Dear Weekend Jolter,
Third time's the charm?
Softly, slowly, and to the consternation of some elected Democrats, the I-word is beginning to return to the conversation, just a few months into President Trump's second term.
Impeachment is not something Democratic leadership is publicly endorsing, to be clear. The chatter is confined for now to backbenchers, the commentariat, and pols (such as Congressman Al Green) in perennial pursuit of that goal. But, as the president pushes the boundaries of executive power and faces blowback, the Trump team reportedly is anticipating a more serious look at it if Democrats win the House next cycle.
As with much of what the Democratic Party sets out to do these days, exploration of an unprecedented third impeachment — one that would be, it must be stressed, doomed as long as Republicans control Congress — has been haphazard. A little-known congressman, Michigan's Shri Thanedar, kicked off a quixotic (and short-lived) seven-article impeachment drive covering a range of Trump 47 controversies, only to back down this week on forcing a vote in the face of intra-party pushback. His irritated colleagues showed little appetite for the fight at this juncture and made their displeasure known. Adding to the drama, several Democrats initially listed as co-sponsors had their names removed, reportedly upon learning that the effort had not been reviewed by leadership. The head of the House Democratic Caucus told reporters "this is not an exercise that we're willing to undertake" — at least now, with Republicans in control.
In this case, primary politics likely were at play. As Noah Rothman explained, the congressman faces challengers and was under pressure to perform a "theatrical gesture" for progressive activists — for example, a giant billboard advertising the articles.
Nevertheless, Thanedar caught the attention of and drew fire from Trump and his allies on the right. Around the same time, Senator Jon Ossoff (D., Ga.) said at a town hall that Trump's conduct "has already exceeded any prior standard for impeachment," specifically citing his "granting audiences to people who buy his meme coin" — while acknowledging Democrats would need House control to act. (He later stood by the comments in an interview with CNN.) Several other left-wing Dems have backed impeachment. Thanedar, despite pulling back, says he plans to keep adding to his articles and rally support for his cause.
The prospect of an eventual third impeachment push might sound foolhardy, and remote, given how the last two rounds went. But Axios reports that Trump's advisers are "seriously considering" the likelihood that Democrats would launch proceedings should they take the House next year. As the report flagged, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently predicted to Tucker Carlson that if Dems win, they're "going to go immediately to impeachment for something."
They won't lack for "somethings." Tariffs, court clashes on immigration, crypto schemes, and other developing controversies could prove tempting fodder for impeachment counts. Andrew McCarthy, in a series that launched last weekend, has endeavored to explain in normal-person terms what the Trump crypto controversy (which Ossoff cited) is about — and the political peril it poses for the president. He cautions that
the unfolding story is going to drive media-Democratic complex yowling for the next two years, leading into the 2026 midterms and, if Democrats take one or both houses of Congress, potentially to 2027 impeachment proceedings that are already being contemplated.
Trump hasn't exactly ignored the murmurs. The president unloaded on "Radical Left Lunatics" and "total Whackjobs" earlier this month for even contemplating another impeachment. "The Republicans should start to think about expelling them from Congress for all of the crimes that they have committed," he mused.
Trump was similarly defiant this week over reports that Qatar is offering to gift the administration a luxury jet for use as Air Force One, faulting Democrats for insisting the U.S. pay "TOP DOLLAR" for the plane. (Andy explains the many problems with this pending transaction here.) While the administration defended the legality of the transfer, Democrats including Trump antagonist and Senator Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) decried the "corruption" on display, absent congressional consent. If Trump goes through with it, add "Qatari plane" to the menu Democrats may eventually peruse in weighing impeachment articles, again. Another Trump antagonist, Representative Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), was asked this week on a podcast, which covered both crypto and Qatar, whether "there [might] be an impeachment on emoluments" if Democrats take the House. Raskin answered, carefully, that "there are many indications in the conversations of the Founders that violations of the emoluments clause were impeachable."
It is perhaps tempting to laugh off the incipient impeachment chatter. Democrats are obviously well aware of their chances of success — based on the past two attempts and factoring in the president's stronger-than-ever grip on his party — and the pressing need to define their agenda for voters as entailing more than just resistance to Trump. But, as Andy noted in a discussion with Rich Lowry on The McCarthy Report, to the extent Trump continues to broadly interpret last year's Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, it only underscores that "the check on presidential abuse of power is Congress." On the crypto issue specifically, Andy predicted that Democrats, should they take the House, would then have a "strong case" to talk about exercising that check. One. More. Time.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On the "gift": Poison Plane
On the reconciliation bill: Passing the Big, Beautiful Bill
ARTICLES
Jim Geraghty: Yes, Our President Was Senile for a Long Stretch
Charles C. W. Cooke: Trump Strikes a Welcome Blow Against the Executive Branch
Rich Lowry: The On-Again, Off-Again Trade War
Rich Lowry: Introducing the Trump Doctrine
Noah Rothman: Trump's Stunning Syria Overture
Noah Rothman: The Wages of Hubris
Stanley Goldfarb: Medical Schools Are Still Discriminating by Race
Audrey Fahlberg: Intra-GOP Tensions Flare over House Republicans' 'Big, Beautiful' Tax-and-Spend Bill
Brittany Bernstein: House GOP's 'Big, Beautiful' Bill Blocked in Key Committee Vote as Party Splinters over Spending Cuts
Neal Freeman: A Reader's Guide to the Sam Tanenhaus Biography of William F. Buckley Jr.
Christian Schneider: The Danger of Outsourcing Our Brains
Yuval Levin: Who Is in Charge of the Library of Congress?
Kathryn Jean Lopez: The Mission of Pope Leo XIV Is Not Kid's Play
Abigail Anthony: Do Ballerina Androids Dream of Electric Nutcrackers?
Ed Whelan: Bench Memos Turns 20!
Jay Nordlinger: WFB & Co.
(And last but not least, congratulations to Jack Butler and the rest of the NR runners for this week's big win)
CAPITAL MATTERS
Marc Joffe & Edward Ring call for turning this train (project) around: California Seeks Federal Funding for the 'Worst New Transit Project in the U.S.'
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White assesses Mamet's return to cinema: David Mamet, Soothsayer
The Met's new exhibition affirms Brian Allen's long-held view of John Singer Sargent: John Singer Sargent, the Ultimate American in Paris
FROM THE NEW, JULY 2025 ISSUE OF NR
Stephen P. White: After Pope Francis
Audrey Fahlberg: Lee Zeldin's Environmental Impact
Noah Rothman: Democrats Are the Rule of Law's False Friends
Philip Klein: An Elegy for Moviegoing
Charles C. W. Cooke: I'm an American Guy Now
Richard Brookhiser: The New Buckley Biography Presents a Man in Full
Daniel Foster: Rage Against the AI Machine
SHALL WE THROW THIS NEWSLETTER INTO HIGH GEAR?
Rich Lowry explains what is shaping up to be the new Trump doctrine, as outlined during this week's Middle East trip:
President Donald Trump gave an important speech in Riyadh that may come as close to outlining a "Trump doctrine" for his second term as we'll probably see.
It was a direct counterpoint to George W. Bush's second inaugural address.
The simplistic way to put it is that what liberty was for Bush, money is to Donald Trump.
That's not quite right, though. The speech had values, they just weren't typical values — accountable government, human dignity — but rather prosperity and peace. These are universally regarded as goods, but Trump is elevating them over other goods — especially democracy — and putting his own distinctive gloss on them.
If Bush wanted to spread freedom, Trump wants to spread gleaming high-rise buildings.
He spoke glowingly of the new towers in Saudi Arabia, and hailed Riyadh as "becoming not just a seat of government, but a major business, cultural, and high-tech capital of the entire world."
He continued, "Before our eyes a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos, where it exports technology, not terrorism, and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence."
Notably, there is no liberty in this affirming sentence — it's all economic activity.
On the positive-news side of the ledger, Charles C. W. Cooke flags a welcome and necessary Trump executive action that's gone under-covered:
The second Trump administration contains multitudes. Rhetorically — and, often, practically — it has advanced an expansive view of executive power that echoes its leader's famous, l'état-c'est-moi-esque declaration that "I alone can fix it." And yet, in its concurrent attempts to rein in the most egregious excesses of our presumptuous and recalcitrant federal bureaucracy, it has tasked itself with effecting reforms that run in precisely the opposite direction. Paradoxical as it may seem, the Trump administration is thus engaged simultaneously in an effort to increase the power of the presidency and in an effort to constrain the institution. In the modern era, politics can be a strange game.
Consider, by way of example, the executive order that President Trump issued last Friday. At first blush, the missive appears to be yet another attempt at executive-led deregulation. "The United States," it begins, "is drastically overregulated. The Code of Federal Regulations contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages — far more than any citizen can possibly read, let alone fully understand." And yet, when one proceeds further into the text, it becomes clear that, while the document's literal purpose is, indeed, deregulatory, its real aim is to impose stricter limits on the freestanding power of the executive. The situation has become so dire, it continues, "that no one — likely including those charged with enforcing our criminal laws at the Department of Justice — knows how many separate criminal offenses are contained in the Code of Federal Regulations." This, it concludes, is a problem not only because it makes life difficult for the citizenry but because "it allows the executive branch to write the law, in addition to executing it."
Indeed, as the order makes clear, the executive branch has now created so many opaque and convoluted regulations that neither the government nor the people can possibly be expected to understand the rules. Worse yet, a substantial number of those regulations do not contain sufficient mens rea requirements, which means that, despite their best efforts, even the most well-intentioned American could end up being prosecuted for transgressing a proscription about which he had no knowledge whatsoever. . . .
Going forward, the directive explains, the executive branch hopes to "ensure no American is transformed into a criminal for violating a regulation they have no reason to know exists."
How? By a) weakening the executive's authority to prosecute violators who were unaware that they were doing anything wrong, and b) adding more transparency to the process, so that Americans have a better chance of comprehending the laws under which they live.
Who's up for some Buckley lore? Neal Freeman assesses the forthcoming and decades-in-the-making Buckley bio, drawing on his own life and times with our founder (read more about the book, and Buckley, from Richard Brookhiser here):
I first heard about this book in the late Nineties. Yes, that would have been in the previous century. After one of Patsy Buckley's fabulous dinners at the New York maisonette — great conversation, great food, bargain wine — WFB signaled a few of us to stay after the other guests had departed: Joseph Donner, a philanthropist and the senior member of the National Review, Inc. board; Evan Galbraith, Reagan's ambassador to France who had been close to WFB since their days together at Yale; William Rusher, the publisher of National Review magazine; and me, the head of a television production company and a member of the NR board for more than 30 years, my tenure being almost as long as the others'.
The four of us had served National Review over the years as a kind of volunteer fire department. Every time NR's finances burst into flames, which happened more often than you might think, we convened instantaneously, each of us lugging as many water buckets as we could manage.
After that dinner in 1998, WFB had settled us back into the living room, postprandial brandy warming in our hands. He then passed around some good cigars — rumored to be the handiwork of skilled Caribbean Communists — and began his pitch. It was always fun to be on the receiving end of a pitch from WFB. Any old pitch. As the great M. Stanton Evans once observed: "It was like sex — even when it was bad, it was pretty good."
The headline of the evening was that, after years of false hopes and crushed expectations, WFB had finally selected the author to write his authorized biography. The winner, WFB announced with unfeigned delight, was Sam Tanenhaus and he had won the sweepstakes for two reasons: First, he had written a book about Whittaker Chambers that WFB had admired. And second, Tanenhaus had come highly recommended by WFB's son, Christopher. Check and check. Sam, as we were nudged to call him, was prepared to start immediately, and WFB had promised him full access. (By this point, WFB was almost dancing in his chair.) WFB had also promised him, uhhhhhh, that the four of us would sit for interviews and open our own files. . . .
This June 3, after 27 years in gestation, Random House will publish Sam's Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. That will be a life-changing day for WFB. There have already been a dozen books about WFB, all of them more or less positive and several of them hagiographically so, but it will be this book, the one for which WFB himself chose the author, that is most likely to seal his legacy.
As you will appreciate, there are challenges unique to a book 27 years in the making. To begin with, it will be the work of multiple authors. In this case, the initial writer was Sam the grateful youngster getting his shot at the bigtime; after which, there was Sam the cultural overlord (by 2004 he had become editor of the New York Times Book Review); followed, finally, by Sam the elder statesman of the lit-set establishment. As I worked my way through the book — and at roughly 900 pages, it is an oaken door-stopper that involves some manual labor — I couldn't help but look for the seams between the various authors. You may find yourself wondering: Who wrote the passage I am now attempting to parse? . . .
Now, to the text and a few bones that need picking. Up front and then again at least twice in the body of the book, Sam repeats the canard that the best writers National Review ever produced were Garry Wills, Joan Didion, and John Leonard. This is a red flag, snapping in the ideological breeze.
I knew them. I respected — and liked — all three of them. But not one of them moved the needle at either the magazine or the cause it served. They did their best work, and earned their professional esteem, only after they had left NR. They won places at the high table of the cultural left after devoted service to causes very different from NR's. (For those of you keeping score at home, the best writers at National Review were Keith Mano, Brent Bozell, George Will, Bill Buckley, Arlene Croce, John Coyne, Joe Sobran, and Rick Brookhiser. This list, as they say, is still in formation. The current staff bristles with young talent.)
Then there is Sam's sense of proportion, or rather, his lack thereof. To rely on this book, you might think that some of WFB's most important professional associates were named E. Howard Hunt, Peter Starr, General Edwin Walker, George Wallace, Gore Vidal, and Edgar Smith. Barrels of perfectly good ink are spilled over these colorful characters as if they had played important roles in either WFB's life or his revolution (to borrow the dubious distinction from Sam's subtitle). They had not. . . .
This book is long, self-indulgently long. But in one sense it's not nearly long enough.
CODA
The weather's starting to turn, the flowers are blooming, the sandals are coming out, and all across this land, the jam bands are hatching. Soon, they'll fly off to join the rest of their kind, at summer music festivals. In that spirit — here's Phish!
Thanks for reading, and have a great one.
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