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The other night, I went to the Vermont State Fair in distinctly downscale Rutland, where my wife and I watched the pig races, ambled through the livestock exhibits, and examined the farm equipment, while enjoying corndogs and the crowd of distinctly overweight Rutlanders. The next day, I was back in my office in midtown Manhattan. A thin man wearing a mask got into the elevator with me and used a cloth to press the elevator button. Then he used the cloth to open the two doors to the street. He was clearly annoyed to have had to share the elevator with a maskless heathen. As he walked away, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a single mask or Covid-crazed person of any sort at the Vermont State Fair.

The New York Times recently ran an article on the dangers of surveillance tech in China. One wishes they would do the same for the US. According to the Times, Chinese authorities implement facial recognition tech everywhere they can, the police seek to connect electronic activity (making a call) to a physical location, biometric information such as fingerprints and DNA is collected on a mass scale, and the government wants to tie together all of this data to build comprehensive profiles on troublesome citizens. The latter is the Holy Grail of surveillance, a single source to know all there is known about a person.

Joe Biden’s speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on Thursday was one of the most remarkable in living memory. By “remarkable,” I hasten to add that I do not mean “good.” On the contrary, it was a breathtaking act of what the psychoanalysts call “projection,” blaming others for the bad things you do yourself. The speech itself was a malignant act of demagoguery that will have colonels and generalissimos everywhere catching their breath with envy. The neo-totalitarian stage set, replete with red lighting effects and military personal flanking the shouting, gesticulating Biden, was right out of central casting. Next time, perhaps Biden will wear epaulettes along with his signature aviators. The speech was billed as a reflection on the “soul of the nation.

What would you do if you were Merrick Garland? Would you prosecute Trump? Or would you walk away, concerned you were playing politics? Step one appears easy: put off any decision until after the midterms. Trump is not a candidate, key issues driving the midterms (inflation, Roe) are not his issues, and while Trump is actively stumping for many candidates, initiating any prosecution before the midterms is just too obvious. Nothing else about Mar-a-Lago has had an urgency to it (months passed from the initial voluntary turnover of documents and the forced search) and announcing an indictment now would be a terrible opening move. So if you're Garland, you have some time.

So the big guy wants a donnybrook then. It began with Lindsey Graham announcing on Fox News a day or so ago that there will — not may — be “riots in the streets” if Donald Trump is indicted by the Justice Department. Trump then reposted Graham’s remark on his badly failing social media outlet Truth Social, which, like most of his ventures, appears to be headed for bankruptcy, only this time there’s no Papa Trump to show up at the casino to buy a stack of chips to bail out the scapegrace son. Now, Trump has gone on something of an internet bender, indulging his thwarted Twitter impulses by posting over sixty times on Truth Social. If the venture goes belly up, it won’t be because Trump ignored it. As Trump tries to seize the spotlight, the GOP is squirming.

Republicans refocus after Mar-a-Lago distraction Three weeks have passed since fifteen boxes of documents were seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago. The breathless reporting about the unprecedented search has faded into the kind of Trump-criminal-investigation white noise with which Americans have lived with for half a decade now, and Republican defenses of the former president are far less enthusiastic than they were immediately after the sweep. As the New York Times observes, the former president’s most loyal defenders paid notably little attention to Friday’s publication of a heavily redacted affidavit that revealed more details about what was taken from Trump’s residence and why.

At first read, the newly released Mar-a-Lago search warrant reveals little, with about half its pages redacted. It does suggest two possible narratives going forward, one of which has severe political implications: the National Archives sicced the FBI on Candidate Trump. The warrant says the search was based on “a significant number of civilian witnesses” to Trump’s actions and the Twitterverse is already speculating as to who that might be (Ivanka or the butler?). This will generate a thousand conspiracy theories as to who first told the FBI about the classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago. But in the end, it adds little to key questions.

Let's commit a potential crime: "Every day the Iraqis turn out military communiques threatening 'severe punishment' against Iran." That line is classified, albeit from 1988. It was put into the public sphere via Wikileaks but never officially declassified. Technically it remains classified even though it is a click away. It illustrates that if there are three things that most everyone in government agrees on, they are: a) there are too many classified documents classified too highly; b) no one is going to risk their neck to be the first to start classifying less; and c) handling all that classified information is a major problem even for those trying to do the right thing. As former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said, “Everything’s secret.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can count on Paul’s vote. That political axiom is the crux of Joe Biden’s decision to forgive vast quantities of student loan debt. He needs Peter's and Patricia’s votes, and he is bribing them with taxpayer money. Taxpayers know it is not a costless gesture. Their backlash is likely to overwhelm any potential gains. The problems begin with the program’s cost and inflationary impact. Spending another $300 to $900 billion, the estimated cost, raises consumer demand without increasing supply. Since the program is not funded by tax increases, it will be paid for by printing money. The inflationary consequences are predictable.