Plus: The Cracker Barrel wars.
• We wish them a long marriage era.
• A disturbed and evil man killed two children in cold blood, ages eight and ten, and injured 18 more people on Wednesday morning. As of this writing, at least a dozen remain hospitalized. His targets were the students and parishioners of Annunciation Catholic school and church in Minneapolis—and while the students attended the first all-school Mass of the fall term. Police have identified the murderer—a 23-year-old man who petitioned the State of Minnesota to legally change his name in 2020 in accordance with his self-proclaimed gender identity. He turned his own weapons on himself in a final bout of homicide. As the transgender identity of the shooter became known, as if on cue, many Democrats and trans activists reacted with fury at anybody who pointed this out, belittling the faith of the Catholic students in the process. “Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey declared. Frey then dismissed anyone offering “thoughts and prayers right now.” When they were attacked, Frey thundered, “these kids were literally praying.” Yes, they were, which is part of what makes this murderer’s crimes so horrific. In fact, the murderer’s video and written manifestos make clear that he targeted the Christian students specifically: “Where Is Your God?” he wrote sardonically in silver paint on one of his magazines. Frustrated by the roadblock that the U.S. Constitution and the American people pose to their anti-gun agenda, some Democrats have chosen to mock those who turn to prayer when confronted with unspeakable evil. Their dismissive attitude toward prayer is rooted in arrogance. In the immediate aftermath of a horrific event, prayer can address pain in a way that legislation, which at a minimum takes time to debate and pass, cannot. When people pray, they can find strength in the face of helplessness, wisdom at a time when nothing makes any sense, and comfort when the soul is being drawn into the abyss of grief. Prayer is efficacious and ennobling. It was not in vain that the Psalmist declared that the Lord “healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.”
• The search warrants executed last week at John Bolton’s home and office trace, at least in part, to the memoir the former national-security adviser penned about his tenure, portraying President Trump as corrupt and incompetent. After an experienced official cleared the 500-page tome for publication, determining that it did not reveal classified information, Trump officials carried out an irregular reassessment, purported to find national-defense intelligence, and accused Bolton of risking catastrophic damage to the intelligence-collection system. By then, Bolton’s publisher had printed and publicized 200,000 copies; a federal judge sharply criticized Bolton, who had not waited for a formal approval, but allowed publication to go forward. The Biden DOJ looked into it but eventually dropped a criminal investigation. According to leaks, the Trump administration’s revival of it stems from indications—from U.S. monitoring of a foreign government that was spying on Bolton—that, in amassing material for the book, Bolton transmitted classified documents over nonsecure channels to people close to him. One rationale for the searches is that if Bolton possessed copies, it would authenticate the documents and corroborate the allegation. We’ll see. But it was impossible not to notice the president’s observation that Bolton now knows how Trump felt when Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was searched.
• Trump says he fired Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Cook says she will continue in her position and is suing to keep it. Can Trump fire her? It’s not a question of the president’s ability to fire officials in so-called independent agencies, because Trump is claiming to fire her for cause, which is permitted under the Federal Reserve Act. The cause is alleged mortgage fraud, by claiming two homes as principal residences simultaneously. The allegation was made by Trump loyalist and Federal Housing Finance Authority Director Bill Pulte, who has also made it against Trump enemies such as Adam Schiff and Letitia James. It appears that the president is using the FHFA to scour the financial records of his political opponents. That doesn’t mean, though, that a serious matter hasn’t been uncovered here. To know whether Cook’s firing is justified, we’ll need to know more, and we’ll no doubt learn more as her lawsuit progresses.
• Even by Trump’s standards, the sudden reversal on Chinese students studying at American universities is bizarre and erratic. In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced, “Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.” Then out of the blue on Monday, Trump announced, “We’re going to allow their students to come in. We’re going to allow it. It’s very important, 600,000 students. It’s very important.” That would represent more than doubling the number of Chinese students currently in the United States. Asked about it the next day, Trump said, “I’m getting along very well with President Xi. . . . I like that other countries’ students come here. And you know what would happen if they didn’t; our college system would go to hell very quickly.” The White House then “clarified” that Trump does not favor any increase in visas for Chinese students. Maybe the “deep state” is protecting us from the Chinese Communist Party.
• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick voiced the latest bad idea to arise from the Trump administration’ s determination to blur the distinction between the public and private sectors. He says the government will take equity stakes in defense-related companies. The purported justification for this is found in the notion that, as the U.S. is such a significant client of such businesses, “the American people” should share in some of the value being created in them. The taxes being paid by these companies, their shareholders, and their employees is, it seems, not enough, nor is the fact that private sector dynamism has designed and built the advanced weaponry that helps keep the U.S. safe. But even partial ownership by the U.S. could deaden these firms’ entrepreneurial verve. It would also weaken their international position: The U.S. is the world’s leading arms exporter. And, as so often is the case, this administration is not giving adequate consideration to the ways that the power it accumulates might be used by a hard-left Democratic successor, such as in this case, when it came to weapons programs of which it disapproved.
• Trump’s executive order on flag burning is too clever by half. Trump’s instinct is both correct and widely popular: Burning the flag is both an act of provocation and a statement of enmity to the nation and system it stands for. We doubt the national conversation would suffer if dissenters were unable to light our flag on fire. But it is not against the law. The Supreme Court’s decision in Texas v. Johnson (1989), striking down a law against flag-burning on First Amendment grounds, is the law and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Trump also can’t make a new federal law against flag-burning without Congress. His workaround is to announce that prosecutors should charge flag-burners whenever possible for other offenses they may commit in the course of protests. But this is the very definition of selective prosecution if the charges would not have been brought anyway—and the federal executive branch is now admitting this in writing. The proper course is to propose a constitutional amendment. Such an amendment last failed in the Senate by one vote in 2006, and it would still be popular, if more controversial with Democrats when associated with Trump. But a debate on an amendment would be more productive than this executive order.
• Trump’s executive order purporting to ban cashless bail is more flagrantly unconstitutional. Trump aims to cut off federal funds for jurisdictions that use cashless bail for “crimes that pose a clear threat to public safety and order.” Trump is right that too many states and cities, in the name of criminal justice “reform,” have made it too easy for dangerous offenders and career criminals to get released pending trial. But Congress has not authorized the president to withhold funds on this basis. The federal government is also limited in using spending to compel states to change their laws. We rightly object when Democratic administrations do this sort of thing to limit how the people of red states can govern themselves. The precedent could easily be used by a future progressive administration to demand the abandonment of cash bail or other forms of pretrial detention. A Republican administration shouldn’t be bailing out those assaults on federalism.
• Riding favorable public reaction to the president’s claims that his deployment of National Guard troops and surge of federal law-enforcement agents has dramatically reduced crime in Washington, D.C., Trump is thinking aloud about similar operations in high-crime cities, beginning with Chicago, the nation’s murder capital. It is good politics to highlight the lunatic pro-criminal policies of progressive Democrats. But the hand could be overplayed. Presidents have more leeway to police the capital, which is federal territory. And in Los Angeles, where Trump dispatched troops weeks earlier, there was rioting against immigration-law enforcement, a federal function the Constitution empowers the president to safeguard. Chicago and the rest are different. The states are sovereign over their basic functions, which include public safety and law enforcement within their territories. Parts of Chicago are dystopian thanks to the Democrats that Chicagoans keep electing. But absent a city’s obstructing the enforcement of federal law, the troops should stay in their barracks.
• The Congressional Budget Office estimates that tariffs (as currently implemented and assuming they stay in place permanently) will reduce deficits by $4 trillion over the next ten years. Raising taxes will indeed bring money into the Treasury, but Republicans are supposed to be against that sort of thing. And $4 trillion over ten years doesn’t come anywhere close to fulfilling Trump’s promises to pay down the national debt (which the CBO projects will increase by $23 trillion over the next ten years) or replace the income tax (which the CBO projects will raise about $37 trillion in a decade). The $4 trillion tax hike is still one of the largest in American history, something the Supreme Court should rule should be left to Congress to enact.
• The French and the British have more in common than their famously tricky relationship would suggest. This may include imminent financial crises. France has long been a power spender (government spending is around 57 percent of GDP), but it is less willing to pay for its extravagance. France’s budget deficit and outstanding government debt stand respectively at 5.4 percent and 114 percent of GDP. A package of cost-cutting measures and tax increases has run into so much opposition that the prime minister has called for a parliamentary vote of confidence on September 8. What will happen if his government loses (and thus falls) is a mystery, but yields on French sovereign debt are reaching Italian levels. Meanwhile, across the channel a Labour government is set on unraveling the last remnants of the Thatcherite settlement with a combination of net zero dogmatism, class warfare, and progressive taxing and spending. Markets are spooked, and the cost of funding the country’s debt and deficit (96 percent and 3 percent of GDP, respectively) are far higher even than France’s, due in part to the so-called “moron premium”: a harsh but not unmerited label.
• In what is clearly the most important news event of the year, and likely the decade or century, pop-music superstar Taylor Swift has accepted a proposal of marriage from the tenth-best tight end in the NFL last year. Travis Kelce is a television commercial pitchman for Pfizer pharmaceuticals, Chunky Soup, State Farm Insurance, Direct TV, Lowe’s home improvement, and McDonald’s, as well as doing some seasonal work catching footballs for the Kansas City Chiefs. His impending marital happiness is, no doubt, a nice consolation prize for losing the Super Bowl to the Philadelphia Eagles, 40 to 22. But credit Kelce; this is the first time he’s won it all without the assistance of an officiating crew. We should also be happy for the bride-to-be, although long-term marital happiness may end her phenomenally successful run of writing best-selling songs about her ex-boyfriends. Still, a lot of people far and wide feel some sense of emotional investment in the relationship of these celebrities. In one of the harshest portrayals of a network news reporter by her own network ever, CBS News felt the need to share footage of reporter Olivia Renaldi learning about the engagement before going on live TV; after exclaiming “Oh my God” nine times, Renaldi beams, “I feel like Paul Revere right now.” The prenups are coming! The prenups are coming!
• It’s more than faintly ridiculous that the nation’s media and political class spent the last week furiously arguing whether Cracker Barrel’s rebranding—which altered its logo to remove both the barrel and the kindly old man sitting next to it—represented a woke attempt at “cracker erasure.” Now that the company has backed down and retained its old logo, victory belongs to the keyboard warriors of the right: The mighty Barrel has been broken. The triumph is likely to be a pyrrhic one. However misbegotten Cracker Barrel’s rebranding attempt, it comes after having shed half its market value over the past five years. Food and service quality have slipped; the customer base has aged into senior citizen status or the grave. The chain was on a road to ruin. People have compared Cracker Barrel’s rebrand to New Coke; the difference is that the Coca-Cola Company still had something “classic” to return to that people wanted; Cracker Barrel no longer does.
• Walt Disney Studios shouldn’t have a problem attracting young men to its theatrical releases. It owns Marvel and Lucasfilm (Star Wars, Indiana Jones): movie franchises that have practically been a license to print money from this demographic. But the studio is now desperate to bring males ages 13 to 28 back into theaters for its movies. That’s according to trade publication Variety, which reports that “the mandate to recruit young males goes as high as the C-suite.” Variety suggests that Disney is seeking original content, not more sequels and reboots. But Disney contributed to this fatigue with a glut of Marvel and Star Wars products in theaters over the past decade, hardly all of which have pleased fans. One reason for that: Many of these offerings have de-emphasized or “deconstructed” male characters. Disney need not embrace chauvinism to compensate. More movies featuring imperfect and well-rounded characters of both sexes, whose stories are informed by classical storytelling structures, could go a long way toward getting those elusive young male viewers out of their basements and back into theaters.