All the President’s ‘Butt Snorkelers’
An emperor president surrounded by a sycophantic cabinet is a dangerous thing.
Our long national nightmare is over: Cracker Barrel announced last night they will abandon their woke new logo and go back to the old one after all. For good measure, representatives of the company called Donald Trump and—in the words of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich—“thanked President Trump for weighing in on the issue of their iconic ‘original’ logo. They wanted the President to know that they heard him.”
Normal country! Normal times! Happy Wednesday.
Nietzsche, Take the Wheel
by William Kristol
I remember reading Nietzsche in college: “When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks back into you.”
Having the abyss look back into you seemed to me kind of a bad thing, so I’ve tried ever since then to avoid frequent abyss-looking.
And I was cheered yesterday to see some non-abysmal developments.
Taylor and Kelce are engaged! Congratulations and best wishes.
Cracker Barrel is returning to its 1969 logo! That’s fine with me—it seems to my untutored eye to be superior to the antiseptic 2025 corporate update.
And in a special state senate election in the Sioux City area, Iowans elected a Democrat, Catelin Drey. It was a previously Republican seat, with Drey winning by more than a 10-point margin in a district Trump won last year by 11, and ending the GOP’s supermajority in the chamber.
Pretty good.
Yesterday also featured a spectacle that perhaps transcended good and evil, but that was certainly striking: A three-and-a-quarter-hour televised cabinet Politburo meeting, in which the highest-ranking government officials of the world’s oldest and once greatest democracy abased themselves ridiculously before their presidential idol.
Every Trump apparatchik took a turn in the Cabinet Room adulating their leader. They even sought to outdo each other. Steve Witkoff’s fawning may have taken the prize: “There’s only one thing I wish for: That that Nobel Committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since that Nobel award was ever talked about.” But there was some stiff competition in this contest, about which retired Gen. Ben Hodges noted, “in the Army we called this Butt-snorkeling.”
Anyway, take a look at some of the clips online if you wish. The flattery is so over-the-top as to be—in short doses, at least—entertaining. And watching the other cabinet secretaries being sure to vigorously nod along to their colleagues’ moments of adoration, lest they seem less than fully enthusiastic, is a sight to behold.
But the great leader to whom all in the room bowed, Donald J. Trump, was not a silent idol. He spoke occasionally. At times he of course added to the sense of ridiculousness. But there were also moments that brought one back to reality.
The president forecast troop deployments to more cities, explaining, “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it.”
He also mocked critics who claim he’s behaving like a dictator, adding that “a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’ But I’m not a dictator.”
So one was reminded: We have a president who rejects any checks on presidential power, and who is trying to normalize the view that dictatorship maybe isn’t so bad.
As for the idea that an opposition to the president and his agenda has some sort of right to exist, the Trump administration rejects that too. On Monday night, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, appeared on Fox News. He called the opposition party “an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”
So much for the rule of law. So much for limits on the power of the executive. So much for the legitimacy of opposition to the government.
One can try to look away from the abyss for a while. But when the diversions end, one can’t help but see that we’re heading straight towards it.
Learning What Time It Is
by Andrew Egger
Last week, the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way circulated a modest proposal: If Democrats want to start winning again, they need to start sounding normal.
“For a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect to voters, Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying,” the memo began. “To please the few, we have alienated the many—especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty, and arrogant.”
What sort of language? The memo singled out dozens of Demspeak terms for purgation. Birthing people. Justice-involved people. Environmental violence. The unhoused. LGBTQIA+. Latinx. BIPOC. Systems of oppression.1 These and many other well-intentioned terms were initially coined, as Third Way put it, “to include, broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace.” But, they write, the effect has been the opposite: the creation of an “eggshell dance of political correctness which leaves the people we aim to reach cold or fearful of admonishment.”
All good advice! But old habits die hard, and Democrats’ recent practice of bringing identity politics to the forefront of any discussion isn’t only a problem because they sound like they’ve swallowed the syllabus of a graduate seminar.
On Monday night, as news broke that Donald Trump was trying to fire Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries released the following statement:
Dr. Lisa Cook is the first Black woman ever to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Donald Trump is trying to remove her without a shred of credible evidence that she has done anything wrong.
To the extent anyone is unfit to serve in a position of responsibility because of deceitful and potentially criminal conduct, it is the current occupant of the White House. The American people are not buying your phony projection and slander of a distinguished public servant.
Why is Donald Trump trying to break the will of the Federal Reserve? Because he wants to be able to set the nation’s interest rates according to his momentary political interests—a tectonic disruption of America’s financial system that could permanently destroy America’s reputation as an economic safe haven and cause immeasurable damage to the U.S. economy. But to hear Jeffries tell it, the most outrageous thing about Cook’s attempted firing is that he’s trying to undo her historic appointment as the first black woman on the board. As significant a breakthrough as that may have been, Jeffries seems to be missing the larger point.
And he’s not alone. Yesterday, Democrats converged on Minneapolis for the Democratic National Committee’s regular summer meeting. There was much to discuss, from questions about how the party can haul itself out of the political wilderness to crucial policy decisions like the party’s posture toward Israel’s war in Gaza. But before they could get to any of that, DNC Chair Ken Martin ceded the floor to a representative of the Saginaw Ojibwe nation to “deliver our land acknowledgement today.” The representative, who began her remarks with several sentences in an indigenous language, then toggled back to English:
The DNC acknowledges and honors the Dakota Oyate, the Dakota people who are the original stewards of the lands and waters of Minneapolis. The Dakota cared for the lands, lakes, and the Wakpa Tanka—the great river, the Mississippi River—for thousands of years before colonization. This land was not claimed or traded; it’s part of a history of broken treaties and promises, and in many ways we still live in a system built to suppress indigenous people’s cultural and spiritual history.
It is difficult to imagine more than a handful of people looking out over the current hellscape of U.S. policy and thinking to themselves: You know what we need to be sure to address today? The Dakota War of 1862. Right-wing media gleefully ping-ponged the clip around social media: Wake up, babe, they’re still doing land acknowledgments!
Democrats may believe, sincerely, that there is no harm (and, indeed, some good) in these displays. But many more people instinctively recoil against this sort of thing because it feeds a sense that Democrats are addicted to ritual self-flagellation—that America can never be good in their eyes.
In the present moment, though, I wonder whether the actual problem isn’t Democrats seeing America as too evil. Ironically, these sorts of Democratic displays are relics of a recent period when the party was too confident about America’s inevitable march toward their view of progress. Liberalism was permanently triumphant, they believed, and the greatest task that remained was smoothing out the remaining vestiges of the bigoted past—surfacing well-meaning people’s unconscious biases, acknowledging the harms of colonialism, appointing more black women to the Federal Reserve, and so on.
Getting with the program today means recognizing that these sorts of issues are now—at best—sideshows. It’s time for Democrats to head for the big tent.
AROUND THE BULWARK
In “Caught Stealing,” Darren Aronofsky returns to fertile ground, and for the first time tells the story of the self-destructive addict with a glimmer of hope, writes SONNY BUNCH.
RFK Jr. Could Blow Up the Vaccine Industry With One Simple Move… A seemingly obscure change to liability laws could wreck the market for some vaccines, reports JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.
Agnes Callard’s Insistent Answers to Life’s Deepest Questions… The University of Chicago philosophy professor invites readers to join her on the higher path, but she loses the spirit of her ancient Greek avatar along the way. MARY TOWNSEND reviews Open Socrates.
The Bolton Raid Was Designed to Scare Us… “I know because I was the first one there”, writes BENJAMIN WITTES.
Trump Drops Brief Embrace of Mail In Voting, Screwing His Party… as JOE PERTICONE details in his latest Press Pass. Plus, Joe writes about another red state map that could change, but not in favor of Republicans.
Quick Hits
‘A TRAGIC MISHAP’: Yesterday, Israel released the results of its inquiry into its strike this weekend on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, which killed—according to Palestinian health officials and the hospital’s own count—at least 20 people, including journalists, rescue workers, doctors, and patients. Even by the standards of the current war, the rationale provided was shocking. Here’s the Wall Street Journal:
Israeli troops fired on a Gazan hospital because they saw a camera they believed Hamas was using to monitor troop movements, the military said on Tuesday. . . .
The strikes drew widespread criticism for targeting a hospital, which has a protected status under international law, and came amid rising international condemnation of Israeli operations in the enclave. Israel is planning to expand the war in a new offensive in Gaza City.
Soldiers from the Golani Brigade operating in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis said they spotted a camera “in the area of the Nasser Hospital that was being used to observe the activity of IDF troops,” according to the findings of an Israeli military inquiry into the incident that were released on Tuesday.
Those defenders that remain of Israel’s conduct in this war tend to lean on a few stock responses in the wake of stories like this. Gaza casualty numbers can’t be trusted, they say, because the authority reporting them is tied to Hamas. And whatever civilian casualties do occur can be blamed only on Hamas, which hides behind civilians, prompted the war with its October 7, 2023 terror attack on Israel, and refuses to end the war by releasing its remaining Israeli hostages.
Such arguments have rung hollow for a while.2 But they truly fall apart in the face of a story like this. Sorry, guys. Had to bomb that hospital—and then bomb it again when the rescue workers came in. Better for a couple dozen innocents to die in terror and agony than for one Hamas camera to go free. And, no, we don’t actually have evidence for our claims. On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attack a “tragic mishap.” That’s one way to describe it.
UNPRECEDENTED AND UNFORTUNATE: One of the small occasional pleasures afforded to us in these grim times is seeing Donald Trump’s legal efforts get super-plexed by conservative judges he himself appointed. We got one of those instances yesterday in Maryland, where the administration has been challenging a ruling that it can’t deport migrants for two business days if those migrants have filed a habeas corpus petition.
It wasn’t a surprise when the administration challenged that ruling back in June. What was surprising was the strategy they went for: Suing the entire slate of judges who sit on Maryland’s district court. With no non-implicated judges left in the state, U.S. District Judge Thomas Cullen was obliged to schlep over from Virginia to hear the case—and he wasn’t particularly pleased about it. In his ruling, Cullen denounced the White House’s suit as “novel and potentially calamitous litigation” that “would run counter to overwhelming precedent, depart from longstanding constitutional tradition, and offend the rule of law.”
If the administration didn’t like the earlier ruling, Cullen wrote, it could have made use of “the tried and true recourse available to all federal litigants”: appeal to a higher court. (Ironically, the Department of Justice has since done just that—for Cullen’s ruling.)
“This court can appreciate the Executive’s concern that Defendants have encroached on its duty to police core matters of immigration,” Cullen went on. “But those disputes, weighty as they may be, must be resolved within the constitutional structure and with due respect for the Judiciary’s co-equal standing with the executive branch.”
For good measure, Cullen—who, again, was appointed by Trump—takes the administration to task for its “concerted effort” to “smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it,” which he called “both unprecedented and unfortunate.” Go off, King Cullen.
A PYRRHIC BREAKTHROUGH: The Financial Times reports, citing European and Ukrainian officials, that “the US has said it is prepared to provide intelligence assets and battlefield oversight to any western security blanket for postwar Ukraine and take part in a European-led air defence shield for the country.” If true, that’s kind of a big deal . . . but also kind of not.
As committed as much of Europe is to helping Ukraine militarily, there are certain things they just can’t do on an American scale. Among them: collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information; coordinating multiple types of forces from multiple countries across thousands of square miles; and deploying high-end air-defense systems. So they rely on the United States for those things. Any European security force in Ukraine after the war would also depend on these American capabilities. (The Europeans are trying to duplicate these capabilities for themselves so that they don’t have to rely on us—because they can’t—but that effort could take years if not decades.)
Still, devoting military assets to a European-led security force seems like a major shift of the American position toward Ukraine, in line with Trump’s recent invitation for Ukraine to strike Russian territory, which would be in violation of what has apparently been the administration’s policy.
But how much does it really matter? For one thing, it’s unclear a European security force would be viable without an American security guarantee. As in the Cold War, the American nuclear umbrella has a key role to play here.
More importantly, though, this agreement is completely hypothetical. Russia analyst Mark Galeotti referred to the Trump–Putin summit in Alaska as “upside down,” because the top leaders met before, rather than after, the lower-level negotiators worked out the details. Now the negotiations are upside-down and backwards, because they’re hammering out an option for after the war when there’s still no reason to think a negotiated solution to the war is in sight.
The biggest caveat, though, is that any American policy is subject to the president’s whims, which are frequently just a function of whom he spoke to last—which of late is often Vladimir Putin.
—Benjamin Parker
Cheap Shots
This is the accepted term to describe the editing process here at Morning Shots.
Hamas may well cook its casualty totals, but the primary culprit for the haze of uncertainty surrounding the carnage is Israel, which has forbidden outside journalists from entering Gaza and occasionally blown to smithereens the ones that enter the strip anyway.
Butt snorklers is A+++
I'm not sure how one puts the attempted firing of a black Fed governor into the proper context without mentioning race.
Is the Democratic party now to avoid mention of race when confronting the actions of an administration focused on attacking anyone "not white"?
I agree that the Dems need to start talking normal again, but it's not like anyone is going to decide to oppose fascism just because the Democrats learn to use different words.