‘Car 54, Where Are You?’

America could quell world chaos—or add to it.

With all the problems facing our nation today, it’s good to see House Speaker Mike Johnson’s got his sights set on what’s really important: Changing the laws of the land to ensure Donald Trump never faces accountability for his alleged crimes. Per Politico:

House GOP leaders . . . spent yesterday afternoon whipping a bill written by Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.) that would allow presidents charged at the state level to move those cases to federal court—effectively nullifying the power of officials like [Manhattan District Attorney Alvin] Bragg and Fani Willis, Trump’s prosecutor in Fulton County, Georgia . . .

Johnson has also been in talks with Judiciary Committee chair and Trump ally Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) about using the appropriations process to target special counsel Jack Smith’s probe. It’s an apparent softening of his position: He said in a POLITICO interview last month that he found a similar idea by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) unworkable; now, he’s actually looking into it.

Happy Thursday.

---

House Speaker Mike Johnson. (Photo by Andrew Harnik / Getty Images.)

It’s Crazy Out There

I intended to write this morning about recent episodes of clownish behavior by Republicans in Congress.

GOP clownishness isn’t new news, I suppose, but I thought it still noteworthy when the Speaker of the House flat out lies:

I thought it noteworthy when a senator parrots ludicrous Putin talking points that even Putin has given up on:

And I thought it noteworthy when a Republican congressman calls the former Republican Speaker “garbage” because he dares say Donald Trump shouldn’t be president again:

Perhaps all this congressional Republican exuberance is due to the coming visit to the Hill of their Leader, Trump. Who wouldn’t get carried away if they had the imminent prospect of receiving the Demagogue’s Touch to heal all their diseases?

But as I settled down to analyze the Republicans’ statements, I thought I’d first go online to see what else was going on in the world. Yikes.

French politics is in total meltdown after Macron’s decision to call a snap election following his party’s poor showing in last weekend’s European parliamentary elections. The insane last 72 hours in Paris are amusingly described in this Twitter thread.

Russia’s banking system seems also to be in meltdown, prompted by yesterday’s announcement of a new package of sanctions.

The situation on Israel’s northern border continues to deteriorate, and Hamas has rejected the much-heralded ceasefire deal for Gaza.

Here at home, Hamas sympathizers are active in the streets of New York City, while the FBI is dealing with ISIS-related terror threats.

Inflation is subsiding, but the Fed’s determination to keep interest rates sky-high isn’t. Meanwhile, the increasingly rickety commercial real estate sector is raising fears of a possible regional banking crisis.

As I said, yikes.

Meanwhile, CNN is proclaiming, “World leaders huddle in Italy for crucial G7 summit.” But how crucial is that summit? I’m sure Apulia is lovely this time of year, but one has the sense that the stately conference sessions and much-negotiated statements are pretty disconnected from the actual, turbulent reality in which we’re living.

I could quote Yeats’s The Second Coming here:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . .

But perhaps the moment is better captured by the theme song of a favorite TV show of my youth, Car 54, Where Are You?

There’s a holdup in the Bronx,

Brooklyn’s broken out in fights;

There’s a traffic jam in Harlem

That’s backed up to Jackson Heights;

There’s a Scout troop short a child,

Khrushchev’s due at Idlewild;

Car 54, Where Are You?

It’s crazy out there.

Which brings us back, in a circuitous way, to where I intended to start, with the Republican party. For it’s Trump’s Republican party, and the fact that he and they could quite conceivably control the federal government after January 20, 2025 is the most destabilizing thing of all.

There’s no solution to the chaos in the world if we’re in chaos here at home. And Trump having a 50/50 chance to be president again, supported by a party slavishly devoted to him, is almost the definition of chaos. (And to be honest, it’s not as if the other political party is in great shape either.)

As Anne Applebaum pointed out yesterday in a fine piece on the European elections:

American media clichés about Europe are wrong. In fact, the European far right is rising in some places, but falling in others. And we aren’t “in danger” of following European voters in an extremist direction, because we are already well past them. If Trump wins in November, America could radicalize Europe, not the other way around.

Since 1945, the United States has been supposed to be the solution to the world falling apart. But now it turns out we’re a large part of the problem.

We’re supposed to be Car 54. But where are we?

—William Kristol

---

Catching up . . .

• Weakened leaders of the West gather in Italy to discuss an unruly world: New York Times

• Trump to meet with GOP lawmakers to sketch a plan for a possible second term: NPR

• House GOP votes to hold Attorney General Garland in contempt: CNN

• EU election results loom over Ukraine aid discussions: Politico

• Biden’s Israel policy may hasten Trump’s rise, U.S. allies fear: Politico

• Life-threatening flooding sweeps South Florida: Axios

---

Quick Hits: Right-Wing Media Are in Trouble

We at The Bulwark spend a lot of time talking about the ongoing grotesqueries of right-wing online media. After all, those are the waters many of us used to swim in, and it’s an ecosystem whose gradual capitulation to Donald Trump over the last decade was a striking illustration of—and major contributing factor to—his conquest of conservatism writ large.

But do these sites still even matter? As Paul Fahri notes in a new piece for the Atlantic, “the flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing”:

This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020 . . . Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent . . .

What’s going on? The obvious culprit is Facebook. For years, Facebook’s mysterious algorithms served up links to news and commentary articles, sending droves of traffic to their publishers . . . In early 2018, [Facebook] began deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members. In 2021, it tightened the tap a little further. This past February, it announced that it would do the same on Instagram and Threads. All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites . . .

Conservative digital media are disproportionately dependent on social-media referrals in the first place. Many mainstream publications have long-established brand names, large newsrooms to churn out copy, and in a few cases, large numbers of loyal subscribers. Sites like Breitbart and Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, however, were essentially Facebook-virality machines, adept at injecting irresistably outrageous, clickable nuggets into people’s feeds. So the drying-up of referrals hit these publications much harder.

Read the whole thing.

---

Cheap Shots