The catfight heard ’round the world seems to have fully sputtered out: “I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week,” Elon Musk tweeted shortly after 3 a.m. this morning. “They went too far.”

It’s unclear what early-morning intelligence Musk might have received to have made him reevaluate his former claims that Trump had been alarmingly close to Jeffrey Epstein and was now making the federal government cover that fact up. Must have been pretty convincing, though! Happy Wednesday.

Less Donald, More George

by William Kristol

“It is safer,” the philosopher Leo Strauss cautioned, “to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself as fully as what it is.”

This week bids fair to be a low moment in American history, as Donald Trump chooses to reveal himself fully for what he is.

First, the president used protests against his mass deportation policy as an excuse to deploy national guard soldiers—activated against the wishes of the state’s governor and the city’s mayor—and then active-duty marines to the streets of Los Angeles. He also issued a presidential memorandum authorizing future domestic use of the U.S. military anywhere at any time he judges appropriate.

Then, in the Oval Office yesterday, the president was asked about the military parade he’s ordered for Saturday in Washington. President Trump will watch from on high, on a reviewing stand, as 150 military vehicles, including 28 tanks and 28 armored troop carriers, roll down Constitution Avenue.

Trump doesn’t want there to be any distraction from this grandiose and, I dare say, un-American spectacle. He’s not interested in any Americans nearby choosing to exercise their First Amendment rights. And so he warned: “For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force. And I haven’t even heard about a protest, but you know, these are people that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force.”

Now, one reason Trump hasn’t heard about a protest in Washington may be that those who have encouraged hundreds of peaceful and patriotic “No Kings Day” demonstrations around the country have in fact urged protesters not to assemble in Washington. They want to avoid possible confrontations, so as to provide no excuse for Trump to use force.

Trump clearly wants such an excuse. He’s always admired the action of the Chinese government in Tiananmen Square in 1989: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”

Having embraced the power of strength against peaceful protests yesterday, Trump then flew to Fort Bragg. There he boasted in an unseemly, and I dare say again un-American, way of the power and strength of the U.S. Army. Trump spoke almost exclusively about power rather than principle, about strength rather than purpose. He also told the assembled soldiers various lies big and small, including that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” He urged them on to jeer the press, President Biden, and Democratic office holders in California.

Un-American once more.

But in line with Strauss’s injunction, I turn away from Trump to remind myself of another address to soldiers by an American president, though this one delivered before the speaker became president.

It was March 1783, and the Continental Army seemed near mutiny against the civil government over its failure to fulfill various commitments to the soldiers, including appropriating funds for their back pay. Matters were coming to a head, and on March 15 Gen. George Washington chose to directly address the threat of military rebellion in a speech to his officers in Newburgh, New York.

Washington argued eloquently and emotionally both against mutiny and against soldiers deserting their station. “This dreadful alternative, of either deserting our country in the extremest hour of her distress, or turning our arms against it . . . has something so shocking in it, that humanity revolts at the idea.”

A bit later in his address, Washington pulled out a letter from a member of Congress to read from it. He paused for a moment, and then reached into his pocket to take out a pair of reading glasses, which most of the officers had never seen him wear. Washington put them on. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.”

This dramatic moment reportedly broke the fever of revolt. After Washington’s speech the officers voted to reject any appeals to mutiny or to desert, and simply asked Washington to negotiate with Congress to redress the wrongs they had suffered.

Washington’s speech concluded:

And let me conjure you, in the name of our common country—as you value your own sacred honor—as you respect the rights of humanity, and as you regard the military and national character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our country, and who wickedly attempts to open the floodgates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.

We have today such a man, a man “who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our country” and “open the floodgates of civil discord.” He’s our president.

And here’s the question before us: Is this now the country of Donald Trump? Or does it remain the country of George Washington?

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Newsom Meets the Moment

by Andrew Egger

I’ve never had a high opinion of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. His essential political quality is his slickness; his appetite for stunts (remember that odd debate with Ron DeSantis?) is beyond large. He has never seemed motivated by deep personal convictions, and I rolled my eyes at his recent attempts to channel the so-called “vibe shift” by transforming overnight from an unremarkable California lib to a guy who goes hunting for common ground with Charlie Kirk on trans issues. When, back in April, Newsom made an off-the-cuff remark calling Trump’s unlawful deportations to El Salvador a “distraction” that Democrats were “sheep” to get “distracted by”—a remark he later clarified and walked back—I had to be constrained by my editors not to send Morning Shots with the headline “Gavin Newsom Can Eat a Bag of D*cks.” [Editor’s note: This is true.]

So you need have no doubt of my sincerity when I say: Hey, you know what? Great speech last night, Mr. Governor.

The anti-ICE protests which began in California have begun to take root across the country. Protesters marched yesterday in Atlanta, Chicago, and New York in events that followed the trajectory of a number of other recent protests: Large, peaceful demonstrations by day giving way to more hostile and chaotic clashes with law enforcement by night.

In his speech last night, Newsom was unequivocal: If you’re using protests as a pretext to indulge in violence, you’re not with us. “If you incite violence or destroy our communities, you are going to be held to account,” he proclaimed. “That kind of criminal behavior will not be tolerated, full stop.” Lawbreakers, he emphasized, would be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

But all this, he said, had been the system working as intended. Los Angeles residents exercising their constitutional right to free speech and assembly. State and city officers on hand to keep the peace and to arrest those who tried to wrest the situation toward chaos. “Like many states, California is no stranger to this sort of unrest,” Newsom said. “We manage it regularly, and with our own law enforcement.”

But Trump, Newsom said, wasn’t interested in maintaining peace. The president wanted to squelch protest, and he welcomed the opportunity to provoke a backlash that he could respond to with still greater force.

“He again chose escalation. He chose more force. He chose theatrics over public safety,” Newsom said. “He federalized another 2,000 guard members. He deployed more than 700 active U.S. marines. These are men and women trained in foreign combat, not domestic law enforcement. We honor their service. We honor their bravery. But we do not want our streets militarized by our own armed forces. Not in L.A. Not in California. Not anywhere.”

Through the speech, Newsom repeatedly made the same point: What Trump represented in his crackdown in Los Angeles wasn’t the rule of law. It was a display of raw power intended to sweep the rule of law aside. And he rolled it all into a broader critique. “Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there,” Newsom said. “When Donald Trump sought blanket authority to commandeer the National Guard, he made that order apply to every state in this nation. This is about all of us. This is about you. California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next.”

Order is breaking down everywhere, and how our leaders respond matters. It is difficult, but absolutely imperative, for Democrats not to let Trump get away with pretending that commanding power is the same thing as upholding the law.

Last night at least, Newsom met the moment.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Danger of Trump’s Clash with the Conservative Legal Movement… Their alliance transformed the judiciary—at a high cost. Now, as the partnership cracks up, GREGG NUNZIATA, a conservative critic of Trump, warns of what’s in store.

• What Do Trump and These Rioters Have In Common? On this week’s Just Between Us, guest host ANDREW EGGER and WILL SALETAN discuss Trump’s immigration crackdown in L.A.

• The Scofflaw Strongman… Trump says he’s defending “law and order” in Los Angeles. The record of his words and deeds on January 6th proves that’s a lie, writes WILL SALETAN.

• NEW MERCH! We have a few new designs available in the Bulwark store! Go check them out.

Quick Hits

A DONE DEAL?: Okay, what on earth is going on with these China tariffs?

U.S. and Chinese officials emerged from deliberations in London yesterday to announce they’d made progress on preliminary talks aimed at restabilizing the fragile truce, which both nations had accused the other of breaking in recent days. Here’s Reuters:

U.S. and Chinese officials said on Tuesday they had agreed on a framework to get their trade truce back on track and remove China's export restrictions on rare earths while offering little sign of a durable resolution to longstanding trade tensions.

At the end of two days of intense negotiations in London, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters the framework deal puts “meat on the bones” of an agreement reached last month in Geneva to ease bilateral retaliatory tariffs that had reached crushing triple-digit levels. . . .

The two sides left Geneva with fundamentally different views of the terms of that agreement and needed to be more specific on required actions, said Josh Lipsky, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center in Washington. “They are back to square one but that’s much better than square zero,” Lipsky added.

In a post just an hour ago, however, Trump went much further, basically declaring victory.

“OUR DEAL WITH CHINA IS DONE, SUBJECT TO FINAL APPROVAL WITH PRESIDENT XI AND ME,” he tweet-shouted. “FULL MAGNETS, AND ANY NECESSARY RARE EARTHS, WILL BE SUPPLIED, UP FRONT, BY CHINA. LIKEWISE, WE WILL PROVIDE TO CHINA WHAT WAS AGREED TO, INCLUDING CHINESE STUDENTS USING OUR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES (WHICH HAS ALWAYS BEEN GOOD WITH ME!). WE ARE GETTING A TOTAL OF 55% TARIFFS, CHINA IS GETTING 10%. RELATIONSHIP IS EXCELLENT! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!”

We say this a lot about Trump posts, but man—what rich text. (If keeping Chinese students in U.S. colleges has “ALWAYS BEEN GOOD WITH” Trump, then we wonder who was pushing to kick them all out, as his administration moved to do weeks ago?) Meanwhile, the tariff talk here is bizarre: The rare-earth deal was seen as a preliminary snag in much broader tariff negotiations, but here Trump characterizes it as the heart of a finished “DEAL.” Is unraveling those export controls—which China slapped on in retaliation to his tariffs—really all Trump needs to pull his tariffs on China back down to 55 percent? We’ll no doubt be teasing all this out in the days ahead, once we’ve figured out if Trump’s confidence and bravado about the negotiations is shared by the Chinese.

REVISIONS, PLEASE: Three weeks ago, Senate Republicans passed a series of resolutions intended to strip California’s ability to set its own vehicle emissions standards—an act less notable for its outcome than for the wild procedural tango they danced to make it happen. As Roll Call put it, Majority Leader John Thune steered the Senate through “party-line votes on a complex set of points of order, motions to table points of order, motions to appeal rulings of the chair, motions to table those motions, and more”—all to scooch around a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian, who had said the resolutions were not in line with the body’s rules.

When it comes to the Big Beautiful Bill, however, Thune seems intent on making nice with the parliamentarian. Politico reported Tuesday that the Senate has sent the House a list of provisions it must strip out of the House bill at the say-so of the parliamentarian in order to permit the bill’s passage under filibuster-dodging budget reconciliation: A few billion in tax credits they won’t be allowed to cut here, a few billion in new spending on military intelligence programs there. Politico has the details on the proposed changes.

House leaders plan to vote to amend the bill to accommodate these preliminary changes this week. And they won’t be the last: The parliamentarian will issue more rulings in the days ahead flagging, among other things, policies that don’t impact federal spending or revenue and thus run afoul of the body’s Byrd rule. (Inquiring minds might wonder whether the bill’s outrageous attempt to block judges from enforcing contempt rulings will survive the parliamentarian process.)

LET HAL DRIVE: Earlier this week, we all saw the sad plight of the innocent Waymo vehicles that had driven to their own deaths after being first summoned, then set on fire, by L.A. rioters. Yesterday, my wife nearly T-boned a car1 whose driver had blown through a red light right ahead of her in an intersection. So I was pre-primed to be highly interested in a huge dollop of new self-driving car data from Waymo, first reported in Vox yesterday, which suggests fully autonomous self-driving cars may already be far safer than cars driven by human beings.

Waymo’s analysis, which is set to be published in a peer-reviewed form in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention, surveyed the performance of its fully self-driving vehicles across more than 56 million miles of driving in four Southwestern cities. Compared to human drivers, Vox reports, Waymo’s cars had:

• 81 percent fewer airbag-deploying crashes

• 85 percent fewer crashes with suspected serious or worse injuries

• 96 percent fewer injury crashes at intersections (primarily because Waymo detects other cars running red lights faster than humans)

• 92 percent fewer crashes that involve injuries to pedestrians . . .

But the numbers really get eye-popping when you extend this data across all 3.3 trillion vehicle miles driven by humans in the US in a typical year. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that if the same 85 percent reduction seen in serious crashes held true for fatal ones—a big if, to be clear, since the study had too few fatal events to measure—we’d save approximately 34,000 lives a year.

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