Politics

Some say the Roman Republic died when the Senate murdered Tiberius Gracchus, a populist reformer. When the elites whose negligence and hubris had fueled in the first place the rise to prominence of Tiberius and his brother, Gaius, chose violence over the political process, they peeled away any pretense of civility with the ruled. Something similar happened with Donald Trump. His presidential record is a mixture of half-truths and half-measures. He was too soft and too undisciplined for all the bluster about him as a competent threat to the established political order. He did, however, help reveal the true face of the regime as it attempted to snuff him out. In February, TIME ran a story about the 'shadow campaign' that altered the course of the 2020 election.

Vice President Kamala Harris embarked on her first foreign trip since taking office this week — and quickly proved herself to be as empty as the faces on the royally-iced cookies she handed out to reporters on Air Force Two. President Biden's 'border czar' traveled to Guatemala and Mexico in a futile attempt to solve an autogenic crisis and insulted the intelligence of each country's leaders and the American people along the way. It seems even Harris's plane knew the disaster that would unfold if she made it to Central America, developing a 'technical issue' to keep the Vice President grounded. Unfortunately for all of us, she was undeterred, switching planes to continue on her journey.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed two more pieces of major legislation on Monday, this time targeting Chinese Communist party influence in the United States. HB 1523 criminalizes 'trafficking in trade secrets', while HB 7017 aims to prevent foreign influence in America's higher education system. The latter implements strict vetting of foreign researchers to avoid espionage and requires state agencies to disclose certain donations from 'countries of concern', which consist of China, Cuba, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela. 'There is no single entity that exercises a more pervasive, nefarious influence across a wide range of American industries and institutions than the Communist party of China,' DeSantis said during a signing event in Miami, Florida.

It began last month when the Wall Street Journal reported that three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology had come down sick in November 2019. According to an intelligence report obtained by the Journal, the scientists had exhibited symptoms ‘consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness’. This was further evidence in favor of the lab leak theory, the idea that the coronavirus had originated inside a Chinese lab. It continued last week with the release of a trove of Dr Anthony Fauci’s emails, which revealed that Fauci had been warned by a California virologist last January that the coronavirus appeared ‘engineered’.

Every president is criticized, sooner or later, for taking too many days off, for lounging around when we’ve hired him to work. Since the media hates Republicans, that criticism is usually directed at them, but even some liberal publications have noticed that — shock! — Democratic presidents play golf, too. That criticism, most recently in Amber Athey’s article in The Spectator, is wrong. It misses the bigger, more important issues — and not just because our country would be well served if most presidents did less, not more. It’s fun to compare the President with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but there are three problems with criticizing presidents for escaping to their beach house in Delaware or their ranch in Texas or California.

Chris Matthews, the former MSNBC host who was unceremoniously canceled a little over a year ago thanks to a GQ article accusing him of sexual harassment, made his return to cable television this week. During an appearance on his old network, Matthews asserted that he takes 'ownership' of his behavior: 'I took ownership of it — using a nice modern phase — I have took complete ownership. I did not deny it. I lost my show over it. That’s it — so that’s the truth.' Matthews's not-so-triumphant comeback follows in the footsteps of other once-canceled personalities like former NBC News contributor Mark Halperin, who has been appearing as a guest on Newsmax, and comedian Louis CK, who is selling out live shows around the country.

Joe Biden may be the leader of the free world, but that hasn't stopped him from taking retirement. The President seems to hardly do much of anything, between frequent press lids before 3 p.m., outsourcing the most serious domestic challenge of his presidency to Vice President Kamala Harris and trips nearly every weekend to his home in Delaware (Joe is less confused upon waking when he gets to sleep in his own bed, you see). Occasionally playing hooky is no big deal when you're in a dead-end 9 to 5, but Biden has decided to take a random weekday off being commander-in-chief to celebrate his wife's birthday. The pair flew to their shore home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware on Wednesday night and will stay through Thursday.

Kevin McCarthy's mouth does two things: it kisses Donald Trump's hand and it emits denouncements of his constituents. After Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently likened what she considers COVID-19-based discrimination to the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust, the House minority leader swooped down bearing talons of condemnation. 'Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling,' he wrote. 'Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language.' Whatever you might think of Greene's comments, it's hard to imagine a Democrat as eager as McCarthy to smite one of his own.

A nonbinding, off-season ballot initiative in rural Oregon isn’t normally the most viscerally exciting of events, couched as they generally are in terms agonizing over whether to ‘note’ or ‘reaffirm’ a past proposal, or to ‘endorse’ or ‘refer’ a more recent one for further consideration. But just the other day, out of the tepid depths of yet more interminable debate on local timber-harvest regulations, or supplemental sport-fishing laws, something of genuine significance happened. The voters of five Oregon counties let it be known that they would like to secede from their state and join Idaho instead. ‘This election proves that rural Oregon wants out of Oregon,’ Mike McCarter, spokesman for the Greater Idaho movement, said in a statement.

President Joe Biden just proposed the largest budget (as a percentage of America’s economy) since the country was fighting Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy. He’s doing it when there is no emergency, only an overweening desire to pass progressive programs quickly, before they lose their legislative majority. The best historical analogue to his proposed budget increase is Lyndon Johnson’s cradle-to-grave Great Society Program. It has the same flaws. In fact, Biden’s program is best understood as the next step in a long political arc, extending from Franklin Roosevelt to LBJ to Obamacare. All of them proposed centralized government solutions to almost every social problem, particularly endemic problems among the poor.

Give some credit to Lori Lightfoot. She’s really good at wrecking things. When America’s most Innsmouth-ian politician took over Chicago in spring 2019 (presumably for lack of any other volunteers), it was hard to imagine screwing up the city worse than it already was. The city was already losing population. It already had the most murders of any US city and a top-30 violent crime rate overall. But Lightfoot rose to the challenge and then some. She inherited a city with 563 murders the year before she took office. In the 365 days between George Floyd’s death and the one-year anniversary of his demise, the city clocked more than 800, including 105 in a single month and 18 in a single day.