One of the accepted media tales about the Republican Party is that because Donald Trump dominates it politically and stylistically, he also dominates its policymaking process. There are several examples where this hasn’t been true, both during his presidency and after it — but perhaps none more prominent than the TikTok debate on Capitol Hill, which resulted in that modern rarity of a sweeping 352-65 bipartisan vote in the House last week, a vote immediately applauded by populist conservative leaders such as Missouri senator Josh Hawley and institutions such as the Heritage Foundation.
Why would nearly 200 elected Republicans just ignore the former president, who declared his opposition to the forced TikTok divestment effort on Truth Social, with language echoed by a supportive chorus including his son Don Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy and Tucker Carlson?
Well, perhaps it’s that after years of learning about the former president and all his various tendencies, the TikTok push is one where they know: Trump’s heart just isn’t in it. He’s still the guy who tried to shut down TikTok as president, albeit unsuccessfully, and no Truth Social post is going to change that. Trump showed as much in an interview released Sunday on Howard Kurtz’s MediaBuzz, where he said in part:
I know a lot about TikTok, and I gave the option of banning it and I had it pretty much done. And I said I didn’t do any jawboning, I didn’t do anything. I just said, you guys want it banned if you want, and Congress probably didn’t want it banned, you know, et cetera. It wasn’t something that I was demanding. If I demanded it, I think I would have gotten it…
And went on to say:
But what I would like to see is if you’re going to do it to TikTok, do it to Facebook. And what you can do is let them sell TikTok, let them sell it in the market, maybe get a good price, maybe not get a good price, I don’t know. But take it away from China control.
Well, conveniently, that’s just what the House bill does: force the sale of the company away from CCP control within six months. It’s one of Trump’s tendencies to zig toward something, have a bunch of his most dedicated supporters scramble to defend his newly formed rationale, then zag back to his original and typically more sane position, leaving them out on a limb. (On some level you have to wonder if he gets personal enjoyment out of watching it play out time and again.) But in this case, the idea that he was going to be a defender of TikTok and China’s data snagging abilities in a serious way always seemed laughable, especially with the news that Steve Mnuchin is putting together a group to buy it.
The dominant theory in Washington as to why a handful of typically anti-China populist voices shifted rapidly and inorganically on the TikTok issue — Ramaswamy was calling the app “digital fentanyl” mere days before joining it, while Carlson had called it “a major security risk, disseminating propaganda” a year earlier — is the influence of a major conservative donor, Jeff Yass, who happens to own a major stake in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance.
Yass’s influence, both as a Republican megadonor and Club for Growth backer, is outlined at length in this Fast Company article:
Trump’s about-face on TikTok came just last week, one week after Yass — a previous critic of his administration whose support would represent a major score for Trump’s cash–strapped reelection campaign — invited Trump to attend a Club for Growth retreat. Last week, insiders also revealed that former Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway is coincidentally now on the Club for Growth’s payroll as a TikTok lobbyist. Known to put his financial and electoral prospects first, Trump may have spied a way to appeal to a major donor, while teeing himself up to be able to tell young voters that, unlike Biden, he supports TikTok.
As for Ramaswamy, his TikTok position reportedly “evolved” last year. According to records, Yass donated $4.9 million to Ramaswamy’s American Exceptionalism PAC sometime between July 1 and December 31.
So perhaps this incident provides multiple lessons. First, even billionaires can’t buy support with real impact within the GOP if you’re seen as taking a soft-on-China position. Second, that right-wing influencers who rail against policies as backed by “RINOs” or “the uniparty” have a hard time advancing that claim when it’s also backed by prominent populist elected leaders. And third, that many Republican politicians have gotten wise to understanding when Trump really means something he says, or when his heart’s not really in it. That last lesson may prove the most important should the former president get his old job back in November.
D.C.’s Most Violent Year
In the 1990s, New York City tackled its crime problem with deterrence. There were cops on the street, and they made arrests for everything from turnstile hopping to murder. It worked: homicides fell from their peak of 2,245 in 1990 to 673 a decade later. In 2018, the city reported just 289 murders.
In DC today, the imperatives are reversed. Rather than cops deterring crime, cops are deterred by public scrutiny and do-nothing prosecutors. We’re through the Broken Windows looking glass — and criminals know it.
Moskos agrees with Mangual that it’s a mistake to talk about DC as an “outlier” on crime, and that it’s useless even to discuss national crime trends, “because crime is local.”
“What happens in DC is unique to DC, but that doesn’t mean DC is necessarily unique,” he says.
Crime may be the same everywhere, but still, DC is unique in some ways. Federal employees made up nearly a quarter of the district’s population in 2023. The majority of these workers went remote during the pandemic, and Washington now has a higher proportion of remote workers than any state.
Remote work keeps DC’s streets empty, and empty streets fuel rising crime, something even Marc Levin and Thaddeus Johnson of the progressive Council on Criminal Justice conceded in a January piece for MSNBC. But rising crime is precisely why federal workers don’t want to return to the office, something their unions have repeatedly noted in response to the Biden administration’s curtailing of remote work flexibility.
Teddy has spent twelve years working for the federal government, and lived in DC for a decade. She actually enjoys going into the office, doing so even during the pandemic, when most of her colleagues were remote. Thanks to her second job at the Lululemon in Gallery Place, she knew firsthand how bad crime was getting in the District, and was willing to put up with it — to a point.
“After a while, I just felt like one day I was going to get killed walking around.” she tells The Spectator. “I’ve never felt so unsafe as I did in DC.”
Teddy can remember the exact moment she decided to leave.
“I was walking behind the Capital One Arena around 3 p.m., and somebody told me they were going to come stab me,” she says. Weeks later, she witnessed an early-evening shooting downtown, and thought, “I need to get out of here.” She left DC shortly thereafter.
Teddy doesn’t think federal employees are pushing for remote work “because they’re being lazy or hate working,” but rather because, like her, they look around their city and say, “I don’t feel like it’s the same place anymore.”
And so Washington faces an interlocking series of impasses. Crime will persist as residents flee, but flight won’t stop until crime ebbs. National media scrutiny is turning the heat up on Biden and Graves, but the spotlight makes them more reluctant to crack down. Prosecutors and police have the power to fix things, but they have never been less incentivized to do their jobs.
In other words, the solution to DC’s crime problem is simple: we just need to find a way to break through the gridlock. We all know how Washington excels at that.
Boeing Whistleblower Found Dead
The last days of Boeing’s whistleblower.
Saturday March 9 dawned as a gusty gray morning in Charleston, S.C. with thunderstorms rolling across the historic city and daggers of lightning lighting up the skies. Just after 10 AM, Rob Turkewitz was sitting in a tony lawyers’ office downtown, waiting for his client John Barnett to testify—and further his crusade for safety in the skies. “My co-counsel Brian Knowles and I were gathered around a conference table alongside Boeing's in-house counsel, and its trial lawyer from Ogletree, Deakens. It was in Ogletree’s offices, much fancier than ours, what you’d call a ‘grand door.’”
Turkewitz wasn’t totally surprised that Barnett was late for this round of depositions. “Downtown Charleston was flooded by one of the worst rainstorms I’ve ever seen,” he recalls. “I’d called John’s room at the Holiday Inn where he was staying at 9 AM to see if he wanted me to pick him up, but he didn’t answer.”
Turkewitz was especially buzzed about this session because Barnett was slated to continue the account of the production gaffes he’d allegedly witnessed up-close on the Boeing factory floor, a dramatic narrative that he’d started the previous day. Barnett, 62, had worked from 2011 to 2017 as a quality manager at the North Charleston plant that assembles the 787 Dreamliner. In that role, he’d alerted senior managers to what he called violations of legally required processes and procedures, and maintained that his warnings were being ignored. In the years following his departure, Barnett emerged as arguably the most renowned Boeing whistleblower, recounting the quality abuses he’d claimed to have witnessed to multiple media outlets.
Barnett’s charges had drawn fresh attention in the wake of the January 737 MAX door-plug blowout on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 just after takeoff from Portland, Ore., followed by a string of other mishaps on Boeing aircraft. In interviews after the big bang over Portland, Barnett had been scathing in his criticism of Boeing’s safety lapses, and attributed the catastrophe to the types of sloppy practices he said that he’d witnessed and flagged years earlier at the North Charleston plant.
Covid Lessons Learned
The best measure of health performance during the pandemic is all-cause excess mortality, which captures the overall number of deaths relative to the expected level, encompassing Covid and lockdown-related deaths. On this measure Sweden—which kept most schools open and avoided strict lockdown orders—outperformed nearly every country in the world.
A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the U.S. “would have had 1.60 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of Sweden, 1.07 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of Finland, and 0.91 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of France.” In America, states that imposed prolonged lockdowns had no better health outcomes when measured by all-cause excess mortality than those that stayed open. While no quantifiable relationship between lockdown severity and a reduction in Covid health harms has been found, states with severe lockdowns suffered significantly worse economic outcomes.
Closing hospitals and cutting off access to non-Covid healthcare generated a fear of entering medical facilities. That was a profound mistake, as was encouraging the false belief that hospitals were too busy to treat people who needed care. Healthcare utilization rates were at low levels between 2020 and 2022. In spring 2020, nearly half of the nation’s some 650,000 chemotherapy patients didn’t get treatment, and 85% of living organ transplants weren’t completed. One study found that there were 35.6% fewer calls for cardiac emergencies after March 10, 2020, compared with the year prior. Emergency-room visits were down between 40% and 50%, according to an estimate in May 2020. That doubtless contributed to observed non-Covid excess deaths and may continue to do so, as Americans suffer from undetected cancers and other long-term conditions. Healthcare uptake is still lower than pre-pandemic levels.
The economic costs of lockdowns were also staggering. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as many as 49 million Americans were out of work in May 2020. This shock had health consequences. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that the lockdown unemployment shock is projected to result in 840,000 to 1.22 million excess deaths over the next 15 to 20 years, disproportionately killing women and minorities.
Perhaps the worst policy error was prolonged school closings. Learning loss for children, especially in poor families, is already showing up in reduced standardized-test scores. These losses will affect earnings for decades. By one estimate today’s children will lose $17 trillion in lifetime earnings owing to school closings. They may also suffer shorter life expectancy, which is linked to income and educational attainment.
Feature
Items of Interest
Foreign
Ukraine’s impossible choice: territory or lives.
Taiwan is the center of the fight for democracy.
Domestic
White House and GOP make Homeland spending agreement.
The Fed plays the waiting game.
Governments across U.S. are just handing out cash.
Supreme Court seen as unlikely to find for free speech advocates.
Hertz CEO out after EV failure.
Lawfare
Trump property to be seized in civil fraud case.
Letitia James to put a padlock on Trump Tower.
Judge denies request of Trump to exclude Cohen, Daniels testimony.
Navarro heads to jail over contempt charge.
Jim Biden associate targeted by DOJ over fraud.
2024
Joe Biden’s “unease” about abortion.
Tech
Wyden criticizes Mnuchin’s TikTok bid.
TikTok supporters blame Jews for ban push.
Why everyone should’ve seen Google Gemini blunder coming.
Health
More than 60 percent of abortions are medication abortions.
Ephemera
George Lucas gives endorsement to Bob Iger.
Rumor: Aaron Taylor Johnson as next James Bond?
Netflix plans to focus on Receivers in next NFL doc series.
Podcast
Quote
“But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away 'blindly' so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality; but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.”
— C.S. Lewis