Today is one of those days where I have several thoughts that probably won’t make it to next week, so I’m just getting them all out at once. So as John McLaughlin used to say, “Issue One!”
I Was Told There Would Be No Math
I mentioned on Wednesday that the D.C. murder rate had dropped to the “lowest point in almost 30 years,” but I may have been conflating that with the overall crime rate. While the murder rate has indeed declined in the last few years, it’s not the lowest in three decades. The worst year I can find data for is 1991, when D.C. had a whopping 482 homicides, for a murder rate of nearly 80 per 100,000 residents. The lowest in recent history was actually 2012, when there were “only” 88 homicides, for a rate of just under 14 per 100,000 residents. If current trends hold and 2025 ends up with 10% fewer homicides than last year, that would be roughly 24 homicides per 100,000 residents, which would be the lowest rate since 2019 and more or less the average rate for the last 10 years.
There also seems to be some grumbling that D.C. police have been tinkering with crime data, so it may not be accurate to say that overall crime is the lowest in almost 30 years. Regardless, it’s not markedly worse in 2025, much less to the point of justifying a federal takeover of law enforcement. The fact remains that Donald Trump is merely using D.C. crime as a pretext to exercise emergency powers when there is no emergency, which is a scandal.
Standards and Practices
There was some minor gloating in the Trump-friendly media this week, when it became apparent that Trump had “survived” the Epstein Files scandal, because it seemed that everyone was moving on and Trump’s polling among his staunchest supporters weren’t abandoning him. As National Review’s Rich Lowry pointed out:
And, I mean, I guess. But that’s actually an indictment of his supporters, isn’t it? The electorate generally lacks the attention span to make any scandal last more than a few days, and Trump’s supporters have reportedly proven that there is no standard to which they are willing to hold him. Trump famously observed that he could stand out on 5th Avenue and shoot people and not lose a single voter. Stipulated. But apparently he can also be on record as being best friends with the most infamous sex offender in recent American history, and it won’t shake loose any of the people who spent the last several years claiming to care about pedophiles enjoying the protection of elites at the highest levels of government. That’s weird, right?
Terrible Officiating
I think I’ve finally been able to put words to a phenomenon that I find incredibly annoying. There’s a certain kind of political creature, more specifically a type of political analyst, who like to consider themselves something of an “umpire.” They don’t take sides, y’see, they’re just “calling balls and strikes” against the various actions of the Trump administration. And that’s fine as far as it goes; not everyone has to be a shameless ideologue. But it seems to me that, to these people, it’s always a 0-0 count. There is no accounting for everything that happened leading up to any particular moment. Oh, Trump is disingenuously using D.C. crime to federalize D.C. law enforcement and park military vehicles on the National Mall? That’s strike one! Ooh, Trump is abusing another emergency authority to unilaterally and arbitrarily raise taxes on American imports? That’s strike one! Donald Trump is using cryptocurrency to set up a direct account that can be used for bribes and a personal slush fund? Strike one again! He pardoned literally everyone involved in January 6th? That’s another strike one!
If there’s never a point where you’re willing to call a batter out, no matter how many strikes he piles up, what you’re doing isn’t umpiring.
Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That
President Trump announced this week that he’s, uh, hosting the Kennedy Center Honors. Trying to make jokes about that is like trying to gild the lily, but man. Whatever else you can say about the man, he is also just a profoundly silly goose. One of the weirder developments in my lifetime has been how an entire political movement came to see this guy as a platonic example of masculinity when he has hard opinions about Broadway shows, has interior design tastes that Liberace would find too gaudy, and hosts snooty awards shows.
Remember when we used to complain that Barack Obama was too much of a pop culture figure? Always needlessly inserting himself into cultural events? I wonder what red-hatted America would have said if Obama had had the audacity, so to speak, to host the Kennedy Center Honors while president. More hard R’s than a pirate ship.
COVID Crazies
Last Friday there were news reports of an active shooter on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta. I thought at the time that it sounded strange, because Emory University isn’t the sort of place that seems like would foment an active shooter, but I didn’t delve into the story.
But then this week we learned that it wasn’t a shooting on Emory’s campus at all — it was actually an attack on the Centers for Disease Control complex by a 30-year-old man with a history of mental health problems [obviously] who blamed the COVID 19 vaccine for his depression. He fired some 500 bullets into the windows of the complex, shattering roughly 180 windows across four different buildings.
That strikes me as a much different event than an “active shooter” on a college campus. What worries me is that we, the royal we, seem to be encouraging this sort of crankery. I don’t think anyone would argue that COVID made quite a lot of people go nuts in various directions. There were people who basically became Howard Hughes and refused to interact with humans, and I still occasionally see people driving alone in their cars while wearing a surgical mask. But those people seem entirely harmless compared to the sort that seem to be genuinely angry about the vaccine, to the extent that they might try to kill people over it. And we have the Health and Human Services secretary essentially indulging that anger by validating these cranks’ suspicions about the COVID vaccine through medical term gibberish. It strikes me as irresponsible both medically and culturally.
Who Could’ve Possibly Predicted?
The Producer Price Index, also known as the Wholesale Price Index, rose much more than expected in July, almost a full percentage point over June [which is alarming] and 3.3% over 2024. It’s the largest monthly jump since 2022 — you guys remember what was going on in 2022, right? — and well above the Federal Reserve target of 2%. To use a technical economic term, it’s Bad News Bears.
But it’s also…an obvious consequence of current federal policy?
As I’ve been banging my spoon on my highchair about for the last five months, when the president [arbitrarily and unilaterally, and quite likely unconstitutionally] raises the cost of importing goods into the United States, that is going to raise the cost of goods throughout the economy. It’s the most basic Macroeconomics 101 concept.
Vice President J.D. Vance was scoffing in June when the PPI numbers weren’t terrible:
Clearly he’s unfamiliar with the story of the Zen Master.
It was well reported at the time, when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs against every municipality in the world [except for Russia], whether they had human populations or not, that companies were front-loading their inventory to get ahead of the tariffs. Which is to say, they were buying much more inventory than they usually would before prices went up so they could stave off raising prices for as long as possible. But it seems like that might be over. It turns out that arbitrarily raising the price of importing goods by double-digit percentages causes prices go up, and those numbers can’t be hidden forever. Which raises the question — which government functionary is going to have to get fired for these terrible numbers?
Incoming Humiliation
As I’m writing this, President Trump is en route to Alaska to meet with Russian dictator and war criminal Vladimir Putin to…well, no one is entirely sure what.
I’m having a hard time envisioning what a plausibly good outcome would be for this meeting, and it’s already off to a bad start even before it begins. For one thing, it’s an embarrassment to invite an actual war criminal onto American soil, and give him the prestige of a one-on-one meeting with the President of the United States, when he’s done nothing to warrant it and is still currently engaged in the propagation of war crimes. These types of prestige summits are usually rewarded after a ceasefire, not before. A ceasefire should be the price of admission.
Beyond that, I simply don’t trust Donald Trump to negotiate effectively with Putin. Trump’s weird deference to and admiration of Putin is well-documented, and it seems entirely plausible that Putin is going to run some sort of scheme on Trump and get him to give away the store. Trump is weirdly desperate to get a Nobel Peace Prize, and he sees brokering a peace between Ukraine and Russia as his ticket to that end, so it makes me nervous to think about what he’d be willing to do in pursuit of it.
He doesn’t care about the geopolitical implications of any deal per se, he just wants something he can call a deal. That’s not a good place for the President of the United States to be.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: 17th Century British History
Clue: The lantern with which he planned to initiate his most famous act is in the possession of England’s Ashmolean Museum.
Guy Fawkes
Today’s clue:
Category: South American Names
Clue: The last country that he liberated before he died was the one named for him.
Dispatches from the Homefront
My older daughter came into my room the other evening, looking freshly bathed. But it was weird that she was by herself.
“Where’s your mom and sister?” I asked her.
“Oh, [sister] is refusing to get in the tub. She’s like a cat or something.”
She then went downstairs to watch TV. Shortly thereafter, a three-year-old comes screaming down the hall [like, literally screaming] being chased by my wife, who was holding a towel.
A tiny voice shouts from downstairs “I TOLD YOU SHE WAS A CAT!”