Politics

As President Donald J. Trump waits for One Big Beautiful Bill to sign on the 4th of July, it’s worth taking some Independence Day time to muse on what he means for The United States, other than making it some really big deals. The best deals, really. It’s what he does. Trump’s detractors call him Cheeto Hitler, the modern face of fascist authoritarianism. He is not that. His most fervent supporters see him as the savior returned to Earth in a golf shirt. He’s definitely not that. Besides, Führer or God isn’t a very American dichotomy. There’s another way, an American way, a very Trumpian way. America, at its core, is a con, a hustle, a 250-year real-estate boodle.

When Zohran Mamdani applied to Columbia University in 2009, he checked both the “Asian” and “Black or African American” boxes on his admissions form. He wasn’t lying – technically. Born in Uganda to Indian parents, Mamdani said he was trying to express his complex heritage. But in a recent interview with The New York Times, he admitted something telling: he doesn’t consider himself black.That admission, buried beneath the usual progressive buzzwords about “nuance” and “complexity,” should be a wake-up call for anyone still defending race-based admissions in elite education. Mamdani didn’t cheat the system. He played by its rules. And that’s exactly the problem.

California is catching the deregulation bug. The state legislature has apparently realized that people need houses too, and sometimes the endangered insects have got to go. On Monday, Gavin Newsom signed a bill streamlining permitting for building projects mired in environmental review.  About time, says Cockburn. Consider for a moment the California High-Speed Rail, a project to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles, which has yet to emerge from environmental clearance despite starting in 1996. The budget has multiplied, in the meantime, from $30 billion to $100 billion. The segment just from San Francisco to San Jose, where the train would use pre-existing Caltrain rail, almost limped across the permitting finish line in 2021.

The US Department of Agriculture rescinded the 2001 Roadless Rule last week, a regulation that restricted road building and timber extraction in about 30 percent of land managed by the National Forest System. Judging the pushback from environmentalists, you might think that President Trump was selling Yosemite to a logging company. But the red-tape cutting actually increases public recreation access and opens neglected forests to fire-mitigation projects. Conservationists should be celebrating. On paper, the Roadless Rule preserved America’s most beautiful landscapes. In practice, the regulation proved burdensome and ecologically counterproductive. For instance, some 2,400 Tinglit Native Alaskans reside on islands in the Tongass National Forest.

Within weeks of launching his campaign to be mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani declared that he was also running to be the first South Asian mayor. He began aggressively courting this demographic, which accounts for around five percent of the city’s population, as well as the seizable total Asian population of almost 15 percent. Mamdani reached out to the desi community with the help of the Indian subcontinent’s great unifier, Bollywood. The Hindi film industry that even those who don’t speak the language in South Asia can relate to. He used a 1980 Bollywood song "Meri Umar Ke Naujawano", roughly translating to "my fellow youngsters", to explain the NYC’s ranked choice voting system using popular desi drink, the lassi, as prop.

Washington, DC Reason magazine staffers Jacob Sullum and Billy Binion walked away from the Reason Versus debate in Howard Theater, Tuesday night, with victory candy cigarettes in hand. Their feat? Convincing a little over half their audience that the federal government should legalize all drugs. Their opponents from City Journal, Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael A. Mangual, started off in the lead with 43 percent of the debate's attendees opposed to legalization. By the end, they lost 4 percent, while Reason gained 13. So what pushed these young, suit-wearing voters to change their conservative-leaning minds toward libertarianism? Sullum, 59, and Binion, 33, argued that prohibition makes the black market more dangerous for drug users.

The Supreme Court has reined in the authority of district court judges by ruling unconstitutional the ever more common practice of universal injunctions, an abuse of Article III power that cried out for the Court’s intervention. Trump v. Casa is a long overdue vindication of the limits of constitutional power. Sadly, yet increasingly predictably, some progressives claimed the end was nigh… again. In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s words fairly smoldered from the page: “It is not difficult to predict how this all ends. Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.” She further lambasted her colleagues’ 6-3 majority decision as “an existential threat to the rule of law.