Plus: Kamala blames Team Biden for her defeat.
• There are “cultural phrases” we could say to CNN, but we will refrain.
• God help us. An assassin shot and killed Charlie Kirk at an event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. Kirk grew to fame by bringing an unapologetically conservative message to college students. On Wednesday, he was doing just that before a massive crowd. There is a lot we don’t know about this depraved crime, including the identity of the shooter, who, as of this writing, is still at large; the FBI has released photos of a person of interest. What is obvious is that the murder of Kirk while he was engaging with young Americans is a tragic loss for his wife and two children and a shocking event that may herald a turn toward greater political violence in America. Kirk’s rise came during an era when younger leftists abandoned the free speech values that their ideological predecessors once espoused. It featured escalating attacks on conservative speakers—efforts to cancel them, to shout them down, to throw objects at them, to make threats. Yet Kirk continued to tour college campuses, to take hostile questions, and to engage with people who passionately disagreed with him. He did his ideological adversaries the favor of taking their questions seriously. This alone was a significant contribution to our civil society. In a free republic, citizens are supposed to resolve their differences by arguing passionately with one another and then voting and legislating. Political violence is a direct threat to the foundations of our free society, and must be condemned by all people of good will, with no throat-clearing or “buts.” America is in danger of moving from the heckler’s veto to the assassin’s veto. At this heartbreaking moment, we pray for Kirk’s family and for the future of the country. May he rest in peace.
• Kamala Harris’s new campaign memoir—or is it a horror novel?—107 Days is heading for publication in late September. The Atlantic has an excerpt that confirms our theory that, at the very least, the book will be nightmarishly boring. Harris’s upcoming “insider” account of a drama that America lived through in real-time last year bears all the hallmarks of being written by a second-rate political ghostwriter slinging focus-grouped buzz phrases around without any proper understanding of what it means to be a human being. (Predictably, Harris blames Joe Biden’s staff for her loss.) Then again, it is a fair impression of the candidate herself, who seems like the kind of woman who would characterize sororities as “engines of uplift” and make solemn observations like “it is often the people with the least who give the most.” Kamala Harris should observe the inverse of that formulation: She was given much, and should feel free to give us all a little bit less of herself from now on.
• The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to take up immediately its defeat in the Federal Circuit on the question of whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 grants the president unlimited emergency tariff powers. That court split 7–4 on the question, and its majority was itself divided on the reasoning; the Court of International Trade had reached the same conclusion by still a third path. Tuesday, the Court took up the case and ordered an aggressive schedule under which the first briefs are due September 19, the final briefs are due October 30, and the cases will be set for argument in November. The Court took up both the case from the Court of International Trade and a parallel case from a federal district court, so it will not be diverted by the question of which lower court properly had jurisdiction. This schedule does not guarantee a quick resolution if the Court is deeply divided, but it suggests that the Court grasps the urgency of the matter and will proceed accordingly.
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its preliminary revision of the previous year’s jobs numbers and found that the total number of jobs from March 2024 to March 2025 was 911,000 lower than previously reported. That miss of 0.6 percent is larger than the average miss of 0.2 percent over the past ten years. The revision is based on the quarterly census of employers, which has higher-quality data than the monthly survey used in the monthly jobs report. The BLS always revises its estimates on the same schedule each year as better data become available. The monthly employer survey’s response rate declined during Covid and has not recovered, leading to lower-quality monthly data. Improving the accuracy of the monthly survey should be a priority for the government, but it has nothing to do with politics or the competence of BLS statisticians. Trump’s response of budget cuts and a loyalist nominee for commissioner will not fix this problem, to the extent that it matters. Markets expected a larger-than-normal revision this year, reacting to it with a calm that political actors should have emulated.
• A judge threw out criminal charges against 15 Trump supporters indicted by Michigan’s Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel in the “fake” electors scheme. Judge Kristen D. Simmons, appointed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D., Mich.), thus struck a blow against the weaponization of prosecutorial power against political opponents. The electors considered themselves contingent, not fake. Following Biden’s 2020 victory, the Trump campaign sought to reverse the result, targeting Michigan among a handful of states won by Biden but controlled by Republican legislatures. Trump’s baseless fraud allegations were swept aside by several courts in Michigan, which Trump lost by over 150,000 votes. But every state has procedures for challenging elections, and states have occasionally certified multiple slates of electors to cast electoral votes—Congress has a statutory procedure for sorting that out. There is nothing illegal about participating in legal processes. The Trump supporters maintained that they merely agreed to serve as electors in the unlikely event the state’s election was lawfully overturned; if top Trump campaign officials hoped alternative slates would serve as a pretext for Vice President Pence to invalidate election results, that was not the electors’ fault. Judge Simmons found prosecutors failed to prove criminal intent. Lawfare continues crumbling.
• Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released images from a 2003 book compiled to celebrate Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday. The images corroborated the existence, first reported by the Wall Street Journal in July, of a lewd poem and a drawing of a naked woman that appeared under the signature of Donald Trump. Trump, somewhat implausibly, had repeatedly denied the existence of the note or his involvement in its creation, despite a well-established social relationship between Trump and Epstein dating from that period and the fact that the signature resembles Trump’s from that era. The president is suing all comers. But the ghost of Epstein continues to haunt his one-time friend.
• As the disgraceful Zohran Mamdani grows stronger in the polls in the New York mayoral race, the case for a united front against him grows more urgent. But it may already be too late, and the personalities involved are not easy ones to budge. Mamdani is still below 39 percent in the polls in the RealClearPolitics average, but the three most recent polls had him pushing gradually into the mid-40s. That puts his support at nearly twice that of his nearest competitor, disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, whom Mamdani leads 48 to 44 percent in a hypothetical two-way race. After overtures from the Trump administration that were rumored to dangle the ambassadorship to Saudi Arabia, disgraced current mayor Eric Adams, increasingly stuck in single digits, held a press conference on Friday to denounce Cuomo as “a snake and a liar” and essentially announce that Adams was staying in the race to hold out for a better deal. Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, a man stubborn enough to pursue a decades-long career as an unarmed crimefighter, is also not budging. Expect more disgraces ahead.
• You may not know much about Jack Schlossberg. You’d know even less if he weren’t part of the Kennedy political “dynasty,” which is currently, mercifully, lacking a foothold in elected office. Schlossberg, the grandson of John F. Kennedy and the son of Caroline Kennedy, aspires to change that. After New York Democratic representative Jerry Nadler recently announced he would not run for reelection, Schlossberg formed an exploratory committee; it would be a surprise if it told him not to run for the seat. That doesn’t mean voters have to take him seriously. After all, Schlossberg is a self-described “silly goose” who has distinguished himself mostly through social-media activity. He spoke at the Democratic National Convention last year, obligatorily endorsing Kamala Harris. He spent last fall as a “political correspondent” for Vogue, during which time he claimed to be “inspired” by his family’s legacy of “public service.” He has accrued some of the prerequisites of elite ambition (Yale B.A., Harvard J.D./M.B.A.). It wasn’t hard to see where this was going. Republicans cannot reasonably expect Nadler’s heavily Democratic district to yield up one of their own. Schlossberg has not broken from leftist consensus in any meaningful way, unlike certain of his predecessors. So in what is likely to be a contest between interchangeably progressive candidates, conservatives should at least hope for a defeat for the presumptuous and shopworn dynastic assertiveness of the Kennedys.
• Israel made good on its vow to seek out Hamas leaders wherever they are when it authorized a daring strike at a location where Hamas leadership was meeting in Doha, the capital of Qatar. President Trump said he was “not thrilled” with Israel’s actions within a nation that he considers a U.S. ally and that has been acting as a mediator in talks to end the war in Gaza while hosting Hamas leaders. But he also called for the return of all hostages and reiterated that the effort to eliminate Hamas was a “worthy goal.” While there hasn’t been any final confirmation, reports from Israeli media have quoted officials as having doubts that the intended targets were killed, though there were some lower-ranking Hamas members eliminated. It is worth wondering what it means that any targets, eliminated or still living, were in Qatar in the first place.
• Perhaps the 19 one-way Russian attack drones that penetrated Polish airspace over the course of several hours this week—driving deep into NATO territory, forcing civilian airports as far away from the border as Warsaw to close, and compelling the Atlantic Alliance to shoot down hostile Russian assets—resulted from an accident. Or maybe Russia wanted to track how NATO responds to an armed incursion, producing valuable data ahead of a more sophisticated effort by Moscow to test the alliance’s resolve. Either way, the Kremlin’s adversaries must respond to this assault on NATO’s sovereignty in the only language that Vladimir Putin recognizes: muscularity and determination. Putin will be waiting to see if aggrieved laments from NATO members contribute to a meaningful shift in the Alliance’s readiness posture both along NATO’s frontier and inside Ukraine, where NATO has a ready-made opportunity to help a partner nation beat back the Russian advance toward NATO’s borders. If the Kremlin does not see that, we should expect more—and more dangerous—Russian efforts to challenge NATO with the goal of fracturing it.
• As widely expected, the minority government led by centrist Prime Minister François Bayrou lost a vote of confidence in France’s parliament this week. The underlying issue was a proposed budget package intended to reduce the country’s budget deficit from 5.4 percent to 4.6 percent. The government fell, taking that package with it. Rejecting calls for his resignation or for another (snap) parliamentary election, in which Marine Le Pen’s RN would probably have advanced still further, President Macron picked Sebastien Lecornu, a conservative turned Macron loyalist, as Bayrou’s successor. Lecornu’s task will be to preserve as much as he can of Bayrou’s budget and to do so before breaching a deadline in early October that would, for technical reasons, reduce his room for maneuvering still further. Given the current parliamentary arithmetic, the result may well not be enough to satisfy the bond markets, a force that is hard to ignore with a large budget deficit and a debt/GDP ratio of 114 percent. Should matters come to a head, the European Central Bank would almost certainly step in to head off a crisis, but that will only postpone what is likely to be an ugly political and economic reckoning.
• Javier Milei’s impressive attempt to reverse Argentina’s long decline has run into trouble at a dangerous time. If he maintains the pace of reform set in the first half of his first term, his party—with origins only dating back to 2021—will need to pick up much more support in the country’s legislature, something that it is hoping to do in midterms due in late October. But local elections in Buenos Aires province (home to roughly 40 percent of the population) saw Milei’s Peronist opposition romp home with 47 percent of the vote, far ahead of his LLA at 34 percent. Even in the Peronist stronghold, this was a far wider margin than expected. Reform fatigue played its part, along with Milei’s failure to win over more centrist voters. But the biggest problem was a corruption scandal in which his sister Karina, his most important advisor (“el jefe”), is allegedly implicated, exactly the sort of thing that Milei was elected to root out. His prescription is working well for Argentina, but he must ensure that his own house is in order—and do so quickly.