony peace prizes than he is on fixing health care or inflation.
So he assures Americans that everything’s fine and they’re doing really well, because guys like Putin, Xi, and MBS have told him so. He’s not refuting the accusation that he cares more about those dictators than he does about you. He’s proving it.
Reflections on Bondi Beach
by Mona Charen
When I go to synagogue, I always smile and wave at the armed police officers stationed outside. I want them to know they’re appreciated, but also, at some level, I guess it’s fair to say that I’m trying to ingratiate myself so that the cop will want to put his or her life on the line to save us if a gunman decides to open fire on or torch our congregation, as happened in Pittsburgh (2018), Poway ( 2019), Miami (2019), Monsey (2019), Halle, Germany (2019), Colleyville (2022), Jerusalem (2023), Djerba, Tunisia (2023), Berlin, Germany (2023), Yerevan, Armenia (2023), Rouen, France (2024), Athens, Greece (2024), Melbourne, Australia (2024), Los Angeles (2024), Manchester, UK (2024), and New York (2025).
That list contains only the successful attacks on houses of worship in recent years. It omits the thwarted ones, as well as attacks like the sniper killings of a young engaged couple (one an Israeli diplomat, the other an American-citizen employee of the Israeli embassy) who were exiting the Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., the arson attack on Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home, the desecration of cemeteries, the harassment of Jewish students, the Boulder, Colorado man who attacked a demonstration calling for the release of hostages with a spray of Molotov cocktails, or of hundreds of menacing threats like the London “pro-Palestine” demonstration that featured loudspeakers broadcasting “Fuck the Jews. Rape their daughters.”
Antisemitism is a poison like radon, always present below the surface in low doses, but sometimes rising to lethal concentrations. Except that radon, being colorless and odorless, is hard to detect without special equipment. Antisemitism, by contrast, is unsubtle and requires deliberate choices to unsee.
We have whole industries devoted to unseeing antisemitism and other outrages perpetrated by our ideological allies, and those same industries instantly become rage machines ready to exploit every act of violence when committed by ideological foes.
In this competitive atrocity era, no good massacre goes to waste. In the hours after the mass killing of Jewish Australians at Bondi Beach on the first night of Hannukah, right-wing rage merchants like Sen. Tommy Tuberville called for the mass deportation of all Muslims from the United States. In a characteristically nuanced take, he tweeted: “Stop worrying about offending the pearl clutchers. We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America.” Lindsey Graham blamed Obama and Biden. And Rep. Randy Fine weighed in with this analysis: “It is time for a Muslim travel ban, radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants, and citizenship revocations wherever possible.”
It’s possible that these guys are letting their amygdalas overwhelm their prefrontal cortexes. Violence does excite the fear/anger receptors in our brains and prepare us to respond in kind. When we see blood, we see red.
But people also have judgment and self-control. They aren’t lab rats robotically responding to stimuli. So unless they respond to every episode of violence—say, Dylan Roof’s murders, or the Christchurch massacre—with similar extreme proposals, it’s safe to assume that they are atrocity opportunists.
The left’s atrocity detectors are tuned to a different channel. They are activated by Israeli wrongdoing (which is real) but quiescent in the face of anti-Israel massacres such as October 7th or the antisemitic attacks that have erupted worldwide in the years since. It wasn’t hard to imagine—and many of us warned—that some people who heard and chanted “Globalize the Intifada” had in mind what was done at that Australian beach. Some on the left object that Jews are using the claim of antisemitism to attempt to silence criticism of Israel. But please tell me what Alex Kleytman, the 87-year-old Holocaust survivor who died shielding his wife, Larisa, from bullets on Bondi Beach, had to do with criticism of Israel? What did ten-year-old Matilda [surname withheld at family’s request] have to do with events in Gaza?
Perhaps some overwrought Israel defenders do overuse accusations of antisemitism, but it’s also true that antisemites use any perceived crime or error by Israel as permission for open season on Jews worldwide.
The murderers in Australia were Muslims who had been radicalized by ISIS. But the hero of the day, Ahmed Al Ahmed, was also a Muslim, a bystander who wrestled the gun away from one of the terrorists and was then shot multiple times by the other. Al Ahmed, who is recovering in the hospital, is a Syrian refugee and father of two girls. His story defies the atrocity mongers who want to exploit this crime to quicken hatred in the world. His shining example is a beacon at a time of year when we celebrate miracles.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Tales of a Billionaire-Populist Wannabe Governor… Tom Steyer has hired Zohran Mamdani’s ad firm to help get him elected in California. Can they pull it off? In The Opposition, LAUREN EGAN has this report.
Trump Wants to Cook the Books… On the Flagship Pod, MIKE STEINBERGER and CATHERINE RAMPELL join TIM MILLER to explain Trump’s attack on facts, the economic fallout of his policies, and Palantir’s growing power.
Trump Is an Idiot Spoiling for War. Also, Maduro Is a Bastard… The enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend, explains JVL in The Triad.
Avatar: Fire and Ash Review… James Cameron’s latest is Avatar by way of Apocalypto, writes SONNY BUNCH.
Quick Hits
JACK SMITH SPEAKS: Former special counsel Jack Smith testified yesterday to a closed-door meeting of the House Oversight Committee that his team had “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump’s stop-the-steal efforts were “criminal” and that he had “willfully retained highly classified documents” and “repeatedly tried to obstruct justice” to keep them secret. Portions of Smith’s testimony were obtained by NBC News. His prosecutions were cut short when Trump was reelected last year, but Smith seems confident that if the election had gone the other way, he would have secured a conviction.
Smith has been repeatedly targeted by Republicans this year. GOP lawmakers have been incensed by revelations that his investigators pulled some of their phone metadata during his investigation; Trump has said Smith belongs in jail. In his testimony, however, Smith told the committee that those phone records “were lawfully subpoenaed and were relevant to complete a comprehensive” investigation. Trump had called lawmakers to try to further a criminal scheme to steal an election, Smith argued. “I didn’t choose those members. President Trump did.”
WALL OF SHAME: Donald Trump has spent a lot of time this year trying to get revenge on various political enemies. But with various attempts to prosecute the likes of James Comey and Letitia James continually blowing up on the launchpad, he’s lately had to find more creative outlets for his endless spleen. Yesterday, the White House revealed the latest: a series of puerile “biographies” of recent presidents displayed on plaques beneath their portraits on Trump’s White House “presidential wall of fame.”
Many long-ago presidents have normal biographies. Those Trump personally likes or dislikes, however, got a different treatment. “Barack Hussein Obama” was “one of the most divisive political figures in American history” who “passed the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act,” “crippled small businesses with crushing regulation and environmental red tape,” allowed ISIS to “spread across the Middle East,” and “presided over the creation of the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.” “Sleepy Joe Biden”—whose portrait is not even displayed, with Trump having framed a picture of an autopen instead—is “by far the worst President in American History,” who was elected “as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States” and “oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction.”
If you think you detect a certain authorial presence behind these descriptors—well, you’re right. “The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each president and the legacy they left behind,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters yesterday. “As a student of history, many were written directly by the president himself.”
Such are the projects on which the president of the United States decides to fritter away his precious time in office.
MINT CONDITION MAGA: The U.S. Mint has nixed Biden administration designs for special commemorative quarters for the nation’s 250th birthday of the American nation. Treasurer of the United States Brandon Beach derided them as “DEI and critical race theory” stuff, and the designs have been replaced.
On the scrap heap: designs commemorating women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and the Civil Rights movement. Also, the Constitution commemorative coin will now feature Philadelphia’s Independence Hall instead of the Statue of Liberty. (None of those “huddled masses,” please.) New Trump designs celebrate the Mayflower pilgrims and the Revolutionary War, while abolition is obliquely referenced in a “Gettysburg Address” coin with two clasped arms on one side and Abraham Lincoln on the other. The Biden abolition coin would have had hands breaking shackles—and Frederick Douglass.
Were the Biden designs perfect? I would have put the Founders, not Lady Liberty, on the Constitution coin. A Revolutionary War coin could have been added without dropping women’s suffrage. But, of course, “canceling” the Biden legacy is the point. And this move clearly tells us, yet again, of what MAGA means by “DEI”: not identity-politics excesses, but pretty much any celebration of Americans who are not white and male—or any recognition of historical injustices toward these groups, even in the form of honoring movements that extended the promise of the Founding to women and minorities.
The administration is still pushing for a special $1 Trump commemorative coin for the anniversary. DEI is fine when it stands for Donald’s Ego Inflation.
—Cathy Young
Cheap Shots
Who was that old, face-painted man that was hollering at me on TV last night? I felt … violated to a considerable extent, berated by someone for something that I didn’t do and made to feel like whatever is wrong with our country and this world, it always was and is someone else’s fault. I got the distinct impression that at any moment he was about to tell me to get the hell out of his taxpayer-funded yard and play ball somewhere else.
Ronald Reagan that guy ain’t. I’d settle for Gerald Ford. There are public speakers who know how to read the room, that gentle, reassuring tones and a visible sense of empathy are the way to bring people over to your side and create a sense of both community and inspired leadership. Then there are those like the current guy who seem to feel that bludgeoning you via a verbal dressing down is the way to move forward, a sort of “get out of my way” approach that makes you feel less like you’re on the team and more as if an obstacle to him realizing the vision that he has for himself and his agenda. The difference between the two is as stark as the degree to which our nation has changed direction, in relatively short time, and not for better, as more and more of our uncouth leaders assert their authority and perceived superiority (see: Hegseth, Pete).
One vision and vibe is democratic and inclusive. The other is autocratic and exclusive, telegraphing that there is a hierarchy of importance at play and you are not one of the Beautiful People. I’d say welcome back to high school, with its cliques and class structures, but this is so much more serious than that. Enjoy the bumpy ride, if you can. We collectively bought the ticket. We continue to pay the price.
I do appreciate the president screaming for 18 minutes that EVERYTHING IS FINE! EVERYTHING IS GREAT! Why in the world would you think otherwise as you just got back from holiday shopping and felt your soul leave your body when you saw the total. Guess we can have gifts or groceries but not both.
And I wasn’t even buying dolls or pencils!