The GOP’s Ceremony of Impotence
Ignoring an abuser, covering up a sex trafficker, and confirming a ringleader.
In an interview over the weekend, Hunter Biden shared some rough news: Joe Biden’s metastatic prostate cancer has spread to “his bones and further.” “It’s very painful and it’s very debilitating in many respects,” the younger Biden told the BBC. “But he’s still out there.”
Cancer is brutal; our thoughts and prayers are with the former president. Happy Monday.
Join Will Sommer and Sam Stein at 10:00 a.m. EDT today for MAGA Mondays on Substack and YouTube.
Eyes Wide Shut
by William Kristol
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Thus George Orwell. But we’re not yet living in Orwell’s totalitarian society. So the members of our ruling party don’t quite reject the evidence of our eyes and ears. They simply avert their eyes and ears from the evidence around them. They minimize its importance and rationalize its significance. And above all, they do nothing about it.
Ohio Rep. Max Miller’s Republican colleagues are well aware of his behavior. They know of what Sen. Bernie Moreno, his ex-father-in-law, calls “the clear pattern of abuse [Miller] has left in his wake.” They understand why Moreno said that Miller “should not serve in the House of Representatives.” They could easily have spoken up last week and told Miller to leave. They could have said they wouldn’t endorse his re-election. They could have announced they wouldn’t help fund his race.
But Miller wants to stay in the House and on the ballot, and President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson have stood by him. And so House Republicans don’t want to deal with the matter. Indeed, as the Washington Post reports, “most of his GOP colleagues in the House refuse to discuss the allegations against him.”
After all, they presumably figure, Miller represents a Republican district, so he may be able to win. He’s wealthy and has announced he’s lending his campaign $1 million, so that should help. And as their speaker has helpfully reminded them, “people have domestic disputes.” Indeed, “It’s part of being flawed humans.”
Meanwhile, over in the Senate, fifty out of fifty-two Republicans voted early Saturday morning to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general. This probably shouldn’t have been a surprise. The GOP-controlled Senate had previously voted to confirm Pam Bondi for that job, along with rubber-stamping other flawed humans like Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth for various positions.
But as conservative lawyer Gregg Nunziata, executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law, pointed out, in way the vote for Blanche was worse:
The one meaningful difference here is with respect to the others senators could claim they were deferring to POTUS and hoping for the best, with Blanche they’ve seen how he operates in this role, abusing power, and they’ve chosen to ratify it. Craven and despicable.
But what was craven to Nunziata was a privilege to Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, the deciding vote in favor of Blanche. Cassidy explained to Margaret Brennan yesterday that “I would read history books and I would read about these great decisions on the Senate floor. . . . The fact that I, Bill Cassidy, was able to do that, I am so privileged, and whenever I just for a second am hit by the gravity of that, and the honor of that, I get emotional.”
Cassidy got emotional about the privilege of casting his historic vote. He chose not to get emotional about Blanche’ s coverup of the Epstein scandal. As Lisa Rubin notes,
Prior to his speech, neither Cassidy nor his staff met with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, despite their repeated entreaties. Notwithstanding that, Cassidy said during his floor speech that among the reasons to support Blanche was that leaving him as an acting AG without Senate confirmation could risk DOJ’s progress on . . . human trafficking.
Perhaps Cassidy agreed with his colleague, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the deciding vote in getting Blanche reported out of committee. When Cornyn was asked to respond to Epstein survivors who said a yes vote on Blanche would have a chilling effect on survivors of sexual assault coming forward, Cornyn replied: “I don’t believe there is anything we could do to assuage them at this point. . . . That’s one of those things that cannot be remedied by a ‘no’ vote.”
So what’s the point, if you’re a Republican senator, of voting against a cabinet nominee central to a sexual assault coverup? What’s the point, if you’re a Republican House member, of speaking up against Max Miller?
I began with the great social democrat George Orwell. I end with the great liberal John Stuart Mill. Mill was concerned about the fate of personal liberty and public spirit in modern democracy. In his 1867 inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews, he remarked that “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
But one has to ask: If they do nothing but look on as bad men compass their ends, are they still good men?
Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die
by Andrew Egger
In our lunatic age, you sometimes run into headlines that you know at once will make people lose their minds. So it was this weekend when the internet was informed that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is freezing her eggs.
In a series of Instagram videos, the congresswoman said she had made the decision to “feel more in control of my life,” and had chosen to be public about it “to show more depictions of women having full lives in every context and every choice,” particularly against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s anti-abortion policies. As she gave herself a hormone shot, she admonished her viewers: “Don’t be weird about this, even though I know you all will be.”
Obviously, she was right. Egg-freezing is an increasingly common procedure—AOC isn’t even the first congresswoman to do it—but MAGA influencers went berserk over the news, with reactions ranging from handwringing to grossly leering.1
Fertility discourse, understandably but stupidly, tends to go like this. Everyone treats it as just another culture-war cudgel: The right accusing the left of insufficient concern for family formation amid cratering birthrates, the left accusing the right of faking concern over families to try to squish women’s rights. Boring, boring, boring!
So I’m going to sidestep the whole mess and simply use it as an excuse, as I do whenever I get the opportunity, to bring up one of the most impactful things I’ve ever read, which I think everyone should read, which is in no small part responsible for my and my wife’s own decision to start having kids young, which if it were up to me they’d teach in schools: a 2018 article by lefty writer Tom Scocca titled “Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die.”
In our social world, in our cultural class, at our point in history, people are brought up . . . to structure their lives as if time were something a person accumulated. . . .
But this idea of certainty is a sham, a distraction, something to turn your attention away from the only truly certain thing, which is that your time will run out. If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children. . . .
Life and the making of more life appears as a technical problem; where the body’s ability to stall falters, cryogenics can take over. Perhaps zygotes can be spun up from ordinary DNA. Science is doing its best to push back the limits. Look to the wealthy and the entitled and see the future: Mick Jagger just sired a baby at age 73.
Now look to the future: when that baby turns 10, Mick Jagger will be 83. When that baby turns 20, Mick Jagger will be 93. When that baby turns 30, 40, 45—Mick Jagger will be almost certainly dead, all but definitely dead, unquestionably dead.
As the child of a spectacularly wealthy man, Mick Jagger’s baby will surely be provided for. But not by its dad, not in person.
I don’t begrudge AOC (or anyone else!) the fertility decisions she makes. I admire her for being public and open about these decisions—an act of actual bravery given the insane culture-war football she no doubt knows she’ll be turned into when she does. Still, if we were friends, and she asked my opinion, I’d send her the article.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Precision Has a Price… When we burn through expensive precision weaponry, we lose some of our ability to keep distance between American service members and the enemy, observes MARK HERTLING.
Trump to Supreme Court: Make Me… His new assault on birthright citizenship will test whether Supreme Court rulings mean anything when a president decides they don’t, writes KIM WEHLE.
Book club reminder! Our August book club will discuss Mark Twain’s very interesting late novel, Pudd’nhead Wilson. The live show is Wednesday, August 12 at 1:30 p.m. ET with Mona Charen and Bill Kristol. More info here: Bulwark Book Club for August: Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson
How Much Harm Is Hegseth Doing? On The Bulwark on Sunday, BILL KRISTOL welcomes recently retired COL. BREE FRAM to discuss the damage Pete Hegseth is inflicting on the United States military, as well as her own experience of being forced out of the military after more than twenty years of service.
Quick Hits
A DIPLOMATIC SHELLACKING: It’s honestly fascinating, the degree to which Donald Trump is ready to surrender to Iran if he can get the tiniest fig leaf to do so—and how unwilling Iran appears to be even to give him that. The hopes of a breakthrough nuclear deal have all but vanished, but the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is ready to declare victory and walk away anyway, if he could just figure out how to reopen the Strait of Hormuz first.
But even this hope seems to be slipping away. On Saturday, Iran issued its largest heap of demands yet: America would need to permanently end the war, withdraw forces from the region, end all Iran sanctions and release all frozen Iranian assets, pay reparations, and suspend attacks on Iran’s regional proxies before Iran will consent to reopen the waterway—and even then, Iran insists, it will maintain operational control of the strait going forward. These demands were quickly followed yesterday by multiple missile attacks on ships trying to transit the strait.
Iran is plainly betting that—all Trump’s saber-rattling aside—the president has completely lost his nerve for additional military escalations in the conflict. That might be a bit premature. Trump is already beaten, but that doesn’t mean he won’t rediscover his bellicose side if Iran pushes him hard enough. If there’s one thing we know about Trump, it’s that he’s perfectly willing to push all strategic thinking to the side to try to punish anyone who makes him look like a fool.
SEN. QUISLING (R-LA.): Incredibly, Sen. Bill Cassidy is at it again. The Louisiana senator has endured two years of nonstop humiliation after his pivotal vote to confirm HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vote he agreed to after he said Kennedy had promised not to pursue anti-vaccine policy at HHS. Kennedy immediately broke his promise, and Trump immediately endorsed a primary challenger and ended Cassidy’s career anyway. Cassidy apparently thinks Todd Blanche will be different, though.
But don’t worry, America: Cassidy wants you to know it was a hard choice. Blanche’s attempt to permanently immunize Trump and his family from IRS investigations almost got him to a “no” vote, he told CBS’s Margaret Brennan yesterday: “That is wrong—and no American should be targeted by the law, but no American should be above the law.” When Brennan asked if he was confident Blanche would “uphold the Constitution with the upcoming elections,” Cassidy replied: “Of course there’s always an existential anxiety. . . . I can’t predict the future.”
Oh, is there always an existential anxiety about the presidential administration tearing up the Constitution to brute force its way to more favorable election results? We’d sort of thought that was a recent development.
LEOPARD EATS PARTY MEMBER’S FACE: “John Gannon is a 75-year-old businessman and lifelong Republican who supported President Trump in 2024,” reports CBS News.
But, Gannon says, “I wouldn’t do that again, not after this fiasco.”
What fiasco is Gannon talking about? There are so many from which to choose.
It turns out the one Gannon meant was the arrest—and possible pending deportation—of his 45-year-old fiancée, an immigrant from Venezuela with a pending asylum application. Gannon said his reaction to hearing the news of her arrest was “total disbelief.”
Really? Maybe Gannon had missed it when the candidate he supported called for “mass deportations.” Maybe he missed it when the delegates at the 2024 Republican National Convention waved signs bearing the phrase “mass deportations now.” Maybe he had missed the actual mass deportations, and the many stories of innocent immigrants being hounded, detained, and deported by ICE—including some to foreign torture chambers. Maybe he had missed that the people carrying out these deportations had killed two American citizens and untold numbers of immigrants, whether in detention centers or in broad daylight in the streets of major American cities. One of the most recent cases was about a month ago. In Houston. Gannon’s hometown.
Gannon should be reunited with his fiancée as soon as possible, and her asylum application should be reviewed according to the law and as speedily as fairness will allow. But then maybe the future Mr. and Mrs. Gannon should have a long conversation about what merits “total disbelief.”
But he shouldn’t expect the Trump administration to help him resolve this “fiasco.” After CBS aired its interview, a White House staffer, who tweets under an anonymous account, mocked Gannon for not realizing what a “headache” Trump’s ICE goons had saved him from.
Cheap Shots
Mill says, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” Bill adds: "If they do nothing but look on as bad men compass their ends, are they still good men?"
I chime in to say, These Republican Senators have done something more than look on. They have actively endorsed a man who comes into office as the most corrupt and compromised AG in our nation's history. They have thrown their power and the force of the United States Senate behind him, and they have done it, not with resignation, but with a curious kind of defensive smugness, whining about their critics and talking about their own greatness merely for participating in the process.
They are not good men. They sure are not. These are some of the worst men the Good Lord ever blew breath into.
"The fact that I, Bill Cassidy, was able to do that, I am so privileged, and whenever I just for a second am hit by the gravity of that, and the honor of that, I get emotional.”
Apparently selling out your country is an emotional thing. Amazing the narrative these fools construct in their heads.