Bess Levin: The Wall Street Journal Goes Full White Supremacist, Blames Silicon Valley Bank Collapse On “1 Black” And “1 LGBTQ+”

As you’ve probably heard by now, on Friday, Silicon Valley Bank—a lender to some of the most notable names in the tech world—became the biggest bank to fail since the 2008 financial crisis. How did this happen? Not surprisingly, a multitude of factors appear to have contributed to the company’s downfall, including its failure to account for rising interest rates; venture capital drying up; a prevalence of uninsured depositors, who usually ask for their money back when things are looking bad; and a lack of regulatory oversight, thanks to one Donald Trump. One reason SVB probably did not fail? The presence of a few women, one Black person, and an individual who identifies as LGBTQ+ on its board. Though The Wall Street Journal isn’t so sure!

In an op-ed titled “Who Killed Silicon Valley Bank?” columnist Andy Kessler writes: “Was there regulatory failure? Perhaps. SVB was regulated like a bank but looked more like a money-market fund. Then there’s this: In its proxy statement, SVB notes that besides 91% of their board being independent and 45% women, they also have ‘1 Black,‘ “1 LGBTQ+,‘ and ‘2 Veterans.’ I’m not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.”

Sure, Kessler is not flatly, literally saying “12 white men would have avoided this mess,” because even David Duke knows you can’t just come out and say that in 2023. But…he’s basically saying exactly that, hence the claim that the bank might have failed because it was “distracted” by supposedly burdensome “diversity demands.” (Here’s where we’d like to point out that having “1 Black” person on a 12-person board means that that board is still 92% white. The same math goes for that “1 LGBTQ+” person.) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/wall-street-journal-column-silicon-valley-bank

Ed Kilgore: Could a Criminal Indictment Actually Help Trump’s 2024 Campaign?

Donald Trump broke a lot of the alleged rules of politics in his improbable rise to the presidency in 2016, his bizarre four-year term in office, and now his attempt at a 2024 comeback. Normally, you’d guess that a criminal indictment would be an instant disqualifier for a presidential candidate. But now that a Trump indictment seems likely in the days ahead — with additional charges from different prosecutors involving separate incidents of alleged criminal misconduct looming — Trump seems poised to break yet another norm.

Trump does not think an indictment would end his reelection bid. In fact, he told the Associated Press that criminal charges wouldn’t deter him in the slightest. “Oh, absolutely, I won’t even think about leaving,” he said this week. “Probably, it’ll enhance my numbers.”

That may sound like just another outlandish Trumpian brag, but it’s actually entirely plausible — in the short term at least. There is no reason to assume that a criminal indictment will change any minds among the MAGA faithful. Trump clearly benefited from both of his congressional impeachments among rank-and-file Republicans. And Trump’s base has been instructed for years that the “deep state,” with its tentacles extending into every branch of government, is determined to remove him from the picture in order to resume its persecution of “patriots” and its globalist destruction of the U.S. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/could-an-indictment-actually-help-trumps-2024-campaign.html

Alexander Burns: Stop Overthinking It: An Indictment Would Be Bad For Trump

Yes, the Trump diehards can be expected to rise up against Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. But that still wouldn’t earn him a single additional vote.

The widely expected indictment of Donald Trump in Manhattan has all the makings of a political disaster for him. It should be the climactic event in a yearslong saga involving marital infidelity, sleazy financial dealings and now the first-ever criminal charge against a former American president.

Naturally, the question arises: Could this actually be good for Trump?

Elections are unpredictable. But it is past time to give up the idea that stoking the anger of Trump’s diehard fans is a victory unto itself.

If each scandal or blunder binds 99 percent of his base closer to him and unsettles 1 percent, that is still a losing formula for a politician whose base is an electoral minority. Trump cannot shed fractional support with every controversy but make it up on volume.

The question before Republicans is whether they need another lesson from the electorate in the perils of running on a version of Trumpism that is all about Trump. A campaign about Jan. 6 and Stormy Daniels is not one that is likely to end well for Republicans.

That is a mortal problem for Trump’s candidacy.

He alone can fix it. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/03/20/indictment-trump-bad-vote-00087892

Maggie Haberman: Out of Power, Trump Still Exerts It

An early-morning social media post amounted to a starter’s gun for Republican officials: Many raced to the former president’s side, denouncing a Democratic prosecutor investigating him.

Since he left office, Democrats and a smaller number of Republicans have vowed to ensure that former President Donald J. Trump never recaptures the White House, where he would regain enormous power over the nation and around the globe.

Yet, in his insistence on forging ahead with a campaign while facing multiple criminal investigations, his dismissiveness toward supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression and his continued provocations on social media and in campaign speeches, Mr. Trump has shown that he does not need control over the levers of government to have an effect on the country — and, in the minds of many, to do damage.

To those who believed that the secret to banishing Mr. Trump was to deprive him of attention — that ignoring him would make him go away — he has shown that to be wishful thinking. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/20/us/politics/trump-indictment-republicans.html

Tom Nichols: Trump Did It Again

Donald Trump threatened to summon a mob—for the second time in two years—to his defense…. The last time he rallied his faithful supporters this way, they stormed the U.S. Capitol, which resulted in death and destruction and many, many prison sentences.

Trump himself upped the ante by saying, in effect, that it doesn’t matter what’s in the indictment. Instead, he is warning all of us, point-blank, that he will violate the law if he wants to, and if you don’t like it, you can take it up with the mob that he can summon at will. This is pure authoritarianism, the flex of a would-be American caudillo who is betting that our fear of his goons is greater than our commitment to the rule of law. Once someone like Trump issues that kind of challenge, it doesn’t matter if the indictment is for murder, campaign-finance violations, or mopery with intent to gawk: The issue is whether our legal institutions can be bullied into paralysis. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/trump-arrest-indictment-protesters-mob/673437/
 

Elizabeth Kolbert: The U.N. Issues a Final Warning on the Climate—and a Plan

The “window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future” is “rapidly closing.” So warns the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its latest report, released on Monday. The findings in the document, officially known as the AR6 Synthesis Report, might be summed up as “Wake up! This is your last chance, humanity.

According to the I.P.C.C., average global temperatures have already increased 1.1 degrees Celsius—two degrees Fahrenheit—from the late nineteenth century, and this is causing “widespread adverse impacts” for people and for other living things. “Impacts on some ecosystems are approaching irreversibility,” the report states. For every additional increment of warming, the chances of catastrophe will only increase, and the options for adaptation will contract. Climate-related and climate-unrelated disasters will begin to interact, resulting in risks that cascade “across sectors and regions.” And those who are likely to suffer the most are those who have done the least to cause the problem. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-un-issues-a-final-warning-on-the-climate-and-a-plan

Molly Roberts: The right wing’s ‘woke’ obsession could come back to haunt it

What, pray tell, is a “woke” bank?

Somehow, when House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) suggested that Silicon Valley Bank had collapsed because it was “one of the most woke banks,” his point, while nonsensical, was entirely clear.

After all, woke has turned into conservatives’ favorite word for anything they dislike.

This week’s bankruptcy brouhaha was typical. An army of partisans greeted SVB’s downfall with musings on, of all things, the evils of diversity, equity and inclusion. Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler called out the composition of its board (“I’m not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but …”); Donald Trump Jr. summoned causal relationships out of thin air (“SVB is what happens when you push a leftist/woke ideology and have that take precedent over common sense business practices”).

None of this has anything to do with the actual cause of the bank collapse — rising interest rates, overinvestment in long-term government bonds or bank deregulation — but, of course, solving the problem isn’t the goal. The goal is to blame the libs. Case in shameless point: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) insisted wokeness was to blame for the massacre of 19 young children in Uvalde, Tex. Apparently, we’ve stopped teaching “values” in our schools, and we’re teaching “indoctrination” instead. Really, indoctrination? In Texas?

Woke is the word these days, and conservatives are shouting it whenever they can — to the point that what exactly it’s supposed to mean, beyond “thing that I don’t like,” has become a mystery.

Wokeness has come to mean everything and nothing all at once, and SVB is far from the only example. Observe rising right-winger Bethany Mandel, asked to define the word. “So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that, um … woke is something that’s very hard to define.” Finally, she managed, “It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and reduce society in order to create hierarchies of oppression.”

If you think that’s gobbledygook, check out this helpful definition from former president Donald Trump: “You know what woke means, it means you’re a loser. …Everything woke turns to sh--.”

But putting a single Black person on the 12-member board of the 16th-largest bank in the country? Hardly the diversity cops running amok. Now some partisans are deriding Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley as so woke he’s destroying the military because of a voluntary seminar on “white rage.” This is Mark Milley — an ROTC grad who exudes normie-boomer energy.

Mike Pompeo, when he was secretary of state, indicted wokeism as an -ism destroying the country, alongside, of all things, multiculturalism. Woke is now deployed against individuals, events and values that many Americans have at least some sympathy for. And perhaps with those Americans, right-wingers’ own obsession with wokeness will backfire — just as liberals’ overly zealous displays of anti-racism risk undermining their aims. These listeners may, in the end, do what the preachers of today’s right-wing gospel want least. That is, they’ll stay woke. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/20/svb-woke-insult-history/

Rich Lowry: Biden Is Not Going to Be Easy to Beat

Republicans Are Delusional If They Think Biden Will Be Easy to Beat“At this juncture, no one else in the country is as likely to be president of the United States come January 2025 as Joe Biden.

Biden was never going to be the next LBJ or FDR as a cadre of historians had seemingly convinced him early in his presidency. But he punched above his weight legislatively during his first two years, getting more out of a tied Senate and slender House majority than looked realistically possible. He’s set up to have the advantage in this year’s momentous debt-limit fight, since it’s hard to see how congressional Democrats aren’t united and congressional Republicans divided.

Biden’s age is a liability for him, but comes with a significant benefit — he does not look or sound like a radical any more than the average elderly parent or grandparent. This has enabled him to govern from the left — he would have spent even more the first two years if he could have — without appearing threatening or wild-eyed. He hasn’t restored normality to Washington so much as familiarity as the old hand who has been there since 1973 and made his first attempt at national office in 1988.


There’s no fortune quite like being lucky in your enemies, and Biden could well get a big break in this respect yet again. However much Republicans may wish he were a pushover, he’s not, and they should be acting accordingly. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/03/16/republicans-biden-trump-2024-election-00087242

Simon Rosenberg: The Republicans Have A DeSantis Problem

Perhaps the central insight of my 2022 election analysis was that I believed the Republicans had made a huge strategic blunder by running towards a politics – MAGA – which had just been overwhelmingly rejected by the American people in two consecutive high-turnout elections. As far back as late October 2021 I warned that if this “anti-MAGA majority” came to understand that the GOP was once again all MAGA it would make 2022 far more likely to be a close, competitive election than a red wave. And that’s basically what happened.

Ron DeSantis looked at all this and decided to become even more MAGA, super MAGA. He’s moved from a 15 week abortion ban to 6 weeks. He’s sold his Presidential campaign as a war against woke. He’s banning books, removing elected officials from office, mounting unprecedented assaults against undocumented immigrants and punishing businesses which don’t agree with his agenda. His response to the Silicon Valley Bank implosion was buffoonish and embarrassing. He choose Putin over America and the West. Republican Senators have been dumping on him all week.

What in the world he is doing? As someone who has been in this business a long time it’s not easy to understand.

For all those Rs hoping DeSantis would be a reasonable and capable alternative to Trump this has been a very bad week. It appears the Rs might be on the verge of another cycle of “candidate quality” problems. It is another reason why as we head into 2024 I would much rather be us than them. https://simonwdc.substack.com/p/the-republicans-have-a-desantis-problem

Tom Nichols: DeSantis Will Betray Ukraine for MAGA Votes

Both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have signaled their willingness to sell out Ukraine to the Kremlin, and the Russians have gleefully taken notice. How could this be happening in the party of Ronald Reagan?

State governors are not usually experts on foreign policy, but those who intend to run for president are advised to at least brush up on the subject. Alas, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis did not get that memo. Last week, DeSantis declared Russia’s massive invasion—the largest operation in Europe since the defeat of the Nazis—to be a mere “territorial dispute,” and said that the war is thus not “a vital American national strategic interest.” This was too much for many elected Republicans and even for the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, who described the comments as “Ron DeSantis’s First Big Mistake.”

This shining opportunity to stumble came courtesy of the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who a few weeks ago sent out questionnaires about Ukraine policy to a group of possible GOP presidential candidates. Carlson’s questions presented Republican contenders with a dilemma.

On the one hand, many faithful MAGA voters, who make up the core of the GOP base, are regular viewers of Carlson’s show, and his questionnaire was a kind of early beauty pageant, an opportunity for Republican candidates to take a quick walk down the runway in front of MAGA World. On the other hand, Carlson is an irresponsible demagogue who has been exposed in the Dominion-lawsuit filings as a relentless opportunist who will bamboozle his own audience for ratings.

In foreign policy, amateurish pandering to Tucker Carlson’s audience is dangerous. The Russian media are already crowing that the next American president will throw Ukraine to the wolves, a belief that could lead the Kremlin to take even greater risks than bumping into drones. Many elected Republicans and GOP presidential contenders—despite their constant fear of offending Trump—seem to recognize this, to their credit. If only Ron DeSantis were one of them.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/03/desantis-ukraine-maga-trump/673424/

Margaret Hartmann: Ron DeSantis Eating Pudding With His Fingers Will End His 2024 Bid

Enshrined in DeSantis lore is an episode from four years ago: During a private plane trip from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C., in March of 2019, DeSantis enjoyed a chocolate pudding dessert—by eating it with three of his fingers, according to two sources familiar with the incident.

At first glance, this may not seem like such a big deal. Pudding is delicious. A finger makes an acceptable utensil in an emergency. And who among us hasn’t tried an odd food maneuver when trapped on a plane? The Daily Beast doesn’t even focus primarily on the pudding incident; it appears at the end of a piece about how the Florida governor “struggles with basic social skills” required of a politician. But I’m calling it now: This story will follow DeSantis like pudding sticks to fingers.

The devil is in the details. The report doesn’t say DeSantis dipped a finger into his pudding sheepishly; he used three fingers, presumably as a scoop. And it’s established in the preceding paragraph that he regularly ate during meetings, “like a starving animal who has never eaten before… getting shit everywhere.” This paints a vivid picture of being trapped in a conference room with your boss as he shoves most of his hand into a pudding cup, scoops the goo into his mouth, licks his fingers, and goes back in for more, with chocolate still smeared around his lips. Disgusting!

Even worse for DeSantis is how funny the word “pudding” sounds. And it’s a dessert for children. The Florida governor wants to look masculine and tough, and there are already reports that Donald Trump plans to mock his primary rival’s height and weight. While I personally support people of all ages, body types, and gender expressions consuming a deliciously chocolatey treat, it’s a bad look for a GOP presidential candidate.

To be clear, I’m not saying that voters are going to hear this story and instantly decide they can’t vote for DeSantis. But I do think the image will lodge itself in people’s subconsciouses. Pretend you’re a GOP primary voter listening to the Florida governor touting his record on flouting public-health recommendations, harassing migrants, and ridding schools of “wokeness.” Sounds pretty good, right? Now picture those same ideas coming out of a man who’s been credibly accused of licking dessert from his paw like a cartoon bear. How do those talking points sound now?

I know what you may be thinking: Wait, isn’t DeSantis’s biggest rival a guy who loves ketchup on well-done steak? Yes, Donald Trump being weird with various foodstuffs — from a taco bowl to Diet Coke to “dangerous” fruit — is basically a genre unto itself. But the 45th president has so many strange peccadilloes that it’s just become part of his oddball charm. And while Trump’s fingers may be short, at least he didn’t eat pudding with them. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/desantis-eating-pudding-with-his-fingers-will-end-2024-bid.html
 

David Brooks: Trump and DeSantis Could Both Lose

If American politics worked as it should, then the Republican primaries would be contests between these two different narratives and governing styles — between populism and conservatism.

But that’s not happening so far. The first reason is that Trump’s supporters are so many and so loyal, and his political style is so brutal, he may be deterring governors from entering the campaign. My educated guess is that Youngkin will not run for president in 2024; he wants to focus on Virginia. And Kemp may not, either. Kemp has taken on Trump in the past, but who wants to get into a gutter brawl with a front-runner when you already have a fantastic job governing the state you love? It could be that the G.O.P. presidential field will be much smaller than many of us thought a couple of months ago.

The second reason we’re not seeing the two narratives face off is Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor should be the ultimate optimistic, businesslike conservative. His state is growing faster than any other in the country. But instead, he’s running as a dour, humorless culture war populist — presumably because that’s what he is.

So right now the G.O.P. has two leading candidates with similar views, and the same ever-present anti-woke combativeness. The race is between populist Tweedledum and populist Tweedledee.

The conclusion I draw is that the Trump-DeSantis duopoly is unstable and represents a wing of the party many people are getting sick of. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/opinion/trump-desantis-lose.html

Bess Levin: Donald Trump, Under Criminal Investigation For January 6, Declares It Was All Mike Pence’s Fault

Over the weekend, Mike Pence declared that his former boss had been “wrong” to demand he overturn the results of the 2020 election and that “history will hold Donald Trump accountable.” While this might have sounded like a serious rebuke of the ex-president, in reality, it was merely the latest in a long line of remarks from the former VP that still manage to effectively let Trump off the hook for inciting a bloody insurrection that left multiple people dead. For one thing, Trump should clearly be judged for January 6 now, not by a history book in five or 10 years. For another, Pence has done everything in his power to ensure the ex-president evades any and all responsibility for the attack on the Capitol, first by refusing to speak to the January 6 committee and later by trying his hardest to dodge a subpoena from the special counsel criminally investigating Trump. Also? He can’t even bring himself to say he wouldn’t vote for the guy in 2024, presumably because, against all odds, he would!

Given all this, you might think Trump would have let Pence’s most recent remarks slide. But obviously, that’s not how the former guy rolls. Instead, he chose to respond to the former VP’s weekend comments by arguing that January 6 was actually Mike Pence‘s fault.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Trump insisted: “Had [Pence] sent the votes back to the legislatures, they wouldn’t have had a problem with Jan. 6, so in many ways, you can blame him for Jan. 6. Had he sent them back to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, the states, I believe, number one, you would have had a different outcome. But I also believe you wouldn’t have had ‘Jan. 6’ as we call it.”

This is obviously an insane line of logic, but don’t take our word for it—even the gang at Fox News couldn’t quite believe their ears.

During the same interview, aboard his plane en route to Iowa, Trump reportedly opined that Pence said what he said over the weekend due to poor 2024 polling numbers. “I guess he figured that being nice is not working,” Trump said. “But, you know, he’s out there campaigning. And he’s trying very hard. And he’s a nice man, I’ve known him, I had a very good relationship until the end.”

Of course, Monday wasn’t the first time Trump had something completely absurd to say re: Pence‘s role in January 6. Back in November 2021, he said that his former VP deserved chants calling for his hanging. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/donald-trump-mike-pence-to-blame-for-january-6

Molly Jong-Fast: GOP Elites Can’t Simply Wish Donald Trump Away

Trumpism has cost the GOP in three consecutive elections, and yet it looks like the Republican base may continue to follow their basest ideological urges and stick with their guy in the next contest. A new CNN poll found that the majority of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) “care more about picking a 2024 GOP nominee who agrees with them on issues than one who can beat [Joe] Biden.” This polling runs contrary to the GOP-elites wishcasting described Wednesday in Politico: “Even die-hard supporters of former president Donald Trump, they’ve reasoned, are finally sick of losing.”

If this polling is right, the base is not “sick of losing.” There is no tangible evidence to support the GOP braintrust’s fantasy. If anything, the base seems stuck in 2016, as four polls last month showed Trump experiencing a February bump, expanding his lead over Ron DeSantis. It’s been clear for months—to me, at least—that Trump shouldn’t be counted out, whereas “several top Republicans,” Axios noted Tuesday, “keep saying there’s no way” he can win the nomination. 

Republican contenders find themselves in an awkward position: How do they win Trump’s base without actually being the 76-year-old reality-television host, or how do they out-Trump Trump? DeSantis has worked hardest to out-Trump Trump by turning Florida into a mini authoritarian state—whether that’s entailed removing an elected prosecutor or radically injecting his right-wing ideology into education. The latter has been a clear priority for DeSantis, from his takeover of New College and signing of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill to his targeting of AP African American Studies and fostering of a climate where supposedly dangerous authors like Jodi Picoult, Toni Morrison, and James Patterson are being banned.

But, how do you switch cult leader mid-cult? How do you appeal to a base that is completely ideological but lacking a coherent ideology? Republicans have had numerous opportunities to uncouple from Trump—right after his first impeachment, right after he lost in 2020, right after he encouraged a riot at the Capitol, right after his second impeachment. Each time Republicans didn’t want to take the pain of possibly alienating the base. The problem with fearing the base is that eventually it gets stronger. Now you have a Republican elite being held hostage by the party’s base, and I am reminded of the old Lindsey Graham tweet from 2016: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/donald-trump-gop-ron-desantis-2024

David Frum: Is Ron DeSantis Flaming Out Already?

Although Florida governor Ron DeSantis has long sought to avoid taking a position on Russia’s war in Ukraine he did find time however, to admonish Ukrainian officials in October for not showing enough gratitude to new Twitter owner Elon Musk. (Musk returned the favor by endorsing DeSantis for president.)

More dangerous than the unpopular positions DeSantis holds are the popular positions he does not hold. What is DeSantis’s view on health care? He doesn’t seem to have one. President Joe Biden has delivered cheap insulin to U.S. users. Good idea or not? Silence from DeSantis. There’s no DeSantis jobs policy; he hardly speaks about inflation. Homelessness? The environment? Nothing. Even on crime, DeSantis must avoid specifics, because specifics might remind his audience that Florida’s homicide numbers are worse than New York’s or California’s.

DeSantis just doesn’t seem to care much about what most voters care about. And voters in turn do not care much about what DeSantis cares most about.

Desantis will be a candidate of the Republican base, for the Republican base. Like Trump, he delights in displaying his lack of regard for everyone else. Trump, however, is driven by his psychopathologies and cannot emotionally cope with disagreement. DeSantis is a rational actor and is following what somebody has convinced him is a sound strategy. It looks like this:

    Woo the Fox audience and win the Republican nomination.
    ??
    Become president.

Written out like that, you can see the missing piece. DeSantis is surely intelligent and disciplined enough to see it too. But the programming installed in him prevents him from acting on what he sees. His approach to winning the nomination will put the general election beyond his grasp. He must hope that some external catastrophe will defeat his Democratic opponent for him—a recession, maybe—because DeSantis is choosing a path that cannot get him to his goal. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/desantis-ukraine-pro-russia-position-gop-presidential-nomination/673392/