It’s fitting that the final phase of the presidential race coincides with the beginning of the NFL season, especially since the first—and perhaps only—debate between Vice President Kamala Harris…

Congress took an important step last week in combating the fentanyl epidemic and the country’s emerging xylazine crisis. The DETECT Xylazine and Fentanyl Act authorizes the Department of Homeland Security…

It is like one of those football games where each team fumbles repeatedly as it approaches the red zone. Neither can put together any kind of sustained drive. After the first Trump assassination attempt,…

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Politics Trump Upends the Rules of the Game The former president’s high-risk strategy separates him from conventional Republicans. It’s fitting that the final phase of the presidential race coincides with the beginning of the NFL season, especially since the first—and perhaps only—debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and the former President Donald Trump has made many Republicans nervous once again about their quarterback. Trump’s most fervent supporters view him as the biggest winner in American politics, vulnerable only to the other side’s cheating. His most ardent detractors, especially inside the Republican Party, tend to view him as a loser in general with one flukey win over Hillary Clinton that he briefly was on the cusp of replicating against a greatly diminished President Joe Biden. I’ve often argued that Trump is best understood as the political equivalent of a gunslinger quarterback whose talents keep every game close but always runs the risk of turning the ball over at the worst moment. The conventional wisdom on such quarterbacks in the NFL is that they always keep both teams in the game. Both parties are counting on Trump to keep them in the game this November. The former president’s campaign is looking to draw low-propensity voters, who skipped out on the disappointing midterm elections or even 2020, to the polls this year. All but two or three of the Republicans’ vaunted 2024 Senate challengers or candidates for open seats are likely reliant on Trump winning and having coattails for their own success. Harris is hoping that Democrats’ fear and loathing of Trump once again motivates them to turn out. Yes, there is more enthusiasm for her than for Biden or Clinton, although some of that represents pent-up demand and desperation more than the hope that powered Barack Obama to two terms. However, is still underperforming Biden 2020 with several key demographics and seeks to compensate by capitalizing on anti-Trump sentiment in unusual places.  Moreover, Harris’s reinvention of herself as a centrist unburdened by her past progressive policy positions counts on anti-Trump fervor keeping the Left in line through Election Day. Both parties really do look to Trump as the primary motivator of their bases. Not all Republicans like this, of course. Now more than ever they see the need for a careful game manager who won’t lose a tied game. Someone who might play for overtime, but won’t take a backbreaking sack or throw an interception to seal the win for the other team. That isn’t Trump. He possesses some of the skills necessary for message discipline, mainly branding and relentless repetition. But he is easily distracted and will always say at least some things that are off-message, often badly so. He also aims his public speeches more at the live crowds than the television audience or the reporters whose headlines will define them for many undecided voters. Just like you can’t have the highlight reel-worthy plays of Brett Favre or, more recently, Josh Allen without the risky throws that might get picked off in inopportune moments, the upsides of Trump the political showman are hard to separate from all the things even sympathetic Republican operatives and commentators find so maddening about him.  But the certainty felt in some circles that a generic Republican would be doing better than Trump is difficult to reconcile with the frequent defeats of more risk-averse GOP nominees since 1992. And it isn’t just the Trumpiest Senate candidates, the Kari Lakes of the world, who are running behind him this year. That’s not to say Trump doesn’t frequently pick self-defeating fights that Brian Kemp or Glenn Youngkin, to say nothing of Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, would avoid. It is entirely possible that he will make a strategic blunder, like a resumption of hostilities with Kemp while Georgia is on the line, that costs him the election. It is nevertheless the case that Trump’s top Republican critics have shown no more introspection about the party’s electoral prospects than his biggest sycophants, pining for the return of an imagined Ronald Reagan who bears only a passing resemblance to the real one. There is also the challenge of working the refs in the fourth quarter of this presidential campaign. If the fact patterns of the second Trump assassination attempt and a Tucker Carlson fan who was against arming Ukraine stood accused of similar misdeeds against the Democratic nominee, it is easy to imagine the overall tone of the press coverage being radically different. But those aren’t the conditions under which this game is being played. The post Trump Upends the Rules of the Game appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Prevent the Zombie Drug Apocalypse Congress must take steps to counter xylazine, the latest lethal threat from China. Credit: image via Shutterstock Congress took an important step last week in combating the fentanyl epidemic and the country’s emerging xylazine crisis. The DETECT Xylazine and Fentanyl Act authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to better track and halt the flow of these lethal substances ravaging our communities. Lawmakers must not mistake it, however, for a one-and-done solution. The stakes are too high and there is too much yet to accomplish for the fight to stop here.  Xylazine, also known as “tranq” or “the zombie drug,” has only begun appearing on America’s streets within the last several years and, as such, there is much we still don’t know. What is clear, however, is the danger it poses. It is highly addictive, leaves its users with nasty withdrawal symptoms, and causes ulcers sometimes requiring amputation. Most troubling of all, users often combine it with fentanyl to intensify the effect at a lower cost. Such mixing increases the likelihood of a deadly overdose.  This issue hits close to home for far too many in my home state of Indiana. Overdose deaths in Indiana doubled between 2018 and 2021, and xylazine’s lethal partner fentanyl played a part in 85 percent of them. Over 100,000 American lives were lost to drug overdoses in 2022 alone, surpassing the total American combat deaths in the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam Wars combined. Tragically, the arrival of new and more deadly drugs like xylazine will only exacerbate the enormous strain the opioid crisis has already placed on our healthcare system. Although new, xylazine has spread like wildfire. It has already turned up in 48 states and a recent investigation in New York City found that 90 percent of confiscated fentanyl samples there contained some admixture of the drug. Such rampant growth makes swift and decisive action from our elected officials all the more necessary. This issue has been on my radar since early 2023. I was among the first members of Congress to speak out on the crisis. We must do more to put a stop to those who are perpetrating this attack on the country. We must tackle the problem at its root: China. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has found that almost 100 percent of the fentanyl in America originates there. The precursor substances used to make fentanyl are shipped from China to Mexico, where cartels process them and send them across our border. Not only is China refusing to take action to stop this flood of fentanyl; recent reports have revealed that the Chinese government even subsidizes the production of fentanyl chemicals. Just as the Chinese Communist Party has fueled the fentanyl epidemic, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now enabling the xylazine crisis as well, according to the DEA. That is why I have pressed for investigations into shipments of xylazine from China. And it is why I have introduced the Countering Beijing’s Weaponization of Fentanyl Act, legislation that would declare fentanyl a bioweapon and sanction Chairman Xi and other CCP officials until they bring an end to the flow of fentanyl precursors across the Pacific. I have called on the DEA to schedule xylazine, a crucial step in tracking and limiting its effects. I have also proposed legislation calling for a mandatory 10-year sentence for fentanyl traffickers. Our outdated laws do not yet reflect the fact that fentanyl can carry the same level of lethality in amounts that are miniscule compared to other drugs. Stemming fentanyl is key to addressing the entire unprecedented crisis that is the opioid epidemic. A safer, healthier country, free from the dangerous substances from China like xylazine that pour across our border, is within reach. There is no excuse for allowing the citizens of the strongest country on Earth to be so vulnerable to such an attack. Action is needed to address the rapidly developing xylazine problem and it is needed now. Every day Congress and the Biden-Harris administration wait, more lives are lost. Hoosiers and Americans deserve better. The post Preventing the Zombie Drug Apocalypse appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Why Can’t Trump Break Through? The former president has failed to capitalize on big moments and a weak opponent. It is like one of those football games where each team fumbles repeatedly as it approaches the red zone. Neither can put together any kind of sustained drive. After the first Trump assassination attempt, the country was probably ready to give the former president a decisive lead: all he had to do was give a calming, unifying, somewhat humble convention speech, perhaps find some providential meaning in his miraculous turn of the head the moment before the shots were fired, and wrap it up in 35 minutes of so. He had been president before, done a fairly good job, and many were inclined to forget about his ridiculous behavior between the 2020 election and January 6, 2021. There was no national clamor for him to modify his hardline positions on immigration, which was broadly popular, or become a born-again Ukraine hawk. Even the foreign policy establishment was willing to concede quietly that the proxy-war NATO expansion gambit had probably failed—at a price paid by many thousands of young Ukrainian and Russian men.  But Trump of course could not manage that, and those who in the Eastern time zone went to bed sometime before the meandering address was finished, well after midnight, awoke to Democratic strategists claiming, somewhat to their surprise, that it was still a winnable race.  Then came the remarkable inner party coup against Joe Biden, which was, qua political maneuver, as deft as anyone my age had ever seen in American politics. Kamala Harris was suddenly the Democratic nominee, and for a sustained month of unimaginably fawning media coverage, no one could quite remember why it was that Democratic politicians and fundraisers had for years been shaking their heads about the vice president, and wondering what maneuver Biden could execute to get her off the ticket. The month of August was a reminder that a heavy preponderance of the media favors Democrats, and an even greater one hates Donald Trump: We were treated to a month of memes about “brat” Kamala and the politics of joy. And the polls moved, inevitably, in Kamala’s direction. But, somewhat surprisingly, not that much.  Kamala Harris made her own miscues. Perhaps out of some fear of being overshadowed, she refrained from wrapping up Pennsylvania with her veep pick, instead choosing a mediocre and almost unknown left-wing Minnesota politician who grows less visible every week the campaign progresses. Her refusal to give an interview to the press eventually became a story of its own. Prior to the first debate, even the pro-Kamala press was running “Is the honeymoon over?” pieces. Since Kamala was unable to speak to the press herself, the Trump campaign had the opportunity to define her political persona (for those interested) in their own rallies, which might generate at least some coverage. There is ample footage of the vice president taking positions—on the police, on abolishing ICE, on the Floyd riots, on “equity”—that are well outside the mainstream. Occasionally, remarkably, the press even did some digging of their own: CNN, generally heavily anti-Trump, ran a segment showing Kamala favoring taxpayer-funded sex change surgeries for illegal alien prisoners—a position so nutty it seemed it might be parody. On the eve of the second debate, some felt Trump, with a good performance, could open up a meaningful lead.  But of course he did not. In the debate, Vice President Harris did not articulate any of her own policy positions, or explain whether or why they had evolved over the past years. But she did quite effectively goad Trump into talking about the size of his rallies, the purportedly stolen election, and any number of issues where he would prove incapable of being calm and reassuring. “They’re eating the cats” (which he actually said) is one way of describing the escalating immigration crisis the Biden-Harris administration has brought about through its open-borders policy—and the border almost certainly will be reopened if Harris wins and voters have forfeited their right to weigh in on the issue—but it may not be the best way to sway undecided voters. (Though, to be fair, the cat memes do shine a light on cultural differences in ways that sociological discussions of Santeria and voodoo might not.)  Now another man—this time a pro-Ukraine fanatic—has tried once more to assassinate Trump, and many pro-Harris voices in the media are more or less saying that Trump himself is at fault. Somewhere in political science there must be a metric that measures the breakdown of democratic governance. If an unorganized riot of people convinced an election is fraudulent belongs somewhere on the matrix (it does, if not particularly high), it is not obvious that leading journalists who claim that a candidate is responsible for people trying to kill him should be less prominent on it. On the existing information, it is not at all clear what will move the needle in the battleground states. The media will remain pro-Harris, though there are certainly some pockets of the establishment which wonder whether the wave of progressivism her victory will usher in is desirable. My own surmise is that some foreign policy surprise—an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Israel’s unanticipated vulnerability to rockets, the collapse of the Ukrainian army in the Donbas, a Zelensky success in escalating the war through missile strikes into Russia, or some event on that scale—will prove influential in the final weeks. Obama opened up a substantial lead against McCain only when he showed himself (to voters) better able to understand them, listen to smart people, and deal with the financial crisis than his hawkish war-hero opponent. Before the crisis happened, that was not a predicted outcome.  In some kind of comparable moment of fear and uncertainty, who would seem more reassuring—the bombastic Trump, or Kamala, who has still not managed to give a credible interview? My hunch is that with media assistance, Kamala would be able to fake it better. The post Why Can’t Trump Break Through? appeared first on The American Conservative.

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