NATIONAL REVIEW
JAN 09, 2026 |
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◼ It was thoughtful of Trump to send New York's new mayor two prospective hires.
◼ American military forces and intelligence operatives conducted a surgical invasion of Venezuela. In a little more than two hours, they extracted dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife and former top regime official, Cilia Flores de Maduro. The pair are charged with overseeing an immense narcotics-trafficking enterprise, as well as international drug cartels in Mexico and South America. The Maduros were arraigned on Monday in a Manhattan federal court on the indictment, which supersedes a similar one filed during the first Trump administration. The stunning proficiency of the extraction operation, in which no Americans were killed, has not been matched by President Donald Trump's management of the aftermath. While Trump said his top administration officials would be "running" Venezuela for the foreseeable future, he has left Maduro's Marxist regime in place under the leadership of Delcy Rodríguez, one of its most ruthless officials. And while the left-wing claim that America fights wars for oil has historically been a smear, Trump is unabashed in insisting that the U.S. is seizing Venezuela's oil. An operation designed to run another country ought to have been authorized by Congress. Weighing heavily in favor of it: Saturday was a bad day for Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran, which were in cahoots with Maduro.
◼ In Minneapolis, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot a 37-year-old woman dead after she blocked the road with her SUV at the scene of an apparent immigration enforcement operation, refused to follow officers' orders, and then seemed to accelerate toward one of the officers, hitting him as she turned. Footage of the incident shows what seems to be a legal, if regrettable, use of force. But this did not prevent the usual suspects from attempting to spin the tragedy into something else. Trump went well beyond the facts to claim that the deceased was a "domestic terrorist" who "violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer." Not to be outdone, some Democrats in Congress falsely labeled the killing a "murder," an "assassination," or an "execution." Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, meanwhile, suggested that he might summon the National Guard to resist ICE—a literally insurrectionary idea—while Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey demanded that all immigration enforcement in the state be canceled. These lattermost sentiments are not only irresponsible; they are guaranteed to make things worse. Previously, Walz has described ICE as the "gestapo"—a characterization that has gone a long way to convince activists that obstructing federal law enforcement is not only legally justified but morally imperative. Nothing good can come of this, and nothing is.
◼ Two days before the Minneapolis shooting, Governor Walz announced that he is abandoning his campaign for reelection. The about-face by Walz, who launched his bid for a third term in mid-September, was triggered by revelations about the state's multibillion-dollar welfare-fraud scandal. At minimum, Walz was asleep at the wheel as his state's treasury was fleeced by every con artist from here to Mogadishu. But the governor insisted that the allegations of fraud were part of a xenophobic witch hunt driven by Republicans. Some of the evidence for large-scale welfare fraud in Minnesota was a matter of public record well before Kamala Harris selected him as her running mate, which confirmed all of our worst suspicions about her judgment. The nation will be better off if neither of them holds public office again.
◼ They say that personnel is policy. In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani's picks have made his preferred policies crystal clear. Hizzoner was reluctantly compelled to throw his transition team's director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, under the bus when it was discovered that she had a long history of advocating policies to make "white people feel defeated." But he has stood by his director of the Office to Protect Tenants, Cea Weaver, who marries that same bigotry to revolutionary Bolshevism with her support for the elimination of private property rights. "Homeownership," she wrote on social media in 2017, "is a weapon of white supremacy." When reporters asked Weaver about her mother's $1.4 million home, the 37-year-old burst into tears. Unfortunately for New York City residents, the disproportionate number of anti-Israel activists inside the Mamdani administration are made of sterner stuff. In the administration's earliest hours, they conspired to scrap former Mayor Eric Adams's executive orders aimed at combating antisemitism. They ditched the executive order enshrining the Holocaust Museum's working definition of antisemitism as the city's legal lodestar, revised an order that had made harassment harder at houses of worship, and scrubbed the mayor's city-owned social media account of Adams-era posts condemning antisemitism. The mayor is, in short, turning out to be exactly who his opponents warned he was. |
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◼ Not content with retreating on health care, some Republicans—unfortunately led by Trump—want to retreat further on abortion at the same time. They have been negotiating with Democrats over extending the enhanced Obamacare subsidies that the latter enacted on a temporary basis during the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump is telling Republicans to be "a little flexible on Hyde": to be willing, that is, to vote for extra subsidies for health insurance policies even if those policies cover abortions. Last night, 17 House Republicans voted for a Democratic bill to extend the subsidies and cover abortion. These are the latest signs that Republican fearfulness about the politics of abortion has outstripped reality. Republicans have gained ground in each of the two national elections since Roe v. Wade was overturned. Taxpayer funding of abortion, moreover, has long been an issue on which the public most sides with pro-lifers. What makes this potential cave-in even more perverse is that a deal may not come together anyway, as a faction of Democrats would prefer to keep blaming Republicans for premium increases or lost coverage. Being "flexible on Hyde" could mean voting for a grave evil—facilitating the unjust taking of human lives—angering political allies, and not getting any political payoff in return. Even the most timorous of Republicans should be able to reject that combination.
◼ When people spend years advancing different theories that lead to the same conclusion, it is typically a sign that they are reasoning backward rather than following the evidence. This is true of most stolen-election theories, especially those about the 2020 presidential election. That election was messy and irregular in a number of ways, but it wasn't stolen from Trump. Still, conspiracy theories about the election continue to surface. The latest claims that in Georgia, 315,000 early, in-person votes in Fulton County were inappropriately counted without proper signature attestations from poll workers. But no Georgia or federal law requires such a signature before the votes are counted. Moreover, all ballots were reviewed in the state's recount, which reached substantially the same result. Georgia has since misplaced some of the relevant records and so faces a suit from a Justice Department highly motivated to find irregularities. But even as the DOJ has stretched the law to indict Trump enemies such as James Comey and Letitia James, it has not come close to charging anyone for stealing the 2020 election. Inaction speaks louder than words.
◼ But the words are often obnoxious. The White House's official website unveiled a web page intended to rewrite the history of January 6. The revision claims that Democrats "staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election." It also accuses Mike Pence of committing "an act of cowardice and sabotage" in service of "the greatest election theft in U.S. history" by refusing to overturn the election results. The web page promotes debunked conspiracy theories about FBI "assets" inciting the riot. It blames the Capitol Police for "aggressively fir[ing] tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber munitions into crowds of peaceful protesters," and for removing barricades. It asserts that Ashli Babbitt was "murdered in cold blood" by Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd, who was never charged or convicted of any such thing. "Three other Americans were also killed," the White House insists, referring to two protesters who died of heart attacks at the scene and a third who died after being trampled by the crowd. While these deaths can fairly be attributed to the day's chaos, it is egregious to cast them as killings by the police. The falsehoods go on, from whitewashing Trump's blanket pardons and commutations to mischaracterizing the prosecutions of rioters to blaming the "deep state" for the assassination attempts on Trump. The president clings to his fabrications and now has put taxpayers behind them. |
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◼ The greater the degree of control exerted by a regime, the greater the responsibility it will be seen to bear when things go wrong. In Iran, the economy has gone very wrong indeed. The country's currency, the rial, has fallen by about 60 percent against the dollar since June. Annual inflation was over 40 percent in December, and food inflation is approaching twice that. GDP is falling, and public services are increasingly unreliable. In a wave of demonstrations across much of the country, protesters have called for regime change, greater freedom, and even, in some cases, for the return of the monarchy. The 2022–23 protests, after the death of Mahsa Amini, eventually petered out, their momentum broken by the regime's violent response and by mass arrests. The Trump administration should continue to make clear that its sympathies lie with the protesters, and, if circumstances warrant, it should press harder. There should be no question of relaxing sanctions. And if this crisis offers any opportunities to disrupt Iran's rebuilding of its nuclear program or its networks throughout the Middle East, they should be taken.
◼ Trump is right to want to advance American interests in Greenland. The Arctic is rapidly becoming an arena of geopolitical competition with Russia and even China. But the administration's approach to this issue has been crass, clumsy, and counterproductive, including not-so-veiled threats of annexation. Yes, the U.S. could easily take Greenland (a largely self-governing part of Denmark), but, in all likelihood, that would come at the cost of shattering NATO. We could win an island but lose a continent. We should replace stick with carrot and rebuild our relations with Copenhagen and, critically, the independence-minded Greenlanders. Given shared interests between the U.S. and Denmark, the U.S. ought to be well placed to build up its defenses in Greenland and cut a good deal over exploiting the island's rich reserves of critical minerals. With tact, finesse, and patience, Trump could get what he wants. Maybe give those qualities a try?
◼ Brigitte Bardot's conservative Parisian parents bristled at her early desire to act. But she became more than just a movie star—she was an emblem of cultural transformation. As the sexual revolution began at the end of the 1950s, her brazen eroticism and carefree spirit represented a hedonistic shift in mores. After working as a model, she made her big-screen debut as a teenager with a minor role in Jean Boyer's Crazy for Love (1952). At 23, she became a worldwide sensation when she starred in Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman (1956), which captivated American audiences. She retired in 1973, after building an oeuvre largely defined by melodramas and insubstantial comedies, but her star power never waned. Later in life, she became a staunch advocate of animal rights. In the 2000s, her commentary on Islam and on homosexuality attracted ire—and the French government fined her five times for incitement. In all aspects of life, Bardot was defiantly herself. Dead at 91. R.I.P.
◼ Michael Edward Reagan, the adopted son of Ronald Reagan and his first wife, Jane Wyman, initially seemed unlikely to follow in his father's footsteps. After struggling in high school and dropping out of college, he became a record-setting powerboat racing champion, then moved through a series of jobs in sales. In 1988, he published On the Outside Looking In, a revealing account of his troubled early life. The book portrayed his father as detached, and it briefly strained their relationship. But as the 1990s dawned, Michael became a staunch advocate of his father's legacy. As a talk radio host and a syndicated columnist, he championed the ideas that made the Reagan revolution a transformative force, arguing for limited government, economic freedom, and traditional values. He celebrated his father's accomplishments and criticized Republicans who, in his view, invoked Reagan's name without embodying what he stood for. Dead at 80. R.I.P.
◼ For almost a decade, CIA officer Aldrich Ames made a fortune by betraying his country. After Ames dropped out of college in 1962, his father, a CIA analyst, helped him secure a job at the agency. In the years that followed, Ames rose through the ranks, eventually becoming head of the Soviet counterintelligence division. He turned to espionage in 1985, when he sold names of U.S. spies to the KGB for $50,000. Initially, he sought the money to pay his debts, but greed and alcoholism motivated him to continue. By the time of his arrest in 1994, after which he spent the rest of his life in prison, Ames had exposed almost all of America's spies in the Soviet Union and compromised its operations around the world. In return, he had received more than $2.7 million from the KGB. He used the money to live lavishly, while his treachery caused at least ten allied intelligence agents to be executed. His life is a monument to the evil of deception. Dead at 84.
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19 West 44th Street, Ste. 1701
New York, NY, 10036 |
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